hrynyshyn | May 24, 2007This Memorial Day will be truly memorial for those who believe the universe is only 6,000 years old. The Creation Museum opens Monday in Petersburg, Ky. A creation of the creationists responsible for the Answers in Genesis "resource," primarily Ken Ham, B.Sc., the designers of the new museum have managed to find $27 million to furnish their monument to Biblical literalism with the latest in multimedia and animatronic displays. Just think what those 27 million clams could have done for, oh ... I dunno ... the pagan public school system?
According to media reports, the folks behind the museum,…
hrynyshyn | May 22, 2007Actually, the report in question came on just shy of 11 p.m. Although my local Fox television network affiliate had been promoting its 10 o'clock news report, in which a scientist uses physics to prove the Christian god exists, for several days, the editors didn't think it newsworthy enough to slot it ahead of half a dozen car wrecks and other assorted crimes and offenses to decency. Which shouldn't come as a surprise, because news that someone had actually proved a god's existence would surely lead off any newscast I was directing. Also unsurprising was the discovery of the identity of the…
hrynyshyn | May 17, 2007Hot on the heels of the good news that the deep ocean conveyor doesn't appear to be on the verge of shutting down -- a scenario that would have eliminated many of the world's most important fisheries among other things -- comes the inevitable flipside bad news. The Southern Ocean has stopped absorbing carbon dioxide. Guess the honeymoon is over.
Just about every climate model includes the assumption that a good portion of all that CO2 we're pumping into the atmosphere will be absorbed by the oceans, and the Southern Ocean in particular. So in addition to forcing the climatologists back to…
hrynyshyn | May 17, 2007New Scientist has assembled a marvelous list of 26 of the most-cited objections to the scientific consensus on climate change. Temperatures rise before carbon dioxide; polar bear population is increasing; there is no consensus; it's all there. This handy-dandy resource -- the answers include source materials -- should be bookmarked. Here's the complete list:
⢠Human CO2 emissions are too tiny to matter
⢠We can't do anything about climate change
⢠The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong
⢠Chaotic systems are not predictable
⢠We can't trust computer models of climate
⢠They…
hrynyshyn | May 16, 2007Pity the poor rationalist, who won't have Jerry Falwell to kick around any more. Gone is one of the leading opponents of reasoned debate, a man who seemed to devote every waking hour to turning the clock back on the Enlightenment. I have no idea how good a family man he was, but his public persona was one of open hostility to tolerance, diversity and science. Just how significant he was -- and therefore how significant is his death -- is far from clear, but I suspect that this morning's eulogies greatly exaggerate his lasting influence.
What's consuming the nation's obituarists today is the…
hrynyshyn | May 15, 2007Anyone who uses Google's personalized home page service and never bothered to delete the default quote of the day was greeted this morning with one of third-rate sci-fi author Michael Crichton's more inane utterances."Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had." Just think about that for a moment as you consider the latest news on the possibility that global warming could stop what is somewhat inaccurately but widely known as the Gulf Stream from keeping Europe as warm as it is today.
According to Crichton, real…
hrynyshyn | May 11, 2007The new Encyclopedia of Life may be the best new thing since sliced bread, but not necessarily just because a catalog of every living species is a pre-requisite to understanding our planet. By making it clear just how little we actually know about life on Earth, EOL could be just the thing biology needs to spur new interest among students, government funding agencies, and the public at large in basic science. That might be overselling it a tad, but it's hard not to use hyperbole when addressing the enormous gap between what the average person thinks we know and what we actually do know.
The…
hrynyshyn | May 10, 2007I'm off on a family extended weekend, and may not have the opportunity to lambaste the forces of darkness until next week. Meanwhile, I'll point you in the direction of two precious posts elsewhere in the blogosphere. First, there's "Fun with correlations" at Real Climate, in which Gavin pokes fun at climate change denialists who have a rather underdeveloped grasp of statistics and math. Second, and still on the denial front, our latest addition to ScienceBlogs, Denialism Blog takes on an op-ed essay in (where else?) the Wall Street Journal, in which Al Gore gets blamed for 9/11. I kid you…
hrynyshyn | May 8, 2007There's a big problem in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Not that it's surprising an economics report would be self-contradictory -- it's not for nothing that they call economics the dismal science. But it's a pretty big problem to sort out. Here's the conflict:
On the one hand, the authors say nuclear power, in the form of good old fashioned uranium-fission reactors, could supply 18 per of the cuts necessary to stabilize greenhouse gas levels and consequently global temperature averages. On the other, it suggests that costs of stabilization will amount…
hrynyshyn | May 5, 2007I am so embarrassed to be a Canadian. A member of Canada's Parliament has given voice to an effort to add Bigfoot to the country's Species at Risk Act. Read it and weep:
The debate over their (Bigfoot's) existence is moot in the circumstance of their tenuous hold on merely existing," reads a petition presented by Lake to parliament in March and due to be discussed next week.
"Therefore, the petitioners request the House of Commons to establish immediate, comprehensive legislation to affect immediate protection of Bigfoot," says the petition signed by almost 500 of Lake's constituents in…
hrynyshyn | May 5, 2007Believe it or not, the New York Times has decided that it would be appropriate to quote someone making the old "Darwin is responsible for Nazis" canard. Using the pretext of the bizarre scene at the Republican presidential contenders debate the other day, when participants were asked to raise their hands is they didn't believe in evolution, the paper decided to delve more deeply into the alleged connection between Darwin and politics. And in that article we're treated to this little nugget of conservative wisdom:
Skeptics of Darwinism like William F. Buckley, Mr. [John G.] West and Mr. […
hrynyshyn | May 4, 2007While reading a hilarious New York magazine interview with Christopher Hitchens, I came across the news that Karl Rove is a apparently an atheist. Really?
Well, Christopher Hitchens may have his problems -- his defection to the pro-war camp a few years back was and remains disappointing -- he's not known for inventing this kind of thing. Atheist Revolution explores the issue further, but it really all comes down to this exchange:
Has anyone in the Bush administration confided in you about being an atheist?
Well, I don't talk that much to them--maybe people think I do. I know something which…
hrynyshyn | May 4, 2007I didn't watch the Republican debate last night, so I can't be sure that climate change got short shift, but seeing as I couldn't find more than a hint of the subject in this morning's coverage on the net -- and heard only a passing reference in a NPR report listing the "other" subjects addressed -- I feel pretty safe concluding that the candidates assume the planet's future, and that of civilization, isn't of particularly interest to GOP voters. No surprise there. The question is, is this a bad thing, or good?
I used to bemoan the right-wing's antipathy to global warming in particular, and…
hrynyshyn | May 3, 2007Some commenters seem puzzled by my conclusion that a couple of recent studies of melting north polar ice could mean an ice-free Arctic within 13 years. I will agree that it does seem rather extreme, but the data support such a conclusion, as a responsible estimate of the near-term end of range of time values. Perhaps part of the problem can be traced to a rather poorly designed graph, drawn from data in a paper (subscription only) published Tuesday in Geophysical Research Letters. Allow me to explain:
The paper, by Julienne Stroeve, Marika M. Holland, Walt Meier, Ted Scambos, and Mark Serreze…
hrynyshyn | May 2, 2007It's been a bad week for the US Interior Department, and it's only Tuesday. First a deputy assistant secretary resigned after her habit of passing endangered species information to private groups was exposed for all to see. Then more than three dozen scientists signed a letter condemning the Bush administration's interpretation of the Endangered Species Act. That would make it a good week for endangered species, though.
Julie MacDonald's resignation came a week before the beginning of a series of House committee hearings on political interference with biologists. Seems an inspector general's…
hrynyshyn | May 1, 2007In a story that caught the attention of only the more astute climate science journalists a few weeks ago, one of the more experienced oceanographers of our time, Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, reported that the Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than we thought. How much faster? So fast that the rate made the story seem too alarmist to take seriously.
As MSNBC's Alex Johnson reported,
Scientists had previously predicted that the summer sea ice would disappear from the Arctic by 2040. But Wadhams' measurements indicate that the thinning was already approaching 50 percent and that…
hrynyshyn | April 30, 2007No one should ever be granted a degree in science without being able to finishing this little gem of an aphorism: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble...
...It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Various sources attribute the quote to Mark Twain, or Will Rogers or Henry Wheeler Shaw. Chances are probably fair that none of them was the originator, but that's not the point. The point is, things change, especially our understanding of nature.
A perfect example appeared recently in the journal Hydrobiologia. It isn't going to rock ecology, like the recent finding…
hrynyshyn | April 30, 2007I've always been intrigued by the Roman Catholic Church's relationship with science and intellectualism in general. On the one hand, the church's history is not one anyone who cares about reason would be proud of, what with the Inquisition, its opposition to Copernican theory and whatnot. On the other, the Jesuit tradition of intellectual inquiry has produced some sharp fellows, many of whom have gone on to embrace a secular approach to politics, e.g. Pierre Trudeau. But every now and then we are reminded that religion is not the best context to foster a love of science. Case in point: the…
hrynyshyn | April 28, 2007Get ready for a big fracas among oncologists: "In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding." (Globe and Mail, April 28). A lot of people are going to find this hard to swallow.
More the Globe's Martin Mittelstaedt:
A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large -- twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking -- it almost looks like a…
hrynyshyn | April 26, 2007The cover story of the latest edition of SEED, which arrived in my physical mailbox today, explores the green technological revolution under way in China. According to Shanghai correspondent Mara Hvistendahl, "an environmental consciousness is building" there. I sure hope she's right, because the latest news, too late to be included in the SEED feature, is that China will...
...exceed the United States as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases as early as the end of this year -- not 2010, as energy experts had previously forecast. (Nature 446, 954-955)
London's Independent, not too…