Climate
hrynyshyn | January 1, 2007What a wonderful way to begin the new year, with a responsible call for action on climate change that embraces the uncertainties rather than yet another stubborn refusal to act because of them. The New York Times' ever-reliable Andrew Revkin writes this morning of a new collective voice of scientists who say we should do something more constructive than just scare people. About time.
Among them is Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research:
Dr. Hulme insists that it is best not to gloss over uncertainties. In fact, he and other experts say that uncertainty is one…
chaoticutopia | December 29, 2006Even in a snowy winter landscape, I feel as if I'm surrounded by fractals. In order to capture this feeling, I turned to the complex topography of the Mandelbrot set. I added an fBm coloring algorithm, to mimic the soft hues of a winter storm. When the fractal was complete, I decided to superimpose a sketchy map outline for clarity. (The NOAA does it, why can't I?) Here's what I came up with:
...which is rather similar to a recent image from the NOAA:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Image of the Day, showing snow accumulation over the Rockies from this week's…
hrynyshyn | December 21, 2006I hope the answer is yes, in the sense that I don't want to see the even the mid-case scenarios come to pass. But this is a legitimate question, coming out of the American Geophysical Union meeting. Kevin Vranes says he senses a growing feeling that maybe climate scientists have gone a bit too far:
We tried for years - decades - to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder…
chaoticutopia | December 20, 2006The mother of all logarithmic spirals is focused right over my head. Check it out:
Basically, moisture is being drawn from the Gulf of Mexico and blown to the northwest. There, it climbs the slopes of the Rockies, where it is colliding with a large mass of cold air from the arctic. For Denver, which has been cool and clear all week, this means one thing... Blizzard:
Current forecasts expect an average of an inch a snow an hour, through tomorrow. The snow is already drifting up to a foot high around our house, and gusts of wind (estimated by the NOAA to be as high as 40 mph) have been…
chaoticutopia | December 2, 2006My apologies for getting the fractal out a day late, and for keeping it simple. Just as soon as I started to get caught up with things, I caught a nasty little cold. So, here are the basics-I'll get back to more detailed posts as soon as my head clears. Thanks for your patience!
For this fractal, I chose to forego the typical Mandelbrot or Julia sets, and stick with a pure fractal coloring algorithm. I use "fractal Brownian motion" to color the fractals rather often, as the stochastic patterns lend themselves well to fuzzy patterns in nature, from fog and clouds to ripples in the Great Sand…
hrynyshyn | November 23, 2006The good people at deSmogBlog have stumbled across exactly what's wrong with the public debate on climate change. IsCanadaReady.com is a compedium of non-scientific arguments that attempts to undermine confidence in anthropogenic global warming theory. But nowhere on the site is there any information describing the author(s) of the material posted thereon. I wonder why that could be?
Could it be that the fellow to whom the domain is registered, one Ed Unverricht of Edmonton, Alta., appears to have some claim of expertise in taxes and golf, but not atmospheric heat flux trends, radiative…
hrynyshyn | November 18, 2006I don't want to get all giddy over the Democratic victory and what it means for the planet. But this little snippet of news from today's WaPo is a good way to start your day off right.
Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) announced his intention to become the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, now headed by Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who has said that global warming is a hoax. Warner has called for action against climate change, and his ascension to a leadership post would accelerate significant changes already underway.
I'm not saying Warner is the Messiah. But…
chaoticutopia | November 1, 2006
...or at least, the end of any simple theory regarding the extinction of our saurian predecessors. A few announcements from the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America last week concerned the simplicity of mass extinctions. For instance, new evidence suggests the Chicxulub meteor impact was not the sole cause of the end-cretaceous extinction:
The Chicxulub impact may, in fact, have been the lesser and earlier of a series of meteors and volcanic eruptions that pounded life on Earth for more than 500,000 years, say Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller and her…
hrynyshyn | October 2, 2006The first question is: how bad are things, really? The second: if things are as bad as the authors of two recent books on climate change say they are, are we capable of doing anything about it?
I've just finished The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock and Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning by George Monbiot. Both authors are familiar to British readers. Both care deeply about the natural world, and both are very worried about where things are headed. Each book comes to similar conclusions -- (1) very bad and (2) yes, but only if we're very…
chaoticutopia | September 22, 2006Deep within the pockets of a Mandelbrot set, delicate branches display endless variations. When highlighted with the colors of autumn, (since today is, after all, the Autumnal Equinox,) patterns of exquisite beauty emerge:
These patterns can remind us of many forms in nature, including a grove of quaking aspen:
Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides)
Aspen are members of the poplar family, along with their cousins, the cottonwoods (featured in last week's fractal.) While they are known for their brilliant foliage in the fall, the species has another claim to fame: the world's largest organism…
hrynyshyn | September 14, 2006Canada's federal government, under the newly elected Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, seems to have adopted the dishonest propaganda techniques of the Bush administration as part of an attempt to wiggle out of past governments' commitments -- weak as they were -- to address climate change. What they're doing, of course, is slandering the good name of doubt.
This surprises no one who has been watching the Harper government cosy up to discredited climate change denialists. But the recent editing of the Department of Environment's explanatory web page on the greenhouse effect is still…
hrynyshyn | September 14, 2006Much has been made of a good-journalism award handed by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists to Michael Crichton for his science-fiction novel, State of Fear. I wrote back in pre-Scienceblog days that the AAPG had gone off the deep end by confusing a bad novel with a "notable journalistic achievement in any medium which contributes to public understanding of geology, energy resources, or the technology of oil and gas exploration."
Fortunately not all geologists are happy with the choice of recipient for that particular award. Via RealClimate we have a copy of a letter (PDF) that…
hrynyshyn | September 2, 2006Trust the gang at deSmogBlog to draw our attention to the latest discoveries in climatology:
chaoticutopia | September 1, 2006Picture a Julia set, in shades of deep blue and green, with stretching, white spiral arms, decorated with fractal Brownian motion, which leaves hazy boundaries between shades of cloud, land, and open ocean:
It might resemble a hurricane. Of course, a relatively simple geometric structure like a fractal has nothing on Mother Nature. You can adjust variables all day, but never get the delicate coastline of Baja California, as a hurricane approaches:
Hurricane John nears Baja, California, moving north-northwest at 8 mph, with sustained winds near 110 mph.
I've been keeping up with the latest…
hrynyshyn | August 30, 2006This week we've been asked to comment on James Robbins' ridiculous essay in The National Review, Hooray For Global Warming. Although a more appropriate response would probably be to ignore such twaddle, that would be contrary to the whole blogging thing. Others might argue that it's obviously satire. I will go out on a limb and assume Robbins is serious.
Seriously ignorant, that is.
Robbins' notion that global warming will be good for the world, give or take a few isolated locales, is so misinformed that it's not even wrong, to borrow a very clever phrase from Wolfgang Pauli.
Pointing out all…
hrynyshyn | August 8, 2006The news that Pat "700 Club" Robertson finally admits that climate change is something to worry about is a few days old, but I thought it worth mentioning.
His Road to Damascus conversion is all the more remarkable when this quote, when you recall that
In October, Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate, said the National Association of Evangelicals was teaming up with "far left environmentalists" for saying global warming was caused by humans and needed to be mitigated.
Contrast that with last week's declaration:
"We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels,"…
hrynyshyn | August 4, 2006I've finally gotten around to reading The Next Big Storm, Can Scientists and Journalists Work Together to Improve Coverage of the Hurricane-Global Warming Controversy? -- the Skeptical Inquirer's monumental review of media coverage of the hurrican-climate change links, by our own Matthew C. Nisbet and Chris Mooney. Wow. So much to chew on, especially for a science journalist who has done a bit of writing on the subject myself.
The nub of their argument is that improving the sorry state of most of the reporting on this hopeless complex subject will:
require getting beyond the tyranny of…
chaoticutopia | August 1, 2006The current "Ask a ScienceBlogger" opens a big can of worms:
I heard that within 15 years, global warming will have made Napa County too hot to grow good wine grapes. Is that true? What other changes are we going to see during our lifetimes because of global warming?
I waited until the last minute on this one, because the more I thought about it, the broader my answer became. So, where to begin?
For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost...
Does a little grape relate to the changes of an entire planetary ecosystem? Of course. Slight changes in temperature will affect the producers, before it…
hrynyshyn | July 28, 2006A newly unearthed memo from a rural utility in Colorado has shed some light on the thinking behind the coal industry's support for climate change contrarians. You can read the memo, which lays out a strategy for a propaganda campaign against the idea that climate change is something we should be worried about, here, thanks to the wonderful metablog, deSmogBlog.
Seth Borenstein's AP story is a good overview from the popular press, and the RealClimate guys weigh in, too.
I haven't got much to add, except to note that I'm willing to bet there's going to be some mad members of the Intermountain…
hrynyshyn | July 22, 2006From today's New York Times comes a story that should worry everyone:
From 2002 until this year, NASA's mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."
In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year's budget and planning documents, the agency's mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific…