hrynyshyn | May 3, 2008It wasn't easy keeping my 18-month-old son out of trouble in the crowd that had gathered yesterday to hear Hillary Clinton speak. But it was worth it, if for no other reason than the opportunities to hear presidential candidates deliver their message unfiltered and unedited are rare out here in western North Carolina. Of course, I was disappointed with what I heard on Hendersonville's Main Street. But the little guy didn't do any damage to himself or anyone else, or anyone else's dog, and I did come away with something to think about.
I was disappointed because I'm one of those tree-hugging…
hrynyshyn | May 1, 2008Climatologists probably need to take a stiff drink before they open the papers (or fire up their web browsers) the morning after their studies appear in print or online. Two if the studies involved say anything interesting about global warming. Today's coverage of a Nature paper that predicts a decade-long, regional cooling trend for Europe and North America is sure to give the authors the jitters.
Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, and his co-authors laced their letter with caveats. They call their attempt to model the effects of meridional…
hrynyshyn | May 1, 2008You'd think that the vice-president would have better things to do than try to make life difficult for one of the most endangered species on the planets. But then, you'd be wrong. Via Talking Points Memo, we learn that Dick Cheney's office has been refusing to let the federal government establish new speed limits for boat traffic in northern right whale territory.
We know this thanks to the efforts of the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Henry Waxman, who has released an April 30 letter to Susan Dudley, administrator
of the Office of Information and…
hrynyshyn | April 30, 2008It's hard to say just when humanity stopped trying to prevent climate change. Some say only a few prescient individuals ever really took the threat seriously until the dramatic events of 2012. But by then, of course, it was too late to do anything about it. Still, if we have to pinpoint a specific time that the public conversation began to switch from how to avoid catastrophic global warming to learning to live with the consequences, 2008 would be as good a candidate as any.
It had only been a couple of years since almost-president Al Gore had awoken the American people from their slumber…
hrynyshyn | April 26, 2008I nominate this review of Expelled as the best yet. It's by Ken Hanke, film critic of the Asheville Mountain X Press, the alternative weekly in western North Carolina. The summary is priceless ;;;;; "An interminable, shockingly bad and completely irresponsible slab of propaganda masquerading as fact." And the review is full of gems like:
Junk science meets even junkier filmmaking in Nathan Frankowski's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed--a no more shameless, stupid and loathsome piece of propaganda has ever skulked its way into the theater.
...
The reality is that the film is as phony as Stein…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2008Warning: Anyone who takes this post seriously please resist the temptation to comment.
Over the reported objections of John McCain and national GOP officials, North Carolina's state Republican party is about to run a campaign ad attacking Barack Obama for consorting with Jeremiah Wright. The ad disingenuously implies that Obama was sitting in the congregation when Wright made some of his more inflammatory remarks condemning America, even though there is no evidence to suggest that Obama was anywhere near the church at the time. Why are these kinds of dirty campaign tricks invariably the…
hrynyshyn | April 23, 2008Just about everyone assumes that there's at least 200 years worth of coal left in the ground. This makes fears about greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming all the more acute, coal being the most carbon-intensive of the fossil-fuels. But what if popular estimates of coal reserves are no more accurate that what the oil companies are telling us about oil? What if, in other words, peak coal is as real a possibility as peak oil?
Well, some analysts say that just may be the case. A couple of months ago New Scientist ran a feature under the head of "Coal: Bleak outlook for the black…
hrynyshyn | April 23, 2008Defenders of science and reason everywhere are shocked and appalled that Obama and Clinton have bought into the bogus notion that the science on autism and vaccines is "inconclusive." As plenty of other SciBlings have pointed out, the science is most definitely not inconclusive. (Aetiology Tara's take is straight to the point, but see also Orac and PZ.) There is no link between the two. So now all three presidential contenders have joined the ranks of the irrational fear-mongers. Or have they?
The story that added the two Democrats to the list came from the Washington Post's Fact Checker…
hrynyshyn | April 22, 2008Just in case you needed a reminder of what's wrong with America:
For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women.
In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.
The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas.…
hrynyshyn | April 20, 2008This three-part series on radical skepticism and the rise of conspiratorial thinking about science, by Daniel Engber, in Slate, is required reading for anyone interested in the role of skepticism in science and society. It's called "The Paranoid Style in American Science."
Here's the concluding paragraph to the second of the three parts. But it's not the money quote. For that, you'll have to read the whole thing.
It's no surprise that suspicion of science has grown distended in recent years and now looks a bit like paranoia. Each new uncertainty campaign further degrades our faith in science…
hrynyshyn | April 19, 2008Much has been written, here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, about the media's willingness to give a couple of kids their 15 minutes for challenging scientific orthodoxy, despite the fact that in both cases, the young Galileo-wannabe figures were dead wrong. Now someone has finally summed it all one in one pithy sentence:
I'd like to caution especially my younger readers that you may be very smart, but you should assume that you are making a mistake if you find yourself thinking you are smarter than every scientist in the world put together. (Michael Tobis, Wired Science)
Thanks, Michael. My…
hrynyshyn | April 18, 2008It is hard to think of a better example of doublespeak. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal editorial on George W's climate change speech and came to the exact opposite conclusion of what really happened. I know the WSJ editorial page has been hostile to reality for years when it comes to climatology, but this goes beyond the pale:
The White House deserves credit for playing the political hand in front of it. It would have been easy enough to abdicate responsibility to the next occupant of the Oval Office, who will be far more likely to wave aside economic considerations in the interests of "…
hrynyshyn | April 17, 2008If there's one thing every environmentally minded American can agree on, it's the complete failure of the Bush administration to recognize the severity of the climate crisis. (Greenhouse-gas emissions stablilization by 2025? You've got to be kidding.) But sometimes it seems that's all we can agree on. Take the ongoing squabbling between Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress (with some help from Dave Roberts at Grist) and the Breakthrough gang (Ted Nordhaus, Michael Schellenberger and Roger Pielke Jr.) Their mutual sniping and name-calling was amusing for all of five minutes. Now it's…
hrynyshyn | April 16, 2008The European Space Agency devoted some computer time to this representation of all the space junk orbiting the earth.
It shows trackable objects in low-Earth orbit from the aspect of the North Pole. Low-Earth orbit is the domain of many commercial, military, scientific and navigational satellites as well as debris, which drift for decades before eventually burning up in Earth's atmosphere.
Yikes.
hrynyshyn | April 15, 2008I'm sure James Hansen has better things to do with his NASA paycheck than hire a lawyer to sue a 16-year-old over a libelous statement on her website. Give the amount of time he's spent crafting public letters to governors, prime ministers and corporate CEOs, though, perhaps he could find the time to write a small note expressing his concern to the parents of Kristen Byrnes of Portland, Maine.
Ms. Byrne was featured on NPR's Morning Edition this Tuesday. She's a top student at her school, and to her credit has recognized the importance of skepticism in science, something it took me an extra…
hrynyshyn | April 14, 2008For once, playing the role of unofficial in-house organ for the Republican Party is pays off in the scoop department. The Washington Times is reporting this morning George W. Bush is about to call for legislation that would do something about the country's greenhouse gas emissions. The story is short on details. All we really get is:
"This is an attempt to move the administration and the party closer to the center on global warming. With these steps, it is hoped that the debate over this is over, and it is time to do something," said an administration source close to the White House who is…
hrynyshyn | April 13, 2008It will be interesting to see how the climate change pseudoskeptics spin the latest research from Kerry Emmanuel. He's the guy whose 2005 paper suggesting climate change is making tropical cyclones stronger prompted the use of the "Hurricane Katrina=global warming meme. Al Gore even used the image of a hurricane emerging from a smokestack to promote An Inconvenient Truth, and his slide show included a large section on a causal connection. But now Emmanuel admits he might have been wrong.
Might is the operative word here. In a new paper in the March issue of Bulletin of the American…
hrynyshyn | April 9, 2008Al Gores' climate crisis slide show has a new tenor and his appeal has a new focus. And in my not-so-humble opinion, it's a welcome shift that makes up for a serious deficiency in his previous attempts to change the world's thinking.
When I give his slide show (as a trained member of his Climate Project) I always emphasize that changing light bulbs and buying hybrid cars is a nice start, but what we really need is to change our political leadership and the laws governing greenhouse-gas emissions.
I know why Gore was reluctant to include the political dimension -- beyond his clever opening…
hrynyshyn | April 8, 2008The idea of holding a presidential candidates debate on the role of science in running the country was always a long shot. But those behind Science Debate 2008 must be crying in their coffees this morning with the news that Clinton and Obama have agreed to a CNN-televised forum a week from Sunday on -- wait for it -- "faith, values and other current issues."
I suppose if we're really lucky the moderators will buy Al Gore's argument that climate change is a moral issue, as is stell cell research, energy independence, the teaching of evolution.... But we all know that's not where this thing is…
hrynyshyn | April 8, 2008New York City's political elite have thumbed their noses at common sense, rejecting a plan to impose an $8 traffic fee on cars and trucks entering the Manhattan core during peak hours. I could understand if NYC was a guinea pig for downtown traffic levies. But that's not at all the case. In fact...
According to a New Scientist story from this past November:
NINE months after London started to charge motorists for driving in the city centre, the leaders of the world's cities are falling over themselves to see if they can repeat London's trick of cutting traffic jams. "We have been inundated…