THB Series

Updated June 2026

There are manycontinuing topical series here at THB focused on a wide range of issues. Series explore a specific theme in depth over multiple posts. Below are some organized guides to the series at THB.

Archives by Year
2020 · 2021 · 2022 · 2023 · 2024 · 2025 · 2026

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Can America Build Nuclear Again? (June 2026)

• Part 1: A cross-national comparison — cost escalation is not inevitable

• Part 2: Federal regulation of natural gas vs. nuclear power

• Part 3: Policy options from nuclear experts

The Climate Litigation Infrastructure (Began March 2026)

The FJC Reference Manual, attribution science, and the institutions connecting them to the courts

• Who Actually Wrote the Climate Manual for Federal Judges (March 2026)

• More Problems With the FJC Science Manual for Federal Judges (April 2026)

• A Takeover of the IPCC (Aug 2025)

• Extreme Non-Event Attribution (Aug 2025)

The Economic Costs of the Iran War (Began March 2026)

• The Hidden Economics of the War with Iran (March 2026)

• The Economic Costs of the Iran War: Update and Scorecard (AEI, April 2026)

RCP8.5 / CMIP7 ScenarioMIP — The End of the Worst Case (Began April 2026)

• 🚨 RCP8.5 is Officially Dead (Apr 29)

• Media Coverage (or not) of RCP8.5 RIP (May 9)

• How Climate Science Lost Its Way on Scenarios (May 13)

• No, RCP8.5 Did Not Become Implausible Because of Climate Policy (May 18)

• Not the Droids You are Looking For (May 21)

Science Institutions & Governance (2025–2026)

• The World’s Most Important Science Advisory Committee (May 2026)

• The Price of Partisan Advocacy by Science Institutions (May 2026)

• What Demographic Prediction Can and Cannot Achieve (May 2026)

The Shrinking Economic Weight of Energy

• Part 1: A Fossil Fuel Energy Transition Started 50 Years Ago

• Part 2: How can fossil-free energy sources outcompete fossil fuels?

• Part 3: Understanding the ‘Iron Law’ of Climate Policy

Making Sense of the Information Ecosystem (Began Jan 2026)

• Part 1: Democracy and Propaganda

• Part 2: Trump’s Policy Vocabulary

Politicization of the American University (Dec 2024)

• Part 1: The Problem

• Part 2: Partisan Professors

• Part 3: How Universities Went Off Track

• Part 4: How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor

• Part 5: Fixing Universities

The Politicization of Intelligence (Began May 2025)

• Part 1: The Trump Administration Shows How it is Done

• Part 2: Reality Actually Matters

Making Sense of Climate Scenarios (Began April 2025)

• Part 1: Constructing Climate Catastrophism

• Part 2: The Future is Already Here Somewhere

• Part 3: What is a “Worst Case” Climate Scenario?

Australia Week 2025

• THB Australian Week Prep Reading

• A Close Look at Australia’s New Climate Assessments

• More Problems with Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment

• My Aon Talk and Australia Papers

• A Close Look at Australia’s New Emissions Reduction Targets

Weather Attribution Alchemy (Began Nov 2024)

• Part 1: A new THB series takes a close look at extreme weather event attribution

• Part 2: Attribution Stealth Advocacy at the NAS

• Part 3: Tricks of the Trade

• Part 4: Climate Science Whiplash

• Part 5: Is Single Extreme Event Attribution Even Possible?

• Part 6: Behind the Curtain, Inside World Weather Attribution

Climate Fueled Extreme Weather (Began July 2024)

• Part 1: A New Series at THB

• Part 2: Schrödinger’s Climate Cat

• Part 3: It’s Later Than You Think

• Part 4: We Don’t Need No Stinking Science

• Part 5: It’s All About the Base(line)

• Part 6: What Did You Expect?

Extreme Weather and Climate Syllabus (Sept 2024)

Module 1: What the IPCC AR6 Really Says About Extreme Weather and Climate

1. Understanding key concepts and terminology

2. Climate variability and why it matters

3. Detecting changes in climate and “time of emergence”

4. IPCC AR6 on “time of emergence”

5. Climate policy, extremes, and “time of emergence”

6. IPCC on changes in extreme to 2040

Module 2: Making Sense of the Economics of Extreme Weather and Climate

7. What is a “normalization” and why does it matter?

8. Normalization example 1: Extreme Events in Europe, 1995-2019

9. Normalization example 2: U.S. hurricanes: 1900-2021

10. How do we know why disasters are becoming more costly?

11. What the peer-reviewed literature says about normalized losses

12. Making sense of “extreme event attribution”

Module 3: Extreme Event Case Studies

13. U.S. hurricanes

14. Global tropical cyclones

15. U.S. heat waves

16. Global and U.S. floods

17. Africa floods

18. Western and Central Europe drought

19. Global and North American drought

20. U.S. tornadoes

Planetary Boundaries and Global Governance

• Culling for Climate (May 2024)

• The Rich vs. the Rest (Dec 2023)

• Planetary Boundaries and the Rise of Non-State Global Governance

• The Political Agenda of the IPCC

• The Two Degree Temperature Target is Arbitrary and Untethered

• The 1.5 Degree Temperature Target is a Dead Man Walking

COVID-19 Origins

• The NIH-EcoHealth Alliance Cover-Up (May 2024)

• Proximal Origins, Scientific Integrity, and “Shadow” Science Advice (April 2024)

• Covidgate (July 2023)

• The COVID-19 Natural Origins Theory Lacks a Storyline (June 2023)

• Answers to COVID-19 Lab Leak Questions? (June 2023)

• Scientific Integrity and the Origins of Covid-19

• Scientific Leadership on Covid-19 Origins

• Book Review: VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19

• The WHO Covid Origins Team has Placed the WHO in a Very Tough Spot

• Debate over the possibility of a COVID-19 lab leak is over

• The COVID-19 Origins Debate Opens Up

• A COVID-19 Lab Leak: More Likely than Not

Pielke Sr. on Weather and Climate

• Extreme Cold in a Warming World

• Where’s the Heat? Roger Pielke Sr. on Ocean Heat Content Change

• How Carbon Dioxide Emissions Change the Climate

• How Land Use Changes the Climate

• Can a Butterfly in Brazil Really Cause a Tornado in Texas?

Energy Policy and Politics

• How Much Does it Cost to Build a Nuclear Power Plant? (Dec 2023)

• Low Hanging Fruit (Nov 2023)

• Can We Reach Net-Zero and Achieve Modern Energy Services for All? (Nov 2023)

• What Countries Have Decarbonized the Fastest? (Apr 2024)

Climate Scenarios

• Climate Science is About to Make a Huge Mistake (June 2024)

• The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science, 2024 Update (Feb 2024)

• Secret Sauce (Dec 2023)

• Jaws of the Snake (Nov 2023)

Mechanisms of Science Advice

• Bamboozled! The UK Covid-19 Inquiry shows that political leaders need policy advice not science lessons (Nov 2023)

• Improve how science advice is provided to governments by learning from “experts in expert advice” (March 2023)

• Science Advice Under Pressure (April 2022)

• The Incredible Absence of U.S. Science Advice and the Covid-19 Pandemic (June 2021)

• Shadow Science Advice (May 2021)

Scientific Integrity

• Original Sin: The U.S. National Climate Assessment was Off Track from the Start (Nov 2023)

• Should Universities Take Political Positions? (Oct 2023)

• The Alimonti Retraction

  • “Think of the Implications of Publishing” (July 2023)

  • The Alimonti Addendum (August 2023)

• A Major Error in IPCC WG1

  • Misinformation in the IPCC (March 2023)

  • A Tip from an IPCC Insider (May 2023)

• “When scientific integrity is undermined in pursuit of financial and political gain” (March 2023)

• Fishy Science (December 2021)

• The Biden Administration Just Failed its First Science Integrity Test (February 2021)

• Scientific Integrity in the Federal Agencies: An Unfinished Agenda (October 2020)

Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics

• Stone of Madness: Misinformation research provides an academic veneer for political propaganda (Apr 2024)

• Bamboozled! The UK Covid-19 Inquiry shows that political leaders need policy advice not science lessons (Nov 2023)

• When Science Influencers Polarize Our Politics (Nov 2023)

• An Introduction to The Honest Broker Framework

• Perils of the “Garden of Forking Paths”

The Culture and Politics of Climate Science

• The New Apocalypticism (August 2023)

• Does Climate Research have an Anti-Growth Problem? (August 2023)

• Unsolicited Advice for the New IPCC Chair (June 2023)

• The Political Agenda of the IPCC (May 2023)

• Has the IPCC Outlived its Usefulness? (March 2023)

What the Media Won’t Tell You About . . .

• Nor’easters

• Wildfires

• Hurricanes — 2023 Edition · 2022 Edition

• U.S. Heat Waves

• Drought in Western and Central Europe

• Floods

• Tornadoes

Making Sense of Trends in Disaster Losses

• Unbelievable: U.S. Flood Damage (Nov 2023)

• U.S. Hurricane Overview 2023 (Nov 2023)

• 21st Century Disasters (August 2023)

• Part 1: What is a “normalization”?

• Part 2: Normalized disaster losses in Europe 1995 to 2019

• Part 3: Normalized Hurricane Losses in the United States, 1900 to 2021

• Part 4: How would we know if disasters are becoming more costly due to climate change?

• Part 5: Climate change and disaster losses

Climate Science

• Net-Zero Does Not Mean What You Think It Does (Tom Wigley, October 2023)

• Can Climate Policy Change the Weather? (August 2023)

• Signal and Noise (August 2023)

• El Niño and U.S. Hurricane Damage (July 2023)

Regulation of Trans Athletes in Elite Sport

• What is a Woman?

• Five Myths about Gender Inclusive Sport

• Making Sense of Debate Over Transgender Athletes: Part 1

• Making Sense of Debate Over Transgender Athletes: Part 2

• The Problem with Outright Eligibility Bans of Trans Women in Women’s Elite Sport

• A “Cap Tie” Rule for Elite Trans Athletes

• The Emerging Consensus on Transgender Athletes in Elite Sport

• Is Opposition to Trans Athletes Really About the Old Testament?

The Future of Football

• Part 1: Before the pandemic, the rise and decline

• Part 2: Why is college football on Saturdays and the NFL on Sundays?

• Part 3: Super Bowl Excitement Can’t Hide Football’s Continuing Decline

• Part 4: Colorado Football’s Reality TV Experiment

• Part 5: What Football Conference Realignment Tells Us About U.S. Universities (August 2023)

Sports Governance Potpourri

• The USA have topped their World Cup group. But can they become the 7th hosts to win? (Sporting Intelligence, June 2026)

• Slim to Win: Athletes describe a “toxic culture” inside the University of Colorado Boulder running program (June 2023)

• What Selective Outrage over LIV Golf Says About Sportswashing (June 2022)

• How Can FIFA be Held Accountable? (Nov 2022)

• The Abuse of Kamila Valieva (Feb 2022)

• How much money would college football players get paid if California’s proposed new law was national? (May 2022)

• Chromosome Sex Testing is Back! (June 2022)

• Reefer Madness, Dodgy Science and Anti-Doping Policy (July 2021)