An irregular exploration of the struggle between the power of rational discourse and the scientific method on one hand, and the forces of superstition and dogma on the other. Mostly regarding climate change, though.
James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
Author's site: cyamid.netPenetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
--- H. L. Mencken
By doubting we come to inquiry; and through inquiry we perceive truth.
--- Peter Abelard
Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.
-- Richard Dawkins
As for evolution, it happened. Deal with it.
-- Michael Shermer.
I'm gettin' bugged driving up and down the same old strip
I gotta finda new place where the kids are hip
My buddies and me are getting real well known
Yeah, the bad guys know us and they leave us alone
I get around
-- B. Wilson, "I get around"
This is just a pair of data points on the itinerant habits of one individual, but it's the kind of thing that makes marine biology fascinating. A certain northern right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) known to human observers as 3270 (pictured), usually hangs out with the other 300 or so remnants of his species on the east coast of North America. But on January 5, 2009, at approximately 16:40 local time, it was spotted in the Azores. Wow.
Bluesy Monday is the one day that they came here,
When they haunt me and they taunt me in my cage.
I mock them all, they're feelin' small, they got no answer.
They're playing dumb but I'm just laughing as they rage.
-- Davies, Richard; Hodgson, Roger, "Asylum"
A single transgression can be excused, but on Monday Lou Dobbs repeated his dismissal of climate science and again entertained the notion that the sun is to blame for what's happening with global temperatures. As an American journalist, he is free, of course, to believe whatever he wants and share those thoughts with his audience. But so are the rest of us entitled to point out he seems to have swallowed the pseudoskeptical kool aid.
And the fog's liftin'
And the sand's shiftin'
I'm driftin' on out
Ol' Captain Ahab
He ain't got nothin' on me
— Tom Waits, Shiver Me Timbers
It's not that we didn't see this coming. Marine protection area advocates have been hoping the rumors were true, and they are. George W. Bush has put almost 200,000 square miles off limits to serious resource extraction. Is this a good thing? Of course. Does it make up for eight years of raping and pillaging the rest of the planet? No. Even the protection of dozens of coral reefs in the Pacific may turn out to be a pointless exercise in legacy building thanks, in part, to Bush's refusal to get with the climate change program.
Well he came home from the war
With a party in his head
And an idea for a fireworks display
— Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones
I spent much of the Solstice/Christmas/New Year's break thinking about the future of this blog. I am happy to report that more a few lurkers broke their silence to urge me to continue the good fight against the forces of ignorance. Thank you for the vote of confidence. I'm going to try to make the Island a more entertaining and provocative place, while still focusing on the science of climatology, and the policy implications that come with it. So let's get right to it, with a look at James Hansen's latest appeal to authority.
For the last four years, I've spent a fair bit of time trying to do my bit to undermine the pseudoskeptical claptrap that passes for criticism of the idea that humans are responsible for global warming. And I'm getting tired. It doesn't seem to matter how many bloggers and journalists who understand the science of climate change point out the facts as climate science understands them, pernicious long-debunked ideas (it's all the sun's fault, the hockey stick is a fraud, water vapor is a forcing, etc.) refuse to die. Is there any point?
If the "Reality" anti-coal advertising campaign represents the best American environmentalists can come up with, Matt Nisbet is right. Communicating the facts about global warming to the masses is simply beyond our ability. Fortunately, there are others who understand how to craft a message that might actually work. As usual, the Brits demonstrate a superior ability on this score. Check out this ad from Europe's Big Ask campaign:
I've been waiting for almost four years for an opportunity to connect homophobia and global warming, and finally I have it, thanks to the pope. Benny XVI the other day managed to compare the effort to save the planetary ecosystem with the fragility of human sexuality. How did he do it?
It didn't take long for the Competitive Enterprise Institute to begin dissembling about John Holdren, President-elect Barack Obama's new science adviser. On his blog, the CEI's Chris Horner dismisses Holdren's soon-to-be ex-employer, the Woods Hole Research Center, as "an environmental advocacy group." This is nonsense, as a simple check of the center's scientific output would show.
First Stephen Chu for energy secretary, then John Holdren for science adviser. Now Jane Lubchenco for NOAA chief. Wow. One of the country's top marine biologists and a hard-core climateer. It's hard to imagine a better science team. From the LA Times:
This segment from Letterman is from back in April, but given the word that John Holdren, former AAAS head, will be running Barack Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy (i.e., serving as chief science adviser to the president), it's worth a replay. This is a man who will be repeatedly reminding the president that climate change is not something that can be placed on the proverbial back burner. I mean, check out his c.v.
Along with Stephen Chu as energy secretary, Obama will be getting the best advice possible on the biggest public policy challenge in history. (Carol Browner will probably turn out to be a fine energy/climate coordinator, but I'm more impressed with the scientists Obama is surrounding himself with.)
Maybe I'm making too much out of one paragraph in a short post on one blog, but I'd rather try to deal with it now before this particular meme travels much further. The offending line appears today in a post on Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog by Jeff Goodell. It offers a description of a man who has, for better or worse, become a lightning rod for the global warming debate, NASA's chief climatologist:
The Washington Post has decided that a carbon tax would be better than capping carbon emissions and trading the rights to emit. It joins a growing list of tax proponents, including James Hansen, Al Gore, Ralph Nader (writing in the Wall St. Journal), The American Prospect, and even ExxonMobil. An eclectic lot. Not everyone's on board, though. A notable holdout is
Al Gore has joined the growing list of notable climateers calling for a new target for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Speaking at the Poznan climate change gabfest this week he said we need to aim for no more than 350 parts per million.
Here's one of those things that Carl Jung would call synchronicity, but is really just an example of how scientific research tends to converge on certain ideas. Item 1, which arrived in my email in box this morning in the form of a press release from the DC-based Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, discusses what attendees at a side-event to the Poznan climate negotiations heard about the the dangers of "black carbon," an important contributor to global warming. Here's the paragraph that got my attention:
The president elect has disappointed many of his supporters by choosing relatively hawkish and right-leaning types to run his foreign and economic policies. But to my mind, his choices for secretary of energy and interior and Environmental Protection Administration chief are more important. And the news Stephen Chu will be energy secretary suggests Barack Obama is going to be progressive where it really counts.
I know that times are tough all over. I know it's hard to sell ads for science sections and programs. But it sure would be nice to see the corporate robber barons that run the most popular media in the country do what's right for a change. I mean, come on: does anyone really believe that scientific issues are going to diminish in importance in the months and years ahead?
Our SciBlogging colleague William "Stoat' Connolley had to do come climbing down after a recent post tearing a strip off fellow Brit, enviro-activist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot turned out to be grossly unfair. Most of the fuss was over Connelley's mistaken impression that Monbiot didn't know what he was talking about, but as anyone familiar with Monbiot knows, he attributes everything and is usually quite accurate when it comes to interpreting whatever piece of climate science he's discussing. But just as important, given recent events, is Connelley's failure to appreciate just why it is people like Monbiot get so worked up about people like George Bush.
Twenty years ago, a clever television documentary called "After the Warming" tried to paint a picture of climate change, and humankind's delayed attempts to deal with it, for next five decades. Drawing on the best science available at the time, the producers predicted that we'd never have enough information to know just how bad things were going to get until it was too late. A new study in Nature Geoscience reminds us just how complex the global climate picture really is.
... is that the rest of the world doesn't stop while you're off stuffing your face with the family. And by the time you're back in the saddle, the virtual stack of papers to read and work to catch up on threatens to bury you before the season's first snowfall. So while I dig myself out, here's a great little snippet from Gavin Schmidt, one of the forces behind RealClimate.org and a leading light in the climatology community:
Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.
Not that I doubt Ms. Rosenthanl's journalistic abilities. It's just that such a reaction is the exact opposite of what we should be seeing.
For the most past few months I've been making brief posts at The Weather Channel's Forecast Earth website, as part of a team of bloggers concerned with climate change and our relationship to the planet in general. Looks like I won't be doing that for much longer, given the news that NBC, which bought TWC earlier this year, just fired the entire Forecast Earth team and killed the show. It was the only weekly program on TV devoted to the climate.
And right in the middle of NBC's Green Week. Oh well.
Upon first read, a new study about the contribution of "black carbon" to the global carbon cycle, and therefore to climate change, suggests things might not be as bad as now commonly thought. But first reads, especially by those who don't have a graduate degree specializing in exactly the field in question, can be misleading. And "Australian climate-carbon cycle feedback reduced by soil black carbon," which appears in the latest Nature Geoscience, is a case in point.
Over at A Few Things Illconsidered, the commenters are debating what to call those folks who just can't bring themselves to accept the science of climate change. You know, the science that says we have to stop spewing the products of the combustion of fossil fuels into the air if we want to keep the planet's ecology close to something we'd consider habitable.
Denialists? Skeptics? Scoffers? I'd like to weigh in with a defense of the term that I now use regularly in this space: "Pseudoskeptics."
So much has changed in the last few weeks that I'm only now beginning to get a handle on things. I'm still processing and unsure about so much that I'm going to do something that I have resisted doing since joining the blogosphere three and half years ago. I'm going to share some personal thoughts about who I am and where I call home.
First, there's the issue of my relationship to government.
I've got a post up at my other blog, where I write about climate change for the Weather Channel's Forecast Earth site, that briefly discusses James Hansen's new paper on appropriate targets for CO2 levels. I still intend to write something more consequential here, but in the meantime, I thought I'd draw ScienceBlogs readers' attention to the reaction at the TWC blog. Here's a selection:
There's talk of "a low-cost, safe, and permanent method to capture and store atmospheric CO2." All it would take is some conventional rock drilling and a little energy in the form of warm water. That's what the authors of a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say is theoretically possible thanks to natural weathering processes at work in the Sultanate of Oman. It's geo-engineering for those who don't much like geo-engineering!
I would have included something about the need for a googolplex of public transportation projects instead of simply encouraging cleaner automobiles, but yeah: this is what Obama should do.
Most of my favorite ScienceBlogs colleagues are up in arms at the very hint that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could end up as the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The problem is RFK, while justifiably cherished for many years by the environmental movement, also happens to be the best-known member of a group of cranks that opposes childhood vaccination because of its alleged links to autism. Are Orac, MarkH, Mike the Mad Biologist, Mike Dunford and the rest justifiably worried? I think so.
"Now the hard part" writes Peter Baker in today's New York Times. Sure enough. It's never too soon to be reminded that Barack Obama is just this guy, you know? But it doesn't take Baker two paragraphs to completely misconstrue the enormity of the challenge facing the next president:
The conventional wisdom is that you have to get a PhD if you want to be a serious scientist. I don't have one, but I'm not a scientist, just a journalist with a BSc who can't claim to have advanced any particular branch of marine biology. There are accomplished researchers out there that have managed to make significant contributions to their field without the cache of a graduate degree, though. Today's New York Times offers a profile of one such scientist, a hero of mine named Alexandra Morton. It wasn't easy and it took years of suffering contempt from "real" scientists before her work was accepted, but when it comes to the environmental impact of salmon farming, she has few equals.
Given than John McCain is now relying on non-Euclidean geometry to construct a scenario in which he prevails on Tuesday, I think it safe to pour to cold on water the hyper-optimism now coursing through progressive America.
Yes, Barack Obama's victory will be cause for celebration. It will be a good thing if for no other reason than his presidency will represent an unprecedented sea change, one that signals to the country and the rest of the world that the 21st century has finally arrived, seven years delayed but hopefully not too late. Regardless of Obama's real capacity to effect change, the world will be a different place on November 5, one in which racism is that much more diminished in power, and one where hope has replaced fear as the dominant political currency. And yet...
After Doonesbury, my morning reading begins with a peek at the RSS feed from Real Climate. Most mornings it's worth a repeat look at posts I've already reviewed as the comments left there offer one of the highest signal-to-noise ratios in the blogosphere. Today I came across this noteworthy note from one Lawrence Brown:
Even Albert Einstein was no Einstein when it came to quantum mechanics. Neils Bohr turned back Einstein's skepticism several times on certain aspects. Which ought to give all of us pause. If Einstein can be wrong what can anyone expect from the rest of us?!
However if you're going to challenge an Einstein you'd better have the goods. [Wilhelm] Reich, [the controversial Freudian psychoanalyist] didn't, Bohr did. The same holds true of climate science. If you want to challenge someone with the stature of say a James Hansen, you'd do well to have an excellent grounding on all aspects of this discipline.
I know of no solid evidence that editorial endorsements have even the slightest effect on presidential campaigns. You might be able to find some correlations in some states, but that could easily be because the newspaper and magazine editors are good at following the general feeling of their readers, rather than the other way around.
But that doesn't mean editors should stop making the endorsements. And our overlords at SEED magazine are taking this first opportunity to officially sanction the candidacy of ...
The Chinese are a complicated lot. On the one hand, they're building a new coal-fired power plant every four or five or six days, depending on who's counting, an endeavor that cost them $248 billion in hidden costs last year "through damage to the environment, strain on the health care system and manipulation of the commodity's price" says Greenpeace. On the other, they've just announced that they're going to spend the equivalent of $280 billion enhancing their passenger rail network. Impressive. Just imagine if we dumped a proportional $75 billion into American passenger rail.
It's almost not worth the bother of taking another swipe at Sarah Palin's anti-intellectual bigotry this late in a game that's pretty much over. I mean, the coverage of her speech in Asheville, N.C., last night couldn't find anything newsworthy to mention beyond her decision to eschew the $150,000 wardrobe in favor of good ol' common-sense jeans. But Christopher Hitchens' way with words makes it all worthwhile.
The Hitch begins by lamenting Palin's empty-headed criticism of fruit fly genetics research: "...where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good -- things like fruit fly research in Paris, France," she said the other day. From which our favorite contrarian launches into a dissection of the McCain-Palin ticket's refusal to respect science.
OK. Not clueless. But today we have yet more evidence that we really don't understand how this planet's carbon cycle works,thanks to the latest issue of the Soil Science Society of America Journal. In "Nitrous Oxide Emissions Respond Differently to No-Till in a Loam and a Heavy Clay Soil", a group of Canadian researchers makes it clear that our species is just plain ignorant when it comes to managing greenhouse gas emissions. It's looking like there is one fewer tool in the box of options at our disposal for mitigating global warming.
I just don't understand where the EPA is coming from when it assigns fuel economy ratings. The latest rankings are out and they just don't jibe with my driving experience. I'm not the most aggressive driver out there, but neither am I an expert hypermiler who keep it down to the speed limit and catches tailwinds. Yet I consistently get better mileage whatever I'm driving than what the EPA says the car gets. I always get better mileage. Always.
There's a new report on Arctic temperatures that is not only worrisome, but helps make clear one of the most challenging aspects of the climate change story, specifically the role of feedback.
For example, pseudoskeptics whose primary source of information on climate is Fox News, are forever pointing out, as if it had never occurred to climatologists, that carbon dioxide levels historically follow rising temperatures, instead of the other way around. To the less informed, this pokes a big hole in the whole global warming story.
The thing to know is, the initial temperature rise was quite slight. To explain the dramatic change in temperatures we see in the ice-core records every 100,000 years you have to invoke the opposite causal chain: rising CO2 levels that trigger further warming. The two are intimately linked. You tinker with one, you set off a positive feedback loop. It's not important which comes first. What's important is where things are headed once that the feedback is in operation. It's the same with what's going on in the Arctic right now.
Two things stand out in my mind about Wednesday's presidential debate, both of them the product of John McCain's imagination. First is his insult to every science educator in the country. Once again, he deliberately mischaracterized a grant request to update an aging projector for Chicago's Adler Planetarium as an earmark for an "overhead projector." Second, he insisted America "can eliminate our dependence on foreign oil by building 45 new nuclear plants, power plants, right away." How many times do we have to point out the flaws in his logic before it sinks in?
Canadian scientists, and climatologists in particular, are probably among the most depressed this morning following Tuesday's federal election, in which the semi-governing Conservative Party was sort-of re-elected to another parliamentary minority.
To no one's surprise, the New York Times prefers Barack Obama's energy policies to those of John McCain. I have no quarrel with that, of course. But I would like to nit pick one little phrase in its editorial of Oct. 11, the one in which both candidates are positively reviewed for their inclusion of nuclear power in an energy portfolio of the future. While I could go on again at length about the inadequacies of generating electricity from uranium decay, this time I'll just focus on to little words: "carbon neutral."
I was going to post a rant about John McCain's dishonest reference to Barack Obama's "overhead projector" earmark in Tuesday's presidential debate, but Joe Romm beat me to it. Again. So let me just say this about planetariums (planetaria?) instead:
The Canadian Press has this story about Canadian scientists who have written an open letter calling on the Canadian voter to consider climate change in next week's federal election. When will their American colleagues follow suit?
To the growing list of consequences of global warming add underwater noise pollution, which may make life difficult for the whales and dolphins who are already facing increased background noises from shipping. It may sound like a stretch, but it's actually pretty straightforward science.
Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth, has just bought the world's largest wind turbine. This from the Daily Mail.
The 100-metre high turbine will supply 7.5 megawatts of power to the national grid when it is installed off the North East coast of England. It is hoped the Queen's involvement will speed up the development of specialist deep water turbines and encourage energy firms to invest in renewable energy.
Jolly good. If it's good enough for Her Majesty, it's good enough for us all!
Some of the world's top climatologists, under the collective title of the Global Carbon Project, have released what is widely considered the definitive accounting of the greenhouse-gas emissions situation. And the news is, as you might expect, not good. Nature's Climate Feedback bloggers sum it up as "We're all doomed." The full report is a lot to swallow, but here's what policy makers and anyone thinking of casting a vote in either the Canadian election next month or the American election in November should know:
I usually like to refer to the actual study, but I can't find it, so we'll have to make do with the Independent's story on a survey of thousands of British primary and secondary schoolchildren that found most have no idea that science is something of value.
The story starts off with the now predictable gnashing of teeth over the finding that "among every generation of school leavers, there are tens of thousands of potential scientists who are, partly owing to ignorance, turning their backs on careers with a science component." But the really depressing part comes in the form of
James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
First Stephen Chu for energy secretary, then John Holdren for science adviser. Now 
For the most past few months I've been making brief posts at The Weather Channel's 
Most of my favorite ScienceBlogs colleagues are up in arms at the very hint that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could end up as the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The problem is RFK, while justifiably cherished for many years by the environmental movement, also happens to be the best-known member of a group of cranks that opposes childhood vaccination because of its alleged links to autism. Are 
Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth, has just bought the world's largest wind turbine.