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David Ropeik
Retired Harvard Instructor, Author
David Ropeik is an award-winning broadcast journalist, a Harvard instructor, and an international consultant in risk communication and risk perception. He’s also the author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.
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As I have written here before, many of us are more worried about some environmental risks than the evidence suggests we need to be – mercury, bisphenol a, nuclear […]
The same psychological risk perception factors that influence how scary things feel to you and me impact politicians in the same way.
In his groundbreaking 1995 book Descartes’ Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes Elliott, a patient who had no problem understanding information, but who nonetheless could not live a normal life. Elliott […]
This space recently offered some thoughts about “The Ethics of Climate Change Denial”. The basic case was that denial which arises out of the innate subconscious urge we all […]
Like its own self-sustaining chain reaction, the battle over nuclear power rages on. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has for the first time since 1978 approved construction of new nuclear reactors. […]
There were a lot of thoughtful comments on my observations last week about the ethics of denying that climate change is real. Many felt that I was arrogant, since […]
Here is a version of The Trolley Problem, a classic experiment in ethics. Let’s say you are next to some train tracks, and down the tracks and behind a […]