climate change
illconsidered | January 31, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This 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 Information overload is pattern recognition January 31, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, Copenhagen Accord, Scorecard, BASIC, COP16, Solomon et al., EPI, WGMS, Usama, IPCC Attack Bottom Line, Cold Snap, Frank et al., WEF, WSF, China & AGW, Gates, OIC - Oct 2011 Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land…
sastyk | January 31, 2010In 2005, my first widely republished article was entitled "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" and detailed the ways that material realities for women were likely to change in an energy depleted world. I got more than a 100 emails after I wrote that piece, mostly falling into two camps - either "Wow, I never thought of that, but of course it is" and "Oh, I've been worrying about these issues for a long time and no one ever writes about them." I was not the first significant woman writer in the peak oil movement, nor was I even the first to ever write about these issues, but somehow this article…
hrynyshyn | January 30, 2010James Delingpole continues to enjoy the privileges of blogging on the Daily Telegraph's imprimatur, despite his repeated misstatements on climatology. His latest affront to journalistic norms comes in the form of another alleged failure of a team of IPCC authors to cite real science. He's calling it "Amazongate." Oh dear.
Delingpole, drawing on pseudo-research by one Richard North, who blogs at Eureferendum, claims that the IPCC authors reference another piece of gray literature that doesn't include the scientific observation they say it does. North and Delingpole say that Chapter 13 of the…
hrynyshyn | January 27, 2010So, to recap:
More than 96% of working climatologists say the global mean temperatures are rising, but only 34% of the public believes "Most scientists think global warming is happening."
How did we let this happen?
hrynyshyn | January 26, 2010I've never met David Rose of the U.K.'s Daily Mail. And, while his past reporting on climate issues has tended to misrepresent the science of the day, it is entirely possible his editors are to blame for the fictionalization of his latest story. So I won't point fingers at this juncture. Regardless, the affair is an ominous reminder of how easily an idea can migrate across the world in a matter of hours even though anyone with a middle-school education could spot the flaw within a few seconds.
According to Rose:
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that…
illconsidered | January 26, 2010The Oregon petition seems to be getting a small revival in the press and blogosphere lately, including in the comments here. I don't have a guide article for that, though I suppose I should. So much has been written about it, I don't know if I have anything original to say.
Some example critiques are from Scientific American:
Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition --- one was an active climate researcher…
grrlscientist | January 26, 2010tags: Story of Stuff, environment, pollution, climate change, global warming, recycling, social commentary, cultural observation, planned obsolescence, perceived obsolescence, fashion, advertizing, social psychology, streaming video
From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental…
illconsidered | January 25, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This 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 Sipping from the internet firehose... January 24, 2010 Chuckles, Copenhagen, BASIC, WFES, IRENA, Solar Cycle, Grumbine, WMO-GCW, NA Ozone, Himalayan Glaciers Bill Gates, Urban Heat Island, Cold Snap, GW & Natural Disasters, CRU, Late Comments Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon…
hrynyshyn | January 21, 2010By ruling that corporations are entitled to exercise unrestricted political speech, the U.S. Supreme Court has just made it much more difficult for Americans to make the transition from a fossil-fuel-based economy to a clean-energy economy.
Most democracies, including, until this morning, the U.S., recognize the danger of giving corporations free rein to influence the outcome of elections and so limit or ban political spending by corporations. But starting now, the $605 billion in profits available to the Fortune 100 can now be spent on advertising during American elections. This means those…
sastyk | January 21, 2010There's yet another kerfuffle about climatology going on. First, of course, there was climategate, whose total revealed knowledge is "if you hack into people's private emails you might find out that some people, even climate scientists, are jerks sometimes." Now there's another one - in the IPCC report, there's an error. That is, scientists took a non-peer reviewed source and transposed it into the report, and didn't back check that source. This was stupid, of course, and should be criticized and corrected.
That said, since the material in the IPCC is overwhelmingly peer-reviewed science…
hrynyshyn | January 19, 2010Dear Massachusetts voters:
If for some reason you haven't yet decided who should get your vote in today's Senate election, consider this little piece of information about Republican candidate Scott Brown, courtesy of the Boston Globe:
Brown typically skips climate change and global warming when discussing the environment; he sees the emissions debate as an economic one, spokesman Felix Browne said. On his website, under "Energy and Environment,'' Brown supports an array of domestic alternatives to foreign oil - including wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and hydroelectric - but does not…
hrynyshyn | January 18, 2010The revelation that at least one group of authors working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would rely on grey literature or even popular media sources for their reporting could end up being a real blow to the Nobel prize-winning organization.
If you haven't heard by now, a section of the Fourth IPCC report, which came out in 2007, cited a prediction for the complete disappearance of all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas by 2035. This alone would be sufficient justification for describing the consequences of climate change as catastrophic, as something like 40…
illconsidered | January 18, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This 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 Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years January 17, 2010 Copenhagen, BASIC, UN Investors Summit, Berlin, WFES, IRENA, Cochabamba, Cold Snap, CRU Carbon Tariffs, Grumbine, In Case Of Failure, Objectivity Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, C & N Cycles, Temperatures,…
illconsidered | January 15, 2010Just in case anyone out there has10 more minutes they are prepared to throw down the bottomless CRU Email hack hole, I found this YouTube video rather thourough and amusing:
One happy data point about this affair is that it clearly did not have much impact outside of the Denial-o-sphere. Copenhagen need no such aid to end in tatters all on its own.
On that note, have a good weekend!
hrynyshyn | January 15, 2010Thanks to the dogged determination of über climate blogger Joe Romm, here's what Mojib Latif wants us all to understand about his previous references to a short-term cooling trend:
Given all the warnings about and plans to forestall global warming, people may be surprised to find, over the next several years that, over parts of the Northern hemisphere, summers are no warmer than before, maybe even a bit cooler-and that winters are as cold, or a bit colder, than they have been in the past couple of decades.
This is because the climate may go through a temporary halt in warming. It's nothing…
hrynyshyn | January 12, 2010The news that Sarah Palin has found a new platform for her particular take on reality brings to mind one of the biggest obstacles to the development of meaningful action on the climate change front -- or any other serious public policy challenge, for that matter.
Palin is more akin to Paris Hilton or Pia Zadora than she is to most other public figures in two ways. First, she brings no obvious talent or experience to the public sphere, just popularity afforded her first by the electorate of a small and politically quirky state, and by the last man standing in one of the weakest fields of…
sastyk | January 11, 2010I'm back after four days of teaching a workshop at my house. It was awesome. It was exhausting. It was fascinating. We milked goats (note, very small adorable goats sell themselves. It is not necessary to talk them up, just to frisk people trying to hide goats under their jackets on the way out ;-)). We talked lactofermentation. We laughed a lot. We cooked on the woodstove. We knit stuff (ok, they knit stuff, I didn't knit much, since I was trying to manage everything). We talked about the future and where we think it is going. We laughed a lot. We talked about growing things and…
sporte | January 8, 2010Next Saturday afternoon, at ScienceOnline2010, the science goddess, the chemspider, and I will be presenting a workshop on getting students involved in citizen science.
In preparation, I'm compiling a set of links to projects that involve students in citizen science. If you know of any good citizen science efforts, please share them in the comments.
Here we go!
Before I start listing links, I am limiting this list to projects that allow both students and citizen scientists to participate. I know of plenty of student projects, where students can isolate phage and annotate their genomes or…
hrynyshyn | January 8, 2010What's better for a book and its author: good reviews or a threat of a boycott of the publisher?
Today I received an email from one Gavin Bower of Quartet Books of London, a publisher with a respectable history of daring to handle works that no one else was willing to touch. The Joy of Sex in 1973, for example. I've never heard from Bower or Quartet before, but for some reason I'm on their media contact list. The subject: a blog post from Quartet's publisher decrying an alleged "orchestrated boycott" from environmental fundamentalists upset that Quartet has published climate change…
hrynyshyn | January 7, 2010One of the more common arguments from skeptics of anthropogenic climate change is that the Earth has experienced periods during which atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were much much higher than they are today -- as much as 10 times higher. Why worry about a mere 30% increase over pre-industrial levels?
There are several answers to that challenge. The most obvious is that while it may be true that CO2 levels have been several times higher that today's 387 parts per million, the Earth was also a very different place back then. The sea level was much higher, the temperature was much warmer and…