hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
January 20, 2009
Well, sort of. It went live a minute past noon ET. But there's no comment function, so it's not what most of us would call a blog. Still, it's nice to know Obama's hip to the blogosphere's significance.
Also nice to see climate change get a nod in the inaugural:
We will restore science to its…
January 20, 2009
The US Climate Action Partnership includes several notable and powerful environmental organizations, specifically the Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund and World Resources Institute. So one might expect that any plan endorsed by the partnership would…
January 19, 2009
This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending ScienceOnline '09, a conference-meetup-lovefest of about 200 scientists, journalists and bloggers. There I learned much about what we should and should not be doing in the blogosphere, and astute readers may notice some small changes on the Island…
January 15, 2009
Nous somme du soleil
-- Anderson/Howe, "Ritual"
It's sad that it's come to this, but I feel compelled to offer some guidance on the persistent allegation that the Earth is about to enter an ice age. It all started a few days ago, when Matt Drudge added a link to an English-language Pravda (?) story…
January 14, 2009
The German government has at least temporarily suspended an experiment that would see 20 tonnes of iron dust dumped into the ocean between Argentina and Antarctica in hopes of inducing plankton bloom that sucks up atmospheric CO2, according to Nature. First, says the government, you have to do an…
January 13, 2009
A laugh for the newsprint nightmare
A world that never was
Where the questions are all why
And the answers are all because
--Bruce Cockburn, "Laughter"
Further to yesterday's post, in which I compared pseudoskeptical propaganda masquerading as informed opinion, what if the same editorial standards…
January 12, 2009
It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first
But the trouble with normal is
It always gets worse.
-- Bruce Cockburn, "The trouble with normal"
It's hard to know what's worse: an economist who thinks he understand climatology better than climatologists, or a news outlet that thinks asking…
January 12, 2009
Before anyone bothers to cast a vote in the 2008 Weblog Awards, please read what P.Z. "Pharyngula" Myers, easily one of the most popular science bloggers on the planet, has to say. Know that of the top three contenders (so far) in the science category are two blogs that exhibit only disdain for the…
January 9, 2009
I'm out here fighting, hungry
The fish ain't biting
Life's so frightening
I'm out here stumbling
Broke and crumbling
And nothing's happening
And aye aye, captain
--Lamont Dozier, "Fish Ain't Bitin' "
Hank Williams at Scientific Blogging has grown weary of the cliches that headline writers use to…
January 8, 2009
Well, how do you explain it?
Some strange lights observed at the time of the incident have been explained. But the physical damage remains an X-file.
January 8, 2009
I'm gettin' bugged driving up and down the same old strip
I gotta finda new place where the kids are hip
My buddies and me are getting real well known
Yeah, the bad guys know us and they leave us alone
I get around
-- B. Wilson, "I get around"
This is just a pair of data points on the itinerant…
January 7, 2009
Bluesy Monday is the one day that they came here,
When they haunt me and they taunt me in my cage.
I mock them all, they're feelin' small, they got no answer.
They're playing dumb but I'm just laughing as they rage.
-- Davies, Richard; Hodgson, Roger, "Asylum"
A single transgression can be excused…
January 6, 2009
And the fog's liftin'
And the sand's shiftin'
I'm driftin' on out
Ol' Captain Ahab
He ain't got nothin' on me
;;;; Tom Waits, Shiver Me Timbers
It's not that we didn't see this coming. Marine protection area advocates have been hoping the rumors were true, and they are. George W. Bush has put…
January 1, 2009
Well he came home from the war
With a party in his head
And an idea for a fireworks display
;;;; Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones
I spent much of the Solstice/Christmas/New Year's break thinking about the future of this blog. I am happy to report that more a few lurkers broke their silence to urge me…
December 29, 2008
For the last four years, I've spent a fair bit of time trying to do my bit to undermine the pseudoskeptical claptrap that passes for criticism of the idea that humans are responsible for global warming. And I'm getting tired. It doesn't seem to matter how many bloggers and journalists who…
December 23, 2008
If the "Reality" anti-coal advertising campaign represents the best American environmentalists can come up with, Matt Nisbet is right. Communicating the facts about global warming to the masses is simply beyond our ability. Fortunately, there are others who understand how to craft a message that…
December 23, 2008
I've been waiting for almost four years for an opportunity to connect homophobia and global warming, and finally I have it, thanks to the pope. Benny XVI the other day managed to compare the effort to save the planetary ecosystem with the fragility of human sexuality. How did he do it?
Well, on…
December 22, 2008
It didn't take long for the Competitive Enterprise Institute to begin dissembling about John Holdren, President-elect Barack Obama's new science adviser. On his blog, the CEI's Chris Horner dismisses Holdren's soon-to-be ex-employer, the Woods Hole Research Center, as "an environmental advocacy…
December 19, 2008
First Stephen Chu for energy secretary, then John Holdren for science adviser. Now Jane Lubchenco for NOAA chief. Wow. One of the country's top marine biologists and a hard-core climateer. It's hard to imagine a better science team. From the LA Times:
Lubchenco did not draw the same level of fire…
December 18, 2008
This segment from Letterman is from back in April, but given the word that John Holdren, former AAAS head, will be running Barack Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy (i.e., serving as chief science adviser to the president), it's worth a replay. This is a man who will be repeatedly…
December 18, 2008
Maybe I'm making too much out of one paragraph in a short post on one blog, but I'd rather try to deal with it now before this particular meme travels much further. The offending line appears today in a post on Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog by Jeff Goodell. It offers a description of a man who…
December 16, 2008
The Washington Post has decided that a carbon tax would be better than capping carbon emissions and trading the rights to emit. It joins a growing list of tax proponents, including James Hansen, Al Gore, Ralph Nader (writing in the Wall St. Journal), The American Prospect, and even ExxonMobil. An…
December 12, 2008
Al Gore has joined the growing list of notable climateers calling for a new target for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Speaking at the Poznan climate change gabfest this week he said we need to aim for no more than 350 parts per million.
The best known climatologist advocating such a low…
December 11, 2008
Here's one of those things that Carl Jung would call synchronicity, but is really just an example of how scientific research tends to converge on certain ideas. Item 1, which arrived in my email in box this morning in the form of a press release from the DC-based Institute for Governance &…
December 11, 2008
The president elect has disappointed many of his supporters by choosing relatively hawkish and right-leaning types to run his foreign and economic policies. But to my mind, his choices for secretary of energy and interior and Environmental Protection Administration chief are more important. And the…
December 4, 2008
So last month its was the Forecast Earth gang at the Weather Channel. This week it's the science and technology team at CNN that gets the axe.
I know that times are tough all over. I know it's hard to sell ads for science sections and programs. But it sure would be nice to see the corporate robber…
December 3, 2008
Our SciBlogging colleague William "Stoat' Connolley had to do come climbing down after a recent post tearing a strip off fellow Brit, enviro-activist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot turned out to be grossly unfair. Most of the fuss was over Connelley's mistaken impression that Monbiot didn't…
December 2, 2008
Twenty years ago, a clever television documentary called "After the Warming" tried to paint a picture of climate change, and humankind's delayed attempts to deal with it, for next five decades. Drawing on the best science available at the time, the producers predicted that we'd never have enough…
December 1, 2008
... is that the rest of the world doesn't stop while you're off stuffing your face with the family. And by the time you're back in the saddle, the virtual stack of papers to read and work to catch up on threatens to bury you before the season's first snowfall. So while I dig myself out, here's a…
November 25, 2008
The sentence that leads off a story in today's New York Times by Elisabeth Rosenthal about the economic crisis is all wrong.
Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and…