hrynyshyn | October 5, 2009
With all due respect to the recipients of this year's Nobel prizes -- telomeres are more than worthy of our attention -- it's time for an overhaul of the whole thing.
Complaints about the outdated categories that ignore an enormous range of scientific endeavors appear each year at this time, and it's unlikely that the latest barrage of criticism will result in any real change. Still, there are plenty of good argument in favor of reform. Here's one.
New Scientist asked a group of notable scientists and authors for their thoughts on the subject. They came up with a letter pointing out the…
hrynyshyn | October 1, 2009It's not a home run by any stretch of the imagination, but the Senate's counterpart to the Waxman-Markey climate change bill (a.k.a. ACES) that the House narrowly passed earlier this year at least gets global warming onto first base. There's bad and good in the awkwardly titled Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, of course, and it still won't get us anywhere the kind of greehouse gas emissions levels than even the conservative climatologists say are necessary. The differences between the bills are worth exploring.
The sections that most pique my curiosity are devoted to emissions…
hrynyshyn | September 29, 2009The arguments against carbon capture and sequestration are legion and the list of reasons not to invest more resources in the technology just keeps getting longer. Here's a new analysis from Canadian journalist Graham Thomson. Some of his figures-- on global carbon emissions, for example -- are less than accurate, and this isn't peer-reviewed science, just a journalist's compendium commissioned by the Munk Centre for International Studies University of Toronto. But even allowing for that, Thompson manages to hit the proverbial nail on the head:
The very promise of CCS, whether delivered or…
hrynyshyn | September 28, 2009U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu is all about saving the coal industry. In the latest issue of Science, which includes a feature series on carbon capture and sequestration, he writes optimistically about the challenges and opportunities such technologies pose and why it could save us all from catastrophic climate change.
At least, that's what I take away from his short essay. I don't doubt Chu's sincerity, or his ability to synthesize data. He is, after all, a holder of Nobel Prize for physics. But I'm afraid he hasn't got a good grip on the economics of the matter.
In his essay, Chu writes…
hrynyshyn | September 25, 2009A few weeks ago the nightly hour-long documentary series on CBC Radio, "Ideas," allowed Canadian climate change pseudoskeptic Larry Solomon an entire hour to make his case against the science of anthropogenic global warming. The producers offered not a single challenge to any of Solomon's arguments, despite the fact that practically every point he made on the science of the subject was either false or grossly misrepresented the science.
Solomon is a "respected" enviromentalist. But he has decided climate change isn't as big a threat as just about the entire climatology community fears it to…
hrynyshyn | September 24, 2009The journal Nature has just published a massive feature series on, to use a well-worn phrase, "the limits to growth." The centerpiece is a graphic created by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and his colleagues as part of "a new approach to defining biophysical preconditions for human development. For the first time, we are trying to quantify the safe limits outside of which the Earth system cannot continue to function in a stable, Holocene-like state." Here's their wheel of misfortune:
The green is the safe limit, the red represents more or less where we are. For those…
hrynyshyn | September 22, 2009Don't be SUCH a scientist
by Randy Olson
195 pages, Island Press
In my review last year of Randy Olson's 2008 film, Sizzle, I wrote that I wanted to like it. I'm exactly the kind of viewer who will eat up anything a marine biologist has to say about communicating science and climate change. But I didn't. Though it was billed as a comedic mockumentary, I found the laughs too few and the central message a tad condescending.
When I found Olson's latest effort to tackle the challenge of communicating science, this time in the medium of short book, I still wanted to like it. This time, I did.…
hrynyshyn | September 18, 2009It's a surprisingly complicated question. There are few reliable sources of data on just how much energy and resources are involved in extracting petroleum from the bitumen-laden sands of northern Alberta. But the inertia that comes with the tens of billions of dollars that have been invested in the tar sands so far means that it's an important question that needs to be answered as we plan our future energy portfolios. Keeping the planet's temperature to a habitable range depends on which fuels we use.
All of which means it's critical to carefully evaluate claims about the greenhouse-gas…
hrynyshyn | September 16, 2009The good news from the Bay of Fundy is that the world's largest tides may soon be generating electricity. The bad news is there's at least one Globe and Mail copy editor who doesn't know the difference between waves and tides.
But that's not the most amusing news from the region. For that, we turn to Kings County, where the local authorities have decided to deny approval to install a WiFi tower because a garlic farmer is worried about the damage it will do to his crops. According to the CBC:
Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since…
hrynyshyn | September 16, 2009On one side we have a long list of scientists who are known, and respected, by the wider public primarily because they have chosen to venture beyond the confines of the laboratory or the classroom into the realm of policy advocacy. Think Carl Sagan (nuclear winter), Sylvia Earle (marine conservation) or Albert Einstein (atomic warfare). On the other are a comparable list of lesser-known but accomplished academics who insist scientists should keep to the facts for fear of tarnishing the reputation of science itself as a neutral arbiter.
An almost-recent paper in Conservation Biology (…
hrynyshyn | September 15, 2009Just eight episodes into a 13-part first season, ABC has canceled suspended (see update below) Defying Gravity, a flawed but relatively honest attempt at hard-core science fiction. Why is this noteworthy? OK, this is a stretch, but I am reminded of attempts to reform the U.S. health insurance system and climate change legislation. In each case creating something that respects reality seems to be beyond the powers that be. And yet even the watered down compromise product that emerges from the sausage factory can't attract sufficient support. Further evidence that the American public is…
hrynyshyn | September 14, 2009One of Canada's best journalists, Andrew Nikiforuk, is the author of a just-released report on Canada's tar sands from Greenpeace. "Dirty Oil: How the tar sands are fueling the global climate crisis" is not a peer-reviewed paper, it was commissioned by environmental activists, and it relies heavily on other non-peer-reviewed reports by non-objective organizations. Despite all that, it's still a solid, reliable read that every Canadian and American with an interest in energy policy should download promptly.
There isn't a lot new in the report for anyone who's been following the massive…
hrynyshyn | September 10, 2009Miles Grant at Grist has alerted us to a new global-warming pseudoskeptic website, PlantsNeedCO2.org, with questionable parentage. Although "Plants Need CO2 is a 501 (c)(3) non profit corporation" it appears to be closely associated with decidedly profit-oriented types.
The domain name is registered to Houston-based Quintana Minerals, although the company's IT chief, Sammer Arnouk, told me they've registered hundreds of sites to all kinds of groups, including non-profits. There is none of the usual information on the "about us" link beyond a bio of a spokesperson, one H. Leighton Steward, "a…
hrynyshyn | September 9, 2009Climatologists have long known that aerosol "haze" plays an important role in determining just hot things get on Earth. But figuring out just what the role is has proven frustrating. The tiny, airborne particles that fly out of smokestacks, tailpipes and ordinary biomass fires can either help cool the earth by reflecting sunlight, for example. But they can also settle on snow in the form of soot and absorb heat. Now comes a paper that claims to have calculated the net effect. If the researchers are right, they've identified an important piece of the climate change puzzle.
Just as important,…
hrynyshyn | September 8, 2009The typical western post-industrial human being has two roles to play in society: citizen and consumer. Both offer the opportunity to exert power and influence, and whether we like it or not, neglecting one over the other invariably gives competing interests an opening. On matter climatological, most campaigners have been focused in recent times on the political sphere, and understandably so: legislation and regulatory proposals are on the table in the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere. But there are those who are keeping an eye on the marketplace, where it may also be possible to effect…
hrynyshyn | September 3, 2009While most media commentators obsess over the "news" that Diane Sawyer will be replacing Charlie Gibson on ABC World News, there are at least some observers who remain more concerned with content. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne weighs in this morning on the sensationalism that has dominated coverage of public participation in the health care insurance reform debate. What we learn about the role of television is not surprising, but it does help remind us why things are going the way they are:
The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer…
hrynyshyn | September 2, 2009While the U.S. Senate's sense of urgency on the climate change front wanes, a new campaign originating on the other side of rapidly warming pond is urging us all to get with the program by cutting our emissions sooner rather than later. This is obviously a good idea from a scientific point of view, but what are its chances of success?
The 10:10 campaign draws on the always-obvious-when-you-think-about-it, but until recently largely ignored, fact that it matters very much how quickly we reduce the carbon emissions that are trapping all the extra heat in the atmosphere and oceans. A pair of…
hrynyshyn | August 31, 2009Hypothetical: If you had to make do with just one source of news, what would it be? I don't mean which medium, either. Let's narrow it down to one outlet, one group of journalists operating under a collectively identity, working with a common set of standards and principles. Twenty years ago, I probably would have chosen a newspaper, likely the New York Times, with its breadth and depth of coverage, one of the best (and now last surviving) sections devoted to science, and a largely intact reputation for honesty and accuracy.
Today, I have a different answer. Not because the Times' reputation…
hrynyshyn | August 27, 2009Yes, your car, and your toaster and television, too, if your electrical utility includes coal- or gas-fired power plants in its portfolio, are contributing to a shift in the Earth's axis by changing the distribution of water in the oceans. This according to a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters (in press).
The effect isn't large enough for anyone to worry about -- at just 1.5 cm, or less than a inch per year, Polaris will still be the North Pole star for a while yet -- but the authors of paper write that
The proposed polar motion signal is therefore not negligible in comparison to other…