hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
September 30, 2011
This story has been around a while, but I haven't been blogging much lately so I am only getting around to it now.
"..the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and…
September 21, 2011
From Long-term trend in global CO2 emissions, published by PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, comes some good news:
Even including the USA whose emissions in 2008-2010 are 11 percent more than in 1990, the industrialised countries…
September 20, 2011
Drawing attention to misinformed pseudoskeptical analyses of peer-reviewed climatology studies is usually counterproductive. But in this case, it's worth mentioning because the author makes such a common mistake that exploring the error might actually help shed light on the why so many people are…
September 19, 2011
More than a few writers have gotten a lot of mileage out of comparing the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries' propaganda efforts to counter rapidly rising mountains of science that counter their "it's all good" message. Al Gore featured it in his slide show. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway wrote an…
September 19, 2011
Fill in the blanks:
It is customary in the popular media and in many journal articles to cite a projected _________ figure as if it were a given, a figure so certain that it could virtually be used for long-range planning purposes. But we must carefully examine the assumptions behind such…
September 9, 2011
A letter in Climatic Change looking at the life-cycle greenhouse warming potential of natural gas raised a lot of hackles a little while back. If, as the authors posit, replacing coal and oil combustion with gas-fired turbines could actually accelerate global warming rather than slow it down, then…
September 2, 2011
Wouldn't it be great if everyone was as good at admitting their mistakes?
Abstract: Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify…
August 31, 2011
Number of hits returned when Googling news sources for "James Hansen" (head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and perhaps the world's best-known climatologist, who was arrested in front of the White House this week as part of a coordinated climate change campaign) and "Keystone" (XL,…
July 21, 2011
"Gobal warming is not about overconsumption, morality, ideology or capitalism. It is largely the result of human beings generating energy by burning hydrocarbons and coal."
-- Mark Lynas, in his book The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans
Provocative? Bleedingly obvious?…
July 15, 2011
Way back when I was just a novice environmentalist, Greenpeace seemed like a good idea. It published a decent newsletter, was drawing attention to otherwise neglected issues, and, while understandably suspicious of technology, seemed to have more than a grudging respect for science as a tool to…
June 20, 2011
Debating the merits and dangers of fracking shale gas has become a major obession of those who worry about energy and the climate. Yale's e360's latest contribution comes in the form a forum that includes a wide variety of perspectives pro and con.
For me, the wisest observation, and the one that…
June 15, 2011
The title of this post won't mean much until you read this contribution to The Conversation, a new and laudable attempt by climatologists to get out the message that time's a wastin,' folks. Here's a taste:
We're only a few decades away from a major tipping point, plus or minus only about a decade…
June 10, 2011
This video, a selection of TV news clips that serve to illustrate Bill McKibben's recent op-ed on climate change denial, has already made the rounds, but as it deserves as wide an audience as possible, I'll do my bit.
It's also noteworthy because the op-ed marked a first for McKibben: the use of a…
June 9, 2011
The flaws with Wednesday's anti-renewables op-ed in the New York Times begin with the headline and continue through just about every paragraph. On second thought, perhaps the problems begin with the decision of the New York Times to run "The Gas Is Greener" in the first place. But let's start with…
May 26, 2011
OK. Taking on logical flaws in Wall Street Journal op-ed items is about as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel, but I can't let Matt Ridley's latest affront to common sense pass without firing off a few rounds for practice if nothing else.
Under a staggeringly unimaginative headline of "…
May 23, 2011
David Appell at Quark Soup draws our attention (via Stoat) to a graph in the recent America's Climate Choices report from the NAS/NRC. If the forecasts on which the authors rely come to pass, it's going to take almost a couple of decades for U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions to return to post-…
May 20, 2011
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was a 21-year-old journalism student spending a couple of weeks as an intern at Science Dimension, a government-funded magazine (there weren't any private science magazines in the country). I was assigned two short features while there: one on canola…
May 18, 2011
Indeed:
The main thing is they are in absolute, abject and catastrophic denial about a straightforward set of facts that is probably the most important set of facts we face as a nation, and as human beings on planet earth. They have turned their faces away from climate change in a way that is…
May 5, 2011
I like Tim's Lenton's style, and his substance. He has his detractors -- and his latest essay in Nature is a little light on supporting data -- but he's almost always worth reading. This one is probably a doomed to be ignored because it advocates focusing climate policy efforts on the complex issue…
May 3, 2011
Climate change activists in Canada are understandably depressed by the results of Monday's federal election, which produced a majority Conservative government run by a party with zero interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There are shards of good news lying in the rubble, although they…
April 28, 2011
What if we could avoid hundreds of thousand of deaths, billions of dollars in crop losses and trillions of dollars in healthcare expenditures simply by spreading off-the-shelf technology and industrialized-world regulations to developing nations? Oh, and along the way, we'd mitigate a fair bit of…
April 27, 2011
Floods, droughts, heatwaves, rising sea levels. Massive debts and deficits. Multiple wars. Peak oil. But what's really important is providing yet more evidence that the president was born on U.S. soil. So the White House flies a staffer 9,600 miles (15,450 km) from Washington, D.C., to Hawaii and…
April 15, 2011
Proponents of shale gas extraction are not particularly pleased with the attention drawn this week to a new study in Climatic Change that found widespread development of Marcellus natural gas may actually accelerate climate change rather than slow it down. Unfortunately for them, their primary…
April 12, 2011
It was in Bill McKibben's first, and arguably best, book, The End of Nature, that I first came across the challenge posed by fugitive emissions. Back then -- just 20-some years ago -- natural gas was touted as a cleaner alternative to coal and oil because the combustion of its primary constituent,…
April 8, 2011
Tennessee's House passed this disingenuous piece of legislation the other day. They're not to the first to try this sort of thing and they probably won't be the last.
HB0368
00242666
-1-
HOUSE BILL 368
By Dunn
AN ACT to amend Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 49,
Chapter 6, Part 10, relative to…
April 6, 2011
We can't seem to stop thinking about nuclear power. Given what's at stake -- the biosphere, the economy, our genetic integrity -- this is understandable. But I think too many are getting distracted from the fundamental problem with splitting atoms and arguing scientific questions we are unlikely to…
April 5, 2011
See that black box over on the left-hand side of this blog? The one with the numbers counting down? That's a little widget I assembled by rejigging one from trillionthtonne.org. The basic idea is that, if our climate can be expected to suffer severe disruption at a certain amount of global warming…
April 4, 2011
A new review paper in Nature makes a stab an answering the question "Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?" In an apparent effort to satisfy a variety of audiences with different evidentiary and skepticism standards, Nature and the reviews authors, led by Anthony D. Barnosky of the…