Climate
cmonforton | June 13, 2011Seven Republicans will meet tonight at St. Anselms college in Manchester, New Hampshire for a Presidential debate. The participants include both the declared candidates (Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santoroum) and likely candidate, Michele Bachman. Given that the event will take place in the St. Anselm Hawk's hockey venue, I'm going to keep a scorecard on the candidates' responses to issues affecting public health.
Since the breath of topics relevant to public health is wide, during tonight's debate I'll focus my attention on domestic policy…
drorzel | December 29, 2010Most of what would ordinarily be blogging time this morning got used up writing a response to a question at thePhysics Stack Exchange. But having put all that effort in over there, I might as well put it to use here, too...
The question comes from a person who did a poster on terminology at the recently concluded American Geophysical Union meeting, offering the following definition of "data":
Values collected as part of a scientific investigation; may be qualified as 'science data'. This includes uncalibrated values (raw data), derived values (calibrated data), and other transformations of…
stoat | December 28, 2010A couple of people have recently complained about the rash of stories explaining how snow-in-December (or, your pet weather event at whatever time of year) is compatible with Global Warming. For example: Cold Spells From Climate Change? (DA) or Yes, they have now said it (TW; I'm sure those two will love being associated).
What I think is correct is to explain that Yes, X has occurred, which perhaps you might not expect given GW, but then showing that it is entirely compatible with GW. Not that it is a particularly exciting game to play, because pretty well any form of weather will be; the…
stoat | December 16, 2010 I largely ignored Copenhagen (the conference, not the city, I hasten to add: very nice place I'm sure and I mean no disrespect) and chose instead to push for Carbon Tax Now, though I felt obliged to read a little bit of what they had to say. But now we have Cancun. What to say about that, other than rather unoriginal puns?
Nothing but the obvious really: it was a total failure and it would have been better if it had never occurred. Cancun was the triumph of the negotiator-class: the parasites encouraged by all the process: yet another waste-of-time conference designed purely to generate…
lborkowski | November 3, 2010John Perlin has written an interesting Miller-McCune article about how the Pentagon has come to understand some of the problems associated with powering Iraq and Afghanistan operations - and how they're now reducing operations' energy consumption and embracing solar power.
Perlin describes the experience of Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, who assumed command of the coalition forces in Iraq's Al Anbar province in 2006 and soon realized that his command's reliance on trucking in liquid fossil fossil fules was contributing to casualties. In today's conflicts, Marine combat brigade uses half a million…
lborkowski | October 5, 2010Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof; Ronald Reagan took them down. Today, at the GreenGov Symposium (taking place here at George Washington University), Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced that the Obama administration will install solar panels and a solar hot water heater on the White House roof by the end of this spring. (Visit Adam Werbach's blog for a video of the announcement.)
This doesn't address the problem of Congress being unable to pass the climate legislation we need, but it does show that the Obama administration recognizes the importance of renewable…
elerner | September 1, 2010Last week, "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjørn Lomborg announced that he was skeptical no more. Timed with the release of his new book "Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits" Lomborg now says that the world needs an investment of $100 Billion a year to fight global warming. Lomborg denies this is a total reversal of his position, considering he never denied the reality of climate change, just the severity of its impacts and cost-effectiveness of attempts to mitigate it. Nevertheless, Lomborg's switching sides has made headlines, though Class M's James Hrynyshyn…
drorzel | August 19, 2010Everybody's favorite science-and-politics blogger has posted a video clip showing part of what's wrong in science communication. It's a clip from the BBC from last December, featuring one of those head-to-head quasi-debates about "Climategate" between Prof. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia and political consultant Marc Morano, who has made himself a nice little media niche as the go-to guy for climate change denial:
I don't think this is quite as damning as Chris says, but it's pretty bad. What you see here is a competition between a scientist and somebody who knows how the…
eklemetti | July 25, 2010The northern Chilean and southern Peruvian Andes are full of volcanoes that look stunning - I mean, jaw-dropping details of volcanism litter the landscape. The reason for this is two fold: (1) there is an awful lot of volcanism in the northern Chilean/southern Peruvian Andes (as known as the Central Volcanic Zone) - and has been that way for over 10 million years and (2) it has also been very, very dry in the area (most of which is known as the Altiplano-Puna Plateau) for at least a few millions years as well - it is the home of the Atacama Desert! So, this means you get lots of volcanic…
hrynyshyn | April 30, 2010Remember how the island on Lost vanished, only to reappear somewhere else? Well, that's what's about to happen here. The phrase "Island of Doubt" has served its purpose, and is being replaced. This is the last post that will appear on that title.
The new blog "Class M," can be found here. It's still part of the ScienceBlogs collective. Its mission is to explore the science bearing on the Earth as a planet suitable for human habitation, which is pretty much what the Island of Doubt came to be all about. The only difference is I will no longer stray into unrelated matters.
My apologies to…
hrynyshyn | April 29, 2010One last look at Judith Curry, before I shut down the Island of Doubt and launch my new blog tomorrow. I, and many other climateers, remain fascinated by what she has to say, largely because we've never seen a respected climatologist be so publicly critical of her peers and so tolerant of the pseudoskeptics, but also because what she's talking about goes straight to the heart of the battle.
The latest volley comes in the form a comment at Keith Kloor's Collide-a-scape blog:
The people slagging off on McIntyre, Watts et al. have probably spent no time over at their blogs or made an effort to…
hrynyshyn | April 27, 2010
Seeing as the comments function is still unavailable here, I'll continue to point y'all elsewhere. The problem will resolved by this weekend, at which time I'll resume posting more original content.
Judith's Curry's now (in)famous Q and A with Keith Kloor continues to fascinate the blogosphere. Today, Stoat provides a more detailed, and even more critical response to her take on Wegman vs. NRC reports and other controversial subjects, and Curry herself provides more insight into her evolution from a standard bearer of anthropogenic global warming into a critic of the IPCC. A disillusioned…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2010There aren't too many working climate scientists out there arguing that the release of the University of East Anglia emails may end up being a good thing. But that seems to be what Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology is arguing. Over at Collide-a-scape, Keith Kloor has posted an email exchange with Curry, who lays out her problems with the state of climate science, the IPCC and a few individuals, ostensibly in hopes of generating some sincere soul-searching and reflection that results in improvements to both the climatology community and the way it communicates with the public…
hrynyshyn | April 23, 2010Renewable energy advocates like to trumpet the rapid growth rate of wind farms and solar power plants, and it's true. Installed wind capacity grew by almost 32 percent globally in 2009, according to on industry estimate. Capacity is now doubling every three years. That's a remarkable feat, considering how sluggish the world economy has been. But it's important to put such numbers in perspective.
All the wind farms in the world are capable of producing just 160 GW of electricity (let's not worry about actual production vs theoretical capacity for the moment). By comparison, the total global…
eklemetti | April 23, 2010A night shot of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption showing the glowing plume from the strombolian explosions and the Aurora Borealis overhead.
A quick update on the current activity at Eyjafjallajökull eruption: the eruption continues at the summit craters, but there seems to be less ash being erupted, at least yesterday. The latest update from the Icelandic Met Office suggest that things are settling down - but floods are still periodically being produced by melting of the glacier:
Volcanic tremor has been similar the last 24 hours. GPS stations around Eyjafjallajökull showed deflation…
hrynyshyn | April 22, 2010On the advent of this 40th Earth Day, nine climatologists from Germany take a look at the range of likely scenarios if we do nothing more to reduce the causes of global warming than is called for by what the world agreed to at Copenhagen last year. The bottom line:
"it is equivalent to racing towards a cliff and hoping to stop just before it."
Here's the summary, as laid out in an opinion essay in Nature (subs req'd, although with something this important, it really shouldn't be:
Nations will probably meet only the lower ends of their emissions pledges in the absence of a binding…
hrynyshyn | April 21, 2010Nothing I could write on the subject of the corporatization of environmentalism can best this.
eklemetti | April 17, 2010Webcam shot of Eyjafjallajökull erupting on April 17, 2010.
I don't want to get too far into this but there has been a lot of chatter about the link between melting ice caps and increase/decrease/neither of volcanism. The two main articles we're talking about are:
Scientific American, saying that ice loss could increase volcanism:Ice cap thaw may awaken Icelandic volcanoes
The long and short of the Scientific American study is that you reduce the pressure of rocks in the crust/mantle below Iceland, you generate more melting - depressurization melting of rock. If you melt the ice cap, you…
hrynyshyn | April 16, 2010Another critical mass of climate change pseudoskeptics will be gathering today for an D.C. lunch event titled "The Climategate Scandals: What Has Been Revealed And What Does It Mean?" It features: Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute and Joseph D'Aleo of ICECAP and is being hosted by Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
More on the speakers and hosts later, but first, let's look at the description of the event, which appears on the invitation reproduced by invitee Sheril "Intersection" Kirshenbaum:
The scientific case for catastrophic…
eklemetti | April 16, 2010The ash plume from the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption.
To say that the Eyjafjallajökull eruption has become the most significant volcano-related news story of the year would be an understatement. There has been wall-to-wall coverage on every major media outlet, dissecting everything from the effect of ash on jets, to the effect of ash on people, to wildly premature commentary on the climatic effect of the eruption to the potential place in history of this event. The eruption is affecting a wide swath through society: the European economy may take a hit of billions of dollars due to…