ronaldo-brazil-world-cup-top-scorer.jpg As the European debt crisis scrapes along, there has been talk about the possible need for developing nations, like China and Brazil, to ultimately help bail out some spendthrift “developed” nations. A new study suggests that maybe they should also help bail out some of our media. The study comes from
Continue readingTag: Chris Mooney
DeSmogBlog: Fox News Viewers are the Most Misinformed: A Seventh Study Arrives to Prove It (and to Vindicate Jon Stewart!)
cavuto-20070117-global-2.jpg Two of my most popular posts here at DeSmogBlog were a pair of items documenting 1) just how many surveys have found Fox News viewers to be more misinformed about factual reality and 2) taking PolitiFact to task for giving Jon Stewart a “false” rating when he pointed this out.
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Anthony Watts and Defensive Reasoning: Three Episodes
anthony-watts.jpg Over the last year, I’ve had numerous blogospheric encounters with the conservative climate “skeptic” Anthony Watts, the author of WattsUpWithThat. In the process, I’ve been particularly struck by how Watts handles inconvenient evidence. Twice now, I’ve seen Watts make a mistake, and then seem to rationalize it, rather than simply correct
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Conservatives Attack and Misunderstand A Book They Haven’t Read…A Book About Flawed Conservative Reasoning
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This would be sad, if it weren’t also so telling.
On Monday I announced my new book The Republican Brain, which will be due out next spring. And I provided a brie…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Rush Limbaugh: Meat Eater, Science Denier
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Recently, Rush Limbaugh went on another of his anti-science rants. This one was particularly fascinating, though, because of the things he actually got right—even as he &n…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don’t Believe in Science (or Many Other Inconvenient Truths)
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Over the last year here at DeSmogBlog, my writings have converged around a set of common themes. On the one hand, I’ve shown just how factually incorrect today’s political …
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Score Another Victory for Scientists, Michael Mann, and the Freedom of Inquiry
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Yesterday in a Virginia courtroom, Michael Mann—who is quickly becoming the Galileo of climate science—triumphed over the conservative American Tradition Institute, an…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Is There a Bias Asymmetry Between Democrats and Republicans?
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There’s a must read item today at the Huffington Post by Jonathan Weiler, co-author of the excellent book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American P…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Why Hard Core Climate “Skeptics” Don’t Change Their Minds
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I’ve been watching with interest the blogosphere uproar over the release of results from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project centered around physicist Richard Mulle…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Why Communicating Science is So Money
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I’ve been meaning to thrown in my congratulations to Gavin Schmidt of NASA and RealClimate.org, who is the first recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s new…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Why Did Climate Progress Stall? It’s Called Conservative Ideological Activation
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There has been much reaction to this weekend’s Elizabeth Rosenthal New York Times piece—“Where Did Global Warming Go?” Clearly, the issue has falle…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: The Old War on Science Returns Under Rick Perry
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In an August post about the return of the “war on science”—prosecuted by the political right—I drew a key distinction between attacks on knowledge that h…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Once And For All: The Precautionary Principle is Not Unscientific
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Some conservatives are immensely more fun to debate than others.
In the past month, a debate over left-right science abuse with Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Insti…
DeSmogBlog: Evolution and Climate Deniers: Natural Allies?
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On the face of things, there is no clear reason why the same person—like, say, Rick Perry—ought to deny accepted science about both evolution, and also global warmin…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Unequivocal: Today’s Right is Overwhemingly More Anti-Science Than Today’s Left
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Last week, I took to task a really poor USA Today op-ed making the following claim:
"In short, for every anti-science Republican that exists, there is at least one anti-scie…
DeSmogBlog: Science Communication: Training for the Future
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Yesterday I arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada, for another installment of an enterprise to which I’ve been increasingly devoted over the last year: Training scientists in c…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: James Powell: Science Denial Is Not Free
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The following post is from James Powell, author of The Inquisition of Climate Science. This is the first post in a 3-part series. It originall…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: New Record or Not, the Arctic Sea Ice Alarm Bells Keep Ringing
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Last week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center came out with the estimate that we did not quite set a record for the minimum extent of Arctic sea this year. Rat…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Want to Sway Climate Change Skeptics? Ask About Their Personal Strengths (And Show Pictures!)
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Readers of my posts over the last half year will be familiar with the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, in which people’s subcons…
Continue readingDeSmogBlog - Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science: Memo to Rick Perry: Galileo Was a Liberal
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Ever since the Republican presidential debate last week, science watchers have been shaking their heads over Rick Perry’s rid…
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