The “bridge” fuel that wasn’t
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on March 14, 2013 Among those who spend their working lives and/or spare time worrying about climate change, there are many subjects that still provoke heated debates, so to speak. Chief among them is the wisdom or folly of turning to natural gas as a “bridge” between the carbon-intensive oil- and coal-dominated present and the clean renewable future that…
NY Times kills environment desk
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on January 11, 2013 Inside Climate News reports that “The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated.” Is this a good thing or bad? The conventional response would be that…
Teasing out the signal from the noise
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on January 10, 2013 The pseudoskeptical argument goes something like this: the last decade hasn’t been significantly warmer than the previous decade, so global warming has stopped. And because the causes of anthropogenic climate change have not stopped, the link between fossil fuel combustion and global warming is therefore broken. This is, of course, complete nonsense. The video above…
Guns, climate and growing up
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on January 4, 2013 Every now and then someone who ordinarily makes a fair amount of sense writes something that serves only to remind us that even the extraordinarily smart can be extraordinarily wrong. So it was with Sam Harris‘s defense of gun rights, The Riddle of the Gun. First, Harris insists that “the correlation between guns and violence…
Compare and contrast
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on November 14, 2012 This is worth a few seconds of your life. Trust me. I’m serious.
The Barry Bonds of storms
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on November 1, 2012 The other day I found myself looking for reading material in a clinic waiting room and for the first time ever I picked up a copy of Bloomberg Businessweek. It’s not that I never used to care about business. I just found business publications and business journalists rarely demonstrated a decent level of understanding of…
Frankenstorm predicted
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on October 30, 2012 OK, no one can predict a specific weather event months in advance. But what we can do is anticipate expected frequency of events. Back in February of this year, Nature Climate Change published a paper, Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change, (PDF bypasses Nature’s paywall) that predicted more frequent storm surges…
Did Climate Change Supersize Hurricane Sandy? | Mother Jones
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on October 30, 2012 Did Climate Change Supersize Hurricane Sandy? asks Chris Mooney in Mother Jones. Look. We know there’s more moisture in the atmosphere because when you warm a gas it holds more vapor. So that means there’s more precipitation when a storm blows in. And we know the sea level is rising because when you heat water,…
More from Michael Mann
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on March 28, 2012 Now on CNN: Imagine you are sitting in your office simply doing your job and a nasty e-mail pops into your inbox accusing you of being a fraud. You go online and find that some bloggers have written virulent posts about you. That night, you’re at home with your family watching the news and a…
in Michael Mann’s words
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on March 8, 2012 Michael Mann, co-author of the “hockey stick” visualization of the last millennium of global warming, has written a book about the trials of sticking to the science in an era when half the country is hostile to reality. Here’s the 10-minute synopsis, in the form of an interview: