Category: climate
And now we turn to a voice of reason. Ken Caldeira, discussing the nuts and bolt of science, and climatology in particular, as part of a group interview with Discover magazine, reminds us all just how silly it is to argue that anthropogenic global warming is bothing but a conspiracy theory propagated by disingenuous researchers (and former vice-presidents) who are only trying to line their own pockets:
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Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 9:55 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
I have an extremely low attention threshold for any mention of the small town of Inuvik, NWT, tucked away in the northwest corner of Canada's Northwest Territories. Not because it's a particularly beautiful place, or politically, economically or scientifically significant, but because I spent 14 months there back in the early 1990s as editor its newspaper, the Inuvik Drum. So when a former premier of one of Canada's provinces makes a speech there, I'm one of the few people outside of Inuvik who perk up. More so when the former premier is speaking about extracting more fossil fuels from beneath the Arctic Ocean. Even more so when the premier manages to invoke the thoughts of not one, not two, but half a dozen of the world's most notorious climate science deniers.
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Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 7:29 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
Even the most optimistic elements of the environmental community know that Friday's passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act by the U.S. House of Representatives was the easy part. Getting something comparable through the Senate will be much tougher. Paul Krugman says it best:
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Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 10:44 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
I've been agonizing over this for weeks. My initial stance was yes, because if Waxman-Markey (a.k.a. the American Clean Energy and Security Act) doesn't make it, I doubt we can afford to wait for Congress to take another stab at it. But the lobbying over the past few days has been fierce. I get emails from both sides, and by both I mean both sides of the environmental community.
The argument against ACESA is compelling. For example, the Climate Crisis Coalitions' latest email enumerate the weakness of the bill thusly:
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Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 12:20 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri is no intellectual slouch. But I have no idea where he gets the idea that news media are doing are bang-up job covering the science and politics of climate change. He recently wrote this baffling piece:
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Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 10:52 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
Here's the headline I would have written if I was editing the West Virginia Gazette's coverage of Tuesday's protest against mountain-top coal mining:
Top government climate scientist arrested in coal protest
Here's the headline the editor(s) chose instead:
Daryl Hannah, scientist among 30 arrested at W.Va. mine protest
Sigh. Have we slid so far down the hole of celebrity worship that a second-string Hollywood personality (who hasn't made a memorable appearance on the silver screen since 1982's Blade Runner), gets top billing over the country's most senior and respected authority on the subject of the story? Apparently.
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Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 9:17 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
The Congressional Budget Office is the probably the closest thing to a non-partisan source of economic analyses. On Friday it released its best guess on how much the ACES bill, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey, will cost the U.S. economy by 2020.
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Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 10:03 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
James Lovelock hates wind turbines, likes nuclear power and generally makes it difficult for anyone who wants to pigeonhole him in the pantheon of environmental heroes. But there's little point in denying that few earth scientists have a better grasp of the big picture when it comes to planetary ecology, so it's always worth asking him for his take on the climate crisis. His most recent pronouncements seem a little less bleak. Relatively speaking.
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Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 2:54 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
Deutsche Bank recently turned on 41,000 LED lights that keep track of the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. Nice idea, but I respectfully suggest a much better one.
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Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 9:30 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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.
