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.
"There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things
which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand.
Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving, and
tiny blasts of tinny trumpets, we have met the enemy, and not only may
he be ours, he may be us."
--Walt Kelly
Well, that headline's a little unfair. I wrote it to lure in those who jump on every opportunity to prove that climatologists are frauds. What I really mean to say is: "Where the most recent assessment by the IPCC has been superceded by more recent findings.
It's all in a new report, The Copenhagen Diagnosis, assembled by some of the top people in the field. Here's the executive summary:
But for those of us born before the advent of the Internet, there's something warm and reassuring about a coffee-table book, all sepia-toned and illustrated in Victorian style, with pull-out reproductions of the great man's field notes. Seeing Darwin's first sketch of a "tree of life" on a screen is fine, I suppose. But flipping open a facsimile of a notebook that displays that very image alongside his scribbled explanation, the ink from the opposite side of the page visible to the point of distraction, sends a little shiver up the spine of this reader. It's like tapping into Darwin's brain.
One of the commenters to my last post, an attempt to explain why the hacked climatology emails do not constitute a scientific scandal, came up with a darn fine idea:
If you think that global warming rests on a few temperature data sets and models, you are very wrong. If you don't understand this then you don't know enough to have an opinion on the subject, and you most likely will be treated just like any other ineducable troll.
Grab a climate textbook and do some reading...it will help if you have some physics background too. Yeah, science takes effort...
Much is being made by those who really, really believe that there's a global conspiracy among climatologists of the emails and other documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. According to such bloggers, thousands of "embarrassing" pieces of correspondence between some of the leading climate researchers in the world now lay bare the scheme to mislead humanity about the nature of climate change.
I downloaded the 62 MB file and took a quick look at a random selection of what are mostly dull little missives bereft of the context required to understand them in any meaningful way. Just as you'd expect from bits and piece of correspondence never intended for public consumption. Next.
I promise to get back to substantive blogging shortly, but in the meantime, if you've got three minutes to tear yourself away from coverage of Sarah Palin's book:
Scientifically sound? Not the words I would use, but not too far off the mark, either. Hyperbolic? Yes. Offensive? To some. Provocative? Absolutely. Greenpeace and the Agit-Pop gang know how to grab your attention. If, that is, you already care about preserving what's left of the planet's ability to host civilization as we know it.
A fascinating paper about to be published in Geophysical Review Letters compares the number of record highs and lows at temperature stations across the U.S. since the 1940s. The authors found that we're getting more record highs and fewer record lows, in a pattern that yet again confirms that climatologists know what they're talking about. They also extrapolate that trend into the future, with some interesting results, but first let's deal with the past.
In an otherwise typically error-dominated Newsweek column, George F. Will spelled "minuscule" correctly. So I don't want to read any complaints that Will gets everything wrong each time he writes about climate change.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't correct his myriad other mistakes. Here's one paragraph, with some necessary edits, just to get us started.
There is muchan unremarkable level of debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the fact that global warming has not increasedcontinued for that long [11 years]. What we know is that computer models did not did predict this. Which matters, a lot, because we are incessantly exhorted to wager trillionsuncertain sums of dollars and diminishedincreased freedom on the proposition that computer models are correctly projecting catastrophic global warming. On Nov. 2, The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Ball reported some inconvenient data that is entirely consistent with the prevailing consensus on the theory of anthropogenic climate disruption. Soon after the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Thinking Man's Thinking Man [George: who calls him this, other than you? -- ed ]--reported that global warming is "unequivocal," there came evidence that the planet's temperature is beginning to coolcontinuing to rise. [George: temperatures rise or fall, they don't cool or warm; only the subject of measurement warms or cools -- ed] "That," Ball writes, "has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect," although climatologists confirmed that the models are performing as well as expected."
Climate Cover-Up
The Crusade to Deny Global Warming
Greystone Books, 250 pages
Canadian public relations agent James "DeSmogBlog" Hoggan has assembled a comprehensive history of corporate efforts to stall action on climate change in a modest little book that should shock and appall anyone who's been living under a rock for the past three decades. For the rest of us, Climate Cover-Up offers few new details. It still serves, however, as a convenient hard-copy reference manual for when the Internet is down and you need a rejuvenating jolt of outrage to help you decide which companies to boycott this week.
That might sound like a dismissive review, but it I don't mean it to be taken that way.
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.
