hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
April 25, 2007
Nobody emerges looking good in Hot Politics, a PBS Frontline documentary on the politics of the first Bush, Clinton and second Bush administrations. It aired last night, but the whole thing is available online. Not a lot we didn't already know, but it's sobering to be reminded that the inertia that…
April 24, 2007
I really didn't set out to keep writing about Al Gore. I mean, he's a good guy, and all. But there are more important things to worry about in the battle between science and superstition. Nevertheless the most active post on the ScienceBlogs at the moment is one in which PZ Myers decries Gore's…
April 24, 2007
Time was when any mention of members of the order Hymenoptera referred to the prospect of killer bees stinging their way up through America. Not anymore. Today it's the other way around. Bee hives are collapsing left, right and center, and not just this side of the Atlantic. And no one is quite…
April 21, 2007
The cover of the latest issue of Maclean's magazine, which is the Canadian equivalent of Time or Newsweek, asks "Is God poison?" The secondary headline to the feature, which is online, says "a new movement blames God for every social problem from Darfur to child abuse." Well, I don't know if it…
April 20, 2007
We can't stop arguing about framing, can we? I've been pondering the subject much of late, especially while I waited these past four days for Duke Power to get us back on the grid following Sunday's windstorm, and I think I've got something relevant to contribute. I know Matt Nisbet has got lots of…
April 17, 2007
[This post is rewritten to reflect a clearer state of mind.]
The front-page editors of the local newspapers here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina had a tough time deciding on today's banner headline. Should it be the shootings at Virginia Tech or the damage wreaked by Monday's…
April 13, 2007
This is scary: The Independent has a story on research that hints at a way for women to produce their own sperm, from their bone marrow, and thereby take men out of the reproductive cycle entirely. Yikes.
The study reportedly appears in the journal Reproduction: Gamete Biology, and although I can't…
April 13, 2007
Jeremy Bruno, one our newest ScienceBloggers, hit the nail on the head with a post about the folly of assuming that we can do about something climate change by planting more trees, at least in the non-tropical regions. This is not a new idea, and studies pointing out that lowering the albedo of…
April 12, 2007
There's an essay in the latest issue of Science & Spirit on the history and value of doubt called "Redeeming Saint Thomas." It carries my byline and I'm quite proud of it. Science & Spirit is a curious and evolving publication that explores "things that matter."
If that's not reason enough…
April 11, 2007
In response to the news that the US Fish and Wildlife Service is even thinking about downlisting the Florida manatee from "endangered" to "threatened," I make this modest proposal: boycott Florida.
Trichechus manatus is considered vulnerable on habitat-wide level by the IUCN - World Conservation…
April 10, 2007
I probably shouldn't get bent out of shape over this, but the intrusion of superstitious nonsense into the culture I have chosen to embrace just makes me so angry sometimes that I just have to exploit my blog pulpit to vent. The offending journalist in this case is Melanie M. Bianchi, the A&E…
April 8, 2007
Those who really care about the process behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports will probably want to grab this. It's a draft of Working Group II's Summary for Policymakers before the final editing session stripped it of some of the more dramatic (alarmist?) language following…
April 7, 2007
Fellow SciBloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet have a short essay in this week's Science that says scientists need to adopt the "framing" strategy that right-wing propagandists have been so successful with over the past couple of decades -- if science is ever to trump the neo-conservative claptrap…
April 6, 2007
Before anyone reads the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, the one released today on the impacts, there are a few things to keep in mind. Chief among them is the level of political interference in the final document. According to the AP
Several scientists objected to the…
April 5, 2007
Every campaign it's the same thing. The editors and their reporting staff vow to pay more attention to the issues and focus less on the horse race. And every campaign that promise turns out to be as hollow as the campaign promises of the candidates the journalists are covering. So it is with the…
April 4, 2007
Remember Chrissy Hynde? Maybe if you're old enough to have some Pretenders CDs in your collection. Otherwise, probably not. But she has enough name recognition to convince the editors of Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper to let her weigh in on that most inevitable sign of spring, the rhetorical war…
April 2, 2007
The U.S. Supreme Court says the Environmental Protection Agency has offered "no reasoned explanation" why it shouldn't regulate carbon dioxide, just like every other pollutant spewing from tailpipes and smokestacks. You'd think that would be a no-brainer, but ...
The court's four most conservative…
March 31, 2007
Ransom Myers had a habit of telling people what they didn't want to hear. In the 1990s, his employers in the Canadian government didn't like it when he told them overfishing was to blame for the collapse of the northern cod stocks. Three years ago it was the U.S. federal government, in a classic…
March 30, 2007
OK. I've read Hansen's new paper, which has been submitted to Environmental Research Letters, but not published. It's basically a review of existing, well-established science followed some personal opinion on the responsibility of scientists to express themselves, so I doubt it will be edited much…
March 30, 2007
I have only read the first few paragraphs, but know the rest of "Scientific reticence and sea level rise" will be fascinating. Jim Hansen bemoans the conservatism of science. Hmmm. I shall offer my thoughts this weekend, but wanted to point it out now so everyone can chime in as soon as possible.
March 29, 2007
A friend of mine, who has a pretty well-exercised brain, tried to get under my skin the other day by invoking the specter of climate change "alarmists," suggesting that we've been there before and should reserve a fair bit of skepticism for anyone who says the sky is falling. Which is true, to a…
March 28, 2007
Bjorn Lomborg, the ex-Greenpeace bad-boy of statistics, is back at it. In last week's National Post, Canada's right-wing embarrassment of a newspaper, he once again takes on climate change activists. The problem with Lomborg, a man trained to play with numbers but seemingly devoid any understanding…
March 27, 2007
This week's Nature explores the growth of university-level instruction in that most incredible of non-conventional medical therapeutic techniques, homeopathy. That's troubling enough, but apparently it's only a part of an even more disturbing trend: the granting of BSc degrees, by otherwise…
March 20, 2007
You've got to hand it to John Edwards. He's always trying to do the right thing, or at least appear to be doing the right thing. Last week he announced that his campaign for the White House will be a sustainable one, through the use of the latest fad in environmental circles: carbon offsets. It's a…
March 16, 2007
Just because you were right yesterday doesn't mean you're going to be right tomorrow. Even if you're one of the most important contributors to biology, like Lynn Margulis, there's no reason anyone should keep paying attention to you if you abandon the skeptical foundation of the scientific method.…
March 14, 2007
Marine biologists have discovered that there's a lot more life in the ocean that can turn sunlight into fuel than anyone thought. The authors of the paper in which the finding appears don't come out and say it in their scientific publication, but the Washington Post convinced one of them to hint at…
March 13, 2007
Often have I tried to draw attention to creationist propaganda masquerading as reasoned discourse. Lest I leave the impression that the mainstream media are incapable of portraying biological evolution as the only scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, it is perhaps appropriate…
March 12, 2007
Sciblogger Rob Knop of Galactic Interactions has learned that the best way to attract comments to a science blog is to post something about religion. (Hence the title of this post; we all like site traffic). I suspect that religosity -- the official SciBlog descriptor is the euphemestic "Culture…
March 9, 2007
On the occasion of PZ "Pharyngula" Myers' 50th birthday, I'd like pay homage to the one science blogger who can bump another's site traffic by an order of magnitude with one link. Also, who else but PZ could generate dozens of comments with a blank post, a null-set blog?
It is an honor share the…
March 8, 2007
Towards the tail end of Al Gore's climate-change slide show -- the one in "An Inconvenient Truth" -- there's a slide on three misconceptions propagated by those who, for lack of a better term, have been called skeptics. One of those misconceptions always struck me a bit odd, and until yesterday, I…