hrynyshyn | August 29, 2007PZ Myers suggested I might have something to say in response to Bjorn "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Lomborg's resurfacing. Indeed I do. The Danish boy wonder is back with a new book, Cool It, in which he makes his case, yet again, that climate change isn't all that bad. He was wrong with his first book, which was savaged by everyone who actually knew the subject matter, and he's even more wrong now.
Salon has an aggressive interview and an excellent book review, and it is on the former that I will base my analysis of Lomborg's major cognitive failure, in lieu of wasting precious time and…
hrynyshyn | August 29, 2007The North Polar ice sheet continues to recede, setting yet another record:
Sea ice extent continues to decline, and is now at 4.78 million square kilometers (1.84 million square miles), falling yet further below the record absolute minimum of 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square miles) that occurred on September 20-21, 2005. -- The National Snow and Ice Data Center, Aug. 28.
Here's the map:
Caveat: this is sea ice extent, not total area coverage. Different groups measure different things. But the trend is unambiguous. The purple line is the median for a typical August.
Note…
hrynyshyn | August 28, 2007Robert Fisk does not deserve to be the inspiration a net-derived term describing a point-by-point debunking of one's argument. He has consistently brought his readers insightful stories about the real world of the Middle East. But my admiration for his skills as a witness to history suffered a near-lethal blow yesterday as I read his latest Independent column, in which he tackles allegedly unanswered questions surrounding the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
Again, I must emphasize that in my opinion, until now Fisk has been a remarkably astute observer of current events in in Lebanon, Israel,…
hrynyshyn | August 27, 2007The climate change denial gang is so predictable. Even when the science as written, and as covered by reputable science journalists, makes it clear that the new evidence bolsters the general consensus, there are those who will give the findings the opposite interpretation. Today's topic is sunspots.
The title of the paper in question actually addresses the issue head on: "Solar-Cycle Warming at the Earth's Surface and an Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity." It's all about using that 11-year sunspot cycle -- the one that produces spectacular aurora and knocks out satellites --…
hrynyshyn | August 24, 2007So Leonardo DiCaprio is picking up where Al Gore left off in the battle to keep Earth habitable. Is this a good thing?
Set aside, for the purposes of this discussion, any misgivings you might have about DiCaprio's acting prowess or lack thereof. They guy has a certain ineffable quality that has propelled him to the top tiers of celebrity, and he has, to his credit, decided to spend some that charismatic capital on the climate change campaign.
There are risks with embracing political and social movements, and not just to one's own career. Many would argue that one of the primary reason why…
hrynyshyn | August 24, 2007The New York Times' Sandra Blakeslee reports today that a group of researchers has managed to induce the famous "out-of-body" feeling that sometimes accompanies near-death experiences. So goes another piece of evidence for the "soul." They employed virtual reality gear to play havoc the senses:
Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one's body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Dr. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.
The…
hrynyshyn | August 23, 2007The argument that atheists should try hard not to offend people of faith, lest we further polarize the two factions, assumes that the meek will inherit the earth, not the rhetorically courageous. But what historical evidence is there for this assumption? Or does history make the opposite case? Christopher Hitchens suggests the latter.
Towards the end of his new dismissal of religion, God is not Great, Hitchens points to the example of the American revolutionary Thomas Paine:
"Paine's Age of Reason marks almost the first time that frank contempt for organized religion was openly expressed. It…
hrynyshyn | August 22, 2007It's the big question that bedevils climate science and politics: how close are these "tipping points" beyond which things get very bad very fast? Tim Lenton of the Laboratory for Global Marine and Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of East Anglia doesn't have any definitive answers, but he makes a valiant effort to explain what we do know in a new essay, "Tipping points in the Earth system." A properly peer-reviewed version is in progress, but for sheer background info, it's already required reading here on the Island.
Lenton has made a career of exploring some of the more extreme ideas…
hrynyshyn | August 21, 2007Actually, burning it would probably be better than this. A barge overturned and dumped a loaded diesel truck in waters just metres from Robson Bight, one of those areas where the term "ecologically sensitive" just doesn't do seem to do justice.
Robson Bight, up near the northern end of Vancouver Island on Canada's west coast, is a wilderness area off-limits to just about everyone and everything, except orcas (killer whales to the unwashed), which visit its gravel beaches for a good rubdown. From today's Globe and Mail:
"There couldn't have a been a worse time and a worse place for this to…
hrynyshyn | August 20, 2007Half of the Scienceblogging team converged on New York City this past weekend to do what science geeks do best: drink someone else's beer and wine and argue about the allegedly non-overlapping magisteria (the science-religion divide to the rest of you). Of course, we talked a lot of science, but we tended to agree on most everything and there wasn't much in the way of genuine debate -- except when it came to how to deal with people of faith. Even those who didn't make it to New York seemed plugged in; witness Matt Nisbet's post explaining "Why the New Atheist Noise Machine Fails," which in…
hrynyshyn | August 16, 2007New Scientist's Fred Pearce reports today on climatologist Tim Lenton's warnings about climate change "tipping points," some of which may already have been passed, although his story doesn't actually mention any of these past-tense points. Lenton was speaking at a meeting organized by the British Antarctic Survey on "complexity in nature" and it's hard to find anything more complex than the Earth's climate. But it turns out Lenton's nightmare scenarios, which he generates from the University of East Anglia in the UK aren't even as scary as some raised by American climatologists.
I don't know…
hrynyshyn | August 15, 2007Sooner or later, at least one member of the audience that has turned out to see me present Al Gore's climate change slide show wants to know why I haven't included nuclear power in the list of technologies that can help cut our carbon emissions. The question is usually put by the likes of a retired engineer who actually understands the physics and technical aspects of nuclear power. I have to admit that I don't welcome the question, because it tends to lead to a drawn-out debate at what is already a longer evening that most attendees bargained for. But I do have an answer: time.
I've written…
hrynyshyn | August 14, 2007The headline for this week's current reading on the Island is perhaps unfair. It's become trite to point out that algebra and algorithm, to name just two mathematical terms, are derived from Muslim scholars. But as Taner Edis, the author of the book "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam" argues in an interview with Salon's Steve Paulson, it's been a long time since Islam produced anything like a scientific advance. And even back in the 10th century, when Islam was the sole guardian of the ancient wisdom the Greeks, they weren't doing much of anything that resembles modern…
hrynyshyn | August 10, 2007That portion of the blogosphere that takes no shame in including Ann Coulter in their blogrolls is all atwitter with the news that NASA has "silently" released adjusted temperature records showing that 1934 is the warmest year on record, not 1998 or 2005 or 2006. How will Al Gore, James Hansen and all the other "enviromoonbats" recover from this embarrassing revelation? Probably without breaking a sweat, I would think.
Many of the blogs make no distinction between "warmest year in American history" and "warmest year in world history." And the difference, as you might expect, is more than a…
hrynyshyn | August 10, 2007Yet more evidence that the Arctic ice cap is disappearing at (yes, here comes that word again) alarming rates. This time the harbinger of bad news is William L. Chapman of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Today, the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area broke the record for the lowest recorded ice area in recorded history. The new record came a full month before the historic summer minimum typically occurs. There is still a month or more of melt likely this year. It is therefore almost certain that the previous 2005 record will be annihilated by the final 2007 annual minima closer to…
hrynyshyn | August 9, 2007When they talk about dangerous climate change, I don't think this is what they had in mind.
hrynyshyn | August 9, 2007The South Nahanni River defies description. It is one of the most spectacular lengths of runnable river in the world. It lies in the southwestern corner of Canada's Northwest Territories and offers one of the more accessible wilderness adventures in the Arctic. Canoeing the Nahanni should be on everyone's lifetime to-do list. The waterfalls at right are twice the height of Niagara. Today it's in the news because the Canadian government has, after years of dragging its feet, agreed to expand the park that encompasses it by 5,400 square kilometres, a move that will help protect the river from…
hrynyshyn | August 9, 2007First, the bad news: the current issue of Biology Letters reports the extinction of the baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin, in what amounts to the official publication of an earlier announcement that the species could no longer be found in its already limited habitat. That would make the baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) the first cetacean to wiped from the face of the Earth by humans. That we know of. Not one has been seen for about a decade. I suppose it's a testament to the species' tenacity that it held on as long as it did, considering the hellish environment in which it was living -- one of the…
hrynyshyn | August 8, 2007Today's Washington Post includes an exploration of a relatively recent trend among evangelical Christians: environmentalism, or more specifically, climate change activism. There's not a lot new here, as the story has been covered in some depth for the last year or so. But it's worth reviewing, because whatever your feelings about the notion of fundamentalists working within a secular campaign, it's beginning to look like these unlikely bedfellows are going to be spending a lot of time between the sheets.
My first reaction to the idea of trying to engage evangelicals on climate change was…
hrynyshyn | August 7, 2007As a Canadian, it's long been a bit of an embarrassment for me that Michael Ignatieff is considered one of Canada's leading intellectuals. Worse now that he's also a sitting member of Parliament. But today's quasi-apology in the New York Times for supporting the invasion of Iraq is perhaps the strangest thing he's written yet. As Mike the Mad Biologist and Matthew Iglesias have already pointed out, academia by and large was not in favor of Bush's blunder. So where does Iggy get the idea that it was?
Everybody seems to have their favorite most-absurd excerpt from the essay, which attempts to…