hrynyshyn | January 8, 2009I'm gettin' bugged driving up and down the same old strip
I gotta finda new place where the kids are hip
My buddies and me are getting real well known
Yeah, the bad guys know us and they leave us alone
I get around
-- B. Wilson, "I get around"
This is just a pair of data points on the itinerant habits of one individual, but it's the kind of thing that makes marine biology fascinating. A certain northern right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) known to human observers as 3270 (pictured), usually hangs out with the other 300 or so remnants of his species on the east coast of North America. But on…
hrynyshyn | January 7, 2009Bluesy Monday is the one day that they came here,
When they haunt me and they taunt me in my cage.
I mock them all, they're feelin' small, they got no answer.
They're playing dumb but I'm just laughing as they rage.
-- Davies, Richard; Hodgson, Roger, "Asylum"
A single transgression can be excused, but on Monday Lou Dobbs repeated his dismissal of climate science and again entertained the notion that the sun is to blame for what's happening with global temperatures. As an American journalist, he is free, of course, to believe whatever he wants and share those thoughts with his audience. But…
hrynyshyn | January 6, 2009
And the fog's liftin'
And the sand's shiftin'
I'm driftin' on out
Ol' Captain Ahab
He ain't got nothin' on me
;;;; Tom Waits, Shiver Me Timbers
It's not that we didn't see this coming. Marine protection area advocates have been hoping the rumors were true, and they are. George W. Bush has put almost 200,000 square miles off limits to serious resource extraction. Is this a good thing? Of course. Does it make up for eight years of raping and pillaging the rest of the planet? No. Even the protection of dozens of coral reefs in the Pacific may turn out to be a pointless exercise in legacy…
hrynyshyn | January 1, 2009Well he came home from the war
With a party in his head
And an idea for a fireworks display
;;;; Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones
I spent much of the Solstice/Christmas/New Year's break thinking about the future of this blog. I am happy to report that more a few lurkers broke their silence to urge me to continue the good fight against the forces of ignorance. Thank you for the vote of confidence. I'm going to try to make the Island a more entertaining and provocative place, while still focusing on the science of climatology, and the policy implications that come with it. So let's get right to it…
hrynyshyn | December 29, 2008For the last four years, I've spent a fair bit of time trying to do my bit to undermine the pseudoskeptical claptrap that passes for criticism of the idea that humans are responsible for global warming. And I'm getting tired. It doesn't seem to matter how many bloggers and journalists who understand the science of climate change point out the facts as climate science understands them, pernicious long-debunked ideas (it's all the sun's fault, the hockey stick is a fraud, water vapor is a forcing, etc.) refuse to die. Is there any point?
For example, over the holidays, Jeremy Jacquot at…
hrynyshyn | December 23, 2008If the "Reality" anti-coal advertising campaign represents the best American environmentalists can come up with, Matt Nisbet is right. Communicating the facts about global warming to the masses is simply beyond our ability. Fortunately, there are others who understand how to craft a message that might actually work. As usual, the Brits demonstrate a superior ability on this score. Check out this ad from Europe's Big Ask campaign:
One can quibble about the exaggerated and inconsistent reference to how much the Earth has warmed so far ;;;; the ad's narrator first talks about "almost" a degree…
hrynyshyn | December 23, 2008I've been waiting for almost four years for an opportunity to connect homophobia and global warming, and finally I have it, thanks to the pope. Benny XVI the other day managed to compare the effort to save the planetary ecosystem with the fragility of human sexuality. How did he do it?
Well, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary Humanae Vitae, the paper that lays bare the thinking (or lack thereof) behind his church's opposition to preventing unwanted pregnancies, the ostensible moral compass for the world's Roman Catholics said that:
the "nature of the human being as man and woman" is an…
hrynyshyn | December 22, 2008It didn't take long for the Competitive Enterprise Institute to begin dissembling about John Holdren, President-elect Barack Obama's new science adviser. On his blog, the CEI's Chris Horner dismisses Holdren's soon-to-be ex-employer, the Woods Hole Research Center, as "an environmental advocacy group." This is nonsense, as a simple check of the center's scientific output would show.
I first ran into the WHRC in the late 1980s, while living and working in Woods Hole. Back then, the center was a recent offshot of the Marine Biological Laboratory's Ecosystems Research Center. Founder George…
hrynyshyn | December 19, 2008First Stephen Chu for energy secretary, then John Holdren for science adviser. Now Jane Lubchenco for NOAA chief. Wow. One of the country's top marine biologists and a hard-core climateer. It's hard to imagine a better science team. From the LA Times:
Lubchenco did not draw the same level of fire from conservative groups as Holdren on Thursday, but she represents just as radical a departure for NOAA, which oversees marine issues as well as much of the government's climate work. While NOAA has traditionally favored commercial fishing interests in policy disputes, Lubchenco has consistently…
hrynyshyn | December 18, 2008This segment from Letterman is from back in April, but given the word that John Holdren, former AAAS head, will be running Barack Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy (i.e., serving as chief science adviser to the president), it's worth a replay. This is a man who will be repeatedly reminding the president that climate change is not something that can be placed on the proverbial back burner. I mean, check out his c.v.
Along with Stephen Chu as energy secretary, Obama will be getting the best advice possible on the biggest public policy challenge in history. (Carol Browner will…
hrynyshyn | December 18, 2008Maybe I'm making too much out of one paragraph in a short post on one blog, but I'd rather try to deal with it now before this particular meme travels much further. The offending line appears today in a post on Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog by Jeff Goodell. It offers a description of a man who has, for better or worse, become a lightning rod for the global warming debate, NASA's chief climatologist:
Maybe Justin Timberlake or Barry Manilow draws a more adoring crowd, but I doubt it. Hansen is not just a rock start here at AGU, but the one true prophet, the Man Who Saw It All Before Anyone…
hrynyshyn | December 16, 2008The Washington Post has decided that a carbon tax would be better than capping carbon emissions and trading the rights to emit. It joins a growing list of tax proponents, including James Hansen, Al Gore, Ralph Nader (writing in the Wall St. Journal), The American Prospect, and even ExxonMobil. An eclectic lot. Not everyone's on board, though. A notable holdout is
Barack Obama, who favors cap-and-trade. Or at least he used to last time he said anything about it.
A lot of the recent converts to a straight tax point to the wacky workings of the European Union's cap and trade system. (Look what…
hrynyshyn | December 12, 2008Al Gore has joined the growing list of notable climateers calling for a new target for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Speaking at the Poznan climate change gabfest this week he said we need to aim for no more than 350 parts per million.
The best known climatologist advocating such a low target ;;;; remember we're at 385 ppmv now ;;;; is NASA climate science chief James Hansen, who is the lead author on a recently published paper that identifies that specific number as the low end of a range of values associated with a climate regime shift between a world dominated by ice and one…
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2008Here's one of those things that Carl Jung would call synchronicity, but is really just an example of how scientific research tends to converge on certain ideas. Item 1, which arrived in my email in box this morning in the form of a press release from the DC-based Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, discusses what attendees at a side-event to the Poznan climate negotiations heard about the the dangers of "black carbon," an important contributor to global warming. Here's the paragraph that got my attention:
"Black carbon is extremely bad news because it contributes to…
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2008The president elect has disappointed many of his supporters by choosing relatively hawkish and right-leaning types to run his foreign and economic policies. But to my mind, his choices for secretary of energy and interior and Environmental Protection Administration chief are more important. And the news Stephen Chu will be energy secretary suggests Barack Obama is going to be progressive where it really counts.
Chu now runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and won a Nobel for physics a while back. He also understands both the threat posed by climate change and the role clean,…
hrynyshyn | December 4, 2008So last month its was the Forecast Earth gang at the Weather Channel. This week it's the science and technology team at CNN that gets the axe.
I know that times are tough all over. I know it's hard to sell ads for science sections and programs. But it sure would be nice to see the corporate robber barons that run the most popular media in the country do what's right for a change. I mean, come on: does anyone really believe that scientific issues are going to diminish in importance in the months and years ahead?
hrynyshyn | December 3, 2008Our SciBlogging colleague William "Stoat' Connolley had to do come climbing down after a recent post tearing a strip off fellow Brit, enviro-activist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot turned out to be grossly unfair. Most of the fuss was over Connelley's mistaken impression that Monbiot didn't know what he was talking about, but as anyone familiar with Monbiot knows, he attributes everything and is usually quite accurate when it comes to interpreting whatever piece of climate science he's discussing. But just as important, given recent events, is Connelley's failure to appreciate just…
hrynyshyn | December 2, 2008Twenty years ago, a clever television documentary called "After the Warming" tried to paint a picture of climate change, and humankind's delayed attempts to deal with it, for next five decades. Drawing on the best science available at the time, the producers predicted that we'd never have enough information to know just how bad things were going to get until it was too late. A new study in Nature Geoscience reminds us just how complex the global climate picture really is.
"Surprising return of deep convection to the subpolar North Atlantic Ocean in winter 2007-2008" (subs req'd) by a team of…
hrynyshyn | December 1, 2008... is that the rest of the world doesn't stop while you're off stuffing your face with the family. And by the time you're back in the saddle, the virtual stack of papers to read and work to catch up on threatens to bury you before the season's first snowfall. So while I dig myself out, here's a great little snippet from Gavin Schmidt, one of the forces behind RealClimate.org and a leading light in the climatology community:
It has become fashionable for some commentators to describe environmentalists and their climate change arguments as having "'religious fervour" or of "being dogmatic".…
hrynyshyn | November 25, 2008The sentence that leads off a story in today's New York Times by Elisabeth Rosenthal about the economic crisis is all wrong.
Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.
Not that I doubt Ms. Rosenthanl's journalistic abilities. It's just that such a reaction is the exact opposite of what we should be seeing.
It seems almost axiomatic that the economic crisis should be what motivates world leaders to do something about climate change, not…