hrynyshyn | March 23, 2010The Economist's reputation as the intellectual's news outlet of choice is probably undeserved -- its questionable choice of correspondents and lack of bylines, heavy editing and conservative politics undermine it's credibility in my book -- but because it's widely read in elite circles, it's hard to ignore. So the magazine's feature treatment of climate science is worth looking at. I am pleased to report that, while The Economist may be a straggler when it came to embracing the science, it is now fully on board.
In any complex scientific picture of the world there will be gaps,…
hrynyshyn | March 22, 2010Since I moved to North Carolina (five years ago next month), it's been depressing to watch the political climate there move ever closer to the one the U.S. managed to pull itself out of in 2008. The latest news, which concerns attempts by the federal government to silence its own climatologists, only reinforces that interpretation.
From the Montreal Gazette we learn of an internal review at the Department of the Environment:
The document suggests the new communications policy has practically eliminated senior federal scientists from media coverage of climate-change science issues, leaving…
hrynyshyn | March 19, 2010BILLINGS, Mont. -- A federal judge has approved a first-of-its-kind settlement requiring the government to suspend 38,000 acres of oil and gas leases in Montana so it can gauge how oil field activities contribute to climate change.
-- The Washington Post's Matthew Brown has the provocative details.
hrynyshyn | March 16, 2010From our friends at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, in Asheville, N.C., we learn the following:
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for February 2010 was 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average of 12.1°C (53.9°F). This is the sixth warmest such value on record.
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for December 2009 - February 2010 was the fifth warmest on record for the season, 0.57°C (1.03°F) above the 20th century average of 12.1°C (53.8°F).
For the year to date, the combined global land and ocean surface…
hrynyshyn | March 12, 2010
One Strawbarb Pi, an entry in the Second Annual Pi Day Contest.
Recipe:
The pastry
250 ml of whole wheat flour
250 ml of white all-purpose flour
two-third of a stick of butter-flavor vegetable shortening
dash of salt
Blend all ingredients using whatever technology is most convenient. Form resulting dough in to two hamburger-sized patties, wrapped in waxed paper. Refrigerate for approx. 15 min.
The filling
Approx 500 g of strawberries, chopped into 1 cc pieces B.C.-grown are the best, followed by South Carolinian varieties when in season and purchased from the side of the road from some…
hrynyshyn | March 8, 2010Randy Olson says:
There comes a point where the public DOES want to see the science community stand up for themselves.
And as if on cue comes the release of another round of once-private emails among members of one section of the National Academies of Sciences alerting us to efforts to do just that. The NY Times has a Greenwire story on it, but you need to read the actual emails.
How can we sit back while many of our colleagues and science as a whole is under massive attack?" asks Paul Ehrlich.
"People who have an open mind are wondering about the absence of any coordinated and
publicized…
hrynyshyn | March 8, 2010I am pleased that activity on the Island of Doubt has increased in recent months. I manage to squeeze in a hour four or five days a week to write about what I think is the most serious public policy challenge of our time, and make what modest contribution I can to the debate, and I wish I could do more.
Indeed, I wish I could devote my entire working day to his blog. But I can't. I have to make a living and income for this blog covers little more than my DSL bill. So monitoring the comments on a hourly basis is out of the question. Until recently, that hasn't been a big problem. But the…
hrynyshyn | March 4, 2010Leslie Kaufman in the New York Times presents a disturbing tale of attempts by creationists to up their chances of slipping religion into science classrooms by piggy-backing it onto "balanced" instruction of climatology.
The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.
Yet they are also capitalizing…
hrynyshyn | March 4, 2010It's a sore spot for some climate change pseudoskeptics. Any time anyone makes any kind of claim about the effects of a warming planet on tropical storm activity, you can count on a deluge of rejoinders about how shaky the science on the subject really is.
Much is made of Al Gore's use of an image of hurricane spewing forth from a smokestack on a promotional poster for "An Inconvenient Truth." And Chris Mooney devoted an entire book to exploring the science, and the battles over and about the science, Storm World. I was commissioned by the Weather Channel a couple of years back to write a…
hrynyshyn | March 2, 2010As regular readers will know, I prefer the term "pseudoskeptic" over "denier" when it comes to those who insist we needn't be worried about climate change. This is because the common denominator among any set of such characters tends to be a misapplication of the scientific method, a failure to apply rigorous skeptical analysis to the subject. Not all of these pseudoskeptics are deniers, as this list from Foreign Policy makes clear.
Indeed, the distinctions among the selected "Guide to Climate Skeptics" make it even more important to choose our descriptors carefully. I would argue that…
hrynyshyn | February 25, 2010This has nothing to do with climatology, or science in general, but I can't resist sharing it with you. From the instructions to our new DTV antenna, which until the Great Ice Storm of 2010 damaged its transformer-coaxial connection, brought in more watchable channels than expanded basic cable or satellite:
For those that might have trouble reading the scanned text, which appears at the bottom of the instructions page in 6-point type, it says:
WARNING Do not attempt to install if drunk or pregnant or both. Do not throw antenna at spouse.
I do hope that no one at Antennas Direct gets in…
hrynyshyn | February 23, 2010It's hard to know just when George F. Will parted ways with reality. Some argue he abandoned respect for historical accuracy years ago. But it's only in the last year or so, thanks to a series of bafflingly misinformed column on climate change, that it became clear to all but his most loyal readers that he no longer cares about getting it right.
Still, you have to appreciate his way with words. In this past weekend's affront to the traditions of evidence-based commentary -- a column that has been eviscerated by most of the better science-oriented bloggers who pay attention to such things --…
hrynyshyn | February 17, 2010In the past couple of days a pernicious little meme has appeared in two leading North American newspapers. I refer to the notion that there is such a thing as "settled science." First, on a column about climatology Monday the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente asked not-so-rhetorically "So much for the science being settled. Now what?" The following day the Wall Street Journal's editorial page weighed in with a review of "what used to be called the 'settled science' of global warming."
Both offerings betrayed a solid lack of understanding, not only of recent events involving recent allegations…
hrynyshyn | February 16, 2010Covering climatology may not be the biggest challenge facing today's mainstream news outlets and the journalists they employ, but it certainly has exposed a serious weakness in conventional news reporting. That weakness, as I implied in my previous post, is a pathological fear of taking sides, even then the "sides" in question are reality and fantasy.
Part of the problem is endemic to much of what passes for science journalism, which is too often practiced by journalists who know so little about the subject they're covering that they can't properly evaluate the reliability or trustworthiness…
hrynyshyn | February 12, 2010David Roberts at Grist, riffing on This American Life's Ira Glass, nails it on the head:
"...news reporting is declining in part because of just this phenomenon: reporters do not react like human beings. The audience doesn't see or hear themselves in most news reporting. When covering something amazing, reporters are not allowed express awe. When covering something unexpected, they're not allowed to express surprise. And when faced with conservatives celebrating and reinforcing one another's ignorance, they're not allowed to show gall or outrage. Or mock.
People reading these stories get "the…
hrynyshyn | February 12, 2010Via the ever-vigilant Stoat, I draw your attention to a letter to the Netherlands parliament from by 55 Netherlands scientists. Along with the usual "the science remains sound" defense of our understanding of anthropogenic global warming, it provides some useful perspective:
The writing of IPCC reports and its quality control remains the work of humans. A guarantee for an error free report is an unachievable ideal, however much an error free report is highly desired
Just as a thousand private emails are bound to include a few intemperate remarks and elucidation of wishful thinking, the…
hrynyshyn | February 11, 2010It gives me no pleasure to pass on the facts about the lack of respect for the truth shown by climate change pseudo-skeptics. But there's simply no getting around it.
Last year, in his book Science as a Contact Sport, veteran climatologist Stephen Schneider made much of the misuse of a quote that actually did come from his lips about the temptation to "offer up scary scenarios" and the need to stay honest. The problem was he ended his observation on conflicting messaging priorities by saying, "I hope that means being both" but that line almost never makes it into stories by denialists citing…
hrynyshyn | February 9, 2010In case anyone is wondering why I haven't posted anything for the past few days, what with all the fuss over the IPCC and all, it's not because I'm reluctant to comment on it. It's just that my little piece of western North Carolina is only now recovering from an ice storm that knocked the power to my house out last Friday morning. I've only been back online for a few minutes and trying to catch up with all the happenings. Of course, I'm horribly behind in work that pays, so it may be a while before I get back to blogging regularly. Stay tuned.
hrynyshyn | February 4, 2010It's not so much that the pseudoskeptics who dominate the climate change denial camp are particularly clever, but they have been rather fortunate, and the forces aligned on the side of science have turned out to be human after all. The result is the denial camp is winning, and those on the defensive have some thinking to do.
First, consider the timing of recent events.
As the year began, climatologists were able to launch what should have been a devastating counterattack to the nonsensical but appealing notion that global warming has been replacing by global cooling. The records show that the…
hrynyshyn | February 2, 2010Never mind that the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record. Or that 2009 tied for the second-warmest year. Neither of those stories are consuming much airtime and web- and print-space. No, the biggest stories on the climate beat involve allegations of fraudulent activity on the part of some of the world's most experienced climatologists. The latest example concerns the lack of records specifying the location of remote Chinese weather stations and just how much they moved.
As Fred Pearce writes in The Guardian, "It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute."…