Climate
hrynyshyn | July 31, 2007James Hansen isn't satisfied with an audience limited to those that read his peer-reviewed scientific papers and the odd Congressional hearing attendee. In this essay, NASA's top climate scientist takes the substance of a recent paper that discusses the "reticence" of some climatologists to make their fears about dangerous climate change public and gives his argument a more accessible treatment. The New Scientist version is gripping stuff, right from the first paragraph, which also appears in almost identical form in the Environmental Research Letters original.
I find it almost inconceivable…
chaoticutopia | July 25, 2007If you’re somewhere in the Denver metro area tonight, consider dropping by the Tattered Cover in Lodo to hear my fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney discuss his new book, Storm World. I’ll be there, sipping a cup of mocha and pondering the future of our climate. The festivities begin at 7:30pm. I hope you can join us!
hrynyshyn | July 24, 2007A committee of the North Carolina House has come up with the state's first renewable-energy bill at long last, one that would require electrical utilities to produce 12.5% of their product from renewable sources. Which is a good thing, if a bit on the weak side. In a bizarre twist, however, committee members added a provision that would also forbid the utilities from building any new nuclear or coal-fired plants unless they can prove that no alternative, climate-friendly technology would be cheaper. Now there's an interesting challenge.
I don't know if any other state has come up with such a…
hrynyshyn | July 24, 2007They say the devil is in the details, and climate change is no different. While climatologists have agreed on the general trend of global temperature rise, it's proving quite tricky to predict regional effects. A new paper in the current Nature won't get us that level of precision, but it does take us one step closer, in the form of latitudinal precipitation forecasts. And it's not looking good.
From "Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends" by Xuebin Zhang et al (doi:10.1038/nature06025):
We show that anthropogenic forcing has had a detectable influence on…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2007Here on the Island of Doubt, climate change is a favored topic for two reasons. First, there is no more important a public policy challenge, no matter what Bjorn Lomborg says. Second, the role of uncertainty in climate science -- and science in general -- has been grossly distorted in many popular media, and this blog was established in part to combat such propaganda. So imagine my reaction to the appearance of a graph in last week's Science that addresses both climate change and uncertainty. At first glance, it may appear a little daunting, but it's worthy thinking about, so bear with me as…
hrynyshyn | July 17, 2007The word from Canada's most rectangular province is that Saskatchewan could soon be home to North American's first "commercial-scale, coal-fired power plants that would produce virtually no greenhouse gas emissions." The estimated $2 billion plant will capture its carbon dioxide and pump it into nearby oil wells. Sound like a good idea. But whether it actually makes environmental or economic sense hinges on the outcome of one of the most contentious debates in the climate change mitigation field.
SaskPower hasn't yet decided whether to go ahead with the project. There's a reason why no one…
voltagegate | July 13, 2007A "green" art show just opened up in Lexington titled "HOT: Artists Respond to Global Warming", where area artists wanted to "participate in the conversation about climate change" through their works.
The objective of the show was to go beyond the informational and factual aspects and allow the artists to become true evaluators of the world around them, she said. The results include numerous media -- pottery, sculpture, oil paintings, watercolor paintings, fabric, and multimedia. The exhibit is laid out clearly, taking visitors from the immediately accessible depictions of global warming to…
voltagegate | July 11, 2007Here are two neat sites I've been meaning to link for a while. One is called The Miniature Earth, a flash vid of statistics revealing the cultural composition of humans if the world's population was proportionally reduced to 100 people. For example, of the 100, 61 would be Asian, 13 African, 12 European, 8 North American, 5 South American/Caribbean and 1 from Oceania.
The other site, BreathingEarth, projects how much CO2 is being released as we speak, country by country, factoring birth rates and death rates into the model. The census data seems to be a bit dated, but it is an interesting…
hrynyshyn | July 10, 2007Martin Durkin, the science documentarian responsible for the most irresponsible documentary ever made on global warming, lashes back at his critics (those who understand the science), in an op-ed for The Australian. It is perhaps the most audacious attempt to defy the facts I've come across since Scooter Libby testified before a grand jury. The language chosen by the maker of "The Great Global Warming Swindle" is simply astounding:
It's all codswallop. The notion of man-made global warming started life as a wild, eccentric theory and, despite throwing billions of dollars at it, scientists…
hrynyshyn | July 9, 2007I promised myself I would go easy on the Live Earth spectacle, despite the easy pickings on the hypocrisy watch. But just how much can one skeptic take? Watching Sting admit he could do more to reduce his carbon footprint was one thing (ya think?), but the Pledge and the only "actions" being asked of those paying attention put me over the edge.
On the one hand, my man Al Gore and his fellow climate action campaigners did work a policy goal of an international treaty that calls for a 90 percent reduction in "global pollution" by developed countries (50 percent for everyone else) into the…
hrynyshyn | June 25, 2007London's often trigger-happy Independent reports today that Al Gore is criticizing climatologists for not reaching a strong consensus on global warming soon enough. That's a switch. The quotes that reporter Jonathan Owen provided, lifted apparently from a forward to a new edition of Gore's Earth in the Balance, may have lost some of their context, however...
Here's what the Independent says warrants the headline "Too little, too late: Gore blames scientists for climate crisis"
In an extraordinary outburst aimed at America's failure to tackle global warming, Al Gore says that if scientific…
voltagegate | June 21, 2007Glaciation opening new niches? The bushbuck, Tragelaphus sciptus, is sure to fill them.
I finally had the chance to this paper on molecular biogeography, an interesting method of analyzing the biodiversity of widespread populations of organisms, their core habitats and their interconnectivity. The bushbuck is a perfect model; it populate most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Genetic data - from mitocondrial DNA and cytochrome b complimentary data - was contextualized and integrated with geomorphologic and climatic history. For those keeping track of the ecology basics posts, this is a perfect example…
hrynyshyn | June 21, 2007Implicit in every "clean coal" advocate's pitch (no pun intended) for subsidizing the technology to free us from our oil addiction is the assumption that we have at least 200 years' worth of the stuff under American soil -- and plenty more around the world. That could be very wrong, according to a new National Academy of Sciences study.
Matthew Wald has the story in today's New York Times. Here's the relevant section from the study itself (bold emphasis mine):
Despite significant uncertainties in existing reserve estimates, it is clear that there is sufficient coal at current rates of…
voltagegate | June 20, 2007Found this on ECOLOG this morning:
Dear Colleagues:
We are writing to invite your participation in a survey of wildlife
responses to climate change in the Rocky Mountains. Results of this
important project will help frame policy decision making, media reports to
the public, and the direction of future science and management programs.
Climate change is no longer a matter of "what if" or "when." The
scientific community agrees: a growing body of evidence indicates that
human activities are causing unprecedented disruptions to the global
climate system. Furthermore, it is clear that these…
hrynyshyn | June 19, 2007The headline for this post is stolen verbatim from a section headline in a paper on climate change just published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. It's yet another depressing read by NASA's Jim Hansen and five co-authors from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Hansen has been trying to get our attention for some 20 years now with a series of papers laced with alarmist language, but in an email to the Independent, says "this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously…
hrynyshyn | June 18, 2007Business Week recently published an odd little essay by Greg Blonder, someone I've not come across before. He posits that painting your roof white will do more to offset anthropogenic climate change than installing photovoltaic panels. Seriously. The science appears to be pretty sound, but it has the whiff of a thought experiment rather than a practical idea.
Here's the essential section:
...imagine a solar photovoltaic panel. Unlike burning coal or oil, the production of photovoltaic electricity does not add to the stock of global warming gases permeating our atmosphere. The panel's surface…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2007For quite a few years now, some pretty smart people have been floating an answer to the thorny problem of how to get both the developed and the developing world to agree on a path to carbon emissions reductions. I have resisted supporting it because it's so bloody simple it seemed like I was missing something. But Gwynne Dyer just reminded me of the idea, and I have to admit, there is no alternative. We have to do this:
Every person on the planet gets the same emissions quota. Simple as that. We figure out how many tonnes of CO2 (and equivalent gases) the planet can tolerate without sending…
hrynyshyn | June 14, 2007It's as if man can't sin. The Southern Baptist Conference, perhaps the most powerful organization of fundamentalist protestants in America, has decided that the evidence humankind is responsible for global warming is just too thin. From Forbes (why not?):
Southern Baptists approved a resolution on global warming Wednesday that questions the prevailing scientific belief that humans are largely to blame for the phenomenon and also warns that increased regulation of greenhouse gases will hurt the poor (emphasis mine).... The SBC resolution, approved near the end of the denomination's annual…
voltagegate | June 12, 2007You tell me:
I realize that the guy is trying to boil it down for people by assessing "risk", but by co-opting Pascal's wager to prove a point, he's made an false and unnecessary concession ("maybe we didn't have a hand in it") and drawn out the denialists and all their baggage on the Digg comment thread.
This sort of logic teaser/statistical manipulation smacks of a bit of pseudoscience. Creationists claim to have "scientific" proof of God or Noah's Ark or whatever, whereupon they submit a logic teaser founded on false assumptions. I'm not equating the two here, it just reminds me of that…
voltagegate | June 11, 2007"The whole thing [global warming] is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability."
- Jerry Falwell