Category: climate
In case anyone is wondering why I haven't posted anything for the past few days, what with all the fuss over the IPCC and all, it's not because I'm reluctant to comment on it. It's just that my little piece of western North Carolina is only now recovering from an ice storm that knocked the power to my house out last Friday morning. I've only been back online for a few minutes and trying to catch up with all the happenings. Of course, I'm horribly behind in work that pays, so it may be a while before I get back to blogging regularly. Stay tuned.
Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 9:41 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
It's not so much that the pseudoskeptics who dominate the climate change denial camp are particularly clever, but they have been rather fortunate, and the forces aligned on the side of science have turned out to be human after all. The result is the denial camp is winning, and those on the defensive have some thinking to do.
Read on »
Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 10:44 AM • 69 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: climate
Never mind that the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record. Or that 2009 tied for the second-warmest year. Neither of those stories are consuming much airtime and web- and print-space. No, the biggest stories on the climate beat involve allegations of fraudulent activity on the part of some of the world's most experienced climatologists. The latest example concerns the lack of records specifying the location of remote Chinese weather stations and just how much they moved.
As Fred Pearce writes in The Guardian, "It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute." But attention it is gathering, and before anyone accuses us "warmists" of ignoring another scandal, it behooves us to address it.
The story seems to involve the troubled Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia and his colleague, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany in New York, who published an oft-cited paper in Nature 20 years ago. The paper concluded that there was no "urban heat island effect" lending a warming bias to temperature records. But because Jones can't produce the documentation attesting to just where many of the Chinese weather stations that supplied some of the data were and how far, it at all, any were moved during the period of time the study involves, allegations of cover-up are raging.
It will probably be a while before we get to the bottom of the story. It is possible that the paper's findings will have to be retracted, which would be a shame. But it changes nothing of importance beyond the reputation of the scientists concerned.
First, there are plenty of other sources of independent data confirming anthropogenic global warming. Second, even if there was an urban heat island effect biasing a few Chinese data points, the effect is clearly not systemic through the world's weather stations. Here's the abstract to a paper from the National Climatic Data Center's Tom Peterson from seven years ago titled "Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found."
Better yet, here's a hot off the presses paper from three of Peterson's NCDC colleagues, "On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record," that's basically a peer-reviewed version of a statement released last year by the station on why U.S. weather station records do not show a warming bias. In fact, not only is there no warming bias, but the opposite seems to the case:
Results indicate that there is a mean bias associated with poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites; however, this bias is consistent with previously documented changes associated with the widespread conversion to electronic sensors in the USHCN during the last 25 years. Moreover, the sign of the bias is counterintuitive to photographic documentation of poor exposure because associated instrument changes have led to an artificial negative ("cool") bias in maximum temperatures and only a slight positive ("warm") bias in minimum temperatures.
So by all means, let's get to the bottom of Jones' latest travails. But we should no more confuse controversies surrounding a single paper with an entire body of science than we should confuse one blustery day in January with 150 years of an inexorably warming planet.
Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 9:15 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
James Delingpole continues to enjoy the privileges of blogging on the Daily Telegraph's imprimatur, despite his repeated misstatements on climatology. His latest affront to journalistic norms comes in the form of another alleged failure of a team of IPCC authors to cite real science. He's calling it "Amazongate." Oh dear.
Read on »
Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 5:09 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
So, to recap:
More than 96% of working climatologists say the global mean temperatures are rising, but only 34% of the public believes "Most scientists think global warming is happening."
How did we let this happen?
Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 3:27 PM • 48 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate
I've never met David Rose of the U.K.'s Daily Mail. And, while his past reporting on climate issues has tended to misrepresent the science of the day, it is entirely possible his editors are to blame for the fictionalization of his latest story. So I won't point fingers at this juncture. Regardless, the affair is an ominous reminder of how easily an idea can migrate across the world in a matter of hours even though anyone with a middle-school education could spot the flaw within a few seconds.
Read on »
Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 3:10 PM • 38 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: politics
Here is Justice Stevens' core argument against his five colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court, each of who believes corporations are legally equivalent to citizens, as laid out in the dissenting opinion in Thursday's ruling on Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission.
The basic premise underlying the Court's ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker's identity, including its "identity" as a corporation. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law. Nor does it tell us when a corporation may engage in electioneering that some of its shareholders oppose. It does not even resolve the specific question whether Citizens United maybe required to finance some of its messages with the money in its PAC. The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court's disposition of this case.
In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure,and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.
I'd call that one of the truths that reasonable people hold to be "self evident," wouldn't you?
Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 3:24 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate • politics
By ruling that corporations are entitled to exercise unrestricted political speech, the U.S. Supreme Court has just made it much more difficult for Americans to make the transition from a fossil-fuel-based economy to a clean-energy economy.
Most democracies, including, until this morning, the U.S., recognize the danger of giving corporations free rein to influence the outcome of elections and so limit or ban political spending by corporations. But starting now, the $605 billion in profits available to the Fortune 100 can now be spent on advertising during American elections. This means those who are making the most money from the existing system are in a much greater position to help determine the future than those who are marginal players.
Fossil-fuel producers are among the richest corporations on the planet and in the U.S. They will now be able to outspend upstart solar, geothermal, wind-power, energy-efficiency and conservation-oriented businesses by several orders of magnitude. If you think it's tough to break into the energy market today, it just got a whole lot harder.
Other winners from today's ruling:
- Carbon capture and sequestration researchers, as bringing down CCS costs (in both energy and money) will now almost certainly be needed in a world that is that even less likely to stop burning coal in time to prevent catastrophic climate change than it was yesterday.
- The advertising industry.
Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 2:09 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: politics
I awoke this morning in a universe with a quantum signature that differs from that of the universe in which I fell asleep. I know this because it's the only way I can explain last night's Republican victory in the safest Democratic seat in the Senate.
It's just like that episode of Star Trek: TNG, the one in which Worf keeps flitting back and forth between alternate realities, including one where the Borg is practically ruling the universe, Once Riker discovers there are realities in which they aren't, he's willing to sabotage the effort to heal the trans-universe rift so he can escape his impending doom. (That one was called "Parallels.") That's how I feel.
Posted by James Hrynyshyn at 1:39 PM • 9 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.
