December 16, 2024
How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor
I am the answer to a trivia question. Who is the only person to appear in the leaked 2009 Climategate emails and in the 2016 Hillary Clinton Wikileaks emails? That’d be me. At the time, in both cases the leaks revealed efforts to censor my research and damage my career. In both cases I thought…
December 2, 2024
The MAGA Science Agenda Reveals America’s Future
The leader of the Republican Party and our country’s next president has tapped a pro-choice scion of the country’s most famous Democratic dynasty to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In keeping with the bewildering dynamics of today’s negative partisanship, conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation have cheered the selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while liberals have…
November 25, 2024
Politicization of the American University
Roger Federer spent 24 years as a professional tennis player. Roger Clemens played 24 years in the major leagues. And at the end of next month, I’ll leave my position as tenured, full professor the University of Colorado Boulder after 24 years on the faculty.1 Roger that! Leaving the faculty has motivated me to try to make sense of the…
November 25, 2024
The Roots of Public Mistrust: Science, Policy, and Academic Integrity
Astronomer Carl Sagan observed in his popular 1980 television show Cosmos, “There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.” The scientific community’s historical…
October 28, 2024
Take the Under
In the Financial Times over the weekend, John Burn-Murdoch discussed how projections of global population keep decreasing: Burn-Murdoch concludes: [T]hese estimates are extremely fuzzy and based on frameworks that were true in the past but may not be today. Use them with caution, and probably err on the low side. Given how important population projections are for climate…
October 24, 2024
Climate Journalism Done Right
Today, The Washington Post has published a lengthy analysis titled, “The real reason billion-dollar disasters like Hurricane Helene are growing more common.”1 The article, by the Post’s Harry Stevens, is brilliantly done — extensively reported, data rich, grounded in a large body of research, with a wide diversity of voices. Watching reactions to the article will…
October 21, 2024
We Found an Excel File Online
A new paper is just out claiming that climate change is increasing the damage associated with U.S. hurricanes: “US hurricane damage, normalized for changes of inflation, population, and wealth, increases approximately 1% per year. For 1900–2022, 1% per year is equivalent to a factor of >3 increase, substantially but not entirely, attributable to climate change.” As they…
October 15, 2024
The “warming surge,” climate model biases, fewer Gulf hurricanes, and super shoes!
In 2024 it can be difficult to sort wheat from chaff in the peer-reviewed literature. There has always been better and worse science — that goes with the territory — but as I argued last week, we are now in an era of tactical research, with science curated to advance narratives over knowledge. That makes knowing…