Category: Environment & Energy Stories

That's a familiar plot in the illus up top, the familiar Keeling graph from NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii,of rising CO2 levels. And it keeps going up as long as one blurs one's eyes against the yearly cycle's ups and downs. A good story now on the wire has the latest - and also illustrates the rewards and sometimes complications of diligent  beat checks to see what is going on without waiting for a press release or other note to float in with no work on the reporter's part.

• AP - Seth Borenstein: US Scientists Report Big Jump In Heat-Trapping CO2 ; The news isn't good for those still believing there is a chance that a suddenly and inexplicably enlightened collective human race can stop throwing its fossil fuel garbage into the air and not run the planet's thermostat past a possibly-catastrophic two degree C...

Chris Mooney, the adept chronicler of the Republican brain and fierce avenger of science denialism wherever he finds it, is unhappy. The reason? A persistent "bad idea that circulates and recirculates with such frequency that once in a while, you just have to dust off your mallet" and give it a whack.

"I'm talking about the idea that when it comes to misusing or abusing science, both sides do it—a pox on both their houses—and the left is really just as bad as the right," he writes at Mother Jones. The idea's latest incarnation, the one that caught Mooney's eye, is a piece by Michael Shermer that appeared in Scientific American recently under the headline, "The...

Congratulations to Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review for sticking around late on a Friday afternoon to get a scoop, if an unfortunate one--The New York Times, Brainard reports, has canceled its popular and important Green blog.

Politicians and government officials who want to hide bad news use the well known tactic of releasing it late Friday, so that it's likely to get nothing more than a small spot in the Saturday papers, which are generally the least read papers of the week. Sunday's paper is by that time mostly filled up with features that have already closed, and by Monday, the bad news is old news. It's considered an underhanded tactic.

It was distressing, therefore, to see The New York Times follow this model by...

Hankering for more prominent coverage of climate change policy paralysis and need a quick fix? A clever column on Time Magazine's Ecocentric site by veteran enviro reporter Bryan Walsh makes one think one should read stories on the political impasse over easing the US national debt immediately (conservatives) or after the economy perks up (liberals). Only instead of reading words such as deficit and debt, swap in global warming. Surprising, but it sort of works.

   In both cases, he explains, the argument features a camp that brooks no compromise or other deal-making that delays immediate, forceful action. The stakes are so high that, these rigid sorts believe, politics as usual must be cast aside. The very existence of civilization and the American way is at stake. Denialists (who either think the federal budget...

The second shoe dropped Monday on the saga of the New York Times environmental writer John Broder's road test, over an icy two days, of the Tesla Model S electric sedan. Our prior post took things through a promise by the Times's public editor, or ombudsman internal-critic, Margaret Sullivan's promise to look into vehement charges from Tesla and its chairman Elon Musk that Broder did not drive the way that he said he did in his review, and that his sloppy and perhaps malicious treatment of the car is why it wound up with a flat battery and a trip on a flattbad tow vehicle to rescue at a charging station. The review, along with a report of slightly higher losses in the fourth quarter of 2012, contributed to a dip in the company's stock this week.

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Nobody has to start supporting a carbon tax or "wearing hemp shoes," but any rational person with a brain in his or her head ought to "if not fully believe that human beings are warming the planet by releasing greenhouse gases, at least recognize that this is what the data seem to suggest and that it is what the vast majority of scientists who study weather believe is the case."

That's the conclusion of an evidently exasperated Matthew Herper at Forbes, who doesn't expect this to put an end to the political fighting, but does allow us "to start aiming our fiery furnace of a political system at actually solving our problems." Fight over a carbon tax, a pipeline, or composting, but at least admit the facts, he argues.

He then lists some of the main objections he...

  Former Congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina is 'former' at least in part because he told his red-state constituents he accepts global warming as real, and important. So today he heads a private enterprise-oriented outfit called the Energy & Enterprise Initiative that tries to convince conservatives that they ought to be leading the fight against climate change. It's an idea that could use a little boost via probing by conservation-minded journalists dismayed over the curiously rigid partisan divide over global warming in US politics and in other nations as well.

    At the climate-focusssed non-profit Yale e360, a magazine and a website, its executive editor Roger Cohn this month has a probing Q&A with Inglis, covering his...