hrynyshyn | June 17, 2010What happened at Three Mile Island in 1979 led to a new regulatory environment that increased the costs of building and running nuclear power reactors in the U.S. The environment was so hostile to the industry that no new reactors have been ordered since then. There are several in the planning stages, but none have been approved. The question now being debated among energy analysts is whether or not what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico at the moment will lead to similar challenges for the oil industry.
Of particular interest is the precedent set this week when BP agreed to pony up $20…
hrynyshyn | June 16, 2010The most intelligent thing I've read so far about Obama's speech Tuesday night, the one that included not a single mention of climate change, comes from Ezra Klein at the Washington Post. He's talking about the assumption that fear doesn't motivation people, only inspiration does.
But that strikes me as depressing evidence of how unlikely we are to succeed. I simply don't believe you could've passed health care if you couldn't have talked about covering the uninsured, and I don't think stimulus would've worked without the spur of the unemployed. It's not that people wanted to hear about…
hrynyshyn | June 16, 2010The latest report from the National Climatic Data Center reminds us that the planet is continuing to warm as expected. Most of the attention will be afforded to the global picture, for good reason:
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2010 was 0.69°C (1.24°F) above the 20th century average of 14.8°C (58.6°F). This is the warmest such value on record since 1880.
Those of us living in the U.S. Southeast are sweltering through a record-breaking heat wave, so there will be much nodding of heads. Of course, regional weather isn't the point. So it's useful to…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2010In a desperate bid to help staunch the propagation of a particularly insidious meme, I offer this attempt to help clear up any confusion:
Mike Hulme and Martin Mahony of the School of Environmental Sciences University at East Anglia have a paper forthcoming in Progress in Physical Geography that explores the IPCC, "its origins and mandate; its disciplinary and geographical expertise; its governance and organisational learning; consensus and its representation of uncertainty; and its wider impact and influence on knowledge production, public discourse and policy development."
The paper does…
hrynyshyn | June 14, 2010Smoke and Mirrors:
Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century
By Burton Richter
Cambridge University Press, 218 pages.
Do we really another book summarizing the science of climate change and the available response options? Sure. Why not? What's the harm? In this era of hyperfractionated audiences and echo-chambers, there's no such thing as too many arrows in our collective quiver. This one, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter, doesn't contribute anything new. But at this point in the conversation, there's not much new to contribute, just novel approaches to making the argument…
hrynyshyn | June 11, 2010I've never been completely comfortable using the fate of small island states -- places like Tuvalu and Kiribati and the Seycelles that might be the first to go under as sea levels rise -- as poster kids for the consequences of climate change. For one thing, as difficult as it would be for their populations to abandon their homes, there's just not that many people involved, and so there was never any real chance that their pleas would have much of an effect on industrialized countries. The reality is people react to threats to their own quality of life, not those facing a tiny group on the…
hrynyshyn | June 10, 2010A debate at TED in February over nuclear power's merits as a clean source of electricity featured Whole Earth Catalog guru Steward Brand (pro) and Stanford energy systems analysts Mark Jacobson. A lot of ground covered in 23 minutes, including just how much ground various clean energy options cover.
The winner? It was a slam dunk for ...
I'll let you figure it out for yourself.
"Does the world need nuclear energy?" is an important question, for at least two reasons. First, Congressional legislators seem intent on including increased support for the nuclear industry in any climate or energy…
hrynyshyn | June 9, 2010NASA's James Hansen has few peers when it comes to the title of leading climatologist-turned-policy-wonk, but Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia (yes, that university) is giving him a run for his money. Hulme's latest entry is a cautionary tale involving the challenges involved in geoengineering.
In Yale e360, Hulme argues that the technical obstacles to making the Earth's climate do what we want aside, the politics of trying to change the radiative heat balance of the atmosphere are problematic in the extreme.
Who, he asks,
is entitled to initiate the large-scale deployment of a…
hrynyshyn | June 8, 2010There's a small community of bloggers and activists who spent the weekend scratching their collective heads in hopes of figuring out what was behind a story that came out of a little place called Beeville, Texas. Last week word came from a local paper than a fourth-grader had won a "National Science Fair" prize by "Disproving Global Warming."
The story immediately drew skeptical analysis, as there hasn't been a "National Science Fair" for some time. More curious was the notion that a fourth-grader could manage to do what thousands of climatologists who make their living trying to find holes…
hrynyshyn | June 4, 2010Hard as it is for someone who isn't familiar with intricacies of U.S. government-run climate science to believe, there is no climatology analog of the the immigration or revenue services, something responsible for overseeing the big picture. Sure, there's NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, but that does a lot of things other than measure and model the climate. There's NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, but it's mostly a number-crunching lab, and not really set up to engage the public. That's about to change, and the folks tasked with overseeing the creation of the new Climate…
hrynyshyn | June 3, 2010Much has been written of late about the nature of denialism. New Scientist a couple of issues back produced a special report on the subject, for example, and the New Humanist explores the idea of "unreasonable doubt."
There's plenty more out there. The most provocative I've come across (thanks to Joss Garman via DeSmog Blog's Brendan DeMelle) is a 2009 paper in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics by Jeroen van Dongen of the Institute for History and Foundations of Science at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His thesis is ideologically based denialism of…
hrynyshyn | June 2, 2010If the title of Matt Ridley's new book, The Rational Optimist, sounds a little familiar, that's because it borrows heavily from the world view of one Bjorn "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Lomborg. Both contrarians dismiss global warming as nothing to worry about, although Ridley seems even less convinced that the planet is actually experiencing anthropogenic global warming. I don't have time to read it -- but I did manage to take a look at the kind of thinking that Ridley uses at his blog.
This week, Ridley wrote about what his research in the "Holocene Optimum," uncovered. What he found, he…
hrynyshyn | June 1, 2010Today marks the official start of North Atlantic hurricane season. So...
One of the key differences between genuine climatology and anti-scientific denialism of anthropogenic climate change is the flexibility of the former and the stubbornness of the latter when it comes to our ever-evolving understanding of how the world works. The connection between hurricanes and climate is a perfect example.
When the "An Inconvenient Truth" crew was filming Al Gore deliver his now-familiar presentation, they couldn't have anticipated that two major hurricanes would, as if on cue, roar through the Gulf of…
hrynyshyn | May 31, 2010A paper in Nature Geoscience published early this month was much derided by the usual suspects in the pseudoskeptic community. Contrary to what many critics of "Methane emissions from extinct megafauna" claim, the research does not lead to the conclusion that humans are solely responsible for a global cooling event known as the Younger Dryas, which saw a brief reversal in the warming trend that brought the last ice age to an end. But it does remind us of just how interconnected are all the elements of the planetary ecosystem, and how dangerous it is to tinker with one of them.
The authors,…
hrynyshyn | May 31, 2010"Climate change is an issue that is almost designed to create apathy ..."
-- Linda Connor, Science Alert, 20 May 2010
The writer argues that the rise of climate change denialism in the face of growing scientific evidence of serious consequences of climate change can be explained by looking at basic human psychology. Essentially, we're talking about extrapolating psychology to the sociological sphere.
Negative messages about the future, such as those expressed in discourses of climate crisis, are a challenge to our cultural projects of immortality. These negative messages, connected with death…
hrynyshyn | May 28, 2010This week's Science has a lengthy review of a long list of recent books by and about climatologists. If you're interested in doing some not-so-light reading this summer (in a year predicted to be the warmest on record), the review, which Science has made freely available, should steer you in the right direction. The reviewer, Columbia University philosopher Philip Kitcher, covers a lot of territory. He puts it all in perspective by pointing out that while many of the books try to convince readers of the simple truth of climate change, the sad truth is that:
Even if American public opinion…
hrynyshyn | May 26, 2010Back in the winter of 1990-91, when I was a between-real-jobs freelancer hanging out in Vancouver with plenty of time on my hands to read, I would cycle down to Stanley Park each rainless day, find a quiet stretch of beach, and read. I went through dozens of books before returning to the working world, but the only book I remember in any detail is Bill McKibben's The End of Nature. It was the first full-length, popular-science take on climate change, and I've spent much of the last 20 years thinking and writing about the subject, thanks to that book. So has McKibben.
eaarth is an oddly…
hrynyshyn | May 25, 2010The appearance of an editorial in the far-right-leaning Washington Times challenging the reality of anthropogenic climate change is not particularly interesting. What is worth looking at is the width of the gap between the research cited by the editorialist and what the research is actually all about.
The editorial, which ran under the headline "Nero was hotter than Al Gore," argues that a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds the Earth was warmer in Roman times than it is today. Even if true, this would mean little, unless the ancient anomalously warm period…
hrynyshyn | May 20, 2010The first three of the "America's Climate Choices" reports from a U.S. National Academy of Sciences committee restate the case that there is "strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that Earth is warming" and calls for the adoption of "an economy-wide carbon pricing system." Not really Earth-shattering news, just climate-disrupting. What is worth drawing your attention to is the embrace of something akin to the "trillionth tonne" idea.
Until now, most government-associated documents dwell on end-point targets. A given a certain chance of keeping…
hrynyshyn | May 18, 2010What's being billed as the U.S. Senate's last chance to pass a bill that deals with climate change, the American Power Act, aims for a now-familiar target: a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 83% by 2050. The idea is that if the developed world can manage to reach that goal, the global goal only has to be something like a 50% cut by mid century. As has been pointed out, this will not be easy.
The authors of a recent paper in PNAS call it "a forbidding challenge." Why? It turns out the math and underlying science are much less forbidding. Allow me to take a stab at explaining it in…