In case anyone was wondering, blogging will be light for the rest of the summer, as I try to step back and once again consider just what my role, and that of this blog, will be in the dialog over what to do about our changing climate.
The news that the U.S. Senate will not pass any kind of legislation dealing with reducing fossil-fuel emissions this year should give us all pause. The recent near-collapse of Scienceblogs a few weeks ago introduced a complicating factor with which I still haven't completed come to grips. Plus there's logistical issues: I'm busy doing things that actually pay the bills, and our annual family vacation is looming in Augus. So unless something really big pops up, the posts for the next few weeks will be few and brief.
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Have a happy holiday, you don't have to worry about thing here
I can think of one thing that might pop up, be big, and cause certain aspects of the global warming discussion to become very timely and important. Katrina's big sister.
It is supposed to be a major hurricane season, but it's been relatively quite. Yet conditions are ripe. Is the metaphorical quiet before the storm come to be real? As it were?
Hey James. Noone cares. Good riddance. You FAIL again.
from the New York Times Virginia Heffernan:
Clearly Iâve been out of some loop for too long, but does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the âskeptical communityâ go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers? And can anyone who still enjoys this class-inflected bloodsport tell me why it has to happen under the banner of science?
Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, thatâs not whatâs bothersome about them. Whatâs bothersome is that the site is misleading. Itâs not science by scientists, not even remotely; itâs science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word âscienceâ and from occasional invocations of âpeer-reviewedâ thises and thats.
Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers â or many of the most visible ones, anyway â prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesnât take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap
"what my role, and that of this blog, will be in the dialog over what to do about our changing climate"
Your role is to show the world what a kool-aid drinking alarmist stooge looks like. Nice work!
It is supposed to be a major hurricane season, but it's been relatively quite. Yet conditions are ripe. Is the metaphorical quiet before the storm come to be real? As it were?
Quote with snips: '... I try to step back and once again consider just what my role, ... will be in the dialog over what to do about our changing climate.'
The snips are to make the quote timeless. It could have been uttered by any sentient human since homo sapiens started having dialogues. What to do about the weather!
Some came up with rain dances, some with human sacrifices. Most recently, some came up with not setting fire to lumps of coal and other sources of our warmth and wellbeing - a kind of mass sacrifice to the weather gods on a very large scale.
I wonder what they'll come with in a thousand years from now? Or maybe, just maybe, we'll have more sense by then?