hrynyshyn | September 30, 2011This story has been around a while, but I haven't been blogging much lately so I am only getting around to it now.
"..the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones."
So says a new paper. Troubling findings. Something's not quite right, and am hoping to nail it down. "The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change," by Harvard's Dan Kahan et al. tested a sufficiently large sample size of…
hrynyshyn | September 21, 2011From Long-term trend in global CO2 emissions, published by PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, comes some good news:
Even including the USA whose emissions in 2008-2010 are 11 percent more than in 1990, the industrialised countries have on average reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about 7.5 percent in the period 2008-2010, compared with 1990. Together they are well on course to achieve the [Kyoto] protocol, target of a collective average decrease in greenhouse gas emissions of 5.2 percent between 2008 and 2012 compared to the…
hrynyshyn | September 20, 2011Drawing attention to misinformed pseudoskeptical analyses of peer-reviewed climatology studies is usually counterproductive. But in this case, it's worth mentioning because the author makes such a common mistake that exploring the error might actually help shed light on the why so many people are easily led astray.
The offender is Anthony Watts, who is arguably (depending on how much weight you assign to blog popularity polls) among the most influential anti-science bloggers out there. His error was to confuse (or conflate, to use a fancier term beloved by social scientists) a direct effect…
hrynyshyn | September 19, 2011More than a few writers have gotten a lot of mileage out of comparing the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries' propaganda efforts to counter rapidly rising mountains of science that counter their "it's all good" message. Al Gore featured it in his slide show. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway wrote an entire book, Merchants of Doubt.
The fact that not only were the denial tactics similar, but so are some of the PR firms and even individuals involved makes for compelling storytelling. But maybe we haven't taken the analogy far enough. Über-foodie Michael Pollan just wrote a piece in The Nation that…
hrynyshyn | September 19, 2011Fill in the blanks:
It is customary in the popular media and in many journal articles to cite a projected _________ figure as if it were a given, a figure so certain that it could virtually be used for long-range planning purposes. But we must carefully examine the assumptions behind such projections. And forecasts that ________ is going to level off or decline this century have been based on the assumption that the developing world will necessarily follow the path of the industrialized world. That is far from a sure bet.
That comes from an essay at Yale's e360.
Given that you're reading a…
hrynyshyn | September 9, 2011A letter in Climatic Change looking at the life-cycle greenhouse warming potential of natural gas raised a lot of hackles a little while back. If, as the authors posit, replacing coal and oil combustion with gas-fired turbines could actually accelerate global warming rather than slow it down, then we have a serious problem, given the investments being made in gas.
Much the skepticism about that study could be traced to the background of the lead author, Robert Howarth, who happens to have a history of opposing gas fracking. Of course, Howarth's scientific credentials, or his activism, have…
hrynyshyn | September 2, 2011Wouldn't it be great if everyone was as good at admitting their mistakes?
Abstract: Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims. Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell [1] that was recently published in Remote Sensing is most likely…
hrynyshyn | August 31, 2011Number of hits returned when Googling news sources for "James Hansen" (head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and perhaps the world's best-known climatologist, who was arrested in front of the White House this week as part of a coordinated climate change campaign) and "Keystone" (XL, the expansion of a continental oil pipeline that will bring Canadian oil sands product to refineries in the southern U.S.): 208
Number of hits returned when Googling news sources for "Daryl Hannah" (Splash and Blade Runner actress) and "Keystone": 659.
(Searches carried out Aug. 31, 2011 at 8:50 a.m.)
hrynyshyn | July 21, 2011"Gobal warming is not about overconsumption, morality, ideology or capitalism. It is largely the result of human beings generating energy by burning hydrocarbons and coal."
-- Mark Lynas, in his book The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans
Provocative? Bleedingly obvious? Guaranteed to generate some comment (and sell some books). Worth pondering. Which I will do before weighing in.
hrynyshyn | July 15, 2011Way back when I was just a novice environmentalist, Greenpeace seemed like a good idea. It published a decent newsletter, was drawing attention to otherwise neglected issues, and, while understandably suspicious of technology, seemed to have more than a grudging respect for science as a tool to preserve those things worse preserving. It was one of the few NGOs that received what little I could afford to donate to charitable causes. I don't regret supporting them in the 80s, and not just because I shared the group's desire to save the whales.
I still want to save the whales. I no longer…
hrynyshyn | June 20, 2011Debating the merits and dangers of fracking shale gas has become a major obession of those who worry about energy and the climate. Yale's e360's latest contribution comes in the form a forum that includes a wide variety of perspectives pro and con.
For me, the wisest observation, and the one that really trumps all others, comes from Kevin Anderson, who directs the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research's energy program:
... the only responsible action with regard to shale gas, or any "new" unconventional fossil fuel, is to keep it in the ground -- at least until there is a meaningful…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2011The title of this post won't mean much until you read this contribution to The Conversation, a new and laudable attempt by climatologists to get out the message that time's a wastin,' folks. Here's a taste:
We're only a few decades away from a major tipping point, plus or minus only about a decade. The rate at which the ice sheets would melt is fairly uncertain, but not the result that says we are very close to a tipping point committing to such melt and breakdown.
...
Is it irresponsible or "alarmist" of climatologists to point this out? The science brief for policy is not to prescribe…
hrynyshyn | June 10, 2011This video, a selection of TV news clips that serve to illustrate Bill McKibben's recent op-ed on climate change denial, has already made the rounds, but as it deserves as wide an audience as possible, I'll do my bit.
It's also noteworthy because the op-ed marked a first for McKibben: the use of a snarky, satirical tone. Until now, he's been a upbeat cheerleader for climate change activists. Sooner or later, it would, we all get tired of banging our head against a wall and have to lash out at idiocy.
hrynyshyn | June 9, 2011The flaws with Wednesday's anti-renewables op-ed in the New York Times begin with the headline and continue through just about every paragraph. On second thought, perhaps the problems begin with the decision of the New York Times to run "The Gas Is Greener" in the first place. But let's start with the headline.
"The Gas is Greener" may seem like a clever double entendre, referring as it does to wishful thinking and the alleged merits of natural gas as a relatively clean source of energy. But it fails on both counts. First, the entire essay is predicated on the notion that environmentalists…
hrynyshyn | May 26, 2011OK. Taking on logical flaws in Wall Street Journal op-ed items is about as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel, but I can't let Matt Ridley's latest affront to common sense pass without firing off a few rounds for practice if nothing else.
Under a staggeringly unimaginative headline of "Inconvenient Truths About 'Renewable' Energy," Ridley argues that renewable energy isn't really renewable, or at least no more renewable that fossil fuels. How does he go about this without shattering his backbone? By pointing out that Haitians are destroying their half of their island home by cutting down…
hrynyshyn | May 23, 2011David Appell at Quark Soup draws our attention (via Stoat) to a graph in the recent America's Climate Choices report from the NAS/NRC. If the forecasts on which the authors rely come to pass, it's going to take almost a couple of decades for U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions to return to post-recession levels. Sounds like good news.
Two years ago, Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute wrote of a watershed moment, and while it looks like he was a bit too enthusiastic -- long-term, carbon emissions still rise -- he might have been on to something.
The United States has ended a century of…
hrynyshyn | May 20, 2011A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was a 21-year-old journalism student spending a couple of weeks as an intern at Science Dimension, a government-funded magazine (there weren't any private science magazines in the country). I was assigned two short features while there: one on canola bioengineering and another on Canada's asbestos industry. Both amounted to free publicity for industries heavily supported by the Canadian taxpayer, but I think the canola story withstood professional scrutiny. The asbestos piece? Not so much.
That story continues to haunt me. The only good thing I can…
hrynyshyn | May 18, 2011Indeed:
The main thing is they are in absolute, abject and catastrophic denial about a straightforward set of facts that is probably the most important set of facts we face as a nation, and as human beings on planet earth. They have turned their faces away from climate change in a way that is simply and utterly unforgivable. They now apparently DO feel entitled to their own facts, and they live, campaign and purportedly do their jobs in a zone of outright lies. Lies they have every reason to understand are lies, and lies that will almost certainly result in massive destruction and death.…
hrynyshyn | May 5, 2011I like Tim's Lenton's style, and his substance. He has his detractors -- and his latest essay in Nature is a little light on supporting data -- but he's almost always worth reading. This one is probably a doomed to be ignored because it advocates focusing climate policy efforts on the complex issue of radiative forcing instead of politician-friendly temperature rise, but he's probably right. A teaser:
Ongoing negotiations for a new climate treaty aim to establish a target to limit the global temperature rise to 2 °C above the average temperature before the industrial revolution. But that is…