hrynyshyn | January 4, 2008It's not over until the Supremes rule on any appeal, but yesterday U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper became my new hero when she issued a ruling that ...
...severely limited the Navy's ability to use mid-frequency sonar on a training range off the Southern California coast, ruling that the loud sounds would harm whales and other marine mammals if not tightly controlled.(WaPo, Jan. 4)
As I wrote in the previous post, this could have far-reaching implications for the long-standing war of priorities between the national security hawks and environmental doves.
In particular, Cooper banned…
hrynyshyn | January 3, 2008Should the U.S. Navy be above the law when it comes to saving the whales? So asks Marc Kaufman of the Washington Post. Good question. One with much broader implications as we head into a future that will almost certainly include mandatory limits on all sorts of now-common but environmentally deleterious practices.
The proximate issue is whether the Navy can exempt itself from the provisions of the Endangered Species Act and, more specifically, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, in order to carry out its national security duties. The Navy wants to use active sonar (echolocation to a toothed…
hrynyshyn | January 1, 2008Climate-change chatter in the blogosphere over the Christmas holidays revolved around a provocative op-ed essay in the Washington Post by Bill McKibben, for whom 350 is the most important number. As in 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a curious new strategy from one of the leading global warming activist types, and it bears exploring if for no other reason than it originates in the mind of none other than Jim Hansen.
Yes, that Jim Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Seems he gave an academic talk last month that got lost in the all attention…
hrynyshyn | December 24, 2007The question comprises the headline of an essay in the New Statesman from David Whitehouse, a former BBC science editor and astronomer ;;;; not someone easily dismissed as a psuedoskeptical crank. His argument getting a lot of traction, and I've even been asked "is this legit?" The answer is ...
No.
Whitehouse, of course, says it has stopped. Otherwise, he wouldn't have asked the question. But the flaw in his argument appears early in the essay:
The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001.Global warming has, temporarily or…
hrynyshyn | December 21, 2007Matt Nisbet once again points out that nobody in America cares about climate change. With all due respect to the Pew survey gang, I doubt things are really that bad. Consider a recent poll of Canadians that puts the environment at the top of their political priorities. As a Canadian living in America, I find that disparity hard to explain. We're just not that different.
Matt writes that "you should not be surprised that climate change fails to crack the top 20 most followed issues or the top 20 most covered topics of 2007." Canuck pollster Angus Reid, commenting on the declining popularity of…
hrynyshyn | December 21, 2007From the master of doom and gloom, James Howard Kunstler, comes this attempt to simultaneous amuse and depress:
hrynyshyn | December 20, 2007It doesn't really matter how many transition fossils paleontologists uncover. Creationists are forever claiming fasely that they've produced "nothing which would qualify as intermediate" between today's whales and their terrestrial ancestors. So this week's fascinating news that we might have figured out what such a forebearer looked like is unlikely to change anyone's mind. Still, it would be nice if everyone who rejected evolution watched the video that the journal Nature has made freely available to help explain the paper it just published on what may be "the missing Eocene piece of the…
hrynyshyn | December 18, 2007The latest news in what the journos are calling the "isotope crisis" reminds us why, even for the biggest supporters of Science Debate 2008, there's something more important than a scientifically literate president.
While I'm still in favor of the science blogosphere's new Mission: Impossible ;;;;; convincing even a handful of presidential contenders to publicly exchange their thoughts on matters of science and technology ;;;;; there is much to recommend the argument that choosing a candidate of integrity trumps the need to find someone who understands the laws of thermodynamics.
When the…
hrynyshyn | December 16, 2007The failure of the negotiators at Bali to reach any kind of agreement on a schedule for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has left many observers wondering if maybe it's time to resort to Plan B. Instead of adapting our industrial economy to the physical realities of radiative forcing and positive feedbacks, we should begin the process of adapting ourselves to a much warmer world. And why not? If there's one thing that sets Homo sapiens apart from the rest of the primate gang, it's our ability to adapt. Because planetary ecology isn't that simple, that's why.
Already, the confused logic of…
hrynyshyn | December 13, 2007One of my Facebook friends, someone I only know through the Internet, just invited me to join the new "Atheists >> Theists" group. I'm sure she meant well, but this is exactly the wrong way to go about trying to spread the word about the Enlightenment.
The group has just 24 members, so it's hardly catching on. Not like the just-created Science Debates 2008 Facebook group, which had 1,334 members last time I checked. But still, it's disappointed to see so many people self-identify with such a self-righteous idea.
Of course, most atheists believe their lack of faith is superior to faith…
hrynyshyn | December 12, 2007Just how out of touch with science is Bush's science adviser? Ray Pierrehumbert, a University of Chicago climatologist, bring us a report on a speech by John Marburger at the current meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Unfortunately there are noreal surprises, just the usual denial.
Pierrehumbert prefaces his post at RealClimate by summarizing what he heard about how fast Greenland's ice is melting, which described as "interesting science, fascinating if scary" in part because it represents "changes in the ice that could raise sea level far beyond the projections given in the IPCC…
hrynyshyn | December 12, 2007Get ready for the climate change pseudoskeptics to exploit to their own disingenuous ends the inevitable disagreement among climatologists over just where the latest 12 months falls in the list of warmest years on record. See? they'll argue, the science can't be trusted. Depending on the record, 2007 is either...
the sixth warmest year on record (Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia) or the second warmest (Goddard Institute of Space Studies).
What those in denial probably won't want to focus on is the fact that two natural cycles that have nothing to do with anthropogenic climate…
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2007I don't know how many hours and dollars were spent by this hot-off-the-presses official government duplication of what Chris Mooney laid out two years ago in The Republican War on Science, but I suppose it's always good to have confirmation that:
the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.
The entire PDF is here. It ends with another stunning piece of old but "inescapable" news:
The Committee's 16-month investigation reveals a systematic White House effort to censor…
hrynyshyn | December 10, 2007
A long list of science community luminaries, including Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum of our own Intersection, are trying to organize the first ever presidential candidate debate on matters scientific and technological. This would be a good thing. Science Debate 2008 is at this point just a proposal, however, and it won't materialize without pressure from a much wider support base than the current list, which includes:
Evolution guru Niles Eldredge, Scientific American editor John Rennie, conservation ecologist Stuart Pimm, some corporate heavyweights, two congressmen, a bunch of…
hrynyshyn | December 10, 2007Today we hear about a new study suggesting the north pole's summer ice will be gone within seven years. Not, 40, not 30, not even 13, but seven. I can't find any information from the actual study. All that we know comes from a brief mention in Al Gore's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, so this should be filed under "wait until further confirmation before getting excited and/or alarmed." But it does fit a trend of increasing temporal proximity.
Here's what Gore said:
Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the…
hrynyshyn | December 8, 2007So there was this guy, right? He worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research was specifically targeted at evolutionary processes. But he was a creationist, so he refused to address evolution in his research. So he was fired. So he sued.
In a 2004 letter to [Nathaniel] Abraham, his boss, Woods Hole senior scientist Mark E. Hahn, wrote that Abraham said he did not want to work on "evolutionary aspects" of the National Institutes of Health grant for which he was hired, even though the project clearly required scientists to use the principles of evolution in their analyses…
hrynyshyn | December 7, 2007"In order to stay below 2 °C, global emissions must peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, so there is no time to lose. -- Bali Climate Declaration
Item 1: The U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has come up with a bill that "calls for a roughly 70 percent cut from 2005 levels by 2050 in the production of carbon dioxide and other climate-altering pollutants." (New York Times, Dec. 6, 2007)
Item 2: The mainstream environmental movement, including the likes of Bill McKibben and the Step it Up gang, has widely agreed on a goal of an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gases by 2050…
hrynyshyn | December 4, 2007A little press-commentary comparison shopping is in order following the recent news of a breakthrough in the effort to produce stem cells without using embryonic cells. I promise this won't take long. First, the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, who announced that Bush was right all along to restrict federal funding for embryonic stem cell research:
That Holy Grail has now been achieved.
Now, the words of the editors of New Scientist:
Impressive as this research is, it is not yet the hoped-for panacea.... there is still a long way to go before they can be used as transplants. ... For one…
hrynyshyn | December 4, 2007There is almost no chance the Bali round of negotiations, which get underway this week, will actually accomplish anything of consequence. Mostly because the United States has no stomach for mandatory greenhouse gas emission caps, but also because too many people still can't get their minds around the numbers involved in climate change.
CNN predicts "lengthy and contentious negotiations on how best to combat global warming." That's putting it mildly.
For example, take this sentence from the just-released United Nations Development Program's 2007 Human Development Report: "On the basis of…
hrynyshyn | December 3, 2007Nicole Kidman says her grandmother, a devout Catholic, would have been happy with her work in the soon-to-be-released The Golden Compass. This even though the book, the first of what producers hope will be a triology of films base on Philip Pulman's His Dark Materials series, begins a story that culminates in the overthrow of religion by humanism.
According to a wire story posted on the SciFi Channel website
The books have been lambasted as anti-religious and, more specifically, anti-Catholic, for their themes and the depiction of the Magisterium, a powerful and oppressive group that many…