Articles by Joseph Romm
Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
All Articles
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Yet another one
As a physicist, I have never been a big fan of Freeman Dyson. He was, after all, one of the "geniuses" pushing Project Orion -- the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs -- I kid you not!
Dyson has written a new book, A Many Colored Glass, that you shouldn't waste your time and money on -- as this extract on global warming makes clear. Dyson has basically joined the famous-crackpot camp with Michael Crichton and Bill Gray. You can read a good debunking of Dyson here. I'll add my two cents.
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To solving our global warming problem
Geo-engineering is "the intentional large scale manipulation of the global environment" (PDF) to counteract the effects of global warming, which itself was unintentional geo-engineering -- although today you'd have to say global warming is intentional, since everybody now knows what we're doing to the planet.But I digress. We're screwing up the planet with unrestricted greenhouse-gas emissions, and the question is, do we want to try to fix that problem by gambling on some other large-scale effort to manipulate the climate, or should we just try to restrict emissions? It's as if the doctor says you have a disease that can definitely be cured by diet and exercise, but you opt for expensive chemotherapy -- even though the doctor can't guarantee the results but is pretty certain the side effects would be as bad as the disease.
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A match made in heaven?
Energy efficiency and renewable power together are better than either alone, according to a recent report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the American Council on Renewable Energy. Not a shocking conclusion, but an important one, especially in a world where it seems that all types of zero-carbon power are competing against each other for funding.
The report finds that synergies between renewables and efficiency would cut greenhouse-gas emissions more effectively than either alone. What kind of synergies?
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The latest skepticism, debunked
Not that anyone but a denier or two believed that some microscopic revision in a few years of temperature data meant the theory of human-caused global warming was even slightly undercut -- but progressives need to know all the rebuttals. I emailed Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate about this -- I'm sure I wasn't alone -- and he put together a very nice debunking post.
As Gavin writes, "there is clearly a latent and deeply felt wish in some sectors for the whole problem of global warming to be reduced to a statistical quirk or a mistake." Sad.
