Climate
sastyk | February 10, 2010A lot of big snowstorms get people who do not grasp the difference between weather and climate all excited. Consider the VA Republican party who claimed in an ad last week that if it snows, we can't have global warming. But it isn't just the skeptics and denialists here - among the believers we routinely see people citing weather, such as the lack of snow in Vancouver for the Olympics. I know that people think this helps, but in the great scheme of things, it doesn't - if people hear people who are trying act against global warming using their weather as an explanation without evidence,…
hrynyshyn | February 9, 2010In case anyone is wondering why I haven't posted anything for the past few days, what with all the fuss over the IPCC and all, it's not because I'm reluctant to comment on it. It's just that my little piece of western North Carolina is only now recovering from an ice storm that knocked the power to my house out last Friday morning. I've only been back online for a few minutes and trying to catch up with all the happenings. Of course, I'm horribly behind in work that pays, so it may be a while before I get back to blogging regularly. Stay tuned.
eklemetti | February 7, 2010We've been discussing calderas recently on Eruptions (I wonder why) and the Laacher See in Germany came up. I've actually been to the Laacher See on a field trip lead by one of the world's experts on the caldera, Dr. Gerhard Worner. So, I thought I'd post some pictures and talk a little about this feature that up until maybe 5 years ago, I didn't even know existed.
Laacher See, Germany
The Laacher See is a caldera in the Rhine Valley of Germany (see below). It is only ~30 km south of Bonn and ~60 km south of Koln (Cologne), just to the west of the Rhine River. It is part of the East Eiffel…
hrynyshyn | February 4, 2010It's not so much that the pseudoskeptics who dominate the climate change denial camp are particularly clever, but they have been rather fortunate, and the forces aligned on the side of science have turned out to be human after all. The result is the denial camp is winning, and those on the defensive have some thinking to do.
First, consider the timing of recent events.
As the year began, climatologists were able to launch what should have been a devastating counterattack to the nonsensical but appealing notion that global warming has been replacing by global cooling. The records show that the…
hrynyshyn | February 2, 2010Never mind that the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record. Or that 2009 tied for the second-warmest year. Neither of those stories are consuming much airtime and web- and print-space. No, the biggest stories on the climate beat involve allegations of fraudulent activity on the part of some of the world's most experienced climatologists. The latest example concerns the lack of records specifying the location of remote Chinese weather stations and just how much they moved.
As Fred Pearce writes in The Guardian, "It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute."…
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…
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…
milhayser | January 21, 2010
Even with the best intentions, it's possible to get things wrong. And with lesser intentions, being wrong becomes easy. First, James Hrynyshyn on The Island of Doubt reports that the IPCC will retract its 2007 prediction that global warming could melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. Although the IPCC promises "the best peer-reviewed science available," this faulty prediction whispered its way from article to article in a game of journalistic telephone. Tim Lambert on Deltoid is grateful that the IPCC will correct their error, and observes that the current gaffe is getting more media…
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…
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…
stoat | January 13, 2010Ha ha, there you go, yet another provocative headline that won't really deliver.
From the comments elsewhere (thanks F):
At the rate newspapers keep pushing the boundaries of what nonsense
they will publish, then Einstein's theories will be up for grabs in a
few years. And there is worse than the reporting done on climate science: try
nutrition, or cancer.
which set me to wondering, hence this post. I would agree that the reporting on nutrition or health etc is utterly appalling; Ben Goldacre has made a good career noticing this. My immeadiate reaction to that is: but everyone *knows* it is…
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…
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…
hrynyshyn | January 6, 2010Over at Linked In, the professionally oriented social networking service, there's a discussion group called "Climate Change - I care!" Most of its members are those who share a concern for what anthropogenic global warming is threatening to do to civilization as we know it. Until this week, membership was open to anyone. But the moderator just ejected one member who has, shall we say, a contrarian point of view. Was that a wise thing to do?
The member, Leigh Haugen, only posted pseudoscientific rants about the conspiratorial nature of the entire climatology community, and if he does actually…
hrynyshyn | January 5, 2010Well, I thought I'd see it all, but I was wrong. Of course, it's been a long time since anyone whose opinion I respect considered Fox News a serious source of news and analysis. Still this example boggles the mind. Here's Brit Hume, the network's senior news analyst, discussing the most important topic of our time:
And here's Brit Hume a few weeks ago on what many of us who don't watch Fox News consider the most important topic of our time:
In a different world, repeatedly misrepresenting the facts about a serious public policy issue would be cause for an employer to reexamine the status of…
hrynyshyn | January 4, 2010Storms of My Grandchildren
The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe
And Our Last Chance to Save Humanity
by James Hansen
Bloomsbury USA, 304 pp.
Another year, another plea for scientists to start communicating better. Here's Chris Mooney, reminding us yet again that
Scientific training continues to turn out researchers who speak in careful nuances and with many caveats, in a language aimed at their peers, not at the media or the public. Many scientists can scarcely contemplate framing a simple media message for maximum impact; the very idea sounds unbecoming.
Well, James Hansen,…