Chris Mooney

There are few who understand the ins and outs of the U.S. government’s climate-change research program better than Rick Piltz. A political scientist by training, Piltz moved to Washington, D.C., from Texas during the scorching summer of 1988, when NASA climatologist James Hansen put global warming on the map with his famous congressional testimony warning […]

During the recent House of Representatives debate on embryonic stem-cell research, there were many moments that made you want to wince, but none rivaled a truly ridiculous statement by pro-life Representative Henry Hyde. “I myself am a 992-month-old embryo,” Hyde declared, in a speech opposing a bipartisan bill to loosen the president’s strict limitations on […]

Standing atop the levee that protects Metairie, Louisiana, a satellite of New Orleans, from Lake Pontchartrain to the north, everything seems normal at first. But scanning your eyes across the horizon — as I did last November, when I visited my hometown for Thanksgiving — you suddenly glimpse the city’s startling vulnerability. It’s simply a […]

Here we go again. Newspapers and TV chat shows have been buzzing lately with news of the latest “controversy” in Kansas, over evolution and “intelligent design.” Analogies to the famous Scopes trial of 1925 have been rampant, despite the seemingly obvious fact that in Kansas there is no trial. Rather, a series of trial-like hearings […]

Once or twice each year in my little corner of Washington, D.C. (the hotel-crowd-oriented Woodley Park area), I encounter our friendly neighborhood pileated woodpecker. He’s hard to miss, being crow-sized where other woodpeckers don’t grow much bigger than robins. When he flies, often crossing the Taft Bridge to get from one part of Rock Creek […]

You don’t have to be anti-abortion to agree with the following statement: A human embryo has greater moral standing than a human skin cell. While I — and many others — would disagree with the notion that early embryos should enjoy all the same rights and protections as fully developed human beings, it’s hard to […]

Recently, a federal judge in Utah came down with a disturbing ruling, essentially undercutting the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) February 2004 attempt, following the death of Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, to ban herbal supplements containing ephedra, which is also known as ma huang and is used for weight loss. According to the FDA, […]

Consider a thought experiment. First, suppose that a prominent U.S. senator had joined a lawsuit over a Clinton administration report on climate change, charging that the document was produced unlawfully and was scientifically flawed, and that its release must therefore be blocked. We’re not talking about freely spoken criticism here, mind you. We’re talking about […]

Last year, when a profound schism erupted between the American scientific community and the Bush administration, a key point of contention concerned the alteration of sexual health information on several government Web sites. A National Cancer Institute fact sheet temporarily suggested the possibility of a link between abortion and breast cancer (scientists say with near […]

Normally, when two of the president’s key advisers publicly contradict each other — see Colin Powell versus Donald Rumsfeld during George W. Bush’s first term — it’s a big story. But when the issue is the literally world-altering problem of global climate change, apparently it’s nothing more than occasion for a yawn from the news […]