hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
April 27, 2009
CBS' 60 Minutes didn't break any news with its report on the dilemma posed by coal-fired power plants. It was probably inevitable that they would look into the fascinating contradictions posed by Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers. For a man who make a lot of money emitting greenhouse gases into the planet…
April 24, 2009
Follow this, if you will.
A couple of week back I wrote a mostly tongue-in-cheek post titled "Why Twitter is Evil," in the form of a parody of "25 random things about me." Each of the 25 reasons was less than 140 characters long. It was not meant to be taken seriously, although as a subsequent post…
April 24, 2009
I feel I'd be neglecting my duties to those few readers of mine who don't read enough other sources if I didn't at least mention Andy Revkin's piece in today's New York Times. An anonymous lawyer slipped him, in what would have once arrived in a brown paper envelope, a document unearthed in a…
April 23, 2009
... you could be in for a surprise. If, that is, you're not up on the latest climate research. Figuring out what role the forests will play in the Earth's climate regulating mechanisms have long proved more than a little tricky. And it just keeps getting more complicated.
Back at the turn of the…
April 22, 2009
It's Earth Day, so in the spirit of celebration, instead of dwelling on the bad news (like the report that 9 out of 10 attendees at the recent Copenhagen scientific conference on climate change don't expect us to be able to avoid increasing the planet's average temperature by a "dangerous" 2°C -- I…
April 20, 2009
The latest report from the Pew Forum provides yet more evidence that the culture wars are more than an amusing abstraction for social scientists. Here's the question, asked of 1502 Americans:
From what you've read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been…
April 17, 2009
Every day it seems there's a new essay or post about social networking fatigue, virtual connectivity's isolating effects, and the threats posed by rapid-fire media. Most of all, though, it's about the problem with Twitter. My "25 random things I hate about Twitter" post attracted an usually large…
April 17, 2009
You may recall Sarah Palin's curious approach to the science of climate change. Although while running for vice-president of the United States she insisted humans were not responsible, she nevertheless advocated doing something about it. This week Alaska's governor offered some details of just what…
April 15, 2009
Fred Pearce, whose byline is most commonly seen in New Scientist over feature stories about climate change, has done a little bit of thinking about whether we should be worried about the virtual certainty that the world's population will hit 9 billion before it starts to fall in the second half of…
April 14, 2009
A new paper to be published next week in Geophysical Research Letters (which really needs a better name) lays out what kind of effort would be required to reduce the impacts of climate change by half. Actually, what it does is conclude that if we reign in our fossil-fuel emissions by 70%,…
April 9, 2009
And now, in another edition of "I was going to ignore this, but," I draw your attention to the latest career move of one Marc Morano and his unwavering campaign to undermine public support for any and all policies that might give us a chance to forestall catastrophic climate change
I was hoping…
April 8, 2009
Back when I was an editor of a small-town community weekly, I had a bumper sticker affixed to one of my office walls with a simple message: "ASSUME NOTHING." One of my predecessors had left it behind. I really should get a new one because, like even the best journalists and bloggers, I need to be…
April 7, 2009
I was going to ignore the open letter-to-the-president advertisement placed in major papers recently by the Cato Institute. You've probably heard of it -- the one that says Obama should ignore global warming alarmism because the science says it isn't happening. The one signed by "over 100…
April 6, 2009
Very few relationships in this world are monotonic. Not the price of stocks, not the traffic on this blog, and not global climate trends. Maybe if more people understood this, we'd have less nonsense about climate change clogging the media.
By monotonic, I mean, if you plot a trend on a standard x-…
April 3, 2009
Why would I care what you're doing?
The 140-character limit.
Just another opportunity to interrupt real-world social interactions.
Enabling attention-deficit disorder sufferers doesn't seem a like a particularly good idea these days.
Gives NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon an excuse to let…
April 2, 2009
"I'm not an expert on any of these things. Much of what I say should be taken with a grain of salt."
So said Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Physics, all-round brilliant scientist, and self-professed global warming "heretic," during a round of questions and…
March 31, 2009
I was wrong. Indeed, it would seem I've been laboring under a misapprehension for the last couple of decades. Anthropogenic global warming is, after all, a fraud, a colossal scheme designed to subvert the very foundations of modern civilization in a favor of a socialist world government that…
March 30, 2009
Freeman Dyson is on the cover of yesterday's New York Times Magazine. Inside a baseball writer (a very good baseball writer, but still) gives the man an opportunity to explain why he doesn't believe climate change is something to worry about.
Others have lamented the attention devoted by the…
March 29, 2009
So Battlestar Galactica is over. Again.
It is unlikely that many a fan of science fiction, or intelligent story-telling of any genre, over the age of 11 mourned the end of the original series. But the resurrected version that drew its final breath a week ago was transcendent television, by any…
March 26, 2009
Few technologies give rise to more spirited debates among environmentalists than nuclear power generation. So it was with some trepidation that I started to read an essay on the subject in last week's Washington Post. This is the same newspaper that took six weeks to run a rebuttal to George Will's…
March 20, 2009
Among the more interesting questions asked in the the just-released Yale poll on "Climate change in the American mind"is the one that shows us how much the country trusts various sources of information on the subject. Keeping reading to find out who tops the list, and who is on the bottom:
March 19, 2009
That is, as the Dane said, the question.
The short answer is "nobody knows," of course. The ice core records suggest that we're adding CO2 to the atmosphere faster than the planet has ever seen before. That doesn't necessarily mean that the consequences of doing so ;;;; planetary warming and…
March 17, 2009
Remarkable words from Canada''s Parliament Hill:
Canada's science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won't say if he believes in evolution.
"I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question…
March 17, 2009
A story on the fate of Greenland's ice sheet published last week in The Guardian attracted the expected level of interest from those who uncritically repeat any scientific tidbit that reminds us we still don't know everything we need to know about climate change. This was because the story, as…
March 16, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, New Scientist published an insightful but hardly controversial little essay on the challenges a science book editor faces when she has to deal with creationist literature. Amanda Geftner's piece, "How to spot a hidden religious agenda" disappeared from the magazine's website…
March 13, 2009
Elizabeth Kolbert's interview in Yale's e360 magazine is a sobering read. But what's even more interesting than the light she sheds on the reasons why the polls keep finding the public is out of touch with the science is the stark reminder I came across in the article's comment section that we've…
March 12, 2009
"Neuroscientists fear brain drain" (Globe and Mail, March 12, 2009)
It's about research funding drying up in Canada, while Obama pours more into U.S. labs.
March 11, 2009
There's a good reason why of all the consequences of anthropogenic global warming, nothing garners as much attention as sea level rise ;;;; with the possible exception of those darn charismatic polar bears, that is.
It's the same reason Al Gore devoted half a dozen slides in his climate change…
March 9, 2009
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The Tempest is not only one of Shakespeare last plays, but arguably his most profound. No longer content with mere comedy or historical tragedy, he explores the changes…
March 4, 2009
Read this, weep, dry your tears and get on the phone. From the still reliable news pages of the WaPo:
The nominations of two of President Obama's top science advisers have stalled in the Senate, according to several sources, posing a challenge to the administration as it seeks to frame new policies…