Let us assume, for purpose of argument, that you are deeply concerned about the potential for humans’ impact on climate, but that you have some uncertainties about the reliability of the science that lies at the foundation of that concern. Today, you note, scientists tell us the planet is warming. But did they not argue …
Matthew Nisbet has an interesting post up today about the future of science journalism. He sees it in things like Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth, or the excellent Yale Forum on Science and the Media. Nisbet wonders whether these sorts of non-traditional approaches are the future of my business: With fewer and fewer outlets for science …
A smart friend recently commented thus: “Gambling is just a way to redistribute resources from the dumber to the smarter.” In that regard, it’s a good thing I’m only playing Intrade with play money. Intrade is the betting-prediction market that’s all the rage among the Wisdom of Crowds Crowd, and I’ve been using it over …
I’ve always been fascinated by astronomy’s variable sky community – the folks who look for things that change. Most traditional astronomy involves parking a big telescope on a single object and watching it for a while. But the variable sky – things that change on time scales ranging from minutes to hours to days – …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Soda Straw Edition’ »
I usually avoid climate wars stuff on the work blog, but we had a letter to the editor in our business section last Thursday that invoked the “Inhofe 400” as part of a critique of mainstream climate science. So I responded.
A Thinking Ape’s Critique of Trans-Simianism: Technologies such as the bow and arrow already desimianize the act of hunting. While our ancestors were able to experience the pure ape feeling of clubbing an animal to death with a rock, we are left with the cold, sterilized bow that kills cleanly and quickly from a safe …
Beware the quagga mussel.
Roger Pielke Jr. points to a nice example of why all the energy so enthusiastically devoted to arguing about the hurricane record or fighting those pesky Climate Audit guys and the other “science wars” activities is such a colossal waste of time. On Prometheus, Roger points to comments by both James Hansen and David Victor …
Cleaning off my desk this evening, I found an interesting paper I’d printed and set aside to read weeks ago by Alison Smith in Holocene about the relationship between climate change and human evolution. Smith uses data from the human genome project on the timing of major bits of human evolution to argue that pressures …
Continue reading ‘Did Climate Change Make Us What We Are Today?’ »
There’s an exchange over at Prometheus that nicely illustrates the fundamentally linear face of the public climate debate, as so eloquently characterized by Andrew Revkin’s “pushmi-pullyu” metaphor. The example at hand is the Prins and Rayner paper in Nature last month laying out, in part, the argument for a fuller integration of adapation to climate …