climate change
hrynyshyn | February 19, 2009I'm dwelling on George F. Will's latest violation of journalistic ethics because it seems to have hit a nerve. Journalists ordinarily too polite to attack another journalist for fear of appearing biased and unprofessional have broken with their habits to call Will on his misrepresentation of the mythical "global cooling" consensus of the 1970s.
It's not surprising to come across sarcastic and caustic reviews in places like the Think Progress Wonk Room or TPM Muckraker. And I would have been shocked if Joe Romm hadn't blown another in his infinite supply of gaskets. But the opprobrium has…
illconsidered | February 18, 2009In the climate debates, I hear it all the time: why should the US do anything when China and India are the fastest growing and largest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet? Though I make it a personal policy to never discussion mitigation policies with characters who will not even accept the reality of the problem, the question does, on its own merits, deserve a thoughtful answer.
Clearly, climate disruption due to accumulating greenhouse gases is a global problem and requires a cooperative and global solution. We all share the same planetary atmosphere, and CO2 is a well mixed gas in…
illconsidered | February 16, 2009I recently wrote about the tragic bushfires in Australia and how it seems to me that it is reasonable to ask if this would have happened without anthropogenic climate changes.
Real Climate has the details on this in their latest post: Bushfires and extreme heat in south-east Australia.
The post is by David Karoly, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He identifies four factors in the fire's ferocity - maximum temperatures, relative humidity, wind speeds and the ongoing drought - and discusses the possible role of climate change in each of them. For three of…
illconsidered | February 12, 2009As I mentioned briefly before, I have just returned from Australia and as you could imagine, the heatwaves and wildfires were a hot topic(how funny am I?).
So the death toll is expected to exceed 200 people. Southern Australia has been experiencing extreme drought for many years now, so the whole place is a tinder box. Increased risk of wildfires is an anticipated, and probably already observed, consequence of global warming.
You are never on solid ground when attributing a particular extreme event to such a slow moving change in the average of all events, which is what climate change is,…
hrynyshyn | February 11, 2009Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office Hadley Centre, says scientists should be careful not to exaggerate the evidence for climate change:
The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change. This message is more difficult to get heard. Scientists and journalists need to find ways to help to make this clear without the wider audience switching off.
She cites the fuss over dwindling Arctic sea ice cover (or extent) as "just one example" of going beyond what the data really say:
Recent headlines…
hrynyshyn | February 10, 2009Northern Ireland's Environment Minister, Sammy Wilson, has banned an advertising campaign promoting efficient use of electricity on the grounds that the central thesis of the campaign is "patent nonsense" and "insidious propaganda." Even if it were true, since when are either attributes grounds for censorship? What's the real problem?
From the BBC's coverage of the story:
Calling for his removal, the Green Party said Mr Wilson made "a laughing stock out of Northern Ireland."
Sammy Wilson argued that the Scottish executive had objected and stopped the adverts being broadcast. However, the…
illconsidered | February 7, 2009So last week I asked "how low", Things Break provided an answer, and Roger continued his love-to-hate realtionship with Real Climate folks. The sopa opera continues, spilling out into Real Life, as Gavin seems to want some formal retraction. Being called a thief is no small matter, and like most of Rogers conclusions, this is just not born out by the evidence. He is once again finding the smallest bit of wiggle room and prying it open until it is wide enough for his ego to fit through!
(And BTW, none of this matters if you are interested in what is actually going on in Antarctica.)
But…
hrynyshyn | February 7, 2009For those in need a splashy video rebuttal to typical climate denial talking points, there's a great little feature on YouTube called Climate Denial Crock of the Week by one Peter Sinclair. Here's a recent one:
illconsidered | February 5, 2009I know I said I would do a weekly "Climate Science for the iPod" feature on A Few Things, but the week after just one edition, I left for a business trip to Tasmania, Australia. So...not a good start!
I am not back yet, I am writing this in a hotel near Melbourne Tullamarine airport(ok, that's a boring link) on my way home (yea!) so still can not check all my podcast subscriptions to see what is fodder for blogging BUT in the meantime I would like to draw your attention to a three part series from CBC Radio called "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer. There is a page here where you can down load…
hrynyshyn | February 3, 2009The U.S. Climate Change Science Program finally managed to release its Final Report of Synthesis and Assessment a couple of weeks back. There's not a lot of new material in the first four of five volumes which deal with the state of the science, mostly because the report was supposed to be released a while back. Must have been some delay at the top of the food change. But the fifth volume came with an intriguing title: "Best practice approaches for characterizing, communicating, and incorporating scientific uncertainty in decision-making"
The 156-page report tries to give scientists a few…
illconsidered | February 3, 2009Just a quick update on my recent post noting Roger Pielke's lack of integrity:
Roger makes a note of my post and John Fleck's and adds this underhanded toss-off line: Hansen's forecast "did not survive the peer review process" and so did not "appear in PNAS". Of course, the alledged "prediction" of a super El Nino ("there is a good chance") from the draft was not submitted to PNAS for peer review. Roger is refering to Hansen's passing the draft to a few friends and colleagues, inadvertently distributing it more broadly (oops, Roger's not a friend!).
There is a must read exchage at John…
illconsidered | February 3, 2009I have made it pretty clear before that I am no fan of Roger Pielke Jr. Everytime I stick my nose in there the smell seems to get a little worse.
His latest effort at sabotaging productive discourse on climate science and policy is a really low blow, putting to rest any lingering hopes one might have had that he still had some integrity stashed away in there somewhere. Now I know these are strong words, but I have to confess this really gets my blood pressure up, it is just the slimiest of tactics. (I will happily retract this post and apologize if Roger makes ammends for his ethical…
edyong | February 2, 2009In the movie Finding Nemo, the eponymous clownfish grows up in the security of his home reef and must find his way back after being fry-napped by an overenthusiastic diver. In reality, the larvae of clownfish spend their early lives adrift in the open ocean and only after weeks, or possibly months, do they return to the reefs where they were born.
Their journey is guided by several cues that help them navigate home. The sound of a reef may be one of these but it's clear that the most important sense for a returning fish is smell. Young fish have very well developed smell organs and respond…
hrynyshyn | February 2, 2009The dominant subject among climate change campaigners these days is economics. One could consider this good news, insofar as we've moved on from debating the science of global warming to the debate over how to deal with it. The bad news is most of what passes for debate in economics makes little sense, even to many an economist. For example, I certainly don't feel competent to pass judgment the relative merits of a carbon tax and cap-and-trade. But we can't ignore the issues, can we? So it is with some trepidation that I turn your attention to the U.S. economic stimulus package now making its…
grrlscientist | February 2, 2009tags: glaciers, global warming, Alaska, environment, streaming video
Tom Gaylord's glacier photos tell a story, in pictures, about Alaska's beautiful but dwindling glaciers. These photos, along with a brief in-flight helicopter movie, were taken in June 2006. The rapid retreat of glaciers throughout the world is an undeniable observation, and that human activities are the major reason for this is a scientific fact. The world needs to move away from speculation and start taking steps to prevent even more devastation to the planet's life [3:02]
hrynyshyn | January 30, 2009There's nothing new, scientifically speaking, in the Monaco Declaration. It's just another plea from 155 scientists representating 26 nations that "sets forth recommendations, calling for policymakers to address this immense problem." The problem is ocean acidification.
It's a problem that got a passing mention in early versions of Al Gore's Inconvenient slide show. Later iterations added a few more slides dealing with the consequences for corals of a changing aquatic habitat. But compare that with more than a dozen slides addressing the threat of increased storm frequency and/or intensity,…
amillikan | January 29, 2009The potential for various geo-engineering proposals to offset the effects of climate change is often not factored in to near- and long-term climate scenarios. In a study conducted by NOAA, released this week, the authors predicted "irreversible changes," but noted, "we do not consider geo-engineering measures that might be able to remove gases already in the atmosphere or to introduce active cooling to counteract warming." Days later, one of the first in-depth analyses of these measures was published, considering both the feasibility and potential payoffs of several geo-engineering schemes.…
hrynyshyn | January 28, 2009So a fair degree of warming is inevitable, eh? That's the conclusion of a PNAS paper making the rounds this week. (I wrote about it yesterday.) But just how "irreversible" are the coming changes? As Arthur C. Clarke said, "When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
The answer can be found in the same PNAS paper, in which the authors qualify their outlook for the next millennium by noting that "we do not consider geo-engineering measures that might be able to remove gases already in the atmosphere or to introduce active cooling to counteract warming."
In one of…
edyong | January 28, 2009The emperor penguin - caring parent, extreme survivor and unwitting movie-star - could be marching to extinction by the turn of the next century. In its Antarctic home, the penguins frequently have to deal with prolonged bouts of starvation, frosty temperatures of -40 degrees Celsius, and biting polar winds that blow at 90 miles per hour. And yet this icy environment that so brutally tests the penguins' endurance is also critical to their survival. This is a species that depends on sea ice for breeding and feeding.
So what will happen to the emperor penguin as Antarctica's sea ice shrinks,…
hrynyshyn | January 27, 2009Can't let this week slip any further past without drawing your attention to a new paper on "Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions," which has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (It can be found here), and I have a copy and will share some excerpts. You can also read a press release here.
First, the authors, Susan Solomon of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder and her European colleagues, deal with the defining the most important term in the paper:
(where irreversible is defined here as a time scale exceeding the…