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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Inhofe is better than fiction
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works: global warming is "the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state." Awesome!
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Oxford green, for now
Did you know that the University of Oxford is run entirely on renewable energy? Me neither. But maybe not for long.
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Who you gonna believe?
I'm currently writing a review of Michael Crichton's new book State of Fear (should be done and published next week, several months after anybody gives a damn). In it, smarty-pants characters who think global warming is a hoax argue against borderline-retarded characters who believe it's a real phenomenon. The smarty-pants cite many scientific papers in support of their view; the borderline-retarded do not.
Setting aside the dubious literary merits of this arrangement, it raises an interesting question I think people ought to discuss more forthrightly: Why do non-scientists believe what they believe about global warming?
(Warning: extended ramble ahead. Click at your own risk.)
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Peer review
The indispens... uh, hang on, let me check my thesaurus ... the necessitous RealClimate has a stellar essay up on the subject of scientific peer review, a topic that anyone who ever talks about climate change ought to know a little something about. They agree with the general sentiment that non-peer reviewed scientific papers shouldn't be taken seriously, but go on to say that peer review is not a magic bullet. It's an important process, but doesn't ensure scientific validity.
The best part is a discussion of some of the many recent peer-reviewed papers that have been hyped as overturning the scientific consensus on anthropocentric global warming. They show how the peer review process breaks down, and more importantly, how even after the scientific community has refuted some of these papers, they go on being hyped by climate change skeptics. Specific examples abound. Here's the money passage:
