hrynyshyn | October 22, 2007Jon Gertner's feature in the current Sunday New York Times magazine is a timely reminder of 1) why the Nobel Committee is giving peace prizes to environmentalists and climatologists, and 2) why (as if we needed another reason) Bjorn Lomborg is wrong when he argues mitigating climate change is a poor use of money.
Gertner begins by pointing out that while sea level rise tends to get all the attention from the long list of bad things that come with a warmer planet, the threat posed by declining freshwater supplies in places like the western half of the United States is at least as troubling.
As…
hrynyshyn | October 21, 2007I've just come across a wonderful concept thanks to Grist. I have no idea if it will work, but it seems worth trying: Run by the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, and the Ecology Center, Catalog Choice can, they claim, "put a stop to all those unwanted catalogs clogging your mailbox."
Since its debut last week, some 20,000 people have signed up for the service, already halting over 50,000 unwanted catalogs. That's a small fraction of the 19 billion catalogs mailed in the U.S. each year (made out of 53 million trees), but it's a start. Did we mention it's free?…
hrynyshyn | October 18, 2007Sooner or later, it would seem even the most brilliant and accomplished scientist says something stupid. James Watson's disappointing pronouncement on race and intelligence is in no way excusable, but it may be explainable. Would that it were not so, but I fear the law of inevitable stupidity will only become more apparent thanks to human longevity and the ever-expanding volume of the blogosphere.
Watson is far from being alone when it comes to that subset of distinguished and accomplished elder statesmen and women of academia who have stepped over the line of reason. Consider these other…
hrynyshyn | October 16, 2007Just about everyone pushing civilization to kick its fossil-fuel habit includes photovoltaics in the list of renewable technologies that will be required to fill the power supply gap. And just about every week one can read about a new breakthrough that promises to make in solar cell technology cheaper and more efficient. But how reliable are those reports? Not very according to one expert.
Solar power is expensive, says the conventional wisdom. Too expensive to be competitive with oil, coal and gas. True in most places, thought not in remote areas far from the grid. I once lived on a…
hrynyshyn | October 15, 2007I've never met Bjorn Lomborg. Never exchanged emails or shared a public forum with him. Although I have seen him speak twice, and I have to concede he's a compelling character, one who's almost impossble to ignore. Until now, I just couldn't figure out how someone as obviously bright and dedicated could be so very wrong. But thanks to the Guardian's Juliette Jowit, it's now clear that guy just doesn't care whether he's right or wrong.
In Sunday's Observer, Jowit tried to find out why Lomborg believes most of the world's polar bear populations aren't facing any threats, despite a clear trend…
hrynyshyn | October 12, 2007Instead of celebrating the news that my man Al Gore is sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the thousands of scientists who supplied the raw material for the slide show that made him "the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding" of climate change, I am compelled to address a list of alleged errors in said slide show. Thank you High Court Justice Michael Burton. No really. Thanks.
As a member of Gore's Climate Project, the team our new Nobel laureate has entrusted to present his slide show, I could take umbrage at the mere notion of inaccuracies therein…
hrynyshyn | October 11, 2007Anyone needing a good rebuttal to arguments in favor of reviving the nuclear power industry -- like this hopelessly amateurish, anachronistic and ill-informed screed on the SciFi Channel's technology page -- need look no further than a concise summary by Walt Patterson, an associate fellow at Chatham House in the UK.
The bad news is it's posted behind the Nature subscription wall at em>Nature 449, 664 (11 October 2007). The good news is Mr. Patterson's got a website with much of the arguments freely available. Plus I have a few spare moments to post the nub of his brief essay, titled "…
hrynyshyn | October 10, 2007It was only three years ago that an environmentalist, Wangari Muta Maathai, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Is the Nobel committee prepared to award this year's prize to another champion of the environment? Betsafe.com, a live-betting site, is giving the best odds to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (3.25 to 1) and Al Gore (3.35 to 1). In third place at 4 to 1 is Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Canadian Inuit who has made drawing the world's attention to the effects of climate change on the Arctic her raison d'être for the last few years.
The best bet on someone who is actually involved in…
hrynyshyn | October 9, 2007Time magazine takes aim at yoga. And a lot of people ain't going to like what reporter Pamela Paul concludes:
The truth is, yoga, regardless of the form, doesn't offer a comprehensive way to get fit. According to a study by the American Council on Exercise, a national nonprofit organization that certifies fitness instructors and promotes physical fitness, dedicated yoga practitioners show no improvement in cardiovascular health. It's not the best way to lose weight either. A typical 50-min. class of hatha yoga, one of the most popular styles of yoga in the U.S., burns off fewer calories than…
hrynyshyn | October 8, 2007Getting around the problem of a lack of precise temperature measurements from anything but the most recent past is one of the most fascinating aspects of climatology. Today I came across yet another study that supports the notion that the earth, and more specifically the oceans, are warming at the rate climate change models predict, and it's so... cool... I just have to write about it.
Most anyone who has even made a cursory attempt to understand the scientific underpinnings of the consensus on global warming -- by watching An Inconvenient Truth, say -- will be familiar with ice-core data,…
hrynyshyn | October 7, 2007They call it "climate porn," for lack of a more sophisticated vocabulary. Sensationalist. Alarmist. Hyperbolic. You pick the term. But the criticism is only valid if the media coverage of climate change is based on something other than a fair representation of the science of climate change. So is it? This week's edition of the BBC's radio program(me) One Planet takes a poorly-aimed stab at the question. Instead of even trying to provide an answer, the producers merely reiterate the claim that the coverage is alarmist. Excuse me, but we already knew that. The real question is, is the alarmism…
hrynyshyn | October 4, 2007Look what the French are up to on the climate change front. According to Nature, a wide coalition of government, business, labor and environmental advocates have agreed on the following:
All newly built homes to produce more energy than they consume by 2020. Renovate all existing buildings to save energy. Ban incandescent light bulbs by 2010. Reduce greenhouse-gas emission by 20% by 2020.
Increase renewable energy from 9% to 20-25% of total energy consumption by 2020.
Bring transport emissions back to 1990 levels. Reduce vehicle speed limits by 10 kilometres per hour. Taxes and incentives to…
hrynyshyn | October 1, 2007Freeman Dyson is one of those important scientists it's impossible to ignore, even when he's dead wrong. In an interview with Salon, he says lots of silly things -- don't worry about the polar bear, religion and science are compatible, and "we have no reason to think that climate change is harmful." But you gotta love the guy anyway...
You gotta love him for two reasons. First, because he came up with the very cool idea of the Dyson sphere, a mammoth shell surrounding a star that supplies the inhabitants of the interior with the maximum amount of solar energy. Second, because he's humble…
hrynyshyn | September 27, 2007The right-wing elements of the blogosphere have long despised Jim Hansen, he of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, for repeatedly undermining their thesis that all climatologists are either idiots or communists. But the one thing they really can't stand is someone who has the nerve to change his mind.
Having run out of distortions and exaggerations to nail to Hansen's proverbial posterior, they have turned to complete fiction. Tim "Deltoid" Lambert has all the details, but I want to explore the bizarre notion that scientists should never change their minds, which is implicit in this…
hrynyshyn | September 27, 2007No, there's no revolutionary finding that maybe the world isn't warming. At least, not yet. But a group of researchers has at least come across evidence that one of the dreaded feedback mechanisms that could accelerate the temperature rise beyond our ability to cope may not be such a threat after all. And just in time -- after all the fuss about record sea ice minima in the Arctic, we could use some good news.
The ecosystems in question are also in the Arctic. It's the not-so-permanent permafrost of the northern peatlands, terrain that has over the milennia sequestered oodles carbon, that has…
hrynyshyn | September 27, 2007Perhaps it isn't fair to make fun of the social sciences, and I know behavioral ecology has its merits, but can you believe people get paid to study how men and women hook up? From New Scientist we learn that:
... a little bit of flirting - smiling, raising eyebrows, nodding - goes a long way towards attracting a woman, even outweighing the negative effects of some men's antisocial nature. "Antisocial men can make up a lot of ground just by being flirtatious," says psychologist Andrew Clark.
Clark presented his findings at an Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour meeting hosted by…
hrynyshyn | September 25, 2007From the "everything you thought you knew about X is wrong" files: an exposé on exercise. Seems there really is no evidence that working out or running hard will help you lose weight. Instead, it all comes down to diet. From New York magazine:
For the last 60 years, researchers studying obesity and weight regulation have insisted on treating the human body as a thermodynamic black box: Calories go in one side, they come out the other, and the difference (calories in minus calories out) ends up as either more or less fat. The fat tissue, in this thermodynamic model, has nothing to say in the…
hrynyshyn | September 21, 2007Wal-Mart scares me on the best of days, but not quite like this. Seems there was a two-year-old who "had a fit" when he came across a Wal-Mart Halloween display that came to life before his innocent little eyes:
The tot was with his grandmother on Tuesday night at the Hendersonville [N.C.] Super Wal-Mart when a Halloween display seemed to take on a life of its own.
As Hendersonville resident Jan Overcash and Tucker were leaving the store, an employee directed their attention to the display, said Overcash, 47. It seemed harmless at first.
"The head was still on it, but then the arms raised up…