By George Monbiot3 August 2016 (The Guardian) – What is salient is not important. What is important is not salient. The media turns us away from the issues that will determine the course of our lives, and towards topics of brain-melting irrelevance. This, on current trends, will be the hottest year ever measured. The previous […]
By Molly Evans2 August 2016 (KUT) – There are 892 active hate groups in the U.S. In Texas, there are 84 — the most of any other state, according to an interactive U.S. map from Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC gathered the data from hate group publications and websites, citizen and law enforcement reports, field […]
By Adam Frank26 July 2016 (NPR) – This is a year of politics. That means everyone has opinions about where the world should be headed and how we should get there. No matter how weird this political season has been, however, there remains a key difference between opinions and facts. That difference comes into the […]
By Alex Emmons22 July 2016 (The Intercept) – At the award-winning seafood restaurant in downtown Cleveland that The Atlantic rented out for the entire four-day Republican National Convention, GOP Rep. Bill Johnson turned to me and explained that solar panels are not a viable energy source because “the sun goes down.” Johnson had just stepped […]
By Ethan Linck 22 July 2016 (The Stranger) – One Small Part of Antarctica Stayed Cool While the Rest Warmed: Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of climate change denialism is the willful idiocy of using local exceptions to a widely supported trend as evidence that trend is false. Climate science—like meteorology, biology, and political science—is […]
By Pia Ranada 18 July 2016 MANILA, Philippines (Rappler) – President Rodrigo Duterte “will not honor” international agreements binding the Philippines to limit its carbon emissions. “You are trying to stymie us with an agreement na ganito lang kayo (that you will stay this way) … That’s stupid. I will not honor that. Sabi niya […]
By Joelle Gergis 10 July 2016 (The Conversation) – In May 2012, my colleagues and I had a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate, showing that temperatures recorded in Australasia since 1950 were warmer than at any time in the past 1,000 years. Following the early online release of the paper, as […]
[The situation with global warming is bad enough; no need to make up a disaster where none exists. –Des] [UPDATE: See Paul Beckwith’s rebuttal here, via Robin Westenra. –Des] [UPDATE2: Climate Feedback gives the original claim a scientific credibility rating of “low”: Analysis of Gabriel Samuels’ “Scientists warn of ‘global climate emergency’ over shifting jet […]
By Michael Mann27 June 2016 (Facebook) – As part of my testimony to the Democratic Party Platform drafting committee a week ago, I made the point, using slightly rhetorical language appropriate for the occasion, that the impacts of climate change are no longer subtle, we no longer need sophisticated signal-detection methods to see the […]
28 April 2016 (Global Environmental Change) – Highlights: Emotional distress is strongly correlated with mitigation motivation; hope is not. Optimistic messages about carbon emissions reduce climate change risk perceptions. Less risk leads to less distress, which in turn lowers mitigation motivation. Pessimistic climate change messages avoid complacency without eroding efficacy. ABSTRACT: For the first time […]
