Over at Making Science Public, Jennifer Metcalfe has a post on her recent paper, “Chanting to the choir: the dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs”, which has received some critical comment from the usual suspects. Metcalfe’s study aims to estimate the management and quality of blog commentary at Jo Nova’s blog, to compare it … Continue reading
Author Archives: benpile
Why we don’t need academics*…
(* – well, not quite so many of them, anyway). To the extent that academia is a place of prestige, Twitter is a great leveller. We can peer over the walls… And, oh my, what a sight… Let me add this to @eucopresident's words: Brexiteers have placed Britain on the #YellowBrickRoad. It's a long & … Continue reading
Misleading Figures Behind the New Climate Economy
A tweet came my way, encouraging the world to read the New Climate Economy Report. The report is the work of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, which claims to be… … a major international initiative to examine how countries can achieve economic growth while dealing with the risks posed by climate change. … Continue reading
What is the sound of one hand hand-wringing?
One of my favourite lines in anything I’ve ever read about politics is possibly an apocryphal attribution to Voltaire. On being told that, ‘life is hard’, Voltaire is said to have replied, ‘compared to what?’. Comparison is essential to all humanist thinking – thinking that puts humans, rather than gods and monsters, at the centre … Continue reading
Who Pushed the Alarmist Domino – Scientists or the Media?
Few have missed the fact that Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, published two days ago is a reworking of 1990s ‘runaway global warming’ hypothesis, now dubbed ‘Hothouse Earth’. The abstract: We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization … Continue reading
The Consensus Enforcers’ Fallacy Fallacy
John Cook of the SKS project (neither of which need an introduction here) has teamed up with Peter Ellerton and David Kinkead, both of the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project, to offer a way of “Deconstructing climate misinformation to identify reasoning errors”. The offering in Environmental Research Letters seemingly takes the reader through the … Continue reading
Adieu, Paris!
So, farewell then, Paris. Trump has called it, and it’s an out. The details of which are yet to emerge, and hopefully not to disappoint. Cue outrage from the likes of Channel 4 news, no doubt. For instance, take this particular illuminating tweet from the UK Green Party’s only MP – Caroline Lucas. The height … Continue reading
Do black lives really matter to greens?
It has been a fair while since we’ve had any airport-runway closing action from the climate, erm… ‘community’. But today’s protest at London City Airport saw black and green seemingly unite. The logic of this move is not obvious. Luckily, the UK’s sole Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas was rushed to the BBC to explain. … Continue reading
