hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
March 23, 2010
The Economist's reputation as the intellectual's news outlet of choice is probably undeserved -- its questionable choice of correspondents and lack of bylines, heavy editing and conservative politics undermine it's credibility in my book -- but because it's widely read in elite circles, it's hard…
March 22, 2010
Since I moved to North Carolina (five years ago next month), it's been depressing to watch the political climate there move ever closer to the one the U.S. managed to pull itself out of in 2008. The latest news, which concerns attempts by the federal government to silence its own climatologists,…
March 19, 2010
BILLINGS, Mont. -- A federal judge has approved a first-of-its-kind settlement requiring the government to suspend 38,000 acres of oil and gas leases in Montana so it can gauge how oil field activities contribute to climate change.
-- The Washington Post's Matthew Brown has the provocative details.
March 16, 2010
From our friends at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, in Asheville, N.C., we learn the following:
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for February 2010 was 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average of 12.1°C (53.9°F). This is the sixth warmest such value on…
March 12, 2010
One Strawbarb Pi, an entry in the Second Annual Pi Day Contest.
Recipe:
The pastry
250 ml of whole wheat flour
250 ml of white all-purpose flour
two-third of a stick of butter-flavor vegetable shortening
dash of salt
Blend all ingredients using whatever technology is most convenient. Form…
March 8, 2010
Randy Olson says:
There comes a point where the public DOES want to see the science community stand up for themselves.
And as if on cue comes the release of another round of once-private emails among members of one section of the National Academies of Sciences alerting us to efforts to do just that…
March 8, 2010
I am pleased that activity on the Island of Doubt has increased in recent months. I manage to squeeze in a hour four or five days a week to write about what I think is the most serious public policy challenge of our time, and make what modest contribution I can to the debate, and I wish I could do…
March 4, 2010
Leslie Kaufman in the New York Times presents a disturbing tale of attempts by creationists to up their chances of slipping religion into science classrooms by piggy-backing it onto "balanced" instruction of climatology.
The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts…
March 4, 2010
It's a sore spot for some climate change pseudoskeptics. Any time anyone makes any kind of claim about the effects of a warming planet on tropical storm activity, you can count on a deluge of rejoinders about how shaky the science on the subject really is.
Much is made of Al Gore's use of an image…
March 2, 2010
As regular readers will know, I prefer the term "pseudoskeptic" over "denier" when it comes to those who insist we needn't be worried about climate change. This is because the common denominator among any set of such characters tends to be a misapplication of the scientific method, a failure to…
February 25, 2010
This has nothing to do with climatology, or science in general, but I can't resist sharing it with you. From the instructions to our new DTV antenna, which until the Great Ice Storm of 2010 damaged its transformer-coaxial connection, brought in more watchable channels than expanded basic cable or…
February 23, 2010
It's hard to know just when George F. Will parted ways with reality. Some argue he abandoned respect for historical accuracy years ago. But it's only in the last year or so, thanks to a series of bafflingly misinformed column on climate change, that it became clear to all but his most loyal readers…
February 17, 2010
In the past couple of days a pernicious little meme has appeared in two leading North American newspapers. I refer to the notion that there is such a thing as "settled science." First, on a column about climatology Monday the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente asked not-so-rhetorically "So much for…
February 16, 2010
Covering climatology may not be the biggest challenge facing today's mainstream news outlets and the journalists they employ, but it certainly has exposed a serious weakness in conventional news reporting. That weakness, as I implied in my previous post, is a pathological fear of taking sides, even…
February 12, 2010
David Roberts at Grist, riffing on This American Life's Ira Glass, nails it on the head:
"...news reporting is declining in part because of just this phenomenon: reporters do not react like human beings. The audience doesn't see or hear themselves in most news reporting. When covering something…
February 12, 2010
Via the ever-vigilant Stoat, I draw your attention to a letter to the Netherlands parliament from by 55 Netherlands scientists. Along with the usual "the science remains sound" defense of our understanding of anthropogenic global warming, it provides some useful perspective:
The writing of IPCC…
February 11, 2010
It gives me no pleasure to pass on the facts about the lack of respect for the truth shown by climate change pseudo-skeptics. But there's simply no getting around it.
Last year, in his book Science as a Contact Sport, veteran climatologist Stephen Schneider made much of the misuse of a quote that…
February 9, 2010
In case anyone is wondering why I haven't posted anything for the past few days, what with all the fuss over the IPCC and all, it's not because I'm reluctant to comment on it. It's just that my little piece of western North Carolina is only now recovering from an ice storm that knocked the power to…
February 4, 2010
It's not so much that the pseudoskeptics who dominate the climate change denial camp are particularly clever, but they have been rather fortunate, and the forces aligned on the side of science have turned out to be human after all. The result is the denial camp is winning, and those on the…
February 2, 2010
Never mind that the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record. Or that 2009 tied for the second-warmest year. Neither of those stories are consuming much airtime and web- and print-space. No, the biggest stories on the climate beat involve allegations of fraudulent activity on the…
January 30, 2010
James Delingpole continues to enjoy the privileges of blogging on the Daily Telegraph's imprimatur, despite his repeated misstatements on climatology. His latest affront to journalistic norms comes in the form of another alleged failure of a team of IPCC authors to cite real science. He's calling…
January 27, 2010
So, to recap:
More than 96% of working climatologists say the global mean temperatures are rising, but only 34% of the public believes "Most scientists think global warming is happening."
How did we let this happen?
January 26, 2010
I've never met David Rose of the U.K.'s Daily Mail. And, while his past reporting on climate issues has tended to misrepresent the science of the day, it is entirely possible his editors are to blame for the fictionalization of his latest story. So I won't point fingers at this juncture. Regardless…
January 22, 2010
Here is Justice Stevens' core argument against his five colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court, each of who believes corporations are legally equivalent to citizens, as laid out in the dissenting opinion in Thursday's ruling on Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission.
The basic premise…
January 21, 2010
By ruling that corporations are entitled to exercise unrestricted political speech, the U.S. Supreme Court has just made it much more difficult for Americans to make the transition from a fossil-fuel-based economy to a clean-energy economy.
Most democracies, including, until this morning, the U.S…
January 20, 2010
I awoke this morning in a universe with a quantum signature that differs from that of the universe in which I fell asleep. I know this because it's the only way I can explain last night's Republican victory in the safest Democratic seat in the Senate.
It's just like that episode of Star Trek: TNG,…
January 19, 2010
Dear Massachusetts voters:
If for some reason you haven't yet decided who should get your vote in today's Senate election, consider this little piece of information about Republican candidate Scott Brown, courtesy of the Boston Globe:
Brown typically skips climate change and global warming when…
January 18, 2010
The revelation that at least one group of authors working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would rely on grey literature or even popular media sources for their reporting could end up being a real blow to the Nobel prize-winning organization.
If you haven't heard by now, a section…
January 15, 2010
Thanks to the dogged determination of über climate blogger Joe Romm, here's what Mojib Latif wants us all to understand about his previous references to a short-term cooling trend:
Given all the warnings about and plans to forestall global warming, people may be surprised to find, over the next…
January 12, 2010
The news that Sarah Palin has found a new platform for her particular take on reality brings to mind one of the biggest obstacles to the development of meaningful action on the climate change front -- or any other serious public policy challenge, for that matter.
Palin is more akin to Paris Hilton…