hrynyshyn | June 25, 2009IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri is no intellectual slouch. But I have no idea where he gets the idea that news media are doing are bang-up job covering the science and politics of climate change. He recently wrote this baffling piece:
It is therefore fair to say that the media has (sic) helped turn public opinion in favor of action on climate change. And this attitude has seeped into the negotiations that began with the 2007 Bali meeting and continued in Poznan, Poland, late last year.
...
There is also every reason to believe that the way the media engages with this issue over the next six…
hrynyshyn | June 24, 2009Here's the headline I would have written if I was editing the West Virginia Gazette's coverage of Tuesday's protest against mountain-top coal mining:
Top government climate scientist arrested in coal protest
Here's the headline the editor(s) chose instead:
Daryl Hannah, scientist among 30 arrested at W.Va. mine protest
Sigh. Have we slid so far down the hole of celebrity worship that a second-string Hollywood personality (who hasn't made a memorable appearance on the silver screen since 1982's Blade Runner), gets top billing over the country's most senior and respected authority on the…
hrynyshyn | June 23, 2009The Congressional Budget Office is the probably the closest thing to a non-partisan source of economic analyses. On Friday it released its best guess on how much the ACES bill, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey, will cost the U.S. economy by 2020.
the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion--or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost of restructuring the production and use of energy and of payments made to foreign entities under the program, but it does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2009James Lovelock hates wind turbines, likes nuclear power and generally makes it difficult for anyone who wants to pigeonhole him in the pantheon of environmental heroes. But there's little point in denying that few earth scientists have a better grasp of the big picture when it comes to planetary ecology, so it's always worth asking him for his take on the climate crisis. His most recent pronouncements seem a little less bleak. Relatively speaking.
Here's Lovelock in 2006, on the occasion of the release of his book, The Revenge of Gaia:
We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2009Deutsche Bank recently turned on 41,000 LED lights that keep track of the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. Nice idea, but I respectfully suggest a much better one.
"If you flipped on one of the news channels that covers the financial news ... and there was a number that was updating once every five years, the commentators would have a hard time finding something to talk about," Kevin Parker, the global head of Deutsche's asset management team, told reporters. "The minute you convert that to a real-time number, it can serve as a backdrop for lots of conversations."
Those…
hrynyshyn | June 19, 2009And now for something completely different.
Nothing to do with climate change, pseudoscience, religiosity or even Twitter. I post it here because I am a freelancer. And everyone who has ever freelanced, or used a freelancer, or thought about freelancing, or thought about using a freelancer, should watch this:
hrynyshyn | June 17, 2009.. climatologists are right when they say we should be worried about what we're doing to the global heat balance.
A commenter on my previous post asked
What aspects of the science do you feel are most convincing in demonstrating the link between fossil fuel emissions and rising global average temperatures?
To which I offered one glib and one sincere but pass-the-buck response. I want very much to get past the whole "what's the evidence for climate change" thing. But on reflection, it's important to remind those who are new to the debate, especially younger participants, just why we have as…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2009The New York Times' Andy Revkin has decided that marine biologist turned filmmaker Randy Olson is the go-to guy for advice on how scientists should communicate with the public when it comes to the threat of climate change. On Dot Earth, he writes about SEED's recent survey of advice from some of the better known suspects, and then puts the same question to Olson. Though Olson's past efforts on the subject haven't attracted much attention ;;;; the comic documentary Sizzle evaporated quickly upon release ;;;; this time he has some thoughts that are worth reviewing:
... humans respond to human…
hrynyshyn | June 12, 2009Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Thursday that Canada is getting out of the medical isotope business. The implications of the decision, which appears to be motivated primarily by a desire to avoid further political embarrassment, go beyond the confines of the country's health-care system. It also hints at some tough times ahead for those responsible for overseeing the world's nuclear industries.
First, Canada until recently produced close to 40% of the world's supply molybdenum-99, a radioactive isotope that decays quickly to technetium-99, which is widely used to help diagnose cancers…
hrynyshyn | June 10, 2009Inspired by a letter to New Scientist by Londoner Guy Robinson, herewith a not-so-abstract thought experiment based on the trillionth-ton climate change concept.
According to a pair of papers recently published in Nature, the Earth stands a good chance of warming more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels if our cumulative atmospheric emissions of carbon since those days reaches a trillion tons. So far, we've emitted about 520 billion tons. leaving us with just 480 billion tons before we enter into dangerous global warming territory.
But some of our total emissions are tied to agricultural (…
hrynyshyn | June 8, 2009Assigning any group to one of just two categories is usually little more than an exercise in stereotyping. What do you do with someone like Francis Collins, for example? On the one hand, he's a brilliant genome sequencer, on the other he confuses (as Bob Park aptly writes) a "hormone rush" with "an encounter with God." But every now and then, plotting attitudes on an x-y grid and dividing the Bell curve into left and right halves can be a useful way of looking at a problem. NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt essentially does this in an interview with Salon's Peter Dizikes, and in doing so helps…
hrynyshyn | June 4, 2009For your consideration: Two possible, if not probable, future scenarios for the human race should the business of fossil fuel combustion continue as usual for the next few decades. The first, an ABC-TV special that aired this Tuesday night, "Earth 2100." The second, a film by UK documentarian Frannie Armstrong, "The Age of Stupid." The former depicts a world that is increasing hostile to civilization as the century draws to a close, the latter an even less habitable planet, not just for humans, by 2055.
Are either visions realistic, or just more worse-case scenarios that grossly exaggerate…
hrynyshyn | June 3, 2009This morning, for the first time this year, the experts who monitor air pollution in these parts issued an "orange" alert. Folks who might have trouble breathing should minimize outdoor activity. As we live in a rural area near the leeward side of the Great Smoky Mountains, this is always a reminder of just how bad the smog from the coal-fired plants upwind of us in Tennessee and Kentucky can be. To make matters worse, a few hours after hearing that news, I came across a recently published paper in PNAS that suggests things are going to get worse if the world continues to warm.
The good news…
hrynyshyn | June 2, 2009It's hard for me to ignore a headline like this: "Climate deal uncertainty clouds carbon market -- survey." According to a Reuters story, a poll of companies around the world with an interest in trading permits to emit greenhouse gases finds that "over half of respondents expect a major climate pact to be postponed until further meetings in 2010." The Greenhouse Gas Market Sentiment survey was released by the International Emissions Trading Association just before today's opening of the latest round of negotiations leading up to December's Copenhagen conference, at which we'll see if a…
hrynyshyn | May 29, 2009A coalition of 15 environmental organizations has released a joint statement explaining why they can't get behind the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey. They complain that it:
sets targets for reducing pollution that are far weaker than science says is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change. The targets are far less ambitious than what is achievable with already existing technology. They are further undermined by massive loopholes that could allow the most polluting industries to avoid real emission reductions until 2027.
All of which is true. There's a…
hrynyshyn | May 27, 2009Peter Behr at Scientific American has a wonderfully clear explanation of just how the cap and trade mechanism prescribed by the Waxman-Markey bill will work, should it make it through Congress. It's not rocket science, but my suspicion is that a lot of observers feel intimidated by the concept and don't make an effort to get their minds around it.
Which is a shame because it's largely a matter of simple math, and Behr turns to Harvard University economist Robert Stavins for help. Here are the essential facts:
In 2016, the U.S. economy would produce an estimated 7.3 billion tons of CO2, based…
hrynyshyn | May 26, 2009There's an interesting but frustrating little essay up at Grist, which has become the go-to publication to follow the fate of the Waxman-Markey bill as it wends its way through Congress. Frequent columnist Gar Lipow argues that
Mainstream environmentalists who take the position that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill "could be worse" help ensure that it will be.
I take it he thinks those who want to see the United States embrace serious climate change mitigation strategies should be working hard to strengthen the bill. Sure.
Proclaiming "It could be worse" makes the bill in its current…
hrynyshyn | May 25, 2009SEED magazine has just published my report on the 2009 Summit of The Climate Project, Al Gore's effort to spread the word on the climate crisis with the help of 2,500 volunteers trained to present his "Inconvenient Truth" slide show. Here's the intro:
Polling data leading up to last week's summit of The Climate Project wasn't exactly inspiring. The widely respected Pew Forum says the share of Americans who believe the Earth is warming is stuck at less than 50 percent, while Rasmussen Reports--often accused of Republican bias--shows that the number has fallen to 34 percent. Both polls have…
hrynyshyn | May 21, 2009Al Gore wants Waxman-Markey to pass. Business (Shell, Duke, Alcoa, etc) likes Waxman-Markey. Joe Romm likes Waxman Markey. Everybody wants this last, best hope to do something about climate change to survive. Everybody, but a few stubborn extremists, like Greenpeace. I say that's a good thing.
I can understand why some climate change campaigners would be annoyed with Greenpeace for not falling into line. Waxman-Markey may be flawed, but it's simply too late in the game to try another approach (a flat carbon tax, say) and political realities make it clear that it's almost certainly the best we…
hrynyshyn | May 16, 2009With around 1,000 pages to digest, only the most committed of climate policy wonks can give you an an honest assessment of the just-released draft of H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill that may or may not get the U.S. on the road to climate repair. Reaction so far is, predictably enough, mixed.
Greenpeace hates its, claiming that it would, at best, cut greenhouse gas emissions by between 4 and 7% below 1990 levels by 2020. Congress should, therefore, go back to the drawing boards.
Al Gore and company have chosen to back the bill -- and they want everyone associated with his Climate Project…