hrynyshyn | March 9, 2011"What is the optimum temperature for man?" asked Virginia Rep. Morgan Griffith at yesterday's Congressional hearings on a bill that would remove the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions "Have we looked at that? These are questions that, believe it or not, I lay awake at night trying to figure out."
Call me crazy, but I don't believe it. I worry about climate change every day of my life and this is not something that keeps me awake at night. Although, if I understood as little about the basic facts of human history as you, who knows what would keep me up night?
The truth is, we…
hrynyshyn | March 4, 2011Andy Revkin recently asked us to consider this 1881 New York Times article and judge whether it's an example of early global warming alarmism or satire. It was unearthed by pseudoskeptic Steve Goddard, prompting Andy to write:
For some reason Goddard avoids pasting into his blog post the humorous, almost Twain-like, elements later in the article that clearly show the author was not exactly taking the astronomer's assertions very seriously.
By the time I got to Goddard's blog, he added this to his post:
[addendum] This 1881 article is satirizing one of the more alarmist explanations for the…
hrynyshyn | March 3, 2011Four years after Al Gore unleashed his army of slide show presenters on the planet in an attempt to spread the word that climate is something we should be worried about, the polls show public opinion has budged hardly at all. If anything, opposition to climate-change mitigation strategies has only hardened. Why?
Some, like Chris Mooney, have turned their attention to the idea that there's a link between political ideology and psychology. There could be something to that, although it's unclear what's the cause and what's the effect. But University of British Columbia geographer Simon Donner…
hrynyshyn | March 2, 2011One of the things that keeps me from throwing in the blogging towel in an era when climate change denial seems to be a prerequisite for membership in the party of Abraham Lincoln is the quality of the comments I get. The praise is nice, the thoughtful exploration of the ideas I introduce is better, but what I really enjoy are the snarky swipes at my character by those who can't come up with anything more cogent to post than a dismissive reference to Star Trek. See here for a typical example,
The first thing that occurred to me when such comments began to appear -- almost immediately after I…
hrynyshyn | February 23, 2011Ray Kurzweil might be right. It could very well be that Moore's law can be applied to all forms of technology, and within a couple of decades clean, renewable forms of power production will be so cheap they will have replaced all fossil fuels. Hey, it could happen. Maybe even it's not just possible, but probable. Kurweil calls it the law of accelerating returns:
Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly -- we are only a few years away from parity. And then it's going…
hrynyshyn | February 21, 2011We all know we need to get off fossil fuels and replace them with carbon-neutral alternatives. The question is not IF we should choose this path, but how best to get where we need to go. There are those who, fairly enough, worry that those clean renewables aren't up to the job. This is a critical question, because if renewables can't fill the void, then we are left with no option but to build more nuclear reactors, with all the myriad problems that accompany them, most notably price, which is forever rising. So much money is at stake that we need to sort out this question, soon.
It all boils…
hrynyshyn | February 17, 2011Media outlets both main and sidestream are abuzz (atwitter?) with the story that scientists are finally daring to link specific weather events with anthropogenic climate change. A pair of papers in Nature are to blame. One, Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes, concludes that the titular events "have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas." The other manages to summarize the whole thing in its tile: "Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to…
hrynyshyn | February 16, 2011As a father of a four-year-old, I'm a big fan of Bob the Builder. The basic plot of each episode of the charming stop-motion children's series revolves around one or more pieces of heavy machinery learning self-discipline, which, as a new PNAS study shows, is a key skill associated with success and happiness later in life. I also like the optimism embedded in the catch-phrase that Bob's machine team invariably declares: "Can we build it? Yes we can!"
If only that can-do spirit were as evident in the public debate over how to respond to the threat of climate change. Recently a spate of reports…
hrynyshyn | January 28, 2011Fast Friday feature (from Utah!):
Climate Science in a Nutshell #9: How Bad Could it Get? from Planet Nutshell on Vimeo.
My only comment is to draw your attention to the video's assumption that the 350 ppm CO2 target is widely accepted as the maximum necessary to avert catastrophic change. It's certainly spreading, but I suspect there are still many who would argue that the science behind it is less than conclusive, as opposed to 450, say.
hrynyshyn | January 24, 2011Last week it was the abuse of a 140-character context-free nano-report on an hour-long discussion on the challenges of communicating science. This week it's the credulous coverage of a 50-page report on climate change. Seems that no matter the length of the material at hand, there are plenty of people eager to jump to conclusions without having the decency to stop and think first.
At least there was no slander this time. But damage has been done to the credibility of climatology, thanks to that old adage, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Now claims of unwarranted alarms have that much…
hrynyshyn | January 19, 2011I've long been ambivalent about the merits of Twitter. Some may recall my "Why Twitter is Evil" post of a while back. That was written with one cheek mostly occupied by my tongue. It now seems clear that, whatever the original designs, the 140-character telegraph has become an invaluable network-building and maintenance tool, particularly for authors, activists trying to organize constituencies. This is all well and good. But the medium's dark side recently became all too clear following this past weekend's wonderful Science Online 2011 conference.
The story begins Saturday afternoon at an…
hrynyshyn | January 15, 2011From the wonderful "Overheard in a newsroom" service:
Reporter doing a phone interview: "Please slow down, professor. You've been researching this topic for a decade. I've been researching it since lunchtime."
hrynyshyn | January 13, 2011So, 2010 is a statistical tie for warmest year on record. This from NASA's GISS and NOAA's NCDC. Some AGW refuseniks might cling to the fact that the year just past was 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than 2005, but then you'd know they never bothered to take a stats class. As the GISS press release puts it:
The record temperature in 2010 is particularly noteworthy, because the last half of the year was marked by a transition to strong La Niña conditions, which bring cool sea surface temperatures to the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
We've also just come out of an unusually long "solar…
hrynyshyn | January 3, 2011Just in case you need a refresher:
It continues here. Meanwhile, the Onion sums it up nicely:
"Climate change is real, and we are killing our planet more every day," said climatologist Helen Marcus, who has made similar statements in interviews in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. "We need to make a serious effort to stop it, or, you know, we'll all die. There really isn't much else to say."
For 2011, I am going to try to implement Oscar Wilde's advice:
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise…
hrynyshyn | November 18, 2010You've no doubt come across this before, but it's worth repeating whenever someone does a story on the American auto fleet's fuel economy:
The New York Times reports that "the average fuel economy in 2009 model cars, vans, pickups and S.U.V.'s was 22.4 miles per gallon -- an increase of 7 percent, or 1.4 miles per gallon, over 2008 figures." Environmentalists, we are told, hailed the news.
Which means the fleet average is now just 2.6 mpg shy of what the Ford Model T achieved 102 years ago. The good news is that embarrassing record is for lack of trying. If we're lucky, the Volt and Leaf are…
hrynyshyn | November 17, 2010There's an advertising feature in the latest GQ that champions 17 "Rock Stars of Science." Each ad includes a genuine rock music star alongside three or four genuine scientists, some Nobel laureates among them. The idea is to make science sexy.
Will it work? Chris Mooney, co-author of Unscientific America, is one of the minds behind the campaign. if you want to know more about it, head on over to his Intersection blog, where he writes about the risks of the project:
Was it an absolute requirement for them to carry on like this (see right) to make their point?
Unfortunately yes--if they were…
hrynyshyn | October 7, 2010I'm still trying to avoid blogging at the moment but the news that Science Friday may not last much longer deserves to be brought to as wide an audience as possible. Apparently, the National Science Foundation no longer believes supporting the show is part of its mandate.
Heard live each Friday beginning at 2 p.m. on many, though not all, NPR stations, Science Friday is simply one of the most valuable two hours of radio programming anywhere. In an era in which corporate anti-science campaigns have made reasonable discourse nearly impossible on a wide variety of critical subjects involving…
hrynyshyn | September 14, 2010I am taking a break from blogging. My reasons are personal. I do not know how long the break will last.
In the meantime, I reproduce a note from the editorial board of Climatic Change. It takes the form of a letter to the late, great Stephen Schneider. I hope they provide some inspiration for those who, like me, are finding the task of thinking about climate change every day a little too much to bear.
Dear Steve:
Many people have been offering chronicles of your amazing life, but it will take
an historian to put all of your accomplishments and contributions into their proper
context. When…
hrynyshyn | September 9, 2010There's always room for one more post about oceanic acidification. Even Sheril Kirshenbaum understates the threat that it poses to the planet's ecosystems and civilization when she describes it a "huge deal." First, let's get one thing straight:
Falling pH levels in the seas do not constitute global warming's "evil twin." That would imply that global warming is oceanic acidification is global warming's good twin. Both are evil. The malapropism was used in a paper published earlier this year in Trends in Ecology & Evolution by a trio of researchers from Spain and Australia, but it's been…