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March 27, 2025
We Still Haven’t Reckoned with Covid’s Costs
Five years ago, a new coronavirus to which no one was yet immune was sweeping the globe, shutting down schools and sporting events. In March 2020, masks had not yet become a partisan lightning rod — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had not yet even recommended them. And according to the Pew Research Center,…
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 27, 2025
Is the EPA “Endangerment Finding” Endangered?
Earlier today, The Washington Post reported that head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, has urged the Trump administration to rescind the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases. The Post reports: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has privately urged the White House to strike down a scientific finding underpinning much of the federal government’s push to combat…
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…
February 10, 2025
The Deeper Question Raised by the NIH Grant Overhaul
Last week, in a classic Friday evening news dump, the Trump administration set off one of those frantic controversies that seem to be our fate for the next few years. A tweet from the official X account of the National Institutes of Health declared: The tweet was backed up by a more formal memo justifying the new policy on…
January 29, 2025
Questions Kennedy Must Answer, According to Experts
Ahead of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings, New York Times Opinion invited experts and leaders across disciplines and ideologies to share questions they believe Mr. Kennedy must answer before serving in a role that oversees a $1.7 trillion budget and wields enormous influence over drug approvals, public health and the nation’s research agenda. M….
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….