By Dr. Robert Thorson As the presidential election draws near, I’ve become astonished at how little the environment seems to matter. Based on the three debates it sits in back of the political bus, far behind the seats for national economy, taxes, medical reform, foreign policy and the sharing of power. I’d like to see […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson I applaud President Barack Obama’s recent climate change policy speech. Fundamentally, he’s doing what he believes is right. Ethically, he’s delivering on a promise he made in 2009 to the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen: to cut U.S. carbon emissions 17 percent by 2020. Politically, he’s invoking executive authority to […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson ‘So the last shall be first, and the first last.” This quote from the King James Bible is my response to Scientific American’s Top 10 stories of 2013. Their tenth-ranked story about the BRAIN initiative is my top story for the year. I refer to Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson ‘Why does public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence?” asks a new study by the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University, which should be required reading for all members of the U.S. “do-nothing” Congress. Psychologist Dan M. Kahan and his colleagues proved […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Geologists just learned that the greatest extinction of life on Earth was aided and abetted by the burning of coal. Though this material has been a great boon for humans since the 18th century, it was a bane beyond measure for nearly every living thing during the 2,519,410th century B.C. Why […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Rumors of war are on the horizon. Political wars pitting deeply held convictions about private property against equally held convictions about the interconnectedness of all things. One side is fueled by the first law of private property: that it belongs to someone and not everyone. The other side is fueled by […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson When I first visited Dock & Dine, a notable waterfront restaurant in Old Saybrook, I was struck by its extreme exposure to Long Island Sound, the fury of river flooding, coastal storms and shifting sands. It leans into the nor’easters coming off the Sound at the mouth of the Connecticut River, […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Finally, the federal climate watchdogs got it right. The just-released U.S. National Climate Assessment avoids pie-in-the-sky abstractions like “saving the planet before it’s too late” and instead concentrates on regional changes affecting our lives today. This regional approach is tacit proof that climate politics have finally caught up with climate science. […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The absurdity of Connecticut’s water politics stuns me. Yes, we need a comprehensive statewide plan, which explains why state law (Public Act 14-163) requires submission of one to the General Assembly by Jan. 1, 2018. But funding for its creation seems to have gone missing. This may explain why an insider […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Earlier this month, several journalists asked my opinion about dumping dredge spoils in Long Island Sound. Having offered off-the-record comments without doing any research, I decided to become better informed. What I learned is that the science on this issue is so buried by an excess of government “word sediment” that […]