Chris C. Mooney's Blog, page 2

The Anti-Science Left? Nope, The Right is Much Worse

A few nights back I was on the Agenda With Steve Paikin, alongside Michael Shermer and Mark Lynas, discussing the “anti-science left.”

My view is that while there are anti-science views on the left wing, they’re swamped by what’s on the right, and that’s really the nature of things–liberals and scientists are allies (and conservatives and scientists are opposed) due to their psychology.

So I didn’t agree with the centrist, pox-on-both-houses framing of the show (and the opinion of Michael Shermer, who argues this). Still, it was a good, meaty discussion:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Navy’s $ 4 Billion Fuel Bill (And Other Reasons the Military and CIA Care About Energy and Climate)

 

Deck of the USS Nimitz, image credit Julia Whitty

Yesterday, I hosted the latest Climate Desk Live event in DC. The video is here, and a Mother Jones wrap-up piece is here.

The bottom line: I had a retired admiral and a captain of the Navy explaining why climate and energy, respectively, are a seriously big deal to the military. And then I had the former administrator of NOAA reporting on work he’s done for the CIA recently, about how climate extremes could upend unstable regions of the world, like the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.

So, I think concern about climate and energy is finding a very new audience–of very serious, pragmatic, get-it-done people. And I couldn’t be happier about that.

Video here, article here. Article that originally inspired it all, by Mother Jones’ environmental correspondent Julia Whitty, here.

Point of Inquiry Live With Steven Pinker and “America’s Science Idol” Winner Tom Di Liberto

On Sunday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston, Indre & I recorded the latest Point of Inquiry live with a stellar guest–Steven Pinker–whose work couldn’t be more timely, because it focuses on the root causes of violence and shows that actually, violence across our global society has been in decline. There is both audio and also video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the end of the show there’s an interview with Tom Di Liberto, a NOAA meteorologist who two days earlier had won the America’s Science Idol competition at the meeting–a competition for which I served as emcee. Videos of this will be coming soon–for now, here’s an interview with the winner.

English Majors Who Become Sci-Fi Authors: “In Love With This Civilization That’s Been So Good to Them”

For the latest Point of Inquiry podcast, my guest is also one of my heroes, a man whose books I read as a kid: sci-fi novelist David Brin.

The interview ranged over a broad area–from Brin’s latest writings, to the future of the Internet and the interstellar quest for other intelligent civilizations.

The title of this post quotes one of the many gems of wisdom and insight from the interview.

Some others that I tweeted or will tweet:

The left-right axis is the “most lobotomizing metaphor in human history”: @DavidBrin1 on @pointofinquiry http://www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

Kicking the Hobbit: @DavidBrin1 critiques the romantic impulse in sci-fi/fantasy on the latest @pointofinquiry http://www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

“I’d much rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy” @DavidBrin1 on @pointofinquiry http://www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

Too often, the “furniture of fantasy” stories is anti-democratic, anti-science @DavidBrin1 on @pointofinquiry http://www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

How to change the Internet to ensure that bad ideas actually die! @DavidBrin1 on @pointofinquiry http://www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

Check the show out here!

My Latest Climate Desk Video: Peering Over the Climate Cliff in a Sweltering D.C. Winter

The latest video from Climate Desk Live has just gone up. In it, I introduce our event from last week (on a day of unseasonably hot D.C. weather) and then we hear from Rep. Ed Markey and a distinguished panel, discussing how President Obama can fix the climate problem in the next four years. Here it is:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note–there are some climate deniers in the comments on the video. But it’s a pile-on, with the forces of reason clearly winning….

Paul Krugman is Reading The Republican Brain

Nobel laureate economist and celebrated New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of our chief chroniclers of the extent to which the modern right has become detached from economic, scientific, and factual reality.

So it’s only fitting, I guess, that he has been reading my book The Republican Brain.

And how do I know that?

Well, he has blogged about it twice now, writing:

I’m belatedly reading Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain: if truth be told, I was afraid the book would be too much red meat for my own predispositions, and wanted to keep my cool. But Mooney actually makes a very good point: the personality traits we associate with modern conservatism, above all a lack of openness, make the modern GOP fundamentally hostile to the very idea of objective inquiry. If they want your opinion, they’ll tell you what it is; doubters of orthodoxy need not apply, and will in fact be persecuted.

And:

Chris Mooney wins again: we’re talking about personality types who aren’t responsive to evidence. Indeed, the more often you show them that their hard-money, anti-spending prejudices have been proven wrong, the more deeply those prejudices become entrenched.

I’m thrilled to have such a distinguished reader, and I’m really glad he seems to be getting a lot out of the book.

Five Things Obama Can Do On Climate…Without Congress

I have a big piece up at Mother Jones today. Basically, it’s my report on what Obama can do on climate, most of it without any Republican cooperation whatsoever.

In the course of writing it, I have to say I realized that all the chatter about a carbon tax right now is deeply misinformed, or at least incomplete.

The real climate action in the next four years is going to be at EPA. And the worst of all worlds might be if we get a carbon tax, but as part of the deal, EPA is preempted from taking the strong steps it has already launched.

That’s not a perspective you’re hearing at all right now in the commentariat. So, when Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney recently dissed carbon taxes….well, that might actually be a good thing.

Read here for more on why that’s the case.

New Point of Inquiry: How to Be Secular, with Jacques Berlinerblau

My latest hosted episode of the podcast is now up–it’s with Georgetown scholar Jacques Berlinerblau, discussing his new book How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom.

Basically, Berlinerblau believes that the Christian Right has routed secularism in the U.S.–no argument there for many atheists and freethinkers.

But where he goes further is arguing that to fix the problem, atheists and religious skeptics need to be building allegiances with moderate religious believers, ranging from Sikhs to, yes, many Catholics.

So far as I know, few if any folks in secularism are actively trying to build these bridges–because of course, the predominant emotion out there is all about denouncing religion, rather than trying to work with it.

So it is a pretty controversial view–and one that should get some attention. Full show here; book link here.

Why The Media Must Stop Winking at Conservative Falsehoods

[image error]This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets(www.dylanottokrider.com).

In early 2009, George Will wrote a column, entitled“Dark Green Doomsayers,” in which he challenged climate science based on a study by the Arctic Climate Research Center–a study that actually said the opposite of what Will claimed it said. We know this because the Arctic Climate Resear...

Of Nerds and Words: Why Everybody Must Read Joe Romm’s New Book Language Intelligence

[image error]I don’t normally do this. But right now, I am going to come out and gushingly endorse a book: Climate blogger Joe Romm’s forthcoming Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.

Everybody who cares about why science doesn’t get through to the public should read it.

Basically, it is a powerful treatise on the neglected art of rhetoric, the technique mastered by Shakespeare, Lincoln, and the writers of the King James Bible. As an English major, I p...