The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck
This piece originally appeared on Mother Jones as part of Climate Desk. Everybody who’s written or blogged about climate change on a prominent website (or, even worse, spoken about it…
Chris Mooney
Are Conservatives Inherently More Biased than Liberals? The Scientific Debate Rages On
Republican Brain.jpg In the first round of critical reactions to my book The Republican Brain, there wasn’t much to impress. As I related at AlterNet, the general conservative response to…
Conversion Fever! Why The Media Adores Former Climate Skeptics
Muller001.jpg If you’ve been following the science of global warming for over a decade—as I have—you might find the recent conversion of Berkeley physicist Richard Muller into a climate believer…
If Conservatives Were Really “Conservative,” They Would Want to Do Something About Global Warming
kerry-emanuel.jpg Originally, when I asked MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel to be a guest on the Point of Inquiry podcast, my goal was simple. I wanted someone who could give…
It’s the Weather, Stupid: Slowly Re-Awakening the Public About Climate Change
drought monitor.gif The Yale and George Mason Centers on Climate Change Communication, collaborators on the well-known “Six Americas” studies of how the public views global warming, are out with their…
After All That, The Himalayan Glaciers are Indeed Shrinking
800px-Everest_North_Face_toward_Base_Camp_Tibet_Luca_Galuzzi_2006_edit_1.jpg Remember the Himalayan glaciers? They were at the root of the most deserved black-eye to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during the intensely politicized period of 2009-2010.…
More Evidence That Republicans Are More Factually Challenged Than Democrats
pinocchio.jpg In writing The Republican Brain, I had a problem to solve. You see, it was one thing to cite all the psychological research suggesting that liberals and conservatives just…
The Politics of Ice and Fire
High_Park_Wildfire_Arapaho_and_Roosevelt_National_Forests_June_10,_2012.jpg In late June of 1988, just under 24 years ago, NASA’s James Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress about global warming. He noted that the Earth had been remarkably…
New Study: Climate Deniers Are Emoting–Especially the Conspiracy Theorists
Im-as-mad-as-Hell.jpg Anyone paying attention these last few years will have noticed that global warming denial simply isn’t a rational phenomenon. And it’s not just that if there were any reason…
A Court’s Scientific Smackdown: The D.C. Circuit Trashes Science Deniers on Global Warming and the EPA
800px-Meade_and_Prettyman_Courthouse.jpg Tomorrow, we may see a court—the highest in the land—flout precedent for partisan ends in its ruling on President Obama’s signature health care law. However, in the meantime, we…
Climate Denial in Brazil: A Translation
ricardo augusto felico.jpg This is a translation of the May 2, 2012 “Programa do Jo” on Globo, a half hour interview with the climate skeptic geographer Ricardo Augusto Felicio on…
Climate Denial Hits Brazil
ricardo augusto felico.jpg Last year, I wrote about how journalists in developing nations were doing a better job of covering climate change, largely because denial hadn’t really taken root in…
Rio-Inspired Optimism (If Not Optimism About Rio)
Rio de janeiro.jpg If the goal was to get the world focused on sustainable development, then this definitely counts as terrible timing. With global leaders pressured by the unending European…
The Normalcy of Hypocrisy: From Clean Energy to Health Care, Conservatives Flip Flop in Support of the Team
go team.jpg One striking feature of the liberal psyche is how it is simultaneously outraged by hypocrisy on the conservative side of the aisle—and yet also morbidly fascinated by it.…
The New ExxonMobil: Has the Tiger Changed Its Stripes?
Private-Empire-ExxonMobil-and-American-Power-by-Steve-Coll.cover_.jpg For a decade, now, I’ve been a reporter on climate science. And one of my earliest stories was a Mother Jones cover, exposing ExxonMobil’s funding of think tanks that…
Mann Handled: A Decade Ago, Conservatives Attacked a Scientist—And Created a Leader
hockeybookmann (1).jpg This is a review of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines, by Michael Mann. I first became familiar with the name Michael…
How Do We Explain Scientifically Literate But Anti-Science Conservatives? Paging Drs. Dunning and Kruger
dunning_kruger_percieved_actual_graph.gif As regular readers of this blog know, I have spent a lot of time discussing what we call the “smart idiot” effect: Political conservatives who know more about science—or,…
The Polarizing Poles: Yet Another Study Shows That More Knowledgeable Conservatives Are *Worse* on Global Warming
Figure1b.png Bloggers and commentators have been talking a lot lately about a recent study, by Dan Kahan and colleagues in Nature Climate Change, capturing what I call the “smart idiot”…
The Big Waffle? New Report Exposes Corporations That Try to Split the Difference on Global Warming
caterpillar-logo-2401.jpg We hear a lot about the Koch brothers. And before them, we heard a lot about ExxonMobil. In other words, we all know the names of the corporations, and…