Articles by David Roberts

Inconvenient science

This is a pretty amazing story. A graduate student at Oregon State University does a little study and gets it published in Science. Good for him, right?

Well, no, because his results are inconvenient for the thuggish cabal running Congress.

You see, Daniel Donato's study showed that post-fire logging hurt forest regrowth, and Congress was busy considering legislation that would allow timber companies to salvage log after fires on federal land. This was always a sop to timber companies, but it was sold with a veneer of science: that salvage logging aided regrowth. So Donato's timing was unfortunate.

Oregon State Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser, who supported the bill, started getting grumpy emails from his extraction buddies in industry and politics:

The Mustache and GM

A while back, Thomas Friedman wrote a column blasting GM for their plan to offer SUV purchasers rebates for gas money. In rather florid language, he compared GM to a crack dealer, said the company is supporting terrorists, and said he looked forward to Toyota taking over.

GM was not happy about it, and in this blog post, Brian Akre of GM's corporate communications dept. recounts his attempts to get the NYT to publish a letter in response. Apparently the NYT was not very accommodating.

Here's the original letter (PDF) GM's VP tried to get in NYT. What do you think?

Gore links

Over on Salon, Katharine Mieszkowski takes a look at the science in An Inconvenient Truth, chats with some climate scientists, and concludes that Gore more or less got everything right.

ThinkProgress dismantles the right-wing canard -- most recently passed along by George Will -- that there's wide scientific disagreement over humans' role in global warming.

'Winger Debra Saunders struggles mightily to revive the familiar media narrative of Al Gore as narcissist and serial exaggerator. Anonymous Liberal debunks some of the more egregious factual errors and ruminates on the narrative that seemingly won't die.

Once the media has settled on a narrative, it is very hard to change it. Al Gore's recent re-emergence into the national spotlight has resulted in some uncharacteristically favorable press coverage. But Gore's conservative detractors, like Saunders and the National Review's Jonah Goldberg are trying very hard to reassert the old Gore narratives. And mainstream journalists (and even liberal commentators like Frank Rich) have demonstrated recently that the old Gore narratives still shape their views of the man.

But I'm cautiously optimistic that this phenomenon can be more effectively combatted and contained in the future. The reason for my optimism is the emergence of the blogosphere as a factor in American politics.

Let's hope. As AL points out, Daily Howler is the place to go for tireless debunking of these tired narratives.

Kolbert does opinion

Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert (Grist interview here; Field Notes from a Catastrophe review here) is, I'm happy to see, indulging in full-on polemic. From her piece in the L.A. Times:

Meanwhile, it's crucial to understand -- although the Bush administration would apparently prefer not to -- that uncertainty cuts both ways. As the administration likes to point out, the U.S. spends about $2 billion a year on climate-change research. It's possible that as scientists learn more about how the climate works, they will discover that the threshold of dangerous change lies further away than is estimated, and Washington's do-nothing policy will come to seem justified. But the reverse is just as likely. In fact, nearly everything that has been discovered about the climate system recently has tended to suggest that the threshold is closer than suspected.