hrynyshyn | May 3, 2011Climate change activists in Canada are understandably depressed by the results of Monday's federal election, which produced a majority Conservative government run by a party with zero interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There are shards of good news lying in the rubble, although they only hint at the possibility of progress in the far-off future.
The fact that the new Official Opposition, the New Democrats, support cap-and-trade legislation isn't as positive a development as it could be, considering that they have no chance of influencing government.
More interesting is the…
hrynyshyn | April 28, 2011What if we could avoid hundreds of thousand of deaths, billions of dollars in crop losses and trillions of dollars in healthcare expenditures simply by spreading off-the-shelf technology and industrialized-world regulations to developing nations? Oh, and along the way, we'd mitigate a fair bit of global warming. Sounds like a plan?
I'd say such a plan would be worth considering. Such a plan is outlined by a team led by NASA's Drew Shindell in Nature Climate Change, which has generously made their paper, "Climate, health, agricultural and economic impacts of tighter vehicle-emission standards…
hrynyshyn | April 27, 2011Floods, droughts, heatwaves, rising sea levels. Massive debts and deficits. Multiple wars. Peak oil. But what's really important is providing yet more evidence that the president was born on U.S. soil. So the White House flies a staffer 9,600 miles (15,450 km) from Washington, D.C., to Hawaii and back to collect the certificate of live birth.
Un frakking believable.
Of course, the emissions generated by the staffer's share of the flight is hardly among the most objectionable consequences of the insanity that is the birther movement. But I just thought I'd point it out.
hrynyshyn | April 15, 2011Proponents of shale gas extraction are not particularly pleased with the attention drawn this week to a new study in Climatic Change that found widespread development of Marcellus natural gas may actually accelerate climate change rather than slow it down. Unfortunately for them, their primary argument rests on a lack of hard data on 1) the actual greenhouse-warming potential of methane; and 2) how much methane finds its way into the atmosphere during drilling and transmission of natural gas. You can find a good summary of the defense's case at something called the Marcellus Shale Coalition.…
hrynyshyn | April 12, 2011It was in Bill McKibben's first, and arguably best, book, The End of Nature, that I first came across the challenge posed by fugitive emissions. Back then -- just 20-some years ago -- natural gas was touted as a cleaner alternative to coal and oil because the combustion of its primary constituent, methane, results in markedly fewer CO2 emissions than other fossil fuels.
That argument is being made even more forcefully now. Everyone and his or her dog is touting the advantage of converting coal mines and car engines to natural gas as a way to mitigate global warming, as well as reduce oil…
hrynyshyn | April 8, 2011Tennessee's House passed this disingenuous piece of legislation the other day. They're not to the first to try this sort of thing and they probably won't be the last.
HB0368
00242666
-1-
HOUSE BILL 368
By Dunn
AN ACT to amend Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 49,
Chapter 6, Part 10, relative to teaching scientific
subjects in elementary schools.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE:
SECTION 1. Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 49, Chapter 6, Part 10, is amended by
adding the following as a new, appropriately designated section:
(a) The general assembly finds that:
(1)…
hrynyshyn | April 6, 2011We can't seem to stop thinking about nuclear power. Given what's at stake -- the biosphere, the economy, our genetic integrity -- this is understandable. But I think too many are getting distracted from the fundamental problem with splitting atoms and arguing scientific questions we are unlikely to resolve anytime soon.
Much of the recent hand-wringing is a reaction to George Monbiot's quasi-conversion to a nuclear power advocate. His latest column, Evidence Meltdown, practically radiates scorn for the "anti-nuclear movement," which he manages to reduce to a monolithic cult led by Helen…
hrynyshyn | April 5, 2011See that black box over on the left-hand side of this blog? The one with the numbers counting down? That's a little widget I assembled by rejigging one from trillionthtonne.org. The basic idea is that, if our climate can be expected to suffer severe disruption at a certain amount of global warming due to a certain amount of carbon emissions (since the beginning of the fossil-fuel era around 1850), then our best strategy should be to limit the cumulative carbon emissions to somewhere below that level, in this case 1 trillion tonnes of carbon.
But there's plenty of uncertainty surrounding the…
hrynyshyn | April 4, 2011A new review paper in Nature makes a stab an answering the question "Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?" In an apparent effort to satisfy a variety of audiences with different evidentiary and skepticism standards, Nature and the reviews authors, led by Anthony D. Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley, offer a variety of phrasings.
First we have the paper's abstract, which wraps up with:
Our results confirm that current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record, highlighting the need for effective conservation measures.
Then we…
hrynyshyn | April 1, 2011No one is more surprised than I to see something worthwhile reading in The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's iPad magazine. You might even be forgiven for suspecting an April Fool. But there it is. It's an editorial by Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst at frequently misnamed Reason Foundation, exploring the fundamental problem with nuclear power. Dalmia's indictment goes far beyond the nuclear industry, though. Intended or not, it strikes at the heart of the economic philosophy that dominates pretty much the entire planet To wit:
The liability cap effectively privatizes the profits of nuclear and…
hrynyshyn | March 30, 2011Last year much was made by climate-change deniers of a poorly referenced section of one of the IPCC reports of 2007 that said "up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall." It turned out that the claim was based on solid science, despite the best efforts of those who just can't bring themselves to trust professional climatologists. You can read the whole sordid tale here. I revisit the issue because of a new paper about to be published by the American Geophysical Union that bears on this question.
"Widespread Decline in Greenness of Amazonian Vegetation…
hrynyshyn | March 25, 2011Just case you were wondering what was going on up North:
Arctic sea ice extent appeared to reach its maximum extent for the year on March 7, marking the beginning of the melt season. This year's maximum tied for the lowest in the satellite record -- NSIDC, March 23
hrynyshyn | March 23, 2011I'm almost weary of blogging about nuclear power. But others are still going strong. Take the Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders, who writes this week that we shouldn't even think of abandoning the technology. Such enthusiasm is particularly curious because he glosses over the Achilles heel of nukes -- the cost -- and Canada has one of the most expensive varieties of nuclear reactors around.
I can only assume that Saunders hasn't done enough research, because if he had he would never come to conclusions such as this:
It may be possible in Europe and North America to talk about reducing consumer…
hrynyshyn | March 22, 2011James Delingpole's relationship with what is commonly understood by the term "journalism" is not readily apparent.
1. PLOS One publishes a peer-reviewed paper by some of the world's leading marine biologists with an interest in the effects of underwater noise pollution. The paper tests the idea that naval sonar could have an impact on whale behavior. It makes no mention of wind farms.
2. The Telegraph publishes a story, "Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales" citing the paper, which has the conveniently precise title of "Beaked Whales Respond to Simulated and Actual Navy Sonar."
4.…
hrynyshyn | March 21, 2011There's an amusing little video making the rounds, and receiving a largely positive response. Which is unfortunate, because it's little more than government-industry propaganda that glosses over the colossal abrogation of responsibility that led to the Fukushima crisis.
At first glance, the cartoon does an exemplary job explaining the situation to Japanese schoolchildren too young to understand half-lives and the role of water as a coolant and moderator in boiling-water reactors. But there's a gaping omission right at the beginning. Nuclear Boy has a stomach ache. No kidding. Why? This is…
hrynyshyn | March 16, 2011How nuclear power is perceived by the general public will take decades to return to what it was a week ago. (Kind of like radioactive decay.) But the list of immutable and defining characteristics of the technology is long one and nothing that happens in Japan is likely to change them. First up: the daunting economics.
Each gigawatt reactor costs upwards of $14 billion these days. And climbing. As the increasingly useful Climopedia at Climate Central puts it: "the question on many peoples' minds today is not what the last nuclear power plant cost, but rather what the next nuclear plant will…
hrynyshyn | March 15, 2011The journal Nature inadvertently (I suspect) reveals why the nuclear power industry has a public-trust problem:
Robin Grimes, director of the Centre for Nuclear Engineering at Imperial College London ... says that he believes the [Fukushima] event actually proves the safety of nuclear power plants. Despite being more than 30 years old, and having faced the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan and a towering tsunami, the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi have, so far, largely contained their dangerous radioactive fuel. "Actually, it's a success," Grimes says, then adds: "Although do I think…
hrynyshyn | March 14, 2011At one end of the hyperbole scale we have Helen "If you love this planet" Caldicott, who raises the specter of "cancer and genetic diseases" if things get any worse at the growing list of nuclear power reactors crippled or destroyed by last week's earthquake in Japan. At the other we have Republican congressman Mitch McConnell, who argues that we shouldn't abandon nuclear power, especially "right after a major environmental catastrophe."
In between the pundits and genuine experts are pointing out that the mining, processing, and burning of fossil fuels kill hundreds or even thousands of times…
hrynyshyn | March 10, 2011I don't drink much coffee. So the news that some coffee producers are finding it tough to deal with changes in growing conditions that could be an early taste of what global warming will bring doesn't strike close to home. And of course, "scientists are uncertain whether the peculiar weather patterns in the area are directly related to warming."
Still, what if the fears are warranted? Is "peak coffee" around the corner? Given how much coffee Americans guzzle, I wonder what would happen if prices started spiking -- just as they are about to do with the another habit-forming commodity.