hrynyshyn | April 25, 2007Nobody emerges looking good in Hot Politics, a PBS Frontline documentary on the politics of the first Bush, Clinton and second Bush administrations. It aired last night, but the whole thing is available online. Not a lot we didn't already know, but it's sobering to be reminded that the inertia that has prevented serious action on global warming long predates the current federal government. For example...
A lot of us had forgotten how poorly the Clinton Administration scored on the environmental front. Clinton and VP Al Gore (there he is again), started off gangbusters with a radical proposal…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2007I really didn't set out to keep writing about Al Gore. I mean, he's a good guy, and all. But there are more important things to worry about in the battle between science and superstition. Nevertheless the most active post on the ScienceBlogs at the moment is one in which PZ Myers decries Gore's alleged belief in creationism and suggests that this is undermining the famous climate change slide show. In reality, Gore is not a creationist and PZ seems to have swallowed an apocryphal report to the contrary.
I'm one of Gore's army of 1,000 slide show presenters. I've shown the offending slide, in…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2007Time was when any mention of members of the order Hymenoptera referred to the prospect of killer bees stinging their way up through America. Not anymore. Today it's the other way around. Bee hives are collapsing left, right and center, and not just this side of the Atlantic. And no one is quite sure why. Among the strangest hypotheses is one that blames cell phone radiation, believe it or not. See here, and here for discussion elsewhere on ScienceBlogs in response to a story across the pond in the Independent. I just want to point out the curious fact that...
today's Science Times section…
hrynyshyn | April 21, 2007The cover of the latest issue of Maclean's magazine, which is the Canadian equivalent of Time or Newsweek, asks "Is God poison?" The secondary headline to the feature, which is online, says "a new movement blames God for every social problem from Darfur to child abuse." Well, I don't know if it does all that, but at least the magazine is finally paying attention to the rise of what, for lack of a better term, is being called "new atheism."
The piece starts off well enough, if rather belatedly, by reviewing the recent crop of books extolling the problems with religion (Dawkin's The God…
hrynyshyn | April 20, 2007We can't stop arguing about framing, can we? I've been pondering the subject much of late, especially while I waited these past four days for Duke Power to get us back on the grid following Sunday's windstorm, and I think I've got something relevant to contribute. I know Matt Nisbet has got lots of social science research that suggests people's eyes glaze over when a scientist uses data to explain something, but that's not my experience. Which is:
As some may recall, I'm a member of The Climate Project, a team of some 1,000 volunteers that Al Gore trained to present his Keynote/PowerPoint…
hrynyshyn | April 17, 2007[This post is rewritten to reflect a clearer state of mind.]
The front-page editors of the local newspapers here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina had a tough time deciding on today's banner headline. Should it be the shootings at Virginia Tech or the damage wreaked by Monday's windstorm, which left much of this part of the state without electricity and destroyed what was left of the economically vital apple orchards not killed by last week's freezing temperatures. There's no way to spin any of it into the good news ledger, and I don't have access to my own computer files…
hrynyshyn | April 13, 2007This is scary: The Independent has a story on research that hints at a way for women to produce their own sperm, from their bone marrow, and thereby take men out of the reproductive cycle entirely. Yikes.
The study reportedly appears in the journal Reproduction: Gamete Biology, and although I can't find it yet, Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne has been working and publishing on this sort of thing for a while, having already found that male gametes derived from embryonic stem-cells in male mice can give rise to viable offspring. Now Nayernia's team has done it in female…
hrynyshyn | April 13, 2007Jeremy Bruno, one our newest ScienceBloggers, hit the nail on the head with a post about the folly of assuming that we can do about something climate change by planting more trees, at least in the non-tropical regions. This is not a new idea, and studies pointing out that lowering the albedo of snow-prone northern latitudes by increasing forest coverage more than offsets any increased carbon uptake by those very same trees have been coming out every few months for at least six years now. What I like about Jeremy's take is his observation that tree-planting advocates are symptomatic of the…
hrynyshyn | April 12, 2007There's an essay in the latest issue of Science & Spirit on the history and value of doubt called "Redeeming Saint Thomas." It carries my byline and I'm quite proud of it. Science & Spirit is a curious and evolving publication that explores "things that matter."
If that's not reason enough to buy a copy, the cover package of this issue is a series of pieces on stem cells research by veteran science writer Rick Weiss and Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, among others. Which makes it quite timely, considering what's going on in the halls of Congress at the moment. Other writers…
hrynyshyn | April 11, 2007In response to the news that the US Fish and Wildlife Service is even thinking about downlisting the Florida manatee from "endangered" to "threatened," I make this modest proposal: boycott Florida.
Trichechus manatus is considered vulnerable on habitat-wide level by the IUCN - World Conservation Union, and the outlook for Florida's sub-population is not rosy. Carl Hiaasen, a long-time defender of what's left of Florida's wildlife, had this to say last June:
A non-scientist looking at the mortality data might wonder why they're so upbeat. Last year, 396 manatees - more than 10 percent of the…
hrynyshyn | April 10, 2007I probably shouldn't get bent out of shape over this, but the intrusion of superstitious nonsense into the culture I have chosen to embrace just makes me so angry sometimes that I just have to exploit my blog pulpit to vent. The offending journalist in this case is Melanie M. Bianchi, the A&E editor for my local alternative weekly. The Mountain Xpress, and the offending item is a preview of a performance scheduled for Wedneday night in Asheville, N.C., by Neko Case, who is one of my favorite musicians these days thanks to her near-perfect 2006 CD, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.
What has…
hrynyshyn | April 8, 2007Those who really care about the process behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports will probably want to grab this. It's a draft of Working Group II's Summary for Policymakers before the final editing session stripped it of some of the more dramatic (alarmist?) language following objections from China and Saudi Arabia. You know it's the earlier version because it has "The content of this draft should not be cited or quoted, and is embargoed from news coverage" on the cover page.
Thanks to Rick Piltz, who managed to get a hold of the draft posted it at his Climate Science…
hrynyshyn | April 7, 2007Fellow SciBloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet have a short essay in this week's Science that says scientists need to adopt the "framing" strategy that right-wing propagandists have been so successful with over the past couple of decades -- if science is ever to trump the neo-conservative claptrap that infects global warming and evolution debates, among other important public policy issues. It's generating a lot of attention in these parts of the blogosphere and throughout the scientific community, I expect. Subscribers can read the whole thing but the publicly accessible one-line summary is…
hrynyshyn | April 6, 2007Before anyone reads the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, the one released today on the impacts, there are a few things to keep in mind. Chief among them is the level of political interference in the final document. According to the AP
Several scientists objected to the editing of the final draft by government negotiators but in the end agreed to compromises. However, some scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vowed never to take part in the process again.
"The authors lost," said one participant. "A lot of authors are not going to engage in the…
hrynyshyn | April 5, 2007Every campaign it's the same thing. The editors and their reporting staff vow to pay more attention to the issues and focus less on the horse race. And every campaign that promise turns out to be as hollow as the campaign promises of the candidates the journalists are covering. So it is with the mountains of attention paid to the fundraising efforts of the presidential contenders. The latest has Barack Obama pulling in a mind-boggling amount of... but there I go, sucked into the vortex of distraction. What I want to explore is John Edwards' environmental platform, which I think is remarkable…
hrynyshyn | April 4, 2007Remember Chrissy Hynde? Maybe if you're old enough to have some Pretenders CDs in your collection. Otherwise, probably not. But she has enough name recognition to convince the editors of Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper to let her weigh in on that most inevitable sign of spring, the rhetorical war over the seal hunt that dominates the news on the country's east coast. You might think that op-ed essayists for a major daily newspaper, even those relegated to web-only contributor status, would bring something more than musical fame to the subject. You would be wrong.
Hynde brings precisely no…
hrynyshyn | April 2, 2007The U.S. Supreme Court says the Environmental Protection Agency has offered "no reasoned explanation" why it shouldn't regulate carbon dioxide, just like every other pollutant spewing from tailpipes and smokestacks. You'd think that would be a no-brainer, but ...
The court's four most conservative members -- Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both appointees of President George W. Bush, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- dissented.
The implications are theoretically immense. Of course, Bush will probably just sign a piece of paper noting that he doesn't agree…
hrynyshyn | March 31, 2007Ransom Myers had a habit of telling people what they didn't want to hear. In the 1990s, his employers in the Canadian government didn't like it when he told them overfishing was to blame for the collapse of the northern cod stocks. Three years ago it was the U.S. federal government, in a classic example of its anti-science bias, that removed his recommendations on the importance of habitat protection from a report on west coast salmon stocks. But he kept telling it like it is. Until a brain tumor finally got the best of him on March 27.
At 54, Myers should have had many more years of blowing…
hrynyshyn | March 30, 2007OK. I've read Hansen's new paper, which has been submitted to Environmental Research Letters, but not published. It's basically a review of existing, well-established science followed some personal opinion on the responsibility of scientists to express themselves, so I doubt it will be edited much before publication. And published it should be. The basic thrust is
Reticence is fine for [the] IPCC. And individual scientists can choose to stay within a comfort zone, not needing to worry that they say something that proves to be slightly wrong. But perhaps we should also consider our legacy from…
hrynyshyn | March 30, 2007I have only read the first few paragraphs, but know the rest of "Scientific reticence and sea level rise" will be fascinating. Jim Hansen bemoans the conservatism of science. Hmmm. I shall offer my thoughts this weekend, but wanted to point it out now so everyone can chime in as soon as possible.