In a recent email conversation with friends and acquaintances, two conservative correspondents sought to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change and its impacts by citing facts they believed undermined the accuracy of that consensus.
One tried to debunk the issue with a recent Wall Street Journal reprint of a 1989 news article in which a U.N. environmental official said that rising sea levels could eliminate whole nations if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000. Another raised a familiar ‘challenge’ by asking 
how we can explain major weather changes hundreds of years ago before industrialization and the invention of the internal combustion engine.
More substantially they also pointed to the NASA finding in 2015 that the ice sheet in Antarctica is growing rather than shrinking, contradicting other studies that found a loss of ice mass in that region as they have also found in Arctic ice. Continue reading “Sense and Nonsense in the Climate Change ‘Debate’”
the President’s constant barrage of self-serving, denigrating and false tweets–social media have made our national political dynamics more divisive, ill-informed and counterproductive. The premium these media place on bite-sized bursts of no-need-to-explain-or-defend assertions has only exacerbated this process. 
and the traditional Republican Party “establishment” sharply denounced Trump for almost everything: his (lack of) credentials, his extravagant lying, his crudeness (if less so his misogyny), his violation of longstanding political norms. No one, they asserted, was less prepared or less fit for the presidency. The party’s most recent standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, urged during the 2016 primaries that “Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.” 