hrynyshyn | September 20, 2007Georetown University's Jacques Berlinerblau has some strange ideas, but they're usually provocative and sometime worth sharing, which is the case today with his slightly tongue-in-cheek proposal that atheists run a candidate for president. The goal: "This is not about winning or losing. This is about figuring out who nonbelievers are. This is about learning where they are." Hmmm.
Berlinerblau's list of possible candidates is perhaps too silly for his argument -- several of his choices don't qualify as they weren't born in the U.S. (Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushie). But what's really…
hrynyshyn | September 20, 2007We'll never know what role, if any, the mockery of the New Atheists had in the decision taken yesterday by the Toronto Catholic District School Board to let the girls in their charge get the HPV vaccine. But for once, it feels good to pass on the news that empirical evidence has trumped irrational faith.
The decision came just a couple of days after the news spread that that another nearby school board, just down the road from Toronto in Halton, " could become the first in Ontario to ban public health nurses from administering the HPV vaccine to young girls at local schools." From the Globe…
hrynyshyn | September 19, 2007Allow me to be among the first bloggers to take advantage of the end of the New York Times Select subscription-only firewall, by pointing to Thomas Friedman's explanation of "why I remain a climate skeptic -- not a skeptic about climate change, but a skeptic that we're going to be able to mitigate it." I say he's a surrender monkey.
Not because he's wrong about the Herculean hurdles facing any society that tries to put an end to our climate-changing ways. He's right about that, as he describes the incredibly rapid pace of industrialization and modernization taking place in Doha, Qatar, and…
hrynyshyn | September 18, 2007The best line from the Emmy's on Sunday night was Stephen Colbert, replying to Jon Stewart's suggestion that award ceremonies might bewasteful and bad for the environment:
Colbert: Jon. If entertainers stop publicly congratulating each other, then the earth wins.
Of course, I didn't actually watch the entire Emmy Awards show, so I suppose someone else could have said something wittier. But I doubt it.
hrynyshyn | September 18, 2007Last week it was the disappearing polar ice cap. This week it's the melting permafrost, which contains a heap big quantity of greenhouse gases, which, if released to the atmosphere, "the Kyoto Protocol will seem like childish prattle," according to one expert. But how worried should be really be about melting tundra?
The new warning comes from one Sergei Zimov, chief scientist at the Russian Academy of Science's North Eastern Scientific station, which Reuters describes as "three plane rides and eight times zones away from Moscow." Here's the essence of his scary scenario:
For millenniums [sic…
hrynyshyn | September 17, 2007Forget about framing for a second. What about the messengers? Speaking to the BBC's World Service, Jim Hansen bemoans the dearth of good science communicators. Given the context of the interview, I think he's referring specifically to climate science communicators. The entire interview is online, but here's the most interesting comment, which I have transcribed for your immediate edification:
The interviewer,Carrie Gracie, refers to the long history of conflict between science and the political establishment, and asks Hansen: "Do you see yourself as being along a frontline that;s always been…
hrynyshyn | September 16, 2007A pair of stories in Saturday's Washington Post would have us believe that atheism is on the rise in America and in Europe. And despite the popularity of the subject here on ScienceBlogs, the culture of science barely rates a mention in either story. Also missing are much in the way of quantitative evidence to back up the main thesis, but there are some hints that the recent proliferation of "New Atheist" literature may be responsible for whatever growth in atheism there really is.
The Post's story on the situation in Europe is headlined " In Europe and U.S., Nonbelievers Are Increasingly…
hrynyshyn | September 15, 2007Everyone, even Wired magazine is jumping on the "news" from the European Space Agency that the Northwest Passage is open, right across the Arctic Archipelago. Which is odd because American researchers made the same announcement earlier this summer. We need better media coverage of the effects of climate change than this.
First, the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado had this to say on Sept 4:
Another notable aspect of August 2007 was the opening of the Northwest Passage... Might the Northeast Passage open in the next few weeks?
Five days later the center noted…
hrynyshyn | September 13, 2007This is not good. A report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme says toxic pollutants, presumably estrogen mimics and other organochlorines, are skewing the sex ratio in Greenland.
The Guardian reports:
Twice as many girls as boys are being born in some Arctic villages because of high levels of man-made chemicals in the blood of pregnant women, according to scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap).
The scientists, who say the findings could explain the recent excess of girl babies across much of the northern hemisphere, are widening their…
hrynyshyn | September 13, 2007That's the big question I take away from a surprisingly fascinating exchange on the what I thought was a tired "how to promote atheism?" debate, in which ...
... Jake Young of the Pure Pendantry blog makes a respectable, if somewhat lengthy, attempt to argue that linking science with atheism too intimately will scare off people of faith and turn science into even more of an elistist community, and Jason Rosenhouse at EvolutionBlog counters that atheists need to make their case more forcefully if rational philosophy is ever to find a position of influence in society. Both, including the…
hrynyshyn | September 13, 2007Bjorn Lomborg's new book, Cool It! is getting less than sympathetic reviews from those whose job it is to understand climate science. No surprise there. But here's a review by an economist, in Nature no less. Given that Lomborg approaches the question of what to do -- and what not to do -- about climate change from a conventional cost-benefit perspective based on the advice of economists, including four Nobel laureates, the Nature review is devastating.
The review is behind a subscription wall, so here's the money paragraph:
Unfortunately, Lomborg's thesis is built on a deep misconception of…
hrynyshyn | September 11, 2007Monday we heard that a group of rogue Makah Indians killed a gray whale without going through the red tape that they're supposed to (or bothering to land it). Tuesday comes a new study that shows the eastern Pacific gray whale population, from which the doomed creature was taken, isn't doing as well as we once thought. The first item is more sensational, but hardly ecologically significant, even with the new data on the whale's pre-whaling population size. But still, interesting timing...
The new study, by Elizabeth Alter, Eric Rynes, and Stephen R. Palumbi, measured genetic variation among…
hrynyshyn | September 10, 2007Well, for what it's worth, the U.S. Geological Survey has confirmed what just about every independent observer of the polar bear has been saying for years: time's running out. According to the executive summary of the service's initial findings as part of its investigation into whether to add Ursus maritimus to the Endangered Species list, the Alaskan population has as little as 45 years left until extirpation. The other North American populations could stick around a bit longer, but when the habitat is on the way out, things are pretty grim all over. To wit (emphasis mine):
Projected…
hrynyshyn | September 10, 2007Why are so many economists so dismissive of attempts to do something about climate change? Adam Finkel, a regulatory law expert at the University of Pennsylvania, has a wonderful take on that question, in a comment posted at The Intersection, in response to a recent Newsweek column by Robert Samuelson. The money quote, so to speak:
[George F. Will], asked a legitimate half-question: "Are we sure the climate at this particular moment is exactly right, and that it must be preserved, no matter the cost?" If economists would ask, and help us answer, the more interesting half of the question--"…
hrynyshyn | September 7, 2007Among the axioms of the day is that we live in a time of change, and those changes are taking place at breakneck speed and accelerating. So rapid are the changes that science fiction writer William Gibson has given up trying to stay ahead of the curve. Historian-journalist Gwynne Dyer argues Gibson is dead wrong. Little of consequence has changed for the developed world for most of the 80 years, he says in a compelling essay published last month. On the other hand...
On the other hand, that status quo situation could be about to come to an end, thanks to a little trend we like to call climate…
hrynyshyn | September 6, 2007It's easy to feel superior when we read stories like "Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god." But are we in the Enlightened West really any better than this sort of thing:
KATHMANDU (Reuters, Sept 5) - Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.
Nepal Airlines, which has two Boeing aircraft, has had to suspend some services in recent weeks due the problem.
The goats were sacrificed in front of the troublesome aircraft Sunday at…
hrynyshyn | September 4, 2007Read the Science Creative Quarterly's list of 15 statements that are as close to being true as we can get without invoking dogma. You won't learn much, but I might win an iPod, allowing my wife and me easy access to our music collection without having to figure out a way to keep all those CDs easily accessible, but still out of reach of our 10-month-old son.
hrynyshyn | September 4, 2007Everybody loves dolphins. They say wild dolphins have been known to save a human's life every now and then. So it only makes sense that swimming with dolphins would be a good thing, right? Wrong. A recently published meta-analysis of the last few years of studies of the alleged benefits -- so-called Dolphin Assisted Therapy -- confirms what I and, according to another recent paper, many others have long suspected.
The evidence, it seems, doesn't support claims that children and some adults suffering from physical and mental illnesses can improve their health by getting in the water and…
hrynyshyn | August 31, 2007Naomi Oreskes, the researcher who could find not a single peer-reviewed climate science publication that disagreed with the consensus that humans are largely to blame for global warming, defends herself against a pathetic attempt to show that she was wrong. (thanks Stranger Fruit.) But in her list of reasons why we shouldn't pay attention to her detractors, there is sad and completely unnecessary little example of the ad hominem logical fallacy:
6) The author is a medical researcher. As a historian of science I am trained to analyze and understand scientific arguments, their development,…
hrynyshyn | August 31, 2007Talk about alarmist climate science. A new study has confirmed earlier propositions that the most recent ice age will be the last, for at least half a million years, if we don't stop burning fossil fuels. But I say, this is not something we should be worried about.
In "The long-term legacy of fossil fuels," (Tellus B, 59(4): 664-672, September 2007), Toby Tyrell, John Shepherd and Stephanie Castle at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton conclude that the ocean's ability to absorb all that carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere to keep our decadent lifestyles afloat will…