hrynyshyn | April 9, 2009And now, in another edition of "I was going to ignore this, but," I draw your attention to the latest career move of one Marc Morano and his unwavering campaign to undermine public support for any and all policies that might give us a chance to forestall catastrophic climate change
I was hoping that Morano, the former pseudo-journalist who first rose to prominence by serving as chief propagandist for the Swift Boat veterans who helped defeat John Kerry's presidential bid in 2004, would just go away after leaving the employ of Republican Sen. James "global warming is a hoax" Inhofe a few weeks…
hrynyshyn | April 8, 2009Back when I was an editor of a small-town community weekly, I had a bumper sticker affixed to one of my office walls with a simple message: "ASSUME NOTHING." One of my predecessors had left it behind. I really should get a new one because, like even the best journalists and bloggers, I need to be reminded of that cardinal rule, and regularly.
Back in January, I posted a rebuttal to Michican columnist John Tomlinson's hopelessly misinformed attempt to debunk anthropogenic climate change. In my post, I repeated an error Tomlinson made by referring to the "Arctic Climate Research Center" at the…
hrynyshyn | April 7, 2009I was going to ignore the open letter-to-the-president advertisement placed in major papers recently by the Cato Institute. You've probably heard of it -- the one that says Obama should ignore global warming alarmism because the science says it isn't happening. The one signed by "over 100 scientists." But the response elsewhere has been interesting. It focuses almost exclusively on the expertise of those who signed the letter, not the merits of the argument it makes. I find myself agreeing -- ever so slightly, with the Cato Institutes' Jerry Taylor, who defended the letter last week in the…
hrynyshyn | April 6, 2009Very few relationships in this world are monotonic. Not the price of stocks, not the traffic on this blog, and not global climate trends. Maybe if more people understood this, we'd have less nonsense about climate change clogging the media.
By monotonic, I mean, if you plot a trend on a standard x-y graph, monotonic lines will always go in the same direction, whether it's up, down or flat, no matter what the scale. The fact that most functions aren't monotonic should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a while. The real world has a habit of being a little wonky. Even those things…
hrynyshyn | April 3, 2009Why would I care what you're doing?
The 140-character limit.
Just another opportunity to interrupt real-world social interactions.
Enabling attention-deficit disorder sufferers doesn't seem a like a particularly good idea these days.
Gives NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon an excuse to let listeners do his job for him by tweeting suggested interview questions.
Created to give Starbucks a way to send us all today's list of special coffees.
I have enough media to monitor, thank you very much.
What part of "trivial" don't you understand?
Maybe if we weren't paying so much attention to our…
hrynyshyn | April 2, 2009"I'm not an expert on any of these things. Much of what I say should be taken with a grain of salt."
So said Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Physics, all-round brilliant scientist, and self-professed global warming "heretic," during a round of questions and answers following his talk Tuesday night at Furman University in Greenville, S.C. "I am not speaking to you as a scientist, but as a story-teller ... of science fiction."
So why then, I asked, should we pay attention to what you have to say on climate change, considering that those who are experts in…
hrynyshyn | March 31, 2009I was wrong. Indeed, it would seem I've been laboring under a misapprehension for the last couple of decades. Anthropogenic global warming is, after all, a fraud, a colossal scheme designed to subvert the very foundations of modern civilization in a favor of a socialist world government that controls every aspect of our lives down to the air fresheners in our bathrooms.
How have I come to this conclusion, one that I will admit is in direction contradiction to just about everything I have written on the subject since the late 1980s? It wasn't any one piece of evidence. Rather, it's more like I…
hrynyshyn | March 30, 2009Freeman Dyson is on the cover of yesterday's New York Times Magazine. Inside a baseball writer (a very good baseball writer, but still) gives the man an opportunity to explain why he doesn't believe climate change is something to worry about.
Others have lamented the attention devoted by the nation's leading newspaper to the thoughts of someone who has no expertise in the field. I share Chris Mooney's reservations about the writer's understanding of the way scientific skepticism is supposed to work. But Dyson cannot be easily dismissed if for no other reason than he has proven himself to be…
hrynyshyn | March 29, 2009So Battlestar Galactica is over. Again.
It is unlikely that many a fan of science fiction, or intelligent story-telling of any genre, over the age of 11 mourned the end of the original series. But the resurrected version that drew its final breath a week ago was transcendent television, by any measure. Those unfamiliar with the program should read no further. Bookmark this post, rent the DVDs and return when you're done.
After four years of ambiguous exploration of the battle between science and faith, the writers chose to end on a decidedly spiritual note. Starbuck is an angel. Boomer and…
hrynyshyn | March 26, 2009Few technologies give rise to more spirited debates among environmentalists than nuclear power generation. So it was with some trepidation that I started to read an essay on the subject in last week's Washington Post. This is the same newspaper that took six weeks to run a rebuttal to George Will's latest attempts to obfuscate the climate change debate and still hasn't run a correction for the myriad mispresentations contained therein. So maybe it's not surprising that "5 Myths on Nuclear Power" by hitherto unheard of Todd Tucker is similarly hobbled by a lack of respect for reality.
Here are…
hrynyshyn | March 20, 2009Among the more interesting questions asked in the the just-released Yale poll on "Climate change in the American mind"is the one that shows us how much the country trusts various sources of information on the subject. Keeping reading to find out who tops the list, and who is on the bottom:
hrynyshyn | March 19, 2009That is, as the Dane said, the question.
The short answer is "nobody knows," of course. The ice core records suggest that we're adding CO2 to the atmosphere faster than the planet has ever seen before. That doesn't necessarily mean that the consequences of doing so ;;;; planetary warming and extreme drought in dry areas, for example ;;;; will be felt soon, or at all. But in the past, such consequences sooner or later come about. And it would be foolish to operate on the assumption that the Earth has some of kind of hitherto undiscovered compensatory mechanism that spares us from them.
Which…
hrynyshyn | March 17, 2009Remarkable words from Canada''s Parliament Hill:
Canada's science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won't say if he believes in evolution.
"I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate," Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
A funding crunch, exacerbated by cuts in the January budget, has left many senior researchers across the county scrambling to find the money to…
hrynyshyn | March 17, 2009A story on the fate of Greenland's ice sheet published last week in The Guardian attracted the expected level of interest from those who uncritically repeat any scientific tidbit that reminds us we still don't know everything we need to know about climate change. This was because the story, as written, implied the ice sheet isn't as sensitive to global warming as is popularly thought.
Something about the story didn't seem exactly right to me, though. For one thing, it was based not on a peer-reviewed paper but a presentation to the recent scientific meeting on climate change in Copenhagen.…
hrynyshyn | March 16, 2009A couple of weeks ago, New Scientist published an insightful but hardly controversial little essay on the challenges a science book editor faces when she has to deal with creationist literature. Amanda Geftner's piece, "How to spot a hidden religious agenda" disappeared from the magazine's website last week (Of course, it's still available elsewhere, like here.) As of this morning, if you try to find it at the New Scientist site, you get a message from the editors:
New Scientist has received a legal complaint about the contents of this story. At the advice of our lawyer it has temporarily…
hrynyshyn | March 13, 2009Elizabeth Kolbert's interview in Yale's e360 magazine is a sobering read. But what's even more interesting than the light she sheds on the reasons why the polls keep finding the public is out of touch with the science is the stark reminder I came across in the article's comment section that we've blown the last quarter century.
Greenpeace has posted a PDF of a 1983 New York Times story that, with only minimal edits of a few numbers -- replace the carbon-dioxide concentration, which was 340 ppm back then, with today's 387 -- could easily run today. I've converted the whole thing to HTML and,…
hrynyshyn | March 12, 2009"Neuroscientists fear brain drain" (Globe and Mail, March 12, 2009)
It's about research funding drying up in Canada, while Obama pours more into U.S. labs.
hrynyshyn | March 11, 2009There's a good reason why of all the consequences of anthropogenic global warming, nothing garners as much attention as sea level rise ;;;; with the possible exception of those darn charismatic polar bears, that is.
It's the same reason Al Gore devoted half a dozen slides in his climate change presentation to animations depicting the flooding that would come with a six- or seven-metre rise. While we can't predict just how much the oceans will rise if the world's glaciers and the Western Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets were to melt, everyone knows, without having to take a course in…
hrynyshyn | March 9, 2009O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The Tempest is not only one of Shakespeare last plays, but arguably his most profound. No longer content with mere comedy or historical tragedy, he explores the changes rocking the Western world in the 17th century as superstition gave way to reason. By the closing of the fifth act, the sorcerer Prosper laments that "Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own."
And yet, four hundred years later, faith in magic and and distrust of science…
hrynyshyn | March 4, 2009Read this, weep, dry your tears and get on the phone. From the still reliable news pages of the WaPo:
The nominations of two of President Obama's top science advisers have stalled in the Senate, according to several sources, posing a challenge to the administration as it seeks to frame new policies on climate change and other environmental issues.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) has placed a "hold" that blocks votes on confirming Harvard University physicist John Holdren, who is in line to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Oregon State University marine…