hrynyshyn | July 29, 2008The man himself has been reduced to a footnote in the last advertisement from his new "we" campaign. The ad is scheduled to appear in the usual suspect media "to make sure Al Gore's clean electricity challenge stays on the top of our leaders' minds during their break." See a bigger version here.
The campaign is currently asking its millions of lip-service supporters to put their money where it counts by helping defray the placement costs of the ad in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. My motive for giving you a preview is not to ask that you donate (although feel…
hrynyshyn | July 29, 2008Andy Revkin demonstrates once again why he's among the best science journalists around in his latest exploration of the challenges facing climatologists frustrated with the way their science is portrayed in the popular media. No real answer emerges from his analysis, but if every researcher and reporter involved in the subject read this piece, maybe we'd be closer to one.
The problem, in short:
Discordant findings have come in quick succession. How fast is Greenland shedding ice? Did human-caused warming wipe out frogs in the American tropics? Has warming strengthened hurricanes? Have the…
hrynyshyn | July 25, 2008As if the developing world didn't have a enough to worry about when it comes to joining the industrialized 21st century without following in the developed world's polluting footprints. A new study by British researchers finds that where you fly makes a difference to your impact on the climate. The take-home message is jet flights near the equator do more damage than at high latitudes.
"Impact of perturbations to nitrogen oxide emissions from global aviation" by Mark Köhler et al in the Journal of Geophysical Research (Vol. 113, D11305) studied the effects of all that nitrogen oxide spewing…
hrynyshyn | July 23, 2008We have to nip this idea in the bud: Shell is reviving the notion of liming the oceans. Why?
...because adding lime to seawater creates an increase in alkalinity, which in turn improves the water's ability to scrub the air clean of carbon.
Right. We know everything we need to know about ocean ecosystems, so there shouldn't be any problem with dumping millions of tonnes of limestone into them.
The project's coordinator, Gilles Bertherin, cites potentially massive ecological benefits from adding limestone to the waters. "Adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the effects of…
hrynyshyn | July 22, 2008I doubt whoever chose today's "quote of day" as it appears on my RSS-fed personalized Google homepage, was thinking about the recent climate-denying nonsense at the American Physical Society. But the timing was impeccable. First, the quote:
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared. - PJ Plauger
When it comes to the climate crisis, that's bang on. Of course, there is always room for dissent on scientific issues, but the key to making sense of any resulting debate is to know who is qualified to weigh in and who isn't.
The…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2008The Internet makes it waaaay to easy to be stupid. Over at my other blog, a collective effort assembled by the Weather Channel, I write exclusively about climate issues. Each of my posts and just about all my colleague's posts dealing with the subject assume that climate change is real and that humans are largely responsible. It's easier that way to keep things short. It also happens to be a reflection of what climatologists think. But almost every post attracts comments from those who beg to differ and last week was no different. Except that some of the comments were more inane than usual.…
hrynyshyn | July 17, 2008I don't have time today to comment on Al Gore's latest challenge to America ;;; "to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years" — except to say that such a plan is at once the best idea to make it to the national stage in years and the most ambitious. More later.
hrynyshyn | July 14, 2008I wanted to like Sizzle. I really did. I like Randy Olson's contributions here on ScienceBlogs to Shifting Baselines. Randy is a former marine biologist and I have a degree in marine biology. He thinks the climate crisis is one of if not the most important public policy challenge of our time. So do I. Global warming pseudoskeptics drive him crazy. Me, too. If anyone should appreciate what Randy's trying to do with his latest documentary, it's me. The problem is, I wasn't quite sure what it is he's trying to do until the last section of the film. I think I figured it out, but I must report…
hrynyshyn | July 11, 2008If you had to identify the most popularly cited threats posed by a changing climate, rising sea levels would be a strong contender. While no one would argue that the fate of hundreds of millions of humans who live in low-lying coastal regions is not a good enough reason to put the brakes on global warming, I'd like to see more attention paid to what's happening beneath the ocean surface at its current level. I'm talking about the possibility of mass coral extinction. It's the subject of a new analysis in Science by an impressive list of 39 scientists from an even more impressive list of…
hrynyshyn | July 10, 2008Not everyone here at ScienceBlogs is happy about a new project appearing here, under the auspices of SEED, and underwritten by none other than Shell. Yes, that's right, the big bad petro products transnational. "The Next Generation of Energy Ideas" is another blog collective, featuring some ScienceBloggers (including me) and a couple of others, most notably Joe Romm of Climate Progress. We'll be tackling a different question, put to us by a SEED editor, each week, and taking turns spewing forth. In return we will be paid for each post. My contributions appear Monday. How do I justify taking…
hrynyshyn | July 10, 2008It's time for the Union of Concerned Scientists' annual scientific integrity editorial cartoon contest. See the candidates and vote for your favorite here. My favorite:
hrynyshyn | July 9, 2008What's not to love about Hawai'i? Well, Honolulu's a bit much, but the island state as a whole seems to understand what it's going to take to beat this whole global warming thing. It just put into a law a requirement that beginning in 2010, all new homes must incorporate solar water heaters.
In so doing, Hawai'i becomes the first state in the union to join the solar water heater bandwagon. It follows Israel, where 90% of homes already have them.
It turns out that, if you happen to live somewhere with plenty of sunshine, solar water heaters make so much sense you'd have to be an idiot not to…
hrynyshyn | July 7, 2008Some guy named Ken Sprague had a thousand pounds of British currency to throw around each year so he decided, for the second year in a row, to hold a competition for editorial cartoons dealing with "climate change and other threats to the environment." Not too surprisingly, many of the entries aren't so much funny as poignant reminders of human stupidity. The Independent offers a slide show of the two dozen best. Here's my favorite by Ukraine's Igor Kondenko. It manages to incorporate a variety of ideas, including a dig at the American can-do spirit, in one simple image:
hrynyshyn | June 27, 2008So much has come down the political pipe in the past few days I've barely had time to think about science. Plus, I'm just about to head off for a 10-day vacation back on Canadian Shield birthright, so I need to get this off my chest: The Second Amendment has to go.
Yesterday's ruling that gives individuals the right to own guns may or may not be good constitutional law. Ed Brayton and just about every one of his commenters seem to agree with it, despite the old conservative-progressive, 5-4 split that usually signals a lapse of intelligence by the majority. I don't know, and I don't think…
hrynyshyn | June 24, 2008The Pew Forum surveys on what Americans think always churn out fascinating results. The latest one, released Monday, is no exception. My favorite tidbit emerges from the clever decision to drill down past the simple question of whether the recipient believes in god to a more sophisticated understanding.
Of particular interest on the Island of Doubt is the question of just how certain are people of faith about what they believe. The answer, which is drawn from 34,000 Americans polled, is that only 71 % are absolutely certain that their god exists. The means the other 29 % harbor some degree of…
hrynyshyn | June 24, 2008It shouldn't be all that difficult to figure out. Do we have the means at our disposal, now, to replace fossil fuels with clean alternatives that won't bankrupt us all? The only two variables we need consider are the energy conversion efficiency ratios of each candidate technology and the costs, up front or amortized, of same. So why can't we agree on this simple question?
Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress, and the blogger responsible for Climate Progress, sums up the disparity in an opinion piece in Nature:
Although it has recently been argued that "enormous advances in energy…
hrynyshyn | June 23, 2008There's much gnashing of teeth among the secular set these days, as South Carolina prepares to offer automobile license plates that declare "I Believe." Just in case other drivers don't get it, the specialty plates will also feature a cross, just as Florida's proposed and rejected plates would have. Is this a breach of the First Amendment, as a lawsuit filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State claims? Or is it much ado about nothing? I can't get worked up ;;;; beyond blogging about it, of course.
South Carolina, like many other states, already offers a standard "In God We…
hrynyshyn | June 20, 2008Sixty years is a blink of the metaphorical eye on geological time scales, and it's still damn fast when you're talking about climate change. While it may be far too long for Wall Street to worry about, six decades is safely with human lifespans, and a study that concludes temperatures in Greenland can shift by 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10°C) in such a short time merits more than a passing mention.
We've known for a few years now that regional climate patterns can shift dramatically with a decade or two, but precise details have been hard to come by, primarily because we just didn't have the…
hrynyshyn | June 17, 2008The man that Republicans believe is the best candidate for president their party has to offer says that lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling would "be very helpful in the short term resolving our energy crisis." This may not be the least intelligent statement to be made in the 2008 campaign to date ;;;; Ed Brayton prefers McCain's demonstration of his lack of understanding of basic legal principles ;;;; but it still boggles the mind.
No one even tangentially familiar with the petroleum industry would dare suggest that the time-frame involved in exploring, reviewing…
hrynyshyn | June 13, 2008Among the most common arguments to emerge from attendees of the climate-change slide show we members of Al Gore's Climate Project hear is "what about nuclear energy?" After all, it doesn't produce any greenhouse gas emissions, at least not while operating, and the technology is already available. Well, there are three reasons why nuclear energy isn't part of a realistic solution to climate change.
One is the time it takes to get a nuke running. First you have to conduct an environmental review of the project and site. Then you apply for federal and local permits. Then you sit through long…