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May 23, 2025
Heavy Metal
More than 7,000 years ago, humans first began mining copper. Since then, humans have mined more than 700 million tonnes. According to a fascinating study of the metals requirements of a net zero energy transition, the world will need to produce another 700 million tonnes of copper over the next 22 years. The study, by Simon Michaux of the…
May 19, 2025
Ten Provocative Graphs
The figures and data below are all hot of the press and shared to help get your weekend off to an intellectually stimulating start. Enjoy! The Earth is Darkening In a new posting, climate scientist James Hansen calls our attention to a “BFD”: Earth’s albedo (or reflectivity) is the portion (percent) of incoming solar radiation that…
April 17, 2025
The New Rules for Experts
My friend and AEI colleague Tony Mills — director of the AEI Center for Technology, Science, and Energy — has been on a tear lately. Today, I share four of Tony’s essays published in the past month on public trust in science, reform of NIH, COVID’s long-term costs, and how virologists lost the gain-of-function debate. Enjoy, and see you…
March 20, 2025
Is Single Extreme Event Attribution Even Possible?
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) currently has a study committee on Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and their Impacts. In this series — Weather Attribution Alchemy — I have previously discussed the committee’s many conflicts of interest. Today I discuss a crucial scientific question at the center of the committee’s work,…
March 12, 2025
“In Bad Faith”
The DC Court that heard the defaation case brought by climate scientist Michael Mann against two bloggers has ruled today that Mann and his lawyers acted in “bad faith” during the case, by presenting false claims on multiple occasions related to Mann’s grant funding: Here, the Court finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that Dr. Mann, through…
February 24, 2025
Why We Do the Research
One of the wonderful things about science is that research results cannot be consistently anticipated. That’s why we do the research. That research doesn’t always come out how we expect is particularly problematic for partisans who expect research to provide results in alignment with their political commitments. So you think hurricane landfalls have become more…
February 18, 2025
The Dilemmas of Democracy
In his classic 1960 book, The Semisovereign People, political scientist E.E. Schattschneider identified a dilemma of democracy: All of us are ignorant about most things, making each of us unsuitable to govern — yet we also have a belief that everyone should be allowed to participate in governance, with our political leaders chosen from among the…
February 12, 2025
The North American Fire Deficit
An important new paper published this week in Nature Communications looks at the historical record of fire in North America — A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned. Parks et al. find that large fires of recent decades in North America are not unprecedented: Our study of 1851 tree-ring fire-scar…
January 27, 2025
The Most Major Hurricanes Ever
Last year the world experienced the most major hurricane landfalls since records are available, tying only 2015, with 11 storms. Does last year indicate that we have reached a new climate-fueled normal? Let’s have a look. More than a decade ago, Jessica Weinkle, Ryan Maue, and I published the first long-period global hurricane landfall dataset using a consistent methodology….
December 23, 2024
Fixing Universities
In my courses on policy analysis I teach my students to focus on problem definition before even thinking about policy options. The problem facing major American research universities, as characterized in this series, is that large segments of the public has lost confidence in them, at least in part because faculty are overwhelmingly on the…