A blog — my first venture into this noisy medium and an experiment, for now. I hope to keep it rather quiet, actually. I doubt I will add new posts more than a few times a month, if that often, and I hope to keep them meaningful, relevant, and useful. The theme will be climate change and all things related: changes in the natural world, scientific advances, new policies or policy ideas, politics, media coverage, censorship …

“Tipping Points” is born as my book, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming, is being released. As the masthead indicates, the blog takes its name from a speech that Jim Hansen gave at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2005. And as the book makes clear, it was this speech that triggered the unusually intense round of censorship at NASA that led Jim, the agency’s — and arguably the world’s – leading climate scientist, finally, in his frustration, to tell the public about the secretive censorship campaign that had been going on at the agency for the previous few years.

That was a tipping point. It has emboldened other scientists and halted the censorship — at NASA, at least — for the time being.

As Jim says, climate is also nearing (and may now have passed) a tipping point. Let us hope that the human mind and the human spirit, too, can reach tipping points, that we will finally do something real to forestall this looming catastrophe — and soon. It is to that end that this blog is dedicated.

 – Mark Bowen, December 30, 2007