climate change
tsmith | November 15, 2011I rarely write about climate change. As much as it's been hashed out amongst climate scientists, and even many of the former "climate skeptics" have now changed their tune, I readily accept that climate change is happening, and is happening largely due to human activities. More importantly for my field, climate change is also having effects on human health in a number of different ways, from the movement of insect vectors into new areas, to warming of the seas leading to more extreme weather conditions, to the loss of coral reefs and the freshwater that these reefs protect from the…
hrynyshyn | November 14, 2011Kevin Trenberth's latest paper, which appears in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is uncharacteristically and refreshingly blunt right from the first few words of the introduction:
Humans are changing our climate. There is no doubt whatsoever. There are arguments about how much and how important these effects are and will be in future, but many studies (e.g., see the summary by Stott et al.1) have demonstrated that effects are not trivial and have emerged from the noise of natural variability, even if they are small by some measures. So why does the science community…
illconsidered | November 14, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Global Warming News Information Overloadis Pattern RecognitionNovember 13, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Bangkok, BEST, Curry, OWS, WEO Oceans & Fires, Bottom Line, Subsidies, Greenland, Cook, Post CRU Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, I-131 in Europe Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food Riots, Food vs. Biofuel…
hrynyshyn | November 10, 2011David Roberts is, as usual, bang on in his latest Grist column, lamenting the pointlessness of the debate between those who insist we need more research and development before tackling climate change, and those who say we shouldn't wait. (Roberts is among the best commenters around when it comes to the social and political context of climate change.)
For the amount of attention it gets, you'd think that settling this debate is the crucial first step in developing a policy plan or a political strategy. You'd think the "enough technology" question must be answered before anyone can move forward…
illconsidered | November 8, 2011Peter Sinclair has a good run down of recent politically motivated FOIA fishing expeditions into climate and other scientist emails.
It includes mention of the recent good news in the ATI v UVa case where the court agreed with UVa that the ATI and their lawyers could not be trusted to see emails UVa has claimed should be exempt from the FOIA request for the purpose of challenging that excemption. Ouch. But good call, I am sure.
Peter also includes mention of an excellent non-climate science related example of the same tactic in the case of a Wisconsin history professor, William Cronon,…
illconsidered | November 7, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...November 6, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, BASIC, Horn of Africa, Bangkok, G20, BEST, Curry, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Koolaid, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Food Prices, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks, Paleoclimate,…
hrynyshyn | November 4, 2011Among the very best of the science-oriented blogs I try to read regularly is Tom Levenson's Inverse Square Blog. Tom, who teaches science journalism at MIT, isn't a climatologist, but whenever he writes about climate science or politics, it's usually worth a look.
Apparently, the folks at Scientific American agree, and they recently invited Tom to contribute a guest post to the magazine's blog site. It's primarily about the recent kerfuffle over the possibility that neutrinos might be able to travel faster than light, and a bit on the lengthy side, but he does manage to work climate in…
illconsidered | October 31, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another Week in the Ecological Crisis Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsOctober 30, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Rogelj, Maplecroft, BEST, OWS, WCRP, Monnett The Cree Prophecy, Bottom Line, Subsidies, Planet 3.0, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Food Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon,…
illconsidered | October 30, 2011The fallout from the BEST project results continues, with the denialosphere frantically trying to disown and defame Richard Muller. Marc Morano is at his shrillest pitch ever, and believe me that is as shrill as shrill gets! I guess it works at some level, because he did make me look at his website. That high pitched squeaking broke down all my intellectual safeguards and I followed a link from his almost daily inbox spamming.
Today's (approving) hysteria was about an article in the DailyMail which gives you the general flavour of the treatment Muller is receiving. Given his own rather…
hrynyshyn | October 27, 2011Don't get me wrong. I love NPR. I listen to it for at least four hours a day. But lately I've found the network's embrace of "he said, she said" journalism a little too difficult to swallow. This morning's report on censorship of a scientific report commissioned by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality isn't perhaps the most egregious example, but it does concern climate change, so it's worth examining.
For those unfamiliar with this lazy and cowardly form of reporting, check out new media maven Jay Rosen's take. Basically, the problem is NPR is afraid to let its reporters come right…
hrynyshyn | October 26, 2011Everyone talks about global warming, but it's not easy to get one's mind around just how much heat we're talking about. Even more difficult is putting that heat energy in terms that the average layperson can grasp. Fortunately, some scientists are making an effort to do just that.
In a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters, "Observed changes in surface atmospheric energy over land," Thomas Peterson, of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC, Katharine M. Willett of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK, and and Peter W. Thorne, who works alongside Peterson at the…
illconsidered | October 24, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week in the Ecological Crisis Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not WisdomOctober 23, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Monsoon, BEST Albedo, Drought, OWS, Monnett, Subsidies, GFI, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, IP Issues, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes,…
hrynyshyn | October 20, 2011There's this notion among the climate denial community that somehow the entire professional climatology community has overlooked an obvious flaw in the science behind anthropogenic global warming. Their hypothesis is that too many of the thermometers used to record temperatures over the last 200 years have been located in or near cities, and so have produced a warming bias produced by the waste heat generated in urban areas.
It sounds plausible. The problem with the notion, of course, is that it's so obvious a potential bias that climatologists long ago learned to take the "urban heat island…
sastyk | October 20, 2011On the 31st of October we will officially reach 7 billion people on the earth. Over the next week or two we'll be talking a lot about population issues, and I wanted to start by doing a light revision of an article I wrote some years ago about a concept a lot of people don't grasp very well - the idea of demographic transition and what it means.
The term "Demographic Transition" describes the movement of human populations from higher initial birth rates to a stabilzed lower one, and seems to be a general feature of most societies over the last several hundred years.
Initially, birth rates…
illconsidered | October 17, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another Week in the Ecological Crisis Information Overloadis Pattern RecognitionOctober 16, 2011 Chuckles, OWS, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Carbon Bill, Drought Monsoon, Bottom Line, Subsidies, Ecocide, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production…
tfk | October 15, 2011Earlier this week, I quoted this from an op-ed in the LA Times:
I recently conducted survey research comparing the most conservative of Protestants â those who identify with a conservative Protestant denomination, attend church regularly and take the Bible literally, or about 11% of the population in my analysis â with those who do not participate in any religion. The conservative Protestants are equally likely to understand scientific methods, to know scientific facts and to claim knowledge of science. They are as likely as the nonreligious to have majored in science or to have a scientific…
hrynyshyn | October 11, 2011How old do you have to be before it's acceptable for your high-school teacher to expose you to propaganda?
Last week I had the honor of taking part in a video chat with a class of eighth graders at a private school in Atlanta. I got involved through a personal connection and then took a strong interest when I learned that the students would be sitting through both Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Martin Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle as part of an environmental writing section of their English course. Then their teacher, in an effort to nudge his students toward something…
tfk | October 10, 2011Sociologist John Evans talks about his research on evangelical attitudes toward science. Writing for the LA Times, he says:
I recently conducted survey research comparing the most conservative of Protestants â those who identify with a conservative Protestant denomination, attend church regularly and take the Bible literally, or about 11% of the population in my analysis â with those who do not participate in any religion. The conservative Protestants are equally likely to understand scientific methods, to know scientific facts and to claim knowledge of science. They are as likely as the…
illconsidered | October 10, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week in the Ecological Crisis Sipping from the Internet Firehose...October 9, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Pakistan, EU & Tar Sands, Planet 3.0 Grumbine, Drought, Maathai, Subsidies, Ecocide, BS Detector, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food: Crisis, Prices, Riots, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, IP Issues…
tfk | October 8, 2011Sarah Posner reports from the Values Voters Summit, a gathering of the theocracy-in-waiting. Various GOP presidential candidates spoke, as did Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association:
Fischer followed Romney's speech with an ugly anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-liberal speech. Although he did not mention Mormonism, he did emphasize, repeatedly, that the president of the United States "needs to be a main of sincere, authentic, genuine Christian faith."
In the rest of his laundry list of presidential prerequisites, Fischer veered from there to discuss the "mythical separation of church…