Freelance designer Luke Clark Tyler keeps all his worldly possessions in the same amount of space that McMansion-dwellers allot for clothes and shoes. His Manhattan apartment is the size of a walk-in closet -- 78 square feet, just enough space to park a Mini Cooper. 

There's a kind of folk myth out there that the profusion of media sources on the internet means that everyone is seeking out only sources that reinforce their preexisting beliefs -- that people are self-sorting into ideological "cocoons."

It turns out that this folk myth, like so many about the internet, is wrong. A recent political science study analyzed media consumption patterns and concluded the following:

To summarize, most individuals do not refuse to hear the other side. In fact, most people consume predominately non-partisan local TV newscasts, while tuning out news from partisan sources altogether. Of those who do turn to partisan sources, most Republicans and Democrats have virtually indistinguishable news diets. Contrary to recent claims, there is little evidence that the electorate is self-sorting into "ideologically like-minded information cocoons" at the level being described by scholars and political commentators.

These findings are interesting in their own right, but they also prompt a thought on the endless debate over climate communication. What seems most germane to me is not the somewhat surprising fact that partisans on both sides consume similar news media, but the familiar, predictable fact that "a majority of viewers consume little or no news," and those who do mostly consume network nightly news. Most people do not watch cable news, read political blogs, or peruse white papers.

But that's where climate change most often gets discussed. So here's a corollary: If you are explicitly discussing climate change in the media, you are most likely communicating in a venue frequented primarily by partisans who have already made up their minds about climate change. Your audience probably contains an abnormally high percentage of people who have strong opinions about climate communication.

An immense amount of time is spent analyzing the way people communicate about climate in these venues. I myself have spent a great many hours analyzing and arguing about it. But insofar as we are concerned about public opinion on climate, the action, it would seem, is elsewhere.

Shoppers might pay next to nothing for those cheapy cheap tables and chairs and bookshelves at IKEA, but the planet pays a much higher price, Environmental Leader reports. According to a forest conservation nonprofit, an IKEA subsidiary is clear-cutting forests that are hundreds of years old.

[The Global Forest Coalition] -- an alliance of NGOs from more than 40 countries -- alleges that Ikea’s wholly owned logging subsidiary Swedwood has been clear-cutting forests in high biodiversity value areas and logging very old trees in parts of the Russian Karelia region.

After Svante Myrick, 25, became the youngest-ever mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., he gave up his car to join the estimated 15 percent of his city's residents who walk to work. As mayor, however, Myrick has a prime downtown parking spot reserved for his exclusive use. So instead of letting it stand empty, last week he began to, as he put it, “turn the Mayor's parking space into a park space.”

European Union greenhouse gas emissions rose 2.4 percent in 2010.

Spain's done with clean energy -- the government is shutting off aid to renewable energy companies.

People living in coal country are still willing to defend Big Coal against natural gas. Stockholm syndrome? (Or maybe they just got $50 and a T-shirt.)

After six months of relative media silence, GMO salmon are back. Since last fall, AquaBounty Technologies, the breeders of the fish -- which is not to be confused with radioactive tuna -- have been in a kind of regulatory limbo, awaiting approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Then this week, several GMO salmon stories popped up in the media, and, taken together, they suggest it might be time to take another look at the salmon, which would be the first genetically engineered animal raised for commercial consumption if it’s approved.

The fish, which is branded AquAdvantage, has been altered with a growth-hormone gene from a Chinook salmon and a gene from a deepwater eel-like fish called an ocean pout. The latter allows the fish to grow during the cold months and reach market size twice as fast as other salmon.

A short article on Seafood Source reported that although AquaBounty continues to hemorrhage money (they reported a net loss of $2.7 million in 2011), CEO Ron Stotish is confident that approval is right around the corner.

For nearly 20 years, Alan Ehrenhalt served as the executive editor of Governing magazine, examining and writing about a variety of local and state-level trends and policies. In his new book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, Ehrenhalt outlines at length what he dubs “a major change in American urban life” over the last decade: namely, that “living patterns are rearranging all throughout a metropolitan area,” something he calls a “demographic inversion.”

Ehrenhalt is no starry-eyed urban triumphalist (like Harvard economist Ed Glaeser), but nor is he predicting cities’ imminent demise (see Joel Kotkin). In fact, compared to the prophets of urban boom and doom, he’s a whole heap of downright boring nuance. Think of him as your teetotaling uncle at the family Christmas party -- the one who doesn’t want the eggnog spiked.

Green jobs? I don't see any green jobs here. (Photo by World Affairs Council of Philadelphia.)

A version of this article originally appeared on Climate Progress.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney campaigned in Craig, Colo., this morning, where he slammed the Obama administration for its energy policies. Romney implied in his speech that there are no clean energy jobs in Colorado, an assertion that is blatantly untrue:

And then of course there’s [Obama's] plan for energy. You see, he said he was going to create some 5 million green energy jobs. Have you seen those around here anywhere? No, as a matter of fact he’s gone after energy.

There are actually tens of thousands of clean energy jobs in Colorado. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [PDF], the state had 72,452 jobs in “green goods and services” in 2010. In addition, the American Wind Energy Association also says that Colorado’s wind energy industry alone supported 4,000-5,000 jobs in 2011.

Photo by Anthony Lopez.

If you're in New York City at 8:19 p.m. today, get your ass to a major cross street (the best ones are  14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, and 57th) and you can see the street grid take on astronomical significance. Tonight is Manhattanhenge, where the setting sun lines up exactly with Manhattan's east-west streets. It'll be an impressive visual spectacle, and a neat moment of urban harmony with nature.

More science won't help.

Why is skepticism about climate change so persistent?

The answer might seem to be obvious: ignorance! People just don't understand the science. Their education has not equipped them to discern good evidence from bad, or reason properly to valid conclusions. The media is not giving them the facts. They need more, better information and improved reasoning skills.

However intuitively plausible this answer might be, it suffers from one important flaw: It is wrong. Better educated people are not less likely to be skeptics. Greater scientific literacy and reasoning ability do not incline people toward climate realism. Where skepticism exists, additional information and arguments only serve to reinforce it.

This has been evident for some time, but a fascinating new study in Nature backs it up with numbers. Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues tested the question directly: Is it true that greater numeracy and scientific literacy reduce polarization about climate science?