hrynyshyn | November 22, 2011In its latest Greenhouse Gas report, the World Meteorological Organization reminds us again that what really sets Homo sapiens apart from the other animals is an unparalleled talent for procrastination. Brad Johnson of Think Progress summarizes:
... since the global convention in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 at which the nations of the world pledged to prevent dangerous global warming, the intensity of global warming has increased by nearly a third. Most of the increase in pollution has come from the burning of fossil fuels, reaping untold profits for oil and coal magnates at the expense of…
hrynyshyn | November 17, 2011"Major storms could submerge New York City in next decade" cries a randomly selected mainstream media outlet over a story about a new report warning residents that climate change could make life difficult in the not-too-distant future. The report, from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, is pretty standard stuff for those who have been paying attention to the growing link between global warming and extreme weather. And maybe it will spur New Yorkers to take the subject a bit more seriously.
But there's a certain set who will welcome this 600-page conpendium of…
hrynyshyn | November 14, 2011This video was just shown to Congressional briefing in Washington, D.C. It is the end result of the BEST review of global temperature records.
hrynyshyn | November 14, 2011Kevin Trenberth's latest paper, which appears in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is uncharacteristically and refreshingly blunt right from the first few words of the introduction:
Humans are changing our climate. There is no doubt whatsoever. There are arguments about how much and how important these effects are and will be in future, but many studies (e.g., see the summary by Stott et al.1) have demonstrated that effects are not trivial and have emerged from the noise of natural variability, even if they are small by some measures. So why does the science community…
hrynyshyn | November 11, 2011Barry Bickmore's 40-minute explanation of why he stopped denying climate science is worth the time. As a a geochemistry professor, it should come as no surprise that he eventually came around, only that it took as long. But better late than never. He teaches at Brigham Young University in Utah, is an active Mormon, and an active Republican. So there you go.
hrynyshyn | November 10, 2011David Roberts is, as usual, bang on in his latest Grist column, lamenting the pointlessness of the debate between those who insist we need more research and development before tackling climate change, and those who say we shouldn't wait. (Roberts is among the best commenters around when it comes to the social and political context of climate change.)
For the amount of attention it gets, you'd think that settling this debate is the crucial first step in developing a policy plan or a political strategy. You'd think the "enough technology" question must be answered before anyone can move forward…
hrynyshyn | November 9, 2011... you must first invent the universe. -- Carl Sagan, born this day in 1934 and the primary inspiration for this blog.
hrynyshyn | November 8, 2011Australia's Senate has approved a controversial law on pollution, after years of bitter political wrangling. The Clean Energy Act will force the country's 500 worst-polluting companies to pay a tax on their carbon emissions from 1 July next year.
-- BBC
hrynyshyn | November 4, 2011Among the very best of the science-oriented blogs I try to read regularly is Tom Levenson's Inverse Square Blog. Tom, who teaches science journalism at MIT, isn't a climatologist, but whenever he writes about climate science or politics, it's usually worth a look.
Apparently, the folks at Scientific American agree, and they recently invited Tom to contribute a guest post to the magazine's blog site. It's primarily about the recent kerfuffle over the possibility that neutrinos might be able to travel faster than light, and a bit on the lengthy side, but he does manage to work climate in…
hrynyshyn | October 27, 2011Don't get me wrong. I love NPR. I listen to it for at least four hours a day. But lately I've found the network's embrace of "he said, she said" journalism a little too difficult to swallow. This morning's report on censorship of a scientific report commissioned by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality isn't perhaps the most egregious example, but it does concern climate change, so it's worth examining.
For those unfamiliar with this lazy and cowardly form of reporting, check out new media maven Jay Rosen's take. Basically, the problem is NPR is afraid to let its reporters come right…
hrynyshyn | October 26, 2011Everyone talks about global warming, but it's not easy to get one's mind around just how much heat we're talking about. Even more difficult is putting that heat energy in terms that the average layperson can grasp. Fortunately, some scientists are making an effort to do just that.
In a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters, "Observed changes in surface atmospheric energy over land," Thomas Peterson, of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC, Katharine M. Willett of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK, and and Peter W. Thorne, who works alongside Peterson at the…
hrynyshyn | October 25, 2011My review of Shawn Otto's new book, Fool Me Twice
Fighting the Assault on Science in America, is up over at the relatively new sustainability-oriented blog/resource site, Planet 3.0. Here's how I start:
Shawn Otto is a big name in the campaign to restore science to its rightful place as a major player in the public sphere. He spearheaded the first "Science Debate" effort in 2008 to get the presidential candidates to address scientific issues, and has been working, tirelessly but not entirely successfully, it would seem, since then to keep the home fires burning. The frustration that comes…
hrynyshyn | October 20, 2011There's this notion among the climate denial community that somehow the entire professional climatology community has overlooked an obvious flaw in the science behind anthropogenic global warming. Their hypothesis is that too many of the thermometers used to record temperatures over the last 200 years have been located in or near cities, and so have produced a warming bias produced by the waste heat generated in urban areas.
It sounds plausible. The problem with the notion, of course, is that it's so obvious a potential bias that climatologists long ago learned to take the "urban heat island…
hrynyshyn | October 11, 2011How old do you have to be before it's acceptable for your high-school teacher to expose you to propaganda?
Last week I had the honor of taking part in a video chat with a class of eighth graders at a private school in Atlanta. I got involved through a personal connection and then took a strong interest when I learned that the students would be sitting through both Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Martin Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle as part of an environmental writing section of their English course. Then their teacher, in an effort to nudge his students toward something…
hrynyshyn | October 7, 2011It's hard to argue against funding scientific research. But let me try.
This past week 18 experts assembled as the Task Force on Climate Remediation Research released the product of its collective wisdom. A creation of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which the New York Times' Cornelia Dean describes as "a research organization based in Washington founded by four senators — Democrats and Republicans — to offer policy advice to the government," the task force concluded that the U.S. should be spending unspecified sums on research into what is colloquially known as climate hacking. Most everyone…
hrynyshyn | October 5, 2011The good folks at the National Snow and Ice Data Center summarize the season in the Arctic Ocean. Turns out that the weather conditions that helped make 2007 a record for low sea-ice extent didn't recur. And yet, 2011 came within a relative hair's breadth of setting a new record. That means longer-term climate trends are to blame, not seasonal weather variation. The low-down:
Why did ice extent fall to a near record low without the sort of extreme weather conditions seen in 2007? One explanation is that the ice cover is thinner than it used to be; the melt season starts with more first-year…
hrynyshyn | October 4, 2011Climatologist Michael Mann is fed up. Actually, he's been fed up a long time, given that he's been the subject of mean-spirited investigations and slander for years now. We probably need more of this kind of rebuttal:
These are just lies, regurgitation of dishonest smears that have been manufactured by fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers, and those who do their bidding by lying to the public about the science.
Mann wrote that in an op-ed for the Vail Daily. It's not the New York Times, but that's the point. The climatology community needs to respond every time some ignorant…
hrynyshyn | October 3, 2011Kate at Climate Sight remind us this week of just how challenging it can be for a mainstream media outlet to accurately report on climatology. Even when the reporter gets it right, a headline-writing editor can inject just enough obsfucation to leave readers puzzled or misinformed.
This particular piece of evidence attesting to the need for all journalists to possess more than just a passing knowledge of the field in question involves a new paper in Nature, "Unprecedented Arctic ozone loss in 2011." The implication of the authors' finding is that the Arctic's UV-radiation-blocking ozone…