hrynyshyn | January 30, 2010James 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 it "Amazongate." Oh dear.
Delingpole, drawing on pseudo-research by one Richard North, who blogs at Eureferendum, claims that the IPCC authors reference another piece of gray literature that doesn't include the scientific observation they say it does. North and Delingpole say that Chapter 13 of the…
hrynyshyn | January 27, 2010So, 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?
hrynyshyn | January 26, 2010I'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, the affair is an ominous reminder of how easily an idea can migrate across the world in a matter of hours even though anyone with a middle-school education could spot the flaw within a few seconds.
According to Rose:
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that…
hrynyshyn | January 22, 2010Here 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 underlying the Court's ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker's identity, including its "identity" as a corporation. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct…
hrynyshyn | January 21, 2010By 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., recognize the danger of giving corporations free rein to influence the outcome of elections and so limit or ban political spending by corporations. But starting now, the $605 billion in profits available to the Fortune 100 can now be spent on advertising during American elections. This means those…
hrynyshyn | January 20, 2010I 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, the one in which Worf keeps flitting back and forth between alternate realities, including one where the Borg is practically ruling the universe, Once Riker discovers there are realities in which they aren't, he's willing to sabotage the effort to heal the trans-universe rift so he can escape his…
hrynyshyn | January 19, 2010Dear 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 discussing the environment; he sees the emissions debate as an economic one, spokesman Felix Browne said. On his website, under "Energy and Environment,'' Brown supports an array of domestic alternatives to foreign oil - including wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and hydroelectric - but does not…
hrynyshyn | January 18, 2010The 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 of the Fourth IPCC report, which came out in 2007, cited a prediction for the complete disappearance of all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas by 2035. This alone would be sufficient justification for describing the consequences of climate change as catastrophic, as something like 40…
hrynyshyn | January 15, 2010Thanks 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 several years that, over parts of the Northern hemisphere, summers are no warmer than before, maybe even a bit cooler-and that winters are as cold, or a bit colder, than they have been in the past couple of decades.
This is because the climate may go through a temporary halt in warming. It's nothing…
hrynyshyn | January 12, 2010The 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 or Pia Zadora than she is to most other public figures in two ways. First, she brings no obvious talent or experience to the public sphere, just popularity afforded her first by the electorate of a small and politically quirky state, and by the last man standing in one of the weakest fields of…
hrynyshyn | January 8, 2010What's better for a book and its author: good reviews or a threat of a boycott of the publisher?
Today I received an email from one Gavin Bower of Quartet Books of London, a publisher with a respectable history of daring to handle works that no one else was willing to touch. The Joy of Sex in 1973, for example. I've never heard from Bower or Quartet before, but for some reason I'm on their media contact list. The subject: a blog post from Quartet's publisher decrying an alleged "orchestrated boycott" from environmental fundamentalists upset that Quartet has published climate change…
hrynyshyn | January 7, 2010One of the more common arguments from skeptics of anthropogenic climate change is that the Earth has experienced periods during which atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were much much higher than they are today -- as much as 10 times higher. Why worry about a mere 30% increase over pre-industrial levels?
There are several answers to that challenge. The most obvious is that while it may be true that CO2 levels have been several times higher that today's 387 parts per million, the Earth was also a very different place back then. The sea level was much higher, the temperature was much warmer and…
hrynyshyn | January 6, 2010Some has decided that the Island of Doubt is one of the top marine biology blogs around. Which is a bit odd as I rarely post about such issues anymore. But I do pay attention, and in an effort to at least acknowledge the honor, here's a relevant post:
The Sea Shepherd Society's ultra-cool trimaran, the Andy Gil, is no more:
And thanks to Southern Fried Science, here's another view of the same incident:
Who's to blame? I wasn't there and I know enough about the challenges of navigating in rough seas not to pass judgment based only on videos taken from less than ideal perspectives. But hey…
hrynyshyn | January 6, 2010Over at Linked In, the professionally oriented social networking service, there's a discussion group called "Climate Change - I care!" Most of its members are those who share a concern for what anthropogenic global warming is threatening to do to civilization as we know it. Until this week, membership was open to anyone. But the moderator just ejected one member who has, shall we say, a contrarian point of view. Was that a wise thing to do?
The member, Leigh Haugen, only posted pseudoscientific rants about the conspiratorial nature of the entire climatology community, and if he does actually…
hrynyshyn | January 5, 2010Well, I thought I'd see it all, but I was wrong. Of course, it's been a long time since anyone whose opinion I respect considered Fox News a serious source of news and analysis. Still this example boggles the mind. Here's Brit Hume, the network's senior news analyst, discussing the most important topic of our time:
And here's Brit Hume a few weeks ago on what many of us who don't watch Fox News consider the most important topic of our time:
In a different world, repeatedly misrepresenting the facts about a serious public policy issue would be cause for an employer to reexamine the status of…
hrynyshyn | January 4, 2010Storms of My Grandchildren
The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe
And Our Last Chance to Save Humanity
by James Hansen
Bloomsbury USA, 304 pp.
Another year, another plea for scientists to start communicating better. Here's Chris Mooney, reminding us yet again that
Scientific training continues to turn out researchers who speak in careful nuances and with many caveats, in a language aimed at their peers, not at the media or the public. Many scientists can scarcely contemplate framing a simple media message for maximum impact; the very idea sounds unbecoming.
Well, James Hansen,…
hrynyshyn | December 30, 2009It's taken me a while to assemble something cogent about the outcome of the CoP15, the Copenhagen conference that produced what some are calling "better than nothing." There are those who consider it a complete failure because the final accord, which didn't receive full approval, includes no specific carbon emissions reductions targets. Others point out that just getting China to agree to a watered-down provision on verification protocols was a major achievement and the best that could be hoped for. I doubt a useful evaluation will be forthcoming until much later in 2010. History's like that…
hrynyshyn | December 29, 2009I really should do this more often, but probably won't manage it again for another five years, so...
Thank you for reading this blog. There's a long list of regular readers and commenters who have helped make the Island of Doubt a project something approaching a worthy project, including Scott Belyea, Bob Koepp, Lance, dhogaza, Chris Salmon, paulm and Hume's Ghost. Not all of you share the concerns that inform my posts, but you keep coming back. And I appreciate it.
I don't moderate comments here, and for the most part I haven't felt the need because the vast majority of the exchanges remain…
hrynyshyn | December 22, 2009Not from me, but from Daniel Loxton of Skepticblog, who has been doing some thinking about what skeptics can learn from James Randi's missteps on climate science. His advice is bound to rankle the feathers of those who are innately distrustful of everyone and everything associated with "conventional wisdom," "expert consensus," or "recognized experts." But for the those who fancy themselves dragon-slayers of pseudoscience, it serves as a valuable reality check.
To begin, Loxton reminds us that "If we're serious about our science-based epistemology, we must be prepared to consistently defer to…
hrynyshyn | December 17, 2009James Randi has corrected himself. After this week's Swift blog post that verged on climate change denialism, he now writes that his observation that the world has cooled over the last 150 years was supposed to have said "warmed." And he accepts that his description of the Oregon Petition as something that "may be valid" was a mistake.
... the importance and the impact of this phenomenon is well beyond my grasp. I merely expressed my thoughts about the controversy, and I received a storm (no pun intended) of comments, many of which showed a lack of careful reading that led to unfair…