Latest Articles

Performance anxiety

It’s not just the ads showing a baby-boomer couple sitting in matching bathtubs on a beach at sunset where you can find performance anxiety these days. Try looking in the hardware aisle and at the gas station. Rather than ban inefficient incandescent light bulbs, for example, California lawmakers set an efficiency performance standard — which […]

Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

Lindsey GrahamSen. Lindsey Graham has stepped up to become the leading Republican advocate of a bipartisan climate bill.  In a New York Times op-ed on Oct. 11, Graham joined with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to put forward a framework for climate legislation that they say can pass Congress and become “the blueprint for a clean-energy […]

Blockbuster new book exposes anatomy of denial

James Hoggan and his DeSmogBlog.com posse might be our nation’s most important sleuths — and they ain’t even from the United States. Not that climate destabilization knows any boundaries. Not that climate change deniers and public relation firms hired by dirty energy corporations pledge allegiance to any country’s well-being. Drawing on their brilliant muckraking and […]

Bill Gates reveals support for GMO ag

As it has come to dominate the agenda for reshaping African agriculture over the years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been very careful not to associate itself too closely with patent-protected biotechnology as a panacea for African farmers. True, the foundation named 25-year Monsanto veteran Rob Horsch to the position of “senior program […]

Coauthor of SuperFreakonomics apologizes to me

[Note:  The error-riddled book is now searchable again on Amazon, so readers can confirm that all of my excerpts were correct and in context.  The book has garnered a number of positive comments from (fast) readers, even on the climate chapter whose main conclusion has been rejected by its two primary scientific sources — see […]

Myhrvold jumps the shark — and jumps ship on SuperFreakonomics

Un-friggin-believable. Nathan Myhrvold, who Levitt and Dubner call the “polymath’s polymath” — who is one of the primary “experts” the authors rely on to make the case for their central geoengineering-only approach to global warming — has just publicly repudiated that approach. Apparently he never read the chapter — or didn’t understand it if he […]

What makes a good story?

Clearly, pretending to loft your kid across the countryside in a balloon is the big story. But what about the fairly extraordinary effort that the kids at 350.org and Bill McKibben are mounting next weekend? They’ve taken serious scientific analysis—the contention first raised by Jim Hansen that 350 ppm co2 is the target we should […]

Interviews support my reporting on SuperFreakonomics

Caldeira, like the vast majority of climate scientists, believes cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions is our only real chance to avoid runaway climate change. “Carbon dioxide is the right villain,” Caldeira wrote on his Web site in reply. He told Joe Romm, the respected climate blogger who broke the story, that he had […]

Columbia suspends evironmental journalism program

Columbia Journalism Review itself reports the startling and depressing news: For the first time since it was created fourteen years ago, Columbia University’s highly regarded dual-degree graduate program in environmental journalism will not be accepting applications for next academic year. In a letter to faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism, the Department of Environmental […]

Anatomy of Debunking

  UPDATE:  For an independent vindication of my reporting here, see Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira backs up my reporting on error-riddled Superfreakonomics. Dubner is baffled that Caldeira “doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions.” I wish I didn’t have to waste valuable blogging time writing this post to set the record straight.  […]