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Chris Mooney

Chris Mooney is a Prospect senior correspondent and, most recently, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatened Our Future (with Sheril Kirshenbaum).

Recent Articles

A Dirty Business

Cynically using science to stall policy is the research equivalent of filing frivolous legal motions.

Chris MooneyAug 31, 2010
(Flickr/Seth Anderson)

The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment, by Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter, Oxford University Press, 223 pages, $27.95

Few people today will recall what happened to the little Pennsylvania town of Donora in the fall of 1948 or what happened afterward, when it appears that two crimes were committed -- one by industry, the other by science acting as an accomplice.

A Really Long Heat Wave

Popular writers and scientists alike are trying to help readers understand climate change, but doing so requires new thinking about the scale of time.

Chris MooneyDec 11, 2008

The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing The Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate By David Archer, Princeton University Press, 180 pages, $22.95

Forecast: The Consequences Of Climate Change, From The Amazon To The Arctic, From Darfur To Napa Valley By Stephan Faris, Henry Holt and Co., 256 pages, $25.00

The Manufacture of Uncertainty

In his new book, Doubt is Their Product, David Michaels describes how the corporate practice of "manufacturing uncertainty" has taken over our regulatory system and undermined our health.

Chris MooneyMar 19, 2008

Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels (Oxford University Press, 359 pages, $27.95)

This Will Mean the World to Us

Despite decades of delay, the next administration could still move us toward a solution before devastating climate change becomes irreversible.

Chris MooneyDec 15, 2007

Is it any wonder that progress on global climate change has been so slow? As the University of Washington ethicist Stephen Gardiner has recently argued, nothing in human experience has prepared us to deal with a problem that has such far-flung causes and uneven and momentous effects. No one source of emissions is to blame: Global warming springs from many acts of energy consumption over many years in many places across the planet. And if and when the temperatures and the seas rise, the toll will fall on some nations (mainly poorer ones) more than others, while the costs of any policy to avert warming will be distributed differently and require present generations to make sacrifices for future ones.

The Right Chemistry

Chris MooneyMar 20, 2006

When the 2005 Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced last October in Stockholm, the new laureates -- Yves Chauvin of the Institute Français du Pétrole, Robert Grubbs of Caltech, and Richard Schrock of MIT -- won recognition for creating “fantastic opportunities for producing new molecules.” They had explained and developed a reaction known as metathesis, which allows chemists to selectively design organic molecules by trading atoms across different compounds. In search of an analogy to help the pubic grasp this concept, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences likened the process to changing partners in a dance. Then came the political statement: The advance represented a “great step forward for green chemistry,” the academy declared.

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