hrynyshyn | December 17, 2009I've run out of anything useful to say about Copenhagen. This graphic, from "Climate Interactive" tells you just about everything you need to know.
hrynyshyn | December 17, 2009I know we're just hours away from the nail-biting climax of the Copenhagen conference at which the fate of humanity hangs in the balance (or not), but a Daily Kos post explaining why efforts to reform health insurance in the U.S. have amounted to nothing has fallen into my "must read" category. One paragraph should be enough to whet your appetite for outrage/resignation:
So here's what you have to understand. If the health insurance and financial industries really felt scared by any particular politician or political party, or their lobbying efforts were inadequate, they could throw them out…
hrynyshyn | December 16, 2009James Randi has few peers when it comes to applying scientific rigor to claims of paranormal or supernatural activity. He's been doing it for what seems like eons, all without any formal scientific training. So when he even hints that climate change denialists might have a point, it's time to see what's up. After all, he's made a honorable career of attacking pseudoscience, not science itself.
The most recent post at his blog, named after Johnathan Swift is a bit on the rambling side, and little inconsistent. The most surprising paragraph is:
I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may…
hrynyshyn | December 15, 2009Following yesterday's Yes Men hoax, in which Canada's position on greenhouse-gas emissions was mocked, the country's minister of the environment seems to have become a persona non grata. At least, that's how it looked to a Toronto Star blogger reporting from Copenhagen:
Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice just finished his press conference and he dismissed the hoax press releases, saying "I am here to negotiate." The Minister's press people distributed a release for a photo-op of U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Prentice to occur shortly after the press conference, outside of the…
hrynyshyn | December 15, 2009The good news is Andrew Revkin will continue to post at his Dot Earth blog for the foreseeable future. The bad news is he will be doing so not as a staff reporter for the New York Times, which has allowed him the rare honor of specializing in something as specialized as climate change, for many years. Instead, it will be as Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University's Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies.
As a "mainstream" journalist, Andy operated under the constraints, baggage and inertia of a system that was ill-suited to cover a subject that fused science…
hrynyshyn | December 14, 2009It would be funny if so much weren't at stake.
Anonymous culture-jammers (probably the "Yes Men") earlier today apparently managed to fool the Wall Street Journal into reporting that Canada has abandoned it established greenhouse gas emissions reductions target of just 3% below 1990 levels by 2020. Instead, it would henceforth support something more in line with what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- and most of the developing world -- say is necessary to avoid dangerous interference in the global climate: 25-40% below 1990 by 2020.
Within an hour, the Canadian government had…
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2009Forget Copenhagen for a moment, and turn your attention back to the U.S. legislative process, into which has just been thrown a new option, a "third option" that just might be able to satisfy both the "it's the only game in town so let's support the cap-and-trade bills now before Congress" gang and those who call cap and trade a scam that's doomed to fail.
The cap-and-trade approach to reducing carbon emissions is the core of both the bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and the one already circulating in the Senate. It embraces the wisdom of the marketplace set us down the road…
hrynyshyn | December 10, 2009Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science. In an op-ed published in today's Washington Post, he excoriates Sarah Palin for her illterate essay, published earlier this week, on the topic of climate change.
While former Alaska governor Sarah Palin wrote in her Dec. 9 op-ed that she did not deny the "reality of some changes in climate," she distorted the clear scientific evidence that Earth's climate is changing, largely as a result of human behaviors. She also badly confused the concepts of…
hrynyshyn | December 9, 2009Dear Ms. Palin,
Re: "Copenhagen's political science" as published in the Washington Post. As the Post didn't see fit to edit or fact-check your piece, I thought I'd save you any embarrassment that might result if you see fit to publish it elsewhere.
I will begin with this paragraph:
The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed [deleted copies of] records, manipulated adjusted data to "hide the decline" in global select North American temperatures [tree-ring proxy data that conflicted with observational records], and tried to silence [challenge] their [non-expert]…
hrynyshyn | December 8, 2009I use the term "climategate" reluctantly because the stolen climatology email story has little in common with Watergate. Those who would deny the physical reality of climate change seem to have latched onto the meme, however, and it is my sad news to report that the essence of the meme, if not that particular label, is spreading further than I originally feared. The latest casualty is Canada's Globe and Mail.
Reporter Doug Saunders is no intellectual slouch. I've followed his work for a while now. He has proven his ability to cut through prevailing dogma -- replacing the myth that Ronald…
hrynyshyn | December 7, 2009William "Stoat" Connolley draws our attention to a couple of essays by Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia climate team on the role of climatologists -- and scientists in general -- in the policy-making process. I have to agree with William, it's not exactly clear just what Hulme is getting at. Some excellent points are raised, though, and the essays are worthwhile fodder for thought as the Copenhagen conference begins.
Hulme may be a fine scientist, indeed one of the best, but I have trouble following his line of reasoning on this subject in both the Wall Street Journal and the BBC…
hrynyshyn | December 4, 2009 Science as a Contact Sport:
Inside the battle to save Earth's climate
by Stephen Schneider
National Geographic, 295 pages
Not even Stephen Schneider could have anticipated how timely his new book, Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the battle to save Earth's climate, would be. The histrionics generated by the theft and publication of the UEA emails suggests climatology is much rougher than even Australian rules football.
Schneider was one of the first climatologists to understand the need to communicate what his research was showing with the general public. He appears in documentaries back…
hrynyshyn | December 2, 2009A two-hour PowerPoint/Keynote presentation isn't enough time to explain the science of climate change, the political forces governing our response to it, and the economics involving in reducing greehouse gas-emissions. Oversimplification is an unavoidable hazard. Just imagine how much trouble you're going to get into if you try to compress all that into 10 minutes? Is it even possible to make a meaningful contribution in such a format?
Annie Leonard's new short feature making the rounds of the net this week, The Story of Cap Trade, clocks in at 9:56. So you know there's going to be complaints…
hrynyshyn | December 1, 2009Anyone who still thinks, fears or harbors even the tiniest suspicion that the stolen CRU emails offer evidence that climatologists are cooking their data must read Tim "Deltoid" Lambert's examination of one of the most widely cited examples of the alleged crimes.
hrynyshyn | November 30, 2009Maybe I've just been at this too long. But it seems that the ratio between banal observations and helpful analyses of the climate crisis is much larger than usual. I mean, I was offline for five days over Thanksgiving and apparently missed nothing. Consider this conclusion from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, writing in Yale's 360:
First, climate change seems tailor-made to be a low priority for most people. The threat is distant in both time and space.
As Special Agent Gibbs might say: "Ya think?"
And over at Nature Climate Change Reports, an interview with NASA climatologist James…
hrynyshyn | November 25, 2009Well, that headline's a little unfair. I wrote it to lure in those who jump on every opportunity to prove that climatologists are frauds. What I really mean to say is: "Where the most recent assessment by the IPCC has been superceded by more recent findings.
It's all in a new report, The Copenhagen Diagnosis, assembled by some of the top people in the field. Here's the executive summary:
Surging greenhouse gas emissions: Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present -day levels, just…
hrynyshyn | November 24, 2009The Darwin Experience:
The Story of the Man and his Theory of Evolution
by John van Wyhe
National Geographic Books
It almost seems like a throwback to another age, a time when people actually read books and stuff. And National Geographic Books' The Darwin Experience: The Story of the Man and his Theory of Evolution may be one of the last such volumes ever produced, given the rate at which e-books are gobbling up market share. After all, if you want to browse through Darwin's life or read On the Origin of Species, you can do that online.
But for those of us born before the advent of the…
hrynyshyn | November 23, 2009One of the commenters to my last post, an attempt to explain why the hacked climatology emails do not constitute a scientific scandal, came up with a darn fine idea:
If you think that global warming rests on a few temperature data sets and models, you are very wrong. If you don't understand this then you don't know enough to have an opinion on the subject, and you most likely will be treated just like any other ineducable troll.
Grab a climate textbook and do some reading...it will help if you have some physics background too. Yeah, science takes effort...
I just happen to have at hand a…
hrynyshyn | November 20, 2009Much is being made by those who really, really believe that there's a global conspiracy among climatologists of the emails and other documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. According to such bloggers, thousands of "embarrassing" pieces of correspondence between some of the leading climate researchers in the world now lay bare the scheme to mislead humanity about the nature of climate change.
I downloaded the 62 MB file and took a quick look at a random selection of what are mostly dull little missives bereft of the context required to understand them in…
hrynyshyn | November 20, 2009I promise to get back to substantive blogging shortly, but in the meantime, if you've got three minutes to tear yourself away from coverage of Sarah Palin's book:
Scientifically sound? Not the words I would use, but not too far off the mark, either. Hyperbolic? Yes. Offensive? To some. Provocative? Absolutely. Greenpeace and the Agit-Pop gang know how to grab your attention. If, that is, you already care about preserving what's left of the planet's ability to host civilization as we know it.