Climate
hrynyshyn | October 28, 2008The Chinese are a complicated lot. On the one hand, they're building a new coal-fired power plant every four or five or six days, depending on who's counting, an endeavor that cost them $248 billion in hidden costs last year "through damage to the environment, strain on the health care system and manipulation of the commodity's price" says Greenpeace. On the other, they've just announced that they're going to spend the equivalent of $280 billion enhancing their passenger rail network. Impressive. Just imagine if we dumped a proportional $75 billion into American passenger rail.
Actually, we…
hrynyshyn | October 23, 2008OK. Not clueless. But today we have yet more evidence that we really don't understand how this planet's carbon cycle works,thanks to the latest issue of the Soil Science Society of America Journal. In "Nitrous Oxide Emissions Respond Differently to No-Till in a Loam and a Heavy Clay Soil", a group of Canadian researchers makes it clear that our species is just plain ignorant when it comes to managing greenhouse gas emissions. It's looking like there is one fewer tool in the box of options at our disposal for mitigating global warming.
Until now, it was generally assumed by aggies the world…
hrynyshyn | October 22, 2008I just don't understand where the EPA is coming from when it assigns fuel economy ratings. The latest rankings are out and they just don't jibe with my driving experience. I'm not the most aggressive driver out there, but neither am I an expert hypermiler who keep it down to the speed limit and catches tailwinds. Yet I consistently get better mileage whatever I'm driving than what the EPA says the car gets. I always get better mileage. Always.
I know that when the EPA says: "it is impossible for one set of estimates to predict fuel economy precisely for all drivers in all environments" they…
hrynyshyn | October 17, 2008There's a new report on Arctic temperatures that is not only worrisome, but helps make clear one of the most challenging aspects of the climate change story, specifically the role of feedback.
For example, pseudoskeptics whose primary source of information on climate is Fox News, are forever pointing out, as if it had never occurred to climatologists, that carbon dioxide levels historically follow rising temperatures, instead of the other way around. To the less informed, this pokes a big hole in the whole global warming story.
The thing to know is, the initial temperature rise was quite…
hrynyshyn | October 16, 2008Two things stand out in my mind about Wednesday's presidential debate, both of them the product of John McCain's imagination. First is his insult to every science educator in the country. Once again, he deliberately mischaracterized a grant request to update an aging projector for Chicago's Adler Planetarium as an earmark for an "overhead projector." Second, he insisted America "can eliminate our dependence on foreign oil by building 45 new nuclear plants, power plants, right away." How many times do we have to point out the flaws in his logic before it sinks in?
I have nothing new to say…
hrynyshyn | October 15, 2008Canadian scientists, and climatologists in particular, are probably among the most depressed this morning following Tuesday's federal election, in which the semi-governing Conservative Party was sort-of re-elected to another parliamentary minority.
In Canada, minority governments don't command enough seats to ensure passage of legislation, but for some reason no one seems to think that means a coalition is required. None of the opposition parties will entertain the notion of a governing coalition, so in all likelihood nothing in the way of consequential legislation will be passed for the…
hrynyshyn | October 13, 2008To no one's surprise, the New York Times prefers Barack Obama's energy policies to those of John McCain. I have no quarrel with that, of course. But I would like to nit pick one little phrase in its editorial of Oct. 11, the one in which both candidates are positively reviewed for their inclusion of nuclear power in an energy portfolio of the future. While I could go on again at length about the inadequacies of generating electricity from uranium decay, this time I'll just focus on to little words: "carbon neutral."
The editorialist wrote "Both candidates agree that because nuclear power is…
hrynyshyn | October 7, 2008The Canadian Press has this story about Canadian scientists who have written an open letter calling on the Canadian voter to consider climate change in next week's federal election. When will their American colleagues follow suit?
Here's the opening to the letter:
We have been disturbed by what we perceive to be a lack of attention to the environment during this election campaign. While it's clear the public accepts that global warming is a threat, it seems people have simply no idea how serious this issue is. Global warming is without a doubt the defining issue of our time, and we cannot let…
hrynyshyn | October 2, 2008To the growing list of consequences of global warming add underwater noise pollution, which may make life difficult for the whales and dolphins who are already facing increased background noises from shipping. It may sound like a stretch, but it's actually pretty straightforward science.
The connection is laid out in a new paper published Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters. "Unanticipated consequences of ocean acidification: A noisier ocean at lower pH" by Keith C. Hester and colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium start off by describing the now well-established trend of declining pH…
hrynyshyn | September 29, 2008Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth, has just bought the world's largest wind turbine. This from the Daily Mail.
The 100-metre high turbine will supply 7.5 megawatts of power to the national grid when it is installed off the North East coast of England. It is hoped the Queen's involvement will speed up the development of specialist deep water turbines and encourage energy firms to invest in renewable energy.
Jolly good. If it's good enough for Her Majesty, it's good enough for us all!
hrynyshyn | September 26, 2008Some of the world's top climatologists, under the collective title of the Global Carbon Project, have released what is widely considered the definitive accounting of the greenhouse-gas emissions situation. And the news is, as you might expect, not good. Nature's Climate Feedback bloggers sum it up as "We're all doomed." The full report is a lot to swallow, but here's what policy makers and anyone thinking of casting a vote in either the Canadian election next month or the American election in November should know:
Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are growing x4 faster since 2000 than during the…
hrynyshyn | September 25, 2008It's not just Alaskan governors who have a problem with treating polar bears as a threatened species. For some reason, a lot of people who just can't bring themselves to accept the idea that we're heating up the planet seem to have it in for poor old Ursus maritimus. A year ago, the journal Ecological Complexity published an attack on the theory that the population of polar bears widely considered most at risk from climate change wasn't actually at risk at all. The inevitable rebuttal just appeared, and the exchange raises some questions about the peer-review process.
In a "Viewpoint"…
hrynyshyn | September 22, 2008Just about every serious proposal to cap fossil-fuel emissions involves an 80 percent cut below 1990 levels by 2050. This might, if we're lucky, keep atmospheric CO2eq (a unit of measurement that expresses the total contribution of all greenhouse forcing gases as just carbon dioxide, for the sake simplicity) at 450 parts per million. But more and more we're hearing that that won't be enough to avoid exceeeding tipping points. More and more we're hearing that even 100% won't do the trick. Instead, say a growing chorus of scientists and analysts, we need to think about getting below current…
hrynyshyn | September 19, 2008If not genuinely good news, then at least it's not bad news. I'm referring to a paper out today in Science (Vol. 321. no. 5896, p. 1648) that describes 700,000-year-old permafrost in the Arctic. It's an optimistic report because, if the permafrost has survived the last few ice ages, which come and go every 100,000 years or so, then they stand a good change of surviving the next few decades during which polar regions are expected to get unusually warm. And we want them to survive, because if they melt, they will release their massive carbon reserves in one of those nightmare positive-feedback…
hrynyshyn | September 16, 2008Barack Obama was the first to answer the questions put to the candidates by the Science Debate 2008 team, and now McCain has responded. As I did with Obama's, I will here deconstruct McCain's answers on climate and energy policy. My comments are italicized.
2. Climate Change. The Earth's climate is changing and there is concern about the potentially adverse effects of these changes on life on the planet. What is your position on the following measures that have been proposed to address global climate change--a cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax, increased fuel-economy standards, or research…
hrynyshyn | September 9, 2008Polls show that most Americans want to drill here and drill now. Why? Because the television media haven't told them just how stupid an idea that really is. That's the conclusion of a study by a group called the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a relatively independent economic think tank. The authors point out that there's a perfectly reliable source, in the form of the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency, that predicts that drilling on the outer continental shelf (OCS) will have little impact if any, on oil prices any time soon.
And yet, a survey of broadcast and…
hrynyshyn | September 5, 2008Two new studies on sea level rise appearing this week deserve our attention, one in Nature Geoscience, the other in Science. Both conclude the IPCC's estimates of no more than 59 cm of rising waters by 2100 should be tossed out the window. We've been hearing this since early 2007, when the latest IPCC reports were released ;;;; specifically, complaints that the cut-off point for research that could be considered was early 2006, and so much has come out since then that we really shouldn't be paying too much attention to IPCC numbers. But most of those comments were based on observations that…
hrynyshyn | September 2, 2008We still aren't going to get a presidential debate devoted to science. So far, though,we have the Democratic nominee's elaborated responses to 14 questions put to him and his Republican counterpart by the Science Debate 2008 group. Here's two of Barack Obama's responses, with italicized annotation from me, on the subject of climate change and energy, which really should be considered one topic.
2. Climate Change. The Earth's climate is changing and there is concern about the potentially adverse effects of these changes on life on the planet. What is your position on the following measures…
hrynyshyn | August 29, 2008Sarah Palin. Huh. Who would have thunk it? On the upside, I had but a few waking hours of moping over Barack Obama's failure to do more than give climate change a single passing reference and again champion the delusional notion of "clean coal" in his otherwise impressive acceptance speech last night before the Republican nominee reminded me just how little he really cares about the subject.
Now, I know vice-presidential choices never make a measurable difference in the election. But let's face it, the probability that McCain will not be able to complete one term in office is considerably…
hrynyshyn | August 28, 2008The We Can Solve It campaign has a new ad. Subtle it is not.
One could argue that clean electricity in 10 years is far too ambitious a schedule, but you know what they say about a journey of 10,000 miles.