Articles by David Roberts

Jim Hansen in NY Review of Books

In the latest issue of the The New York Review of Books (not yet online here), legendary climate scientist Jim Hansen leaves behind the cozy confines of technical scientific writing and launches into the world of book review prose. He does remarkably well.

The books at issue are Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers, Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, but Hansen mostly uses the books as a pretext to lay out the basic state of conventional wisdom on the climate issue, namely: Things are bad and getting worse, species are set to die out and sea levels are set to rise, we can either continue on with business as usual or set a new course, and we really should set a new course, because within 10 years we'll pass a point of no return. Regular Grist readers will find it all quite familiar, but Hansen does a nice job of presenting the information in a compact, dispassionate, and frightening form.

Perhaps more juicy, from a purely tabloidy perspective, are some nuggets about Gore and Hansen's relationship toward the end of the piece. To wit:

Red state penetration

The Courier-Journal (of all papers) out of Louisville, Ky. (of all places), is running a wide-ranging, in-depth look at global warming.

Kudos, Kentucky!

Starbucks and milk

My wife, who is in the coffee business (and an unreconstructed coffee snob), is fond of saying that it’s misleading to call Starbucks a “coffee shop.” Starbucks’ primary beverage product is milk. Coffee is just one of the flavorings — along with chocolate, syrups, chai, and lord knows what else — they use in their […]

Your Adequacy

This chat between Al Gore and director Davis Guggenheim is a little silly, but it's funny that first thing, Guggenheim asks Gore what he'd like to be called and Gore says, "Your Adequacy." One of his stock jokes, but an amusing one.