Musings
Category archives for Musings
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…
Republicans with cooler heads
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on January 6, 2012 Barring a miraculous revival of the fortunes of Jon Huntsman, Republicans this year will, for the first time, elect a presidential nominee who does not believe that humans are responsible for global warming. How did things get this bad? The Climate Desk team found a few of the last Republicans among the party’s leadership who…
A climate change report for the Tea Party
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on November 17, 2011 “Major storms could submerge New York City in next decade” cries a randomly selected mainstream media outlet over a story about a new report warning residents that climate change could make life difficult in the not-too-distant future. The report, from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, is pretty standard stuff for those…
What if climatologists reversed the null hypothesis?
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on November 14, 2011 Kevin Trenberth’s latest paper, which appears in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is uncharacteristically and refreshingly blunt right from the first few words of the introduction: Humans are changing our climate. There is no doubt whatsoever. There are arguments about how much and how important these effects are and will be in future, but many…
Just how much heat does global warming entail?
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on October 26, 2011 Everyone talks about global warming, but it’s not easy to get one’s mind around just how much heat we’re talking about. Even more difficult is putting that heat energy in terms that the average layperson can grasp. Fortunately, some scientists are making an effort to do just that. In a recent paper in Geophysical Research…
BEST paper in the urban heat island effect category
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on October 20, 2011 There’s this notion among the climate denial community that somehow the entire professional climatology community has overlooked an obvious flaw in the science behind anthropogenic global warming. Their hypothesis is that too many of the thermometers used to record temperatures over the last 200 years have been located in or near cities, and so have…
“Thousands have been taken in, hook line and sinker”
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on October 20, 2011 You will laugh. Guaranteed.
Scientific literacy and climate concern: An inverse relationship?
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on September 30, 2011 This story has been around a while, but I haven’t been blogging much lately so I am only getting around to it now. “..the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones.” So says a…
How asbestos made me a better journalist
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on May 20, 2011 A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was a 21-year-old journalism student spending a couple of weeks as an intern at Science Dimension, a government-funded magazine (there weren’t any private science magazines in the country). I was assigned two short features while there: one on canola bioengineering and another on Canada’s…
Tennessee
Posted by James Hrynyshyn on April 8, 2011 Tennessee’s House passed this disingenuous piece of legislation the other day. They’re not to the first to try this sort of thing and they probably won’t be the last.