hrynyshyn | May 15, 2009While I attend (and cover for SEED) the North American Summit of the The Climate Project -- a reunion of members of Al Gore's army of climate change slide show presenters -- this weekend, I won't be posting much. Not that I ever post much on the weekends. Meanwhile, however, there's a new mini-collective blog at ScienceBlogs, to which I am contributing. The Energy Grid blog tackles issues "revolving around issues of energy security and environmental sustainability." Royal Dutch Shell is paying us to write weekly responses to questions posed by a moderator, one Jonas Meckling, a research…
hrynyshyn | May 13, 2009Canadians had a chance to introduce a national carbon tax last year during a federal election, but failed to elect the party that was pushing it. Yesterday's provincial election in British Columbia produced the opposite result: the governing party, which had introduced a carbon tax last year, survived.
Interesting.
No one considered the 2008 national campaign a referendum on the merits of a carbon tax, and there were certainly other issues at play in the B.C. vote. But the tax attracted an enormous amount of attention, largely because the opposition party, the New Democrats, have…
hrynyshyn | May 12, 2009The "whither twitter" debate is irrelevant. Evidence hinting that its popularity may be short-lived is not hard to find, but I wouldn't place any money on it either way. It's just too hard to predict what will take hold in the ever-shifting sands of the semi-arid intellectual desert that some still call cyberspace. I doubt tweets will go away any time soon, and I'm not sure that they should go away, despite the legs my "Twitter is Evil" parody have acquired.
Rather than dwell on the merits or shortcomings of the 140-character medium, I'm more interested in doing my part to improve the signal-…
hrynyshyn | May 8, 2009The Real Climate gang rarely disappoint. But the latest post from Gavin Schmidt is not just useful, but downright brilliant:
Imagine a group of 100 fisherman faced with declining stocks and worried about the sustainability of their resource and their livelihoods. One of them works out that the total sustainable catch is about 20% of what everyone is catching now (with some uncertainty of course) but that if current trends of increasing catches (about 2% a year) continue the resource would be depleted in short order. Faced with that prospect, the fishermen gather to decide what to do.
Read the…
hrynyshyn | May 6, 2009Here's how I would have liked to have introduced this post:
The good news is that, other than for an increasingly marginalized minority, the focus of attention on climate policy has shifted from the reality of global warming to the economic tools needed to address the problem.
Sadly, climate change denialism remains relatively robust and widespread, with more half of all Americans and popular columnists of George F. Will's stature still unwilling to accept the science. I have no choice but to acknowledge the task of getting everyone on board will require more time and energy, even while we…
hrynyshyn | May 5, 2009The more I read about the trillionth ton (or tonne for our non-American friends), the more intrigued I am by its power to change the way we approach the threat of global warming. I wrote last week about the idea, which represents a whole new way of thinking about carbon emissions, but I'd like to take another stab at it, in hopes of spreading the meme further than my last post managed.
The "trillionth ton" refers to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Before the invention of the steam engine and everything that followed since the middle of the 18th century, there was a certain amount of…
hrynyshyn | May 5, 2009Which of these recent developments raises your eyebrows the highest?
Russia is planning a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves, causing widespread alarm among environmentalists. (The Guardian, May 3, 2009)
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has decided to accept all federal stimulus money her state is eligible for, with one exception: the nearly $29 million for the state energy office. Ms. Palin has rejected the state energy office funds out of concern that it would obligate Alaska to enact more stringent building codes. "Alaska's vast…
hrynyshyn | April 30, 2009This comment, posted to a Yahoo Finance forum by one dianasullivan1953 in response to a pointer to my recent post about the possible end of coal, was a great start to the day. I laughed for ages.
Some one smoking left handed cigarettes. wrote this memo.
What are the replacing coal with?
wHEN ARE THEY GROUNDING AIRPLANES.
They polute more than coal fired plants daily.
China is building three coal fire plants every month.
US is less than 4 % air polution. Fact.
Try tyelling Chian and India to stop coal usage.
This rfeport just like AL Gore invented then internet and
he has no nterest in Kleiner…
hrynyshyn | April 30, 2009This week's Nature includes a trio of climate features, book reviews, an essay, a pair of new papers, and and editorial highlighting how little wiggle room we have left if we want to avoid warming the planet 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. It's science journalism at its best. Sadly, it's up to us bloggers to lift as much as we can without incurring the wrath of the journal's intellectual property lawyer to spread the word. So here goes.
The most interesting of the features, in my opinion, covers the spreading meme that 450 parts per million isn't a low enough concentration of atmospheric…
hrynyshyn | April 29, 2009In the past week both Canada and the UK have announced a phase-out of conventional coal-fired power plants. Could this be the beginning of the end? Are we seeing the first stages of a global moratorium? Too soon, to tell of course. But it's encouraging.
First, came the British news:
Any new coal-fired power stations built in Britain will have to be fitted with cutting-edge technology to capture their carbon emissions, the Government announced yesterday in a revolution in energy policy.
...
As the technology is in its infancy and still unproven, new generating stations would have to be built…
hrynyshyn | April 27, 2009CBS' 60 Minutes didn't break any news with its report on the dilemma posed by coal-fired power plants. It was probably inevitable that they would look into the fascinating contradictions posed by Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers. For a man who make a lot of money emitting greenhouse gases into the planet's biosphere, he sure seems to grok the climate crisis. And he seems to be sincere about transforming his business into a carbon-neutral supplier of electriticy.
When it comes to walking the walk, though ...
"Controlling carbon emissions in the near future is inevitable in your view. This is going…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2009Follow this, if you will.
A couple of week back I wrote a mostly tongue-in-cheek post titled "Why Twitter is Evil," in the form of a parody of "25 random things about me." Each of the 25 reasons was less than 140 characters long. It was not meant to be taken seriously, although as a subsequent post, "The problem with Twitter" laid out, I do have serious objections to the medium. Here's what happened:
That second post (the one where I explore the sociological consequences of tweeting and following tweets), included a reference to another blogger's disdain for the tweets of writers he otherwise…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2009I feel I'd be neglecting my duties to those few readers of mine who don't read enough other sources if I didn't at least mention Andy Revkin's piece in today's New York Times. An anonymous lawyer slipped him, in what would have once arrived in a brown paper envelope, a document unearthed in a California lawsuit. It doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know, generally speaking, but it's always good to be able to point to specific evidence when you summarily dismiss an entire industry as untrustworthy.
Here's what a coalition of coal, oil and auto industries said their scientific advisers…
hrynyshyn | April 23, 2009... you could be in for a surprise. If, that is, you're not up on the latest climate research. Figuring out what role the forests will play in the Earth's climate regulating mechanisms have long proved more than a little tricky. And it just keeps getting more complicated.
Back at the turn of the century, for example, it was widely assumed that heavily forested countries would be in an enviable position when it comes to calculating net carbon emissions. Canada went to Kyoto negotiations in 2001 arguing that it should get credit for maintaining its vast boreal forests, because "everyone knows…
hrynyshyn | April 22, 2009It's Earth Day, so in the spirit of celebration, instead of dwelling on the bad news (like the report that 9 out of 10 attendees at the recent Copenhagen scientific conference on climate change don't expect us to be able to avoid increasing the planet's average temperature by a "dangerous" 2°C -- I said I wouldn't dwell, but I reserve the right to mention), let's consider things from an optimist's point of view.
Which optimist should we choose? How about New York Times columnist John Tierney? Not because he's a particularly well-regarded climatologist. He's not even a scientist at all. Like…
hrynyshyn | April 20, 2009The latest report from the Pew Forum provides yet more evidence that the culture wars are more than an amusing abstraction for social scientists. Here's the question, asked of 1502 Americans:
From what you've read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not? [If "yes," ask]: Do you believe that the earth is getting warmer... 1 - Mostly because of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, OR 2 - Mostly because of natural patterns in the earth's environment? [options rotated]
And here are the results,…
hrynyshyn | April 17, 2009Every day it seems there's a new essay or post about social networking fatigue, virtual connectivity's isolating effects, and the threats posed by rapid-fire media. Most of all, though, it's about the problem with Twitter. My "25 random things I hate about Twitter" post attracted an usually large amount of traffic, including several visits from those who were alerted to the piece via Twitter, but that was written at least half in jest. Now allow me to share with you some more carefully considered criticisms.
The problem with Twitter is not that it's useless. As überTwitterfan Coturnix has…
hrynyshyn | April 17, 2009You may recall Sarah Palin's curious approach to the science of climate change. Although while running for vice-president of the United States she insisted humans were not responsible, she nevertheless advocated doing something about it. This week Alaska's governor offered some details of just what we should do.
In a speech delivered on the occasion of a visit by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to her state, she said:
Some would have you delay exploration and development in the federal offshore of Alaska over concerns related to global warming and its effects in the Arctic. First of all let me…
hrynyshyn | April 15, 2009Fred Pearce, whose byline is most commonly seen in New Scientist over feature stories about climate change, has done a little bit of thinking about whether we should be worried about the virtual certainty that the world's population will hit 9 billion before it starts to fall in the second half of this century. His verdict? While still a serious problem when it comes to the evils of poverty, overpopulation will have little bearing on our efforts to deal with global warming.
The title of his piece in Yale's e360 pretty much says it all: "Consumption Dwarfs Population
As Main Environmental…
hrynyshyn | April 14, 2009A new paper to be published next week in Geophysical Research Letters (which really needs a better name) lays out what kind of effort would be required to reduce the impacts of climate change by half. Actually, what it does is conclude that if we reign in our fossil-fuel emissions by 70%, temperature rise and a few other consequences will be roughly half of what they'd be in the absence of any mitigating effort. But since both targets are arbitrary, it doesn't really matter which way you approach the subject.
Either way, the news ain't good.
In "How much climate change can be avoided by…