geoengineering
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If the grass looks greener, it’s important to understand the nature of the fence
Cross-posted from The Bellows. One of the things about politics is that solutions always seem easier to implement and more promising before they stand a real chance of being implemented. People who have for one reason or another fallen in love with the idea of a carbon tax watch the difficulty Congress is having negotiating […]
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Why Branson and SuperFreakonomics are wrong, in pictures
This week, as reported by Andy Revkin, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson said something heroically, world-historically stupid: “If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.” Sir Richard was talking about removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. […]
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‘SuperFreakonomics’ will misinform readers on climate science
Cross-posted from The Huffington Post. The forthcoming SuperFreakonomics, written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, plays fast and loose with the scientific consensus on climate change. The book’s fifth chapter, “Global Cooling,” revisits a number of discredited arguments that misinform readers about the danger unchecked global warming poses to the United States and […]
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‘SuperFreakonomics’ is ‘patent nonsense’
Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception. That staggeringly anti-scientific statement (page 170) is just one of many, many pieces of outright nonsense from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. In fact, human-caused global warming is well-established science, far better established than any […]
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The fallacy of climate activism
In the 20 years since we climate activists began our work in earnest, the state of the climate has become dramatically worse, and the change is accelerating — this despite all of our best efforts. Clearly something is deeply wrong with this picture. What is it that we do not yet know? What do we […]
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Gaia proponent Lovelock says it’s time to adapt to inevitable global heating
James Lovelock speaking at the World Nuclear Association Symposium in 2007Courtesy Jon and Lu via FlickrWhat is it with Preeminent Thinkers and intensely bleak public lectures? Two weeks ago Earth Institute economist Jeffrey Sachs, in an address at the Asia Society in New York, argued that climate change cannot be averted without massive use of […]
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Lots of great green stuff in the latest issue of The Atlantic
I haven’t read The Atlantic much lately, but I picked up the latest issue at the airport and it is superb. Three pieces are worth particular note. First, Joshua Green has a piece on “The Coming Green Economy” that is as good as anything I’ve ever read in popular media about the contours of the […]
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Myth: Tackling climate change requires fundamental technological breakthroughs
No myth has done more to lull Americans into complacency or allow bad actors to fight off good policy. The American people are deeply attached to the notion that any problem can be solved with a new doohickey. It would, after all, relieve them of the terrible responsibility of saving the world. (Surely a clever […]
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DARPA to investigate geoengineering
Oh, great, DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Dept — is convening a meeting to look into geoengineering. Count me with Ken Caldeira: “The last thing we need is to have DARPA developing climate intervention technology,” says Caldeira. He says he agreed to go to the meeting “to […]
