hrynyshyn | August 6, 2007One of the best environment reporters, not just in Canada but anywhere, died last week at the age of 57. Dennis Bueckert, was one of the best, knowing what constituted a story of importance, like climate change, long before his editors would agree to let him devote serious company resources to it. The official obit is here. A more personal eulogy can be found at this blog. The timing of his passing could not be worse. With climate change rapidly becoming the dominant issue of our time, we need more journalists with his abilities.
hrynyshyn | August 6, 2007What with all the enthusiasm about the energy legislation now working its way through the U.S. Congress, it's easy to forget there is a fundamental contradiction between the goals of conservationists and those of the utilities involved in supplying the energy. And this inconvenient contradiction, between capitalism and conservation, is not easily resolved. A case in point is an ongoing marketing campaign by one of America's largest utilities, Duke Energy.
Duke just happens to be the supplier of the electricity that powers my family's ultra-efficient heat pump, compact fluorescent light bulbs…
hrynyshyn | August 3, 2007If this isn't a sign of the apocalypse, I don't know what is. Seven legs, double-gendered and bowel-challenged, according to the Herald-Sun. What a way to start your weekend. (Click for full size image.)
I came across the story while reading that Pope B16 says "there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution." Well, that's settles that, then.
hrynyshyn | August 2, 2007Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers have endorsed the "OUT" campaign that encourages atheists (or agnostics, if that's your semantic druthers) to publicly declare their lack of believe in gods and the supernatural. To help make the point, the campaign comes equipped with a red letter "A" that can be worn as a T-shirt logo or displayed on a blog. While there can be no doubt that society needs more people to declare their unfaith, is this new campaign a universally good idea?
I fear not.
It all depends on the context, or more specifically, the social environment. For Dawkins and Myers, academics who…
hrynyshyn | July 31, 2007James Hansen isn't satisfied with an audience limited to those that read his peer-reviewed scientific papers and the odd Congressional hearing attendee. In this essay, NASA's top climate scientist takes the substance of a recent paper that discusses the "reticence" of some climatologists to make their fears about dangerous climate change public and gives his argument a more accessible treatment. The New Scientist version is gripping stuff, right from the first paragraph, which also appears in almost identical form in the Environmental Research Letters original.
I find it almost inconceivable…
hrynyshyn | July 30, 2007Are we ScienceBloggers just wasting our time when it comes to politics? While I'm sure that none of us are operating under the delusion that anything we write has a significant influence on the outcome of pivotal events like presidential elections, could it be that the scientific, rational approach to running this country is completely irrelevant? Do Americans, by and large, actually distrust intelligence and reason to the point where they prefer their candidates be ignorant and simple-minded? In other words, was George W. Bush more than an aberration?
Ten days ago on NPR's All Things…
hrynyshyn | July 27, 2007A new study that shows people who say radio waves from cell phone towers are making them sick are exhibiting a purely pyschosomatic reaction won't be the last nail required to seal this particular coffin of pseudo-science. But as a double-blind randomized test of the alleged effect, it surely should.
The British team, lead by Elaine Fox of the Department of Psychology at University of Essex, published "Does Short-Term Exposure to Mobile Phone Base Station Signals Increase Symptoms in Individuals who Report Sensitivity to Electromagnetic Fields? A Double-Blind Randomised Provocation Study"…
hrynyshyn | July 27, 2007The Guardian wins the prize for best headline for its coverage of the tipsy astronauts: "Drunk astronauts go from Right Stuff to the hard stuff." While we're on the subject, though, how about this, even less amusing, story: "Three die in Branson's space tourism tests."
hrynyshyn | July 26, 2007Now here's something you don't see every day: a cogent argument in defense of cloning. Not just therapeutic cloning, the better to produce embryonic stem cells, but full-on human reproductive cloning. And from a bioethicist, no less. Hugh McLachlan of Glasgow Caledonian University, doesn't actually say cloning is a good thing, but he does deftly destroy the arguments against it.
The essay is in the subscription-only section of New Scientist, and I wouldn't even think of violating copyright by re-posting the whole thing (I've written for New Scientist and want to keep that option open). I will…
hrynyshyn | July 25, 2007Steven Pinker of The Blank Slate fame, weighs in on the nature and temptation of "dangerous ideas" in the latest must-read for visitors to the Island. Not too surprisingly, he likes them. Among the questions we should not be afraid to ask, says Pinker, are:
* Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?
* Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?
* Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?
An excerpt , from his essay, which is the introduction to a series on dangerous ideas…
hrynyshyn | July 25, 2007Among the most common questions that follow my presentations of Al Gore's climate change slide show is "What about vegetarianism?" I usually respond that eating less meat will probably be a consequence of climate change, due to the enormous water and energy costs associated with raising livestock, rather than a significant mitigation strategy. But I'm going to reconsider the situation, in the light of this paper in Animal Science Journal.
"Evaluating environmental impacts of the Japanese beef cow-calf system by the life cycle assessment method" (doi: 10.1111/j.1740-0929.2007.00457.x) takes a…
hrynyshyn | July 24, 2007A committee of the North Carolina House has come up with the state's first renewable-energy bill at long last, one that would require electrical utilities to produce 12.5% of their product from renewable sources. Which is a good thing, if a bit on the weak side. In a bizarre twist, however, committee members added a provision that would also forbid the utilities from building any new nuclear or coal-fired plants unless they can prove that no alternative, climate-friendly technology would be cheaper. Now there's an interesting challenge.
I don't know if any other state has come up with such a…
hrynyshyn | July 24, 2007They say the devil is in the details, and climate change is no different. While climatologists have agreed on the general trend of global temperature rise, it's proving quite tricky to predict regional effects. A new paper in the current Nature won't get us that level of precision, but it does take us one step closer, in the form of latitudinal precipitation forecasts. And it's not looking good.
From "Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends" by Xuebin Zhang et al (doi:10.1038/nature06025):
We show that anthropogenic forcing has had a detectable influence on…
hrynyshyn | July 23, 2007Last week, the city council of Brevard, N.C, a community just over a couple of hills from here that's known for its vibrant musical culture, voted to remove the fluoride they've been adding to the public water supply for last 27 years. The decision was prompted by one councillor who had "had read studies that suggested fluoride might create health problems such as bone decay, memory loss and thyroid problems." But does the science support such a decision?
Brevard Council, as any responsible council would do, asked its top administrative official, city manager Joe Albright, to look into the…
hrynyshyn | July 22, 2007Just in case you were wondering why so many science bloggers devote so much keystrokes to criticizing religion, the Washington Post's Rob Stein has this convenient reminder of the danger of letting faith inform public policy:
The long decline in sexual activity among U.S. teenagers, hailed as one of the nation's most important social and public health successes, appears to have stalled.
After decreasing steadily and significantly for more than a decade, the percentage of teenagers having intercourse began to plateau in 2001 and has failed to budge since then, despite the intensified focus in…
hrynyshyn | July 20, 2007I have no idea if the staff at ScienceBlogs anticipated just how popular the religion vs. atheism debate would be on these pages, but it would seem we're not the only home of passionate and often thoughtful argument over the God Question. Over at the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog, there a fascinating example of what sets a science-oriented forums apart from those that appeal to a more general audience. Jacques Berlinerblau, an associate professor and program director at Georgetown University, recently complained that secularists are boring, and argued that atheists haven't come up with a…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2007Before you read anything else about the Chilean sea bass served Al Gore at his daughter's wedding rehearsal party, read Deltoid's thoroughly researched review of how lazy journalists and bloggers once again did their best to undermine the world most popular climate change campaigner, and a guy who's just trying to be nice. Given how much unfair grief Gore received recently over his electricity bill, shouldn't we all be bit more careful before casting aspersions on his sincerity?
The bottom line is this: Gore was attending a private function, at which his future in-laws served him a dish that…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2007Here on the Island of Doubt, climate change is a favored topic for two reasons. First, there is no more important a public policy challenge, no matter what Bjorn Lomborg says. Second, the role of uncertainty in climate science -- and science in general -- has been grossly distorted in many popular media, and this blog was established in part to combat such propaganda. So imagine my reaction to the appearance of a graph in last week's Science that addresses both climate change and uncertainty. At first glance, it may appear a little daunting, but it's worthy thinking about, so bear with me as…
hrynyshyn | July 17, 2007I've only read the introduction to Natalie Angier's The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science but everyone else is blogging about it, and what I've read so far is so damn good that I'm going to add my precipitous two cents now.
Angier has long been a favorite of mine, ever since 1988's The Search of the Oncogene, in which the author immerses herself in a Boston laboratory to shed light on the scientific process -- warts and all -- during what turned out to be one of the biggest breakthroughs in cancer research. Now the New York Times journalist has pulled back to offer…
hrynyshyn | July 17, 2007The word from Canada's most rectangular province is that Saskatchewan could soon be home to North American's first "commercial-scale, coal-fired power plants that would produce virtually no greenhouse gas emissions." The estimated $2 billion plant will capture its carbon dioxide and pump it into nearby oil wells. Sound like a good idea. But whether it actually makes environmental or economic sense hinges on the outcome of one of the most contentious debates in the climate change mitigation field.
SaskPower hasn't yet decided whether to go ahead with the project. There's a reason why no one…