Climate
hrynyshyn | December 23, 2008If the "Reality" anti-coal advertising campaign represents the best American environmentalists can come up with, Matt Nisbet is right. Communicating the facts about global warming to the masses is simply beyond our ability. Fortunately, there are others who understand how to craft a message that might actually work. As usual, the Brits demonstrate a superior ability on this score. Check out this ad from Europe's Big Ask campaign:
One can quibble about the exaggerated and inconsistent reference to how much the Earth has warmed so far ;;;; the ad's narrator first talks about "almost" a degree…
hrynyshyn | December 22, 2008It didn't take long for the Competitive Enterprise Institute to begin dissembling about John Holdren, President-elect Barack Obama's new science adviser. On his blog, the CEI's Chris Horner dismisses Holdren's soon-to-be ex-employer, the Woods Hole Research Center, as "an environmental advocacy group." This is nonsense, as a simple check of the center's scientific output would show.
I first ran into the WHRC in the late 1980s, while living and working in Woods Hole. Back then, the center was a recent offshot of the Marine Biological Laboratory's Ecosystems Research Center. Founder George…
hrynyshyn | December 19, 2008First Stephen Chu for energy secretary, then John Holdren for science adviser. Now Jane Lubchenco for NOAA chief. Wow. One of the country's top marine biologists and a hard-core climateer. It's hard to imagine a better science team. From the LA Times:
Lubchenco did not draw the same level of fire from conservative groups as Holdren on Thursday, but she represents just as radical a departure for NOAA, which oversees marine issues as well as much of the government's climate work. While NOAA has traditionally favored commercial fishing interests in policy disputes, Lubchenco has consistently…
hrynyshyn | December 18, 2008This segment from Letterman is from back in April, but given the word that John Holdren, former AAAS head, will be running Barack Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy (i.e., serving as chief science adviser to the president), it's worth a replay. This is a man who will be repeatedly reminding the president that climate change is not something that can be placed on the proverbial back burner. I mean, check out his c.v.
Along with Stephen Chu as energy secretary, Obama will be getting the best advice possible on the biggest public policy challenge in history. (Carol Browner will…
hrynyshyn | December 18, 2008Maybe I'm making too much out of one paragraph in a short post on one blog, but I'd rather try to deal with it now before this particular meme travels much further. The offending line appears today in a post on Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog by Jeff Goodell. It offers a description of a man who has, for better or worse, become a lightning rod for the global warming debate, NASA's chief climatologist:
Maybe Justin Timberlake or Barry Manilow draws a more adoring crowd, but I doubt it. Hansen is not just a rock start here at AGU, but the one true prophet, the Man Who Saw It All Before Anyone…
hrynyshyn | December 16, 2008The Washington Post has decided that a carbon tax would be better than capping carbon emissions and trading the rights to emit. It joins a growing list of tax proponents, including James Hansen, Al Gore, Ralph Nader (writing in the Wall St. Journal), The American Prospect, and even ExxonMobil. An eclectic lot. Not everyone's on board, though. A notable holdout is
Barack Obama, who favors cap-and-trade. Or at least he used to last time he said anything about it.
A lot of the recent converts to a straight tax point to the wacky workings of the European Union's cap and trade system. (Look what…
hrynyshyn | December 12, 2008Al Gore has joined the growing list of notable climateers calling for a new target for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Speaking at the Poznan climate change gabfest this week he said we need to aim for no more than 350 parts per million.
The best known climatologist advocating such a low target ;;;; remember we're at 385 ppmv now ;;;; is NASA climate science chief James Hansen, who is the lead author on a recently published paper that identifies that specific number as the low end of a range of values associated with a climate regime shift between a world dominated by ice and one…
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2008Here's one of those things that Carl Jung would call synchronicity, but is really just an example of how scientific research tends to converge on certain ideas. Item 1, which arrived in my email in box this morning in the form of a press release from the DC-based Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, discusses what attendees at a side-event to the Poznan climate negotiations heard about the the dangers of "black carbon," an important contributor to global warming. Here's the paragraph that got my attention:
"Black carbon is extremely bad news because it contributes to…
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2008The president elect has disappointed many of his supporters by choosing relatively hawkish and right-leaning types to run his foreign and economic policies. But to my mind, his choices for secretary of energy and interior and Environmental Protection Administration chief are more important. And the news Stephen Chu will be energy secretary suggests Barack Obama is going to be progressive where it really counts.
Chu now runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and won a Nobel for physics a while back. He also understands both the threat posed by climate change and the role clean,…
hrynyshyn | December 2, 2008Twenty years ago, a clever television documentary called "After the Warming" tried to paint a picture of climate change, and humankind's delayed attempts to deal with it, for next five decades. Drawing on the best science available at the time, the producers predicted that we'd never have enough information to know just how bad things were going to get until it was too late. A new study in Nature Geoscience reminds us just how complex the global climate picture really is.
"Surprising return of deep convection to the subpolar North Atlantic Ocean in winter 2007-2008" (subs req'd) by a team of…
hrynyshyn | December 1, 2008... is that the rest of the world doesn't stop while you're off stuffing your face with the family. And by the time you're back in the saddle, the virtual stack of papers to read and work to catch up on threatens to bury you before the season's first snowfall. So while I dig myself out, here's a great little snippet from Gavin Schmidt, one of the forces behind RealClimate.org and a leading light in the climatology community:
It has become fashionable for some commentators to describe environmentalists and their climate change arguments as having "'religious fervour" or of "being dogmatic".…
hrynyshyn | November 25, 2008The sentence that leads off a story in today's New York Times by Elisabeth Rosenthal about the economic crisis is all wrong.
Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.
Not that I doubt Ms. Rosenthanl's journalistic abilities. It's just that such a reaction is the exact opposite of what we should be seeing.
It seems almost axiomatic that the economic crisis should be what motivates world leaders to do something about climate change, not…
hrynyshyn | November 24, 2008For the most past few months I've been making brief posts at The Weather Channel's Forecast Earth website, as part of a team of bloggers concerned with climate change and our relationship to the planet in general. Looks like I won't be doing that for much longer, given the news that NBC, which bought TWC earlier this year, just fired the entire Forecast Earth team and killed the show. It was the only weekly program on TV devoted to the climate.
And right in the middle of NBC's Green Week. Oh well.
I've got a contract that sees my TWC relationship through the end of the year, but I'm not…
hrynyshyn | November 22, 2008Upon first read, a new study about the contribution of "black carbon" to the global carbon cycle, and therefore to climate change, suggests things might not be as bad as now commonly thought. But first reads, especially by those who don't have a graduate degree specializing in exactly the field in question, can be misleading. And "Australian climate-carbon cycle feedback reduced by soil black carbon," which appears in the latest Nature Geoscience, is a case in point.
Black carbon is one the complicating factors that have to be taken into account when trying to figure out what the net effect…
hrynyshyn | November 20, 2008Over at A Few Things Illconsidered, the commenters are debating what to call those folks who just can't bring themselves to accept the science of climate change. You know, the science that says we have to stop spewing the products of the combustion of fossil fuels into the air if we want to keep the planet's ecology close to something we'd consider habitable.
Denialists? Skeptics? Scoffers? I'd like to weigh in with a defense of the term that I now use regularly in this space: "Pseudoskeptics."
The reason is simple. Pseudo means false. And false skepticism is what we're talking about. It…
hrynyshyn | November 13, 2008I've got a post up at my other blog, where I write about climate change for the Weather Channel's Forecast Earth site, that briefly discusses James Hansen's new paper on appropriate targets for CO2 levels. I still intend to write something more consequential here, but in the meantime, I thought I'd draw ScienceBlogs readers' attention to the reaction at the TWC blog. Here's a selection:
After we are done manipulating global carbon dioxide plant food levels to within a couple parts per million of sheer evolutionary perfection, then we'll get to work on that thermostat-wired-over-to-the-sun…
hrynyshyn | November 11, 2008There's talk of "a low-cost, safe, and permanent method to capture and store atmospheric CO2." All it would take is some conventional rock drilling and a little energy in the form of warm water. That's what the authors of a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say is theoretically possible thanks to natural weathering processes at work in the Sultanate of Oman. It's geo-engineering for those who don't much like geo-engineering!
"In situ carbonation of peridotite for CO2 storage" appears this week in PNAS. The authors, Peter B. Kelemen and Jurg Matter of Columbia…
hrynyshyn | November 10, 2008Words of wisdom are pouring from the pages of America's punditocracy, and many embrace a common theme: dare to be bold, Mr. President-elect.
From E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post:
The president-elect is hearing that his greatest mistake would be something called "overreach." Democrats in Congress, it's implied, are hungry to impose wacky left-wing schemes that Obama must resist. In fact, timidity is a far greater danger than overreaching, simply because it's quite easy to be cautious.
From Paul Krugman of the New York Times:
Right now, many commentators are urging Mr. Obama to think small…
hrynyshyn | November 9, 2008I would have included something about the need for a googolplex of public transportation projects instead of simply encouraging cleaner automobiles, but yeah: this is what Obama should do.
hrynyshyn | October 30, 2008After Doonesbury, my morning reading begins with a peek at the RSS feed from Real Climate. Most mornings it's worth a repeat look at posts I've already reviewed as the comments left there offer one of the highest signal-to-noise ratios in the blogosphere. Today I came across this noteworthy note from one Lawrence Brown:
Even Albert Einstein was no Einstein when it came to quantum mechanics. Neils Bohr turned back Einstein's skepticism several times on certain aspects. Which ought to give all of us pause. If Einstein can be wrong what can anyone expect from the rest of us?!
However if you're…