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I saw Chris Mooney (The Republican War on Science) speak last night at CalTech. A couple of things I noticed on the analytical level, where interesting things happen that aren't necessary what the event's about:

1. Mooney is young, a little nervous, and generally kind to his audience, even his hecklers. (There was one: He wanted Mooney to admit that the Bush administration is the first to have funded stem cell research, so Mooney did, and graciously moved on.) Nevertheless, he seems fairly fed up with the inability, or unwillingness, of scientists to talk to the public about things scientific.

2. When the question-and-answer period came around, Mooney -- unlike so many politicans, pundits, media experts, journalists and scientists I have seen at these kinds of speaking events -- called disproportionately on women.

3. And far from being a knee-jerk ideologue, Mooney stays in the land of acceptable, proven research. "When there's a debate, describe the debate," he tells science journalists. "When there's not a debate, don't report one." (I paraphrase.) There is no debate on, for instance, evolution vs. Discovery Institute-style creations, aka "intelligent design." There is, however, on whether hurricanes have become more intense or frequent due to global warming.

I would have agreed until yesterday -- and not just because the 882-millibar Wilma (which Reuters described as a hurricane that "boasts a very tight eye") briefly became the biggest, baddest hurricane ever recorded. I changed my mind when, on the Weather Channel yesterday, Dr. Heidi Cullen showed a graph of historical hurricanes over the last century. I can't find it online (though I'm still looking), but it looked pretty much like this one.

In other words, it looked like a hockey stick.

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