hrynyshyn | February 7, 2009For those in need a splashy video rebuttal to typical climate denial talking points, there's a great little feature on YouTube called Climate Denial Crock of the Week by one Peter Sinclair. Here's a recent one:
hrynyshyn | February 3, 2009The U.S. Climate Change Science Program finally managed to release its Final Report of Synthesis and Assessment a couple of weeks back. There's not a lot of new material in the first four of five volumes which deal with the state of the science, mostly because the report was supposed to be released a while back. Must have been some delay at the top of the food change. But the fifth volume came with an intriguing title: "Best practice approaches for characterizing, communicating, and incorporating scientific uncertainty in decision-making"
The 156-page report tries to give scientists a few…
hrynyshyn | February 2, 2009The dominant subject among climate change campaigners these days is economics. One could consider this good news, insofar as we've moved on from debating the science of global warming to the debate over how to deal with it. The bad news is most of what passes for debate in economics makes little sense, even to many an economist. For example, I certainly don't feel competent to pass judgment the relative merits of a carbon tax and cap-and-trade. But we can't ignore the issues, can we? So it is with some trepidation that I turn your attention to the U.S. economic stimulus package now making its…
hrynyshyn | January 30, 2009There's nothing new, scientifically speaking, in the Monaco Declaration. It's just another plea from 155 scientists representating 26 nations that "sets forth recommendations, calling for policymakers to address this immense problem." The problem is ocean acidification.
It's a problem that got a passing mention in early versions of Al Gore's Inconvenient slide show. Later iterations added a few more slides dealing with the consequences for corals of a changing aquatic habitat. But compare that with more than a dozen slides addressing the threat of increased storm frequency and/or intensity,…
hrynyshyn | January 28, 2009So a fair degree of warming is inevitable, eh? That's the conclusion of a PNAS paper making the rounds this week. (I wrote about it yesterday.) But just how "irreversible" are the coming changes? As Arthur C. Clarke said, "When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
The answer can be found in the same PNAS paper, in which the authors qualify their outlook for the next millennium by noting that "we do not consider geo-engineering measures that might be able to remove gases already in the atmosphere or to introduce active cooling to counteract warming."
In one of…
hrynyshyn | January 27, 2009Can't let this week slip any further past without drawing your attention to a new paper on "Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions," which has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (It can be found here), and I have a copy and will share some excerpts. You can also read a press release here.
First, the authors, Susan Solomon of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder and her European colleagues, deal with the defining the most important term in the paper:
(where irreversible is defined here as a time scale exceeding the…
hrynyshyn | January 26, 2009New Scientist's recent cover that heralded the stunning news (not) that "Darwin was wrong" has generated an enormous amount of antipathy in these parts. Bora's keeping notes, and the feature article's author, Graham Lawton, surely doesn't deserve the vitriol. (Although with the umbrage he takes in return via blog comments, he is hardly doing himself any favors).
I understand the reaction among those who live, eat and and breathe evolutionary biology ;;;; perhaps Lawton's interpretation of a few issues is questionable ;;;; but stand back and take a deep one, folks. This is journalism we're…
hrynyshyn | January 26, 2009Last week, I wrote to John Tomlinson, "a local conservative columnist" for The Flint (Michigan) Journal to ask him for the sources he used for a recent column on the scientific evidence against global warming. He indulged me, and "thousands" of others" who expressed interest by supply those sources in a mass email. In return, I have a few thoughts that I have put in the form of an open letter.
Dear John,
Thank you for taking the time to share the sources you used in your Flint Journal essay of 19 January 2009, "It's time to pray for global warming," which attracted considerable attention this…
hrynyshyn | January 23, 2009No sooner had I finished writing about the Eos poll on the near unanimity of the climatology community on the anthropogenic cause of global warming than I came across another poll on the general public's position. And I did not take heart.
The authors of the Eos paper referred to a 2008 Gallup polll that found 58% of Americans think "human activities rather than natural causes explain the rise in the Earth's temperature." Around 38% say it's natural.
Troubling enough. But then along comes this new Rasmussen poll that find only "44% of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the…
hrynyshyn | January 21, 2009Tim Lambert beat me to it (surprise), so you can read Deltoid's take on the new poll of the Earth sciences that finds that the more your working life is dominated by climatology, the more likely you are to accept the basic conclusions of the anthropogenic global warming consensus. I'll just add a couple of thoughts.
The survey, which appears in the latest issue of EOS, the official (subs req'd) newsletter of the American Geophysical Union, contrasts the findings of a recent Gallup poll to its own. When asked a variant of the question "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing…
hrynyshyn | January 20, 2009Well, sort of. It went live a minute past noon ET. But there's no comment function, so it's not what most of us would call a blog. Still, it's nice to know Obama's hip to the blogosphere's significance.
Also nice to see climate change get a nod in the inaugural:
We will restore science to its rightful place.... We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.... With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.
hrynyshyn | January 20, 2009The US Climate Action Partnership includes several notable and powerful environmental organizations, specifically the Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund and World Resources Institute. So one might expect that any plan endorsed by the partnership would be relatively strong and science-based, even if the group is dominated by industry members, like Duke Energy, Ford and Alcoa. But that isn't the way the USCAP's recently released strategy for cutting greenhouse gas emissions is being received. Indeed, by supporting the plan, more than a few enviros…
hrynyshyn | January 19, 2009This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending ScienceOnline '09, a conference-meetup-lovefest of about 200 scientists, journalists and bloggers. There I learned much about what we should and should not be doing in the blogosphere, and astute readers may notice some small changes on the Island of Doubt as a result. Nothing major, just refinements to my particular approach to this still-fledgling communications tool.
More importantly, though, I got acquainted and reacquainted with a few folks behind some blogs that I feel are worthy of your attention. I'll get around to updating my long-…
hrynyshyn | January 15, 2009Nous somme du soleil
-- Anderson/Howe, "Ritual"
It's sad that it's come to this, but I feel compelled to offer some guidance on the persistent allegation that the Earth is about to enter an ice age. It all started a few days ago, when Matt Drudge added a link to an English-language Pravda (?) story claiming that "a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science" points to the impending end of the current interglacial period. Never one to care what Drudge is linking to, I tried to ignore it. But then I started getting email.
The most depressing came from someone…
hrynyshyn | January 14, 2009The German government has at least temporarily suspended an experiment that would see 20 tonnes of iron dust dumped into the ocean between Argentina and Antarctica in hopes of inducing plankton bloom that sucks up atmospheric CO2, according to Nature. First, says the government, you have to do an environmental impact study. But the very experiment itself is a study in environmental consequences. After all, if it works, then we might have at our disposal a simple way to draw down as much as 10% of the atmospheric carbon that's heating the planet. But wait.
There's this international…
hrynyshyn | January 13, 2009A laugh for the newsprint nightmare
A world that never was
Where the questions are all why
And the answers are all because
--Bruce Cockburn, "Laughter"
Further to yesterday's post, in which I compared pseudoskeptical propaganda masquerading as informed opinion, what if the same editorial standards were applied to other fields, such as sports journalism? Imagine a newspaper reporter who covers baseball writing something like:
Last night's win evokes the Orioles' come-from-behind World Series victory 1992. Every man on the bench could do no wrong, as if they were in some kind of meditative…
hrynyshyn | January 12, 2009It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first
But the trouble with normal is
It always gets worse.
-- Bruce Cockburn, "The trouble with normal"
It's hard to know what's worse: an economist who thinks he understand climatology better than climatologists, or a news outlet that thinks asking an economist for his thoughts on climatology is a good idea. Because I've spent more than 20 years in the journalism business, I'm more depressed by the latter. But I'm open to persuasion in favor of the former.
Joe Romm ably tears apart the thoughts of Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn, who told a…
hrynyshyn | January 12, 2009Before anyone bothers to cast a vote in the 2008 Weblog Awards, please read what P.Z. "Pharyngula" Myers, easily one of the most popular science bloggers on the planet, has to say. Know that of the top three contenders (so far) in the science category are two blogs that exhibit only disdain for the scientific process. The other eight nominees include genuine science powerhouses like Real Climate and Bad Astronomy and, of course, Pharyngula, who is currently in second place. yet, the top vote-getter as of Monday morning at 9 a.m. ET is the non-evidence-based Watt's Up With That.
Something is…
hrynyshyn | January 9, 2009I'm out here fighting, hungry
The fish ain't biting
Life's so frightening
I'm out here stumbling
Broke and crumbling
And nothing's happening
And aye aye, captain
--Lamont Dozier, "Fish Ain't Bitin' "
Hank Williams at Scientific Blogging has grown weary of the cliches that headline writers use to describe how scientists react to the unexpected. Too bad for him. "Baffled," "stunned" and that good old standby for the climate crowd, "alarmed," are just too tempting for editors to ignore and always will be. But I used to be paid to write headlines, and I understand Williams' point of view.
Which…
hrynyshyn | January 8, 2009
Well, how do you explain it?
Some strange lights observed at the time of the incident have been explained. But the physical damage remains an X-file.