Articles by David Roberts

Americans and Climate Change: Incentives: Politicians

"Americans and Climate Change: Closing the Gap Between Science and Action" (PDF) is a report synthesizing the insights of 110 leading thinkers on how to educate and motivate the American public on the subject of global warming. Background on the report here. I'll be posting a series of excerpts (citations have been removed; see original report). If you'd like to be involved in implementing the report's recommendations, or learn more, visit the Yale Project on Climate Change website.

Why aren't politicians more eager to champion the issue of global warming? Why did Al Gore fail to get any traction with it in 2000? Find out below!

Adaptation

The other issue that's come up in Pielke-Roberts Mild Disagreement '06 is the relative importance of mitigation vs. adaptation, climate-change wise. A couple of issues need to be distinguished here.

First, the substance: According to Roger, the "Kyoto Protocol, as is the FCCC under which it was negotiated, is in fact strongly biased against adaptation." It frames money spent on adaptation as money directly drained from mitigation (which it says would make adaptation unnecessary). I'm no expert on the FCCC, but this jibes with what I've read, and I agree with Roger that it's not a smart way of framing things.

Bucking conventional wisdom: the new black

A couple days ago, Roger Pielke Jr. posted about "non-skeptic heretics," a group of which he and Gregg Easterbrook are allegedly a part. I left a slightly intemperate comment about it, to which Roger responded at some length. Several issues are getting run together. I'm going to take them one at a time.

The least significant in the grand scheme of things, but most personally aggravating to me, is this question of a "third way" (in general, not on climate change in particular).

It is conventional wisdom now that every issue is defined by two shrill, partisan camps, and that it is a mark of intellectual integrity to choose a path between them.

As a heuristic, this may have once had some value, but today it's become a fetish. A tic.

Let's be clear: There is no empirical significance in falling between, or even just outside, two opposing positions. A position's truth value has nothing to do with its number of adherents, or its adherents' rhetorical acumen. The desire not to be a "joiner," not to belong to a "tribe," is a matter of temperament, not empiricism.

Patrick Michaels hackery through history

As you may recall, on FOX's Hannity & Colmes, the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels plucked a quote from my Gore interview and grossly misinterpreted it to mean that Gore was exaggerating the evidence for global warming.

I called him out on it here, but for some reason the bell never rang that this was the very same Patrick Michaels involved in a legendary piece of hackery.

Paul Krugman reminds us of the sordid tale in his column: