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Archive for September, 2011
The Monktopus vs the Lucianator
So what’s this about? All that damn math hurts my eyes. Can someone take pity on my meager mental powers and boil this battle down to a nice soundbite?
(As for my headline, partial credit goes to the inscrutable Mosher.)
I’m interested in hearing the significance of this smackdown. Can you make it pithy? Does it have great pith?
The Climate Funny Bone
At the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, I survey the landscape beyond mind-deadening gloom and doom.
Ecocide on the Docket
So the idea here is to make the burning of fossil fuels equivalent to genocide, which means the CEO’s of oil & gas companies would be the equivalent to war criminals.
Some UK group I never heard of is behind this. They will succeed in generating headlines. And bringing scorn to their cause.
How Low Will Ken Green Go?
Ken Green, the conservative AEI scholar who has been sparring with liberal science writer Chris Mooney over which political party is more anti-science, keeps digging himself a bigger hole.
Yesterday, I called attention to the loaded language Green used to describe his political opponents. I also wasn’t very impressed with his sourcing. Via Twitter, Green responded:
Perhaps @KeithKloor prefers WikiPedia as a source for Carol Browner’s Socialist cred? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Bro”¦
No, actually I wouldn’t. Wikipedia is not considered a citable source by journalists. Let’s go to the Reuters handbook for how we treat and use Wikipedia:
Online information sources which rely on collaborative, voluntary and often anonymous contributions need to be handled with care. Wikipedia, the online “people’s encyclopedia”, can be a good starting point for research, but it should not be used as an attributable source. Do not quote from it or copy from it. The information it contains has not been validated and can change from second to second as contributors add or remove material.
Now, let me be clear. Wikipedia is a very useful source and I have linked to it from this blog when I want to direct readers to general information on a subject or a person’s biography. (I also scrutinize the linked-to source closely before recommending it.) But I do not use Wikipedia to support specific assertions, nor have I cited it as a primary reference in any of my professionally published articles. Moreover, in the journalism classes I teach at NYU, I say exactly what Reuters advises–that it “can be a good starting point for research.” Nothing more.
That Green is determined to find a citation to support his charge that Browner is “a card-carrying socialist” continues to speak volumes about his character. I really thought that, after some reflection, he would have stepped back from the sewer he was swimming in with the politically charged, hyperbolic language in his last post. Apparently not.
Oh, it is also amusing that Green would cite Wikipedia as a go-to source, when this is at the top of his own page:
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This article or section reads like a news release, or is otherwise written in an overly promotional tone. Please help by either rewrite this article from a neutral point of view or by moving to Wikinews. When appropriate, blatant advertising may be marked for speedy deletion with {{db-spam}}. (August 2010) |
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A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia’s content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please discuss further on the talk page.(August 2010) |
UPDATE: A new tweet from Green reads:
Want to smear those who dispute liberal public policies? Call them “anti-science.”
This is precious coming from someone who cavalierly tags a former EPA administrator and influential Washington insider as a “card-carrying socialist.” Green’s lack of self-awareness is breathtaking.
An Elegy for Greece
There is nobody I know in journalism who is more modest than Joanna Kakassis, who I got to know several years ago when we were both fellows at the University of Colorado, in Boulder. Since then, Joanna has been filing incredible stories from around the world, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and her native Greece.
Joanna’s latest piece, now featured at Foreign Policy, is a poignant essay about her homeland. Here’s an excerpt:
Greece has changed, and not changed, since my father and his older brother — my Uncle Thanassis — were born. It’s no longer the impoverished country where many Greeks died of treatable illnesses, as my paternal grandparents did in the 1930s. It has transformed from a wild, agrarian land plowed by donkeys to a full-service, high-end mecca for sun-and-sea tourists. Half of the population now lives in Athens, the capital, a once-provincial city that is now a crushing, seething chaos of concrete apartment blocks and ancient ruins, Michelin-starred restaurants and screaming bouzouki clubs, suburban villas and inner-city ghettos. And the country now has about a million immigrants, many from Africa and South Asia, and the Greek-born, Greek-speaking children of those immigrants have sparked a separate identity crisis over what it means to “be Greek.”
But Greece’s sky is still, in many ways, deep and changeless. Greeks have clung to the distant past and have sometimes managed to live very viscerally in the present, but they have never really welcomed the future. Now the future is so grim, no one wants to think about it.
There is the Greece in today’s headlines and the romanticized, stereotypical Greece to outsiders. Joanna’s beautiful essay captures the economic tumult and cultural upheaval rocking the country, but we see it through the eyes of family members whose lifetimes have borne witness to what Greece was and to what it has become. It’s a richly contextualized portrait of a country that the rest of the world has viewed one-dimensionally for far too long.
When the Ideologue Gets Ugly and Shrill
You are what you eat, and you are what you say. Or put another way, the kind of person you are is revealed by the language and terms you use to characterize those whose politics or policies you disagree with. Ken Green tells me everything I need to know about him here, of which this is a sampling:
So let’s see who is running the asylum under Obama. As I pointed out in 2009, Obama’s science team is composed almost exclusively of environmental radicals, and until recently, Carol Browner, Gore’s disciple (and yes, a card-carrying socialist), was part of Obama’s team as well. Her disciple, Lisa Jackson, has unleashed an unprecedented tidal surge of environmental regulations into the teeth of an economic downturn second only to the Great Depression.
Here I thought that environmentalists were thoroughly disenchanted with Obama’s green policies. And that part about Browner being a “card-carrying socialist” is quite the gem, and culled from especially credible, non-partisan sources, too! What a proud moment for the AEI gang, when one of their own speaks truth to power with such forthrightness and unassailable evidence.
Science Journo Transformation Underway
A media scholar surveys an emerging science journalism trend:
The dominant way of thinking about the role of science journalists historically was to view them as translators, or transmitters, of information. Now, however, a powerful metaphor for understanding their work as science critics is to see them as cartographers and guides, mapping scientific knowledge for readers, showing them paths through vast amounts of information, evaluating and pointing out the most important stops along the way.
The question is, can they they do a better job than your average New York City double-decker bus tour guide? That all depends on who your guide is.
Wedges: The Sequel
In his 2010 book, The Climate Fix, Roger Pielke Jr. writes:
The view that decarbonization of the global economy is a political problem and not a technological problem has been strongly influenced by a 2004 analysis by two Princeton researchers, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, that was published in Science. The analysis is often referred to by its very useful focus on a concept called a “stabilization wedge”…In their paper, Pacala and Socolow identified fifteen possible stabilization wedges, including approaches such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) from coal power plants, enhanced nuclear power, and improved soil management in agriculture.”
After detailing a major critique of the wedges approach by NYU’s Martin Hoffert, RPJ goes on to write:
The stabilization wedges and the IPCC have shaped the policy debate on decarbonization away from technological innovation, under an assumption that we have all the technologies that we need (or soon will have them). In a very practical sense, that assumption is very likely to be wrong….any commonsense climate policy will take a look at the real numbers behind the stabilization wedges and recognize that technological innovation must be a central strategy behind any effective policy focused on accelerating decarbonization.
Earlier this year, it was widely reported that one of the co-authors, Robert Socolow, had come to regret that the “wedges” thesis was grossly oversimplified by climate advocates, making it seem that it would be easier to achieve than it really was. However, he quickly walked back that story and now, this week, has firmly doubled down on the “wedges” scheme.
Andy Revkin has valuably elicited reactions from experts over at Dot Earth. He also links to reactions from Freeman Dyson and Nicholas Stern. So Andy has provided a nice one-stop shop for this renewed, and very important debate.
Eco-Metaphors
They capture our imagination. They help frame public discourse on important issues.
Just one problem: some of our most famous eco-metaphors have not held up to the test of time.
At the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, I suggest that some of the more popular ones stick around past their expiration date. Have a read and let me know over there if you agree or disagree–and if you think any other eco-metaphors should be retired.
About That Anti-Climate Change Spike in the U.S.
On Sunday, a longish AP article appeared, with this headline:
The American ‘allergy’ to global warming: Why?
The reporter, Charles Hanley, takes stock of the hardening U.S. attitudes on climate change, including the sharp divergence between Democrats and Republicans. But Hanley seems to conflate the reasons for this state of affairs. Charlie Petit at The Tracker notices as well:
The story takes on a genuine and profound issue. It may not describe it quite correctly, however. The allergy term seems right enough. but is it one expressed by the American public overall, or primarily by elected officials? That is, the enormous surge of conservative lawmakers in Congress last year, and the deepening freeze in place on climate laws including a push by the next conservative batch of candidates to undo the ones we have, seems mainly to be a reflection of voter anger over a continuing rotten economy. The bums that got tossed were mostly Dems, and the Republicans who went in were heavily of Tea Party persuasion. Scoffing at climate science, along with even more securely bedrock science such as evolution, is a trait of that lot. The GOP’s primaries, heavily dominated by determined activists, compel candidates to court the Tea Party faithful. So a tail wags the dog. Yet public polls find Americans tend to say climate change is real, and a problem. Some of us have this allergy, but not most.
Second, to what degree does the USA stand out? One’s impression is that Australian and Canadian governments have somewhat similarly scaled down their intentions to curb carbon emissions, and perhaps one can include the UK. Globally, for reasons beyond this allergy, no carbon regs with teeth seem to be on the immediate agenda. I can cite no specific study but do feel that while the US stands out, it does not do so by much.
Seems about right to me.
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