hrynyshyn | February 1, 2008Having torn a thin strip off statician William Briggs recently for what seems to me to be a disingenuous attack on the climatology community, it seems only fair to commend him for a succinct and poignant post, this time on the nonsensical argument over who's allowed to criticize.
Briggs, tired of being criticized for criticizing the anthropogenic global warming consensus because he's not a full-time climatologist, points out that
...the public-comment restriction must, by logic, go both ways. If you are not allowed to offer negative commentary because you are not a climatologist, then you are…
hrynyshyn | January 31, 2008An editorial in the current edition of the journal Nature suggests we science types take advantage of the writers' strike. It does this under the headline "A quantum of solace," stolen from the next Bond flick. The headline's a stretch, and so is the editorial itself, but hey...
Here's the essential bit:
Scientists often complain that they can never change the way that science is portrayed in films, which seems as if the screenplays are written on a planet with different laws of physics. But, to quote an earlier Bond film, never say never. Indeed, today is a propitious time for such…
hrynyshyn | January 30, 2008... or, at least, in this one case, he's on the right track. Although the editors at the journal Nature don't think so. In fact, they tear a strip off the guy in last week's editorial, and I'm not really sure why.
Here's the Romney quote that ignited Nature's ire:
"We spend $30 billion a year in the National Institutes of Health, and we lead the world in health-care products. In defence, we spend even more. We lead the world in defence products," he told the Detroit Economic Club on 14 January. "Why not also invest in energy and fuel technology right here in Michigan?"
As Nature notes, "these…
hrynyshyn | January 29, 2008Upon the advice of Roger Pielke Jr., who in a recent post at Prometheus praises the appearance of two new blogs, I checked out William M. Briggs, Statistician. Although the most recent post there, "Is climatology a pseudoscience?" begins with an intriguing premise, it eventually deteriorates into a sad self-parody by invoking the venerable Bob Parks' Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science.
Here's how Briggs starts out:
...suppose, if you are able, that significant man-made climate change is false; further, that it cannot happen, and that all changes to the climate system are due to external…
hrynyshyn | January 28, 2008The latest example of irrational, Medieval policy-making in Washington to outrage these parts of the blogosphere is a three-week-old story from NPR in which we learn that federal officials oppose the distribution of cheap "overdose-rescue" kits to heroin addicts. Why? Well, according to Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy...
the rescue programs might take away the drug user's motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.
"Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care…
hrynyshyn | January 25, 2008CBC reports that Canada's "national science adviser Arthur Carty would be retiring on March 31, and that the position and office would be phased out." To which I could only say: "Who would want the job anyway? You'd just be ignored and made to feel small and insignificant."
John Smol, a leading ecology professor and researcher with Queen's University, said he found the news "troubling and worrisome."
"Having someone in a position to advise the prime minister or a cabinet minister gave me more confidence in the process," Smol said. "There's so little of this contact between the scientific…
hrynyshyn | January 25, 2008The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell says "after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand." This in an email from Jeroen van der Veer to his staff. Hmmm.
That means two things: even more demand for the expensive stuff, like Alberta's tar sands, and really expensive gasoline. Unless, that is, van der Veer's more optimistic scenario comes to pass:
The other route to the future is less painful, even if the start is more disorderly. This Blueprints scenario sees numerous coalitions emerging to take on the challenges of economic development, energy security and…
hrynyshyn | January 23, 2008Will a warmer world mean fewer hurricanes hitting American soil? Nobody really knows. But a study just published in Geophysical Research Letters is bound to provide fodder for those who enjoy heralding every little morsel of evidence to support their contention that climate change is a communist plot.
"Global warming and United States landfalling hurricanes," by Chunzai Wang of NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, connects the dots between wind shear patterns (the difference between high- and low-altitude wind speeds) and long-term trends in storms that hit the U.S. (…
hrynyshyn | January 22, 2008Too much of anything is a bad thing, and skepticism is no exception. Indeed, without some degree of trust, modern society would be impossible. Which brings us to another of those questions that dominated last weekend's North Carolina Science Blogging Conference: Just what are bloggers good for, anyway?
Thousands of years back, long before the advent of toll-free product help lines, the typical member of Homo sapiens was entirely capable of evaluating the advice and opinions of their family, friends and hunting-party colleagues. Most knowledge was essential, and therefore shared by all members…
hrynyshyn | January 21, 2008We bloggers tend to assume, or at least hope, that blogging is intrisincally a Good Thing. But at this past weekend's North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, some even dared ask if we can save science. If that's not a tall order, I don't know what is.
The conference drew a couple of hundred veteran bloggers, students and scientists from across the continent and abroad -- including a healthy representation from our own ScienceBlogs.com gang -- to the Sigma Xi headquarters in Research Triangle Park for a day of debate over what blogging can and cannot do, its relationship to journalism,…
hrynyshyn | January 19, 2008Coal is everywhere in the news. Which is a good thing. Especially when the news is bad. For example:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The country's fourth-largest coal producer, Massey Energy Co., has agreed to a $30 million settlement with the government over allegations that over seven years it routinely polluted hundreds of streams and waterways in West Virginia and Kentucky with sediment-filled waste water and coal slurry.
...
The pollution "destroyed streams, destroyed fish habitat. There was definitely an environmental impact here," Granta Nakayama, the assistant EPA administrator for enforcement,…
hrynyshyn | January 18, 2008So, there's this town in Montana, see. Name of Choteau. And seems that science ain't so popular in those parts...
School authorities' cancellation of a talk that a Nobel laureate climate researcher was to have given to high school students has deeply divided this small farming and ranching town at the base of the east side of the Rocky Mountains.
The scholar, Steven W. Running, a professor of ecology at the University of Montana, was scheduled to speak to about 130 students here last Thursday about his career and the global changes occurring because of the earth's warming. Dr. Running was a…
hrynyshyn | January 17, 2008It didn't take but two weeks for President George W. Bush to resume his war on science. Collateral damage this time will be of the cetacean order, thanks to an executive order exempting the Navy from any inconvenient environmental laws.
From the AP:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush exempted the Navy from an environmental law so it can continue using sonar in its anti-submarine warfare training off the California coast -- a practice critics say is harmful to whales and other marine mammals.
...
The Navy training exercises, including the use of sonar, "are in the paramount interest of the…
hrynyshyn | January 15, 2008Now you can say that I've grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there's a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices ... In the tower of song
;;;; Leonard Cohen
Predicting the future is rarely a wise move, even for a scientist whose job it is to come up with ways of doing just that, if one cares about a public reputation. Fortunately, there are some courageous researchers out there willing to take a stab. The emerging consensus in climatology is that 2008 will be...
... nothing special.
A…
hrynyshyn | January 14, 2008A new study of Antarctic ice trends by an impressively international group of scientists has raised the alarms bells, and not just in the blogosphere, either. We should always take notice when reputable researchers find things are worse than expected, but let's not put out tenders for the Ark just yet.
The first thing to note about "Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling" in the latest edition of Nature Geology (doi:10.1038/ngeo102) is that the abstract begins with "Large uncertainties remain in the current and future contribution to sea level…
hrynyshyn | January 12, 2008I've been presenting Al Gore's climate-change slide show for a year now, spreading the "message" to anyone prepared to receive it on the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My version has evolved, along with the science, and the social and political landscape. But one part of Gore's presentation that I never embraced was his conviction that global warming is a moral issue. Now I finally can point to someone who can explain why it's a mistake to confuse moral imperatives with environmental advocacy: Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, whose essay in this coming Sunday's New York Times…
hrynyshyn | January 10, 2008We may never live it down. The sight of George W. Bush traipsing about his ranch in Texas, extolling the virtues of switchgrass-derived ethanol as a replacement for gasoline generated more than a few chuckles among scientifically literate environmentalists. Yet another example of the commander in chief's fanciful world view, right? Probably. But a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that maybe, just maybe, he was on to something real.
"Net energy of cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass" by M.R. Schmer, et al. at the University of Nebraska…
hrynyshyn | January 9, 2008Did Clinton win the New Hampshire Democratic primary Tuesday because her name came before Obama's on the ballot? SciBlogger Matt "Framing Science" Nisbet has a couple of posts referring us to someone who seems convinced she did. I'm not so sure, but find the mainstream media's reluctance to at least entertain the notion at little curious.
According to social scientist, and presumably survey expert, Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, serious candidates whose names appear higher on ballot lists enjoy a significant advantage:
Our analysis of all recent primaries in New Hampshire showed that…
hrynyshyn | January 9, 2008Are the ice sheets about to melt away? Andrew Revkin of the New York Times offers a news story and a blog post that explores what the scientists trying to answer the question have to say. Both are worth reading, but I found the "Dot Earth" blog post, which is just as journalistically sound as the "official" story, more interesting. The headline on the blog post is an excellent summary: "Melting Ice = Rising Seas? Easy. How Fast? Hard."
For those with even less time than I have to keep up with the flood of information on this more critical question, here are the highlights from Revkin's blog:…
hrynyshyn | January 7, 2008With a little over a year left for analog television broadcasts, just about every non-Luddite who hasn't already bought an HDTV will be doing so in 2008. For most, the selection process will boil down to getting the largest set in their price range. More sophisticated buyers will weigh the pros and cons of the plasma, LCD, rear-projection technologies. But there is another criteria that we should consider: the science of power consumption.
Analog TV will be history on Feb. 17, 2009. The U.S. government has already started offering $40 coupons for those who want to continue using their old-…