hrynyshyn | November 24, 2008For the most past few months I've been making brief posts at The Weather Channel's Forecast Earth website, as part of a team of bloggers concerned with climate change and our relationship to the planet in general. Looks like I won't be doing that for much longer, given the news that NBC, which bought TWC earlier this year, just fired the entire Forecast Earth team and killed the show. It was the only weekly program on TV devoted to the climate.
And right in the middle of NBC's Green Week. Oh well.
I've got a contract that sees my TWC relationship through the end of the year, but I'm not…
hrynyshyn | November 22, 2008Upon first read, a new study about the contribution of "black carbon" to the global carbon cycle, and therefore to climate change, suggests things might not be as bad as now commonly thought. But first reads, especially by those who don't have a graduate degree specializing in exactly the field in question, can be misleading. And "Australian climate-carbon cycle feedback reduced by soil black carbon," which appears in the latest Nature Geoscience, is a case in point.
Black carbon is one the complicating factors that have to be taken into account when trying to figure out what the net effect…
hrynyshyn | November 20, 2008Over at A Few Things Illconsidered, the commenters are debating what to call those folks who just can't bring themselves to accept the science of climate change. You know, the science that says we have to stop spewing the products of the combustion of fossil fuels into the air if we want to keep the planet's ecology close to something we'd consider habitable.
Denialists? Skeptics? Scoffers? I'd like to weigh in with a defense of the term that I now use regularly in this space: "Pseudoskeptics."
The reason is simple. Pseudo means false. And false skepticism is what we're talking about. It…
hrynyshyn | November 18, 2008Mostly because I'm tired of being a pessimist. But there's also things like this:
"Delay is not an option. Denial is no longer acceptable." Gotta love that.
h/t to Reader Brian D for directing me to the video. Much better than the print coverage of same.
hrynyshyn | November 18, 2008So much has changed in the last few weeks that I'm only now beginning to get a handle on things. I'm still processing and unsure about so much that I'm going to do something that I have resisted doing since joining the blogosphere three and half years ago. I'm going to share some personal thoughts about who I am and where I call home.
First, there's the issue of my relationship to government.
I was born a Canadian and except for 22 months in the late 1980s, spent my life in Canada, before moving to western North Carolina in the spring of 2005. As a Canadian, I grew up assuming that Canada was…
hrynyshyn | November 13, 2008I've got a post up at my other blog, where I write about climate change for the Weather Channel's Forecast Earth site, that briefly discusses James Hansen's new paper on appropriate targets for CO2 levels. I still intend to write something more consequential here, but in the meantime, I thought I'd draw ScienceBlogs readers' attention to the reaction at the TWC blog. Here's a selection:
After we are done manipulating global carbon dioxide plant food levels to within a couple parts per million of sheer evolutionary perfection, then we'll get to work on that thermostat-wired-over-to-the-sun…
hrynyshyn | November 11, 2008There's talk of "a low-cost, safe, and permanent method to capture and store atmospheric CO2." All it would take is some conventional rock drilling and a little energy in the form of warm water. That's what the authors of a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say is theoretically possible thanks to natural weathering processes at work in the Sultanate of Oman. It's geo-engineering for those who don't much like geo-engineering!
"In situ carbonation of peridotite for CO2 storage" appears this week in PNAS. The authors, Peter B. Kelemen and Jurg Matter of Columbia…
hrynyshyn | November 10, 2008Words of wisdom are pouring from the pages of America's punditocracy, and many embrace a common theme: dare to be bold, Mr. President-elect.
From E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post:
The president-elect is hearing that his greatest mistake would be something called "overreach." Democrats in Congress, it's implied, are hungry to impose wacky left-wing schemes that Obama must resist. In fact, timidity is a far greater danger than overreaching, simply because it's quite easy to be cautious.
From Paul Krugman of the New York Times:
Right now, many commentators are urging Mr. Obama to think small…
hrynyshyn | November 9, 2008I would have included something about the need for a googolplex of public transportation projects instead of simply encouraging cleaner automobiles, but yeah: this is what Obama should do.
hrynyshyn | November 7, 2008Most of my favorite ScienceBlogs colleagues are up in arms at the very hint that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could end up as the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The problem is RFK, while justifiably cherished for many years by the environmental movement, also happens to be the best-known member of a group of cranks that opposes childhood vaccination because of its alleged links to autism. Are Orac, MarkH, Mike the Mad Biologist, Mike Dunford and the rest justifiably worried? I think so.
According to Politico, "Obama advisers said the nomination would please both Sen.…
hrynyshyn | November 5, 2008"Now the hard part" writes Peter Baker in today's New York Times. Sure enough. It's never too soon to be reminded that Barack Obama is just this guy, you know? But it doesn't take Baker two paragraphs to completely misconstrue the enormity of the challenge facing the next president:
WASHINGTON -- No president since before Barack Obama was born has ascended to the Oval Office confronted by the accumulation of seismic challenges awaiting him. Historians grasping for parallels point to Abraham Lincoln taking office as the nation was collapsing into Civil War, or Franklin D. Roosevelt arriving in…
hrynyshyn | November 4, 2008The conventional wisdom is that you have to get a PhD if you want to be a serious scientist. I don't have one, but I'm not a scientist, just a journalist with a BSc who can't claim to have advanced any particular branch of marine biology. There are accomplished researchers out there that have managed to make significant contributions to their field without the cache of a graduate degree, though. Today's New York Times offers a profile of one such scientist, a hero of mine named Alexandra Morton. It wasn't easy and it took years of suffering contempt from "real" scientists before her work was…
hrynyshyn | November 3, 2008Given than John McCain is now relying on non-Euclidean geometry to construct a scenario in which he prevails on Tuesday, I think it safe to pour to cold on water the hyper-optimism now coursing through progressive America.
Yes, Barack Obama's victory will be cause for celebration. It will be a good thing if for no other reason than his presidency will represent an unprecedented sea change, one that signals to the country and the rest of the world that the 21st century has finally arrived, seven years delayed but hopefully not too late. Regardless of Obama's real capacity to effect change,…
hrynyshyn | October 30, 2008After Doonesbury, my morning reading begins with a peek at the RSS feed from Real Climate. Most mornings it's worth a repeat look at posts I've already reviewed as the comments left there offer one of the highest signal-to-noise ratios in the blogosphere. Today I came across this noteworthy note from one Lawrence Brown:
Even Albert Einstein was no Einstein when it came to quantum mechanics. Neils Bohr turned back Einstein's skepticism several times on certain aspects. Which ought to give all of us pause. If Einstein can be wrong what can anyone expect from the rest of us?!
However if you're…
hrynyshyn | October 29, 2008I know of no solid evidence that editorial endorsements have even the slightest effect on presidential campaigns. You might be able to find some correlations in some states, but that could easily be because the newspaper and magazine editors are good at following the general feeling of their readers, rather than the other way around.
But that doesn't mean editors should stop making the endorsements. And our overlords at SEED magazine are taking this first opportunity to officially sanction the candidacy of ...
Well, you know who. For a science-orientated publication, this was a no-brainer.…
hrynyshyn | October 28, 2008The Chinese are a complicated lot. On the one hand, they're building a new coal-fired power plant every four or five or six days, depending on who's counting, an endeavor that cost them $248 billion in hidden costs last year "through damage to the environment, strain on the health care system and manipulation of the commodity's price" says Greenpeace. On the other, they've just announced that they're going to spend the equivalent of $280 billion enhancing their passenger rail network. Impressive. Just imagine if we dumped a proportional $75 billion into American passenger rail.
Actually, we…
hrynyshyn | October 27, 2008It's almost not worth the bother of taking another swipe at Sarah Palin's anti-intellectual bigotry this late in a game that's pretty much over. I mean, the coverage of her speech in Asheville, N.C., last night couldn't find anything newsworthy to mention beyond her decision to eschew the $150,000 wardrobe in favor of good ol' common-sense jeans. But Christopher Hitchens' way with words makes it all worthwhile.
The Hitch begins by lamenting Palin's empty-headed criticism of fruit fly genetics research: "...where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or…
hrynyshyn | October 23, 2008OK. Not clueless. But today we have yet more evidence that we really don't understand how this planet's carbon cycle works,thanks to the latest issue of the Soil Science Society of America Journal. In "Nitrous Oxide Emissions Respond Differently to No-Till in a Loam and a Heavy Clay Soil", a group of Canadian researchers makes it clear that our species is just plain ignorant when it comes to managing greenhouse gas emissions. It's looking like there is one fewer tool in the box of options at our disposal for mitigating global warming.
Until now, it was generally assumed by aggies the world…
hrynyshyn | October 22, 2008I just don't understand where the EPA is coming from when it assigns fuel economy ratings. The latest rankings are out and they just don't jibe with my driving experience. I'm not the most aggressive driver out there, but neither am I an expert hypermiler who keep it down to the speed limit and catches tailwinds. Yet I consistently get better mileage whatever I'm driving than what the EPA says the car gets. I always get better mileage. Always.
I know that when the EPA says: "it is impossible for one set of estimates to predict fuel economy precisely for all drivers in all environments" they…
hrynyshyn | October 17, 2008There's a new report on Arctic temperatures that is not only worrisome, but helps make clear one of the most challenging aspects of the climate change story, specifically the role of feedback.
For example, pseudoskeptics whose primary source of information on climate is Fox News, are forever pointing out, as if it had never occurred to climatologists, that carbon dioxide levels historically follow rising temperatures, instead of the other way around. To the less informed, this pokes a big hole in the whole global warming story.
The thing to know is, the initial temperature rise was quite…