Articles by David Roberts
David Roberts was a staff writer for Grist. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.
All Articles
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Geoengineering redux
RealClimate weighs in on the debate over geoengineering (which was featured in a much-discussed NYT piece yesterday). There's some technical discussion, but here's the take-home point:
... in my opinion, the proposals are unlikely to gain much traction. Maybe an analogy is useful to see why. Think of the climate as a small boat on a rather choppy ocean. Under normal circumstances the boat will rock to and fro, and there is a finite risk that the boat could be overturned by a rogue wave. But now one of the passengers has decided to stand up and is deliberately rocking the boat ever more violently. Someone suggests that this is likely to increase the chances of the boat capsizing. Another passenger then proposes that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics he can counterbalance the first passenger and indeed, counter the natural rocking caused by the waves. But to do so he needs a huge array of sensors and enormous computational reasources to be ready to react efficiently but still wouldn't be able to guarantee absolute stability, and indeed, since the system is untested it might make things worse.
So is the answer to a known and increasing human influence on climate an ever more elaborate system to control the climate? Or should the person rocking the boat just sit down? -
More on Inhofe press release
Via Josh Marshall, we find more background on the loopy press release from Inhofe's office yesterday:
Good Catch! Until a couple months ago, the press release writer, Marc Marono, worked for CNSnews.com where he distinguished himself by using disgraced NASA crony George Deutsch to attack NASA scientist James Hansen. Deutsch, you'll remember, was the young Bush campaign flack who was sent over to NASA to censor scientific publications, made a splash when he instructed NASA scientists not to discuss the Big Bang without considering the topic from a religious perspective and then got bounced when it emerged that he'd lied about having a college degree. Earlier, Marono wrote this beaut questioning whether Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) may have faked the wounds for which he received two Purple Hearts.
It's all one seamless web of fruitcakery.
Update [2006-6-28 8:43:38 by David Roberts]: ThinkProgress does the yeoman's work of refuting the claims in the release. For my part, I'm sick of knocking down the same zombie falsehoods again and again. The folks advancing these claims can no longer claim to be acting in good faith, so they won't get good faith responses from me. From now on, they get what they deserve: disdain and mockery. Wo0t!
Update [2006-6-28 12:26:24 by David Roberts]: And still more detailed debunking from Tim Lambert. But will the debunking stop this thing from spreading like wildfire throughout the crankosphere? I doubt it.
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Link dump
As always, I regret having to do this sort of post, but there's only so much stuff one man can write about (and still make time for his quest to view the entire Gilmore Girls corpus over the course of a single summer).
