The boss is out to lunch
The two basic criteria to establish whether someone is your boss are: – Can they fire you ? – Can they give you a raise ? Unless the answer to…
science
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…
Five Years Left
The most clear warnings are getting more clear. Either we stop emitting so much green house gas, or we permanently change our climate. Are we screwed? With the people we…
The Future Is Frenzied
Professor Albedo-9000 Frink (the Third) was justifiably proud of his invention. It had taken him nearly 300 years of his genetically enhanced life to construct the Frink Dojigger 12. (Experimental…
Conservatives Attack and Misunderstand A Book They Haven’t Read…A Book About Flawed Conservative Reasoning
mooney.jpg 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…
Rush Limbaugh: Meat Eater, Science Denier
Rush_Limbaugh.jpg 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...
The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don’t Believe in Science (or Many Other Inconvenient Truths)
mooney.jpg 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…
My BCHA talk: 14 Billion Years in 90 Seconds
I finally got a half-decent video of myself giving a talk. Of course the projector still failed to work with my laptop, so I went slide-less (but it still works…
Score Another Victory for Scientists, Michael Mann, and the Freedom of Inquiry
495px-Mann4.jpg Yesterday in a Virginia courtroom, Michael Mann—who is quickly becoming the Galileo of climate science—triumphed over the conservative American Tradition Institute, an...
Must be me…
The Globe and Mail has a story about an “experiment” (I use quote-unquote because I personally see nothing new about it, but I come back to this below) carried out…
Is There a Bias Asymmetry Between Democrats and Republicans?
democrat_and_republican_symbols.jpg 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...
Finally, Some Good News Out Of Ottawa: All-Party Climate Caucus Formed
Thanks in large part to the hard work of Kirsty Duncan, Liberal MP for Etobicoke North and IPCC scientist, a new House of Commons “climate change” caucus has been formed.…
Why Hard Core Climate “Skeptics” Don’t Change Their Minds
Muller001.jpg 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...
Time to simplify
As I was discussing with my collaborator the wisdom of following the request of one of the referees to include an additional figure in our manuscript, I expressed my doubts…
Why Communicating Science is So Money
schmidt2-300x300.jpg 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...
Why Did Climate Progress Stall? It’s Called Conservative Ideological Activation
HideTheDeclineShirt.jpg 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...
Apology Of A Poseur
(The following was inspired by Deepak Chopra's quackery-laden and hypocritically self-serving review of Richard Dawkins' book, The Magic of Reality. Enjoy).I find myself saddened - yet also outraged - by…
The Old War on Science Returns Under Rick Perry
Galveston Bay.gif 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...
Once And For All: The Precautionary Principle is Not Unscientific
Sharp Edges.jpg 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...
Rantings over rankings
Times Higher Education has just published its influential rankings of World universities. I imagine that university presidents all over the world, at this time, are either pounding their chests, proudly…