Climate
hrynyshyn | July 14, 2009By "that," I mean Sarah Palin's first attempt at recreating herself as a pundit. For some reason, the Washington Post continues to publish error-ridden op-eds.
By "this," I mean former Fortune managing editor Eric Pooley's debunking of the climate-bill scare tactics of Warren Buffet, scare tactics that lesser minds (see above) embrace.
Both items were published today.
h/t to Joe Romm.
hrynyshyn | July 9, 2009The science machine continues to churn out depressing reports. The high-latitude permafrost contains more carbon than originally thought. The Arctic Ocean ice is even thinner than we feared. But my thoughts are dominated by the issues raised by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum in their new book, Unscientific America.
I reviewed it Tuesday. Today I came across a fascinating interview with NASA climatologist and RealClimate.org founder Gavin Schmidt. It's long but worth reading. Among the highlights is his discussion of his efforts to bridge the cultural gap between scientists and society at…
eklemetti | July 8, 2009Two papers submitted, one to go. Keeps you quite busy, let me tell you.
Lava flow from a 2006 eruption on Mayon in the Philippines.
A few bits of news today:
A few more details about the ongoing watch of Mayon in the Philippines . There have been apparently no changes in the shape of the floor of the crater as you might expect if magma was rising underneath. However, there has been an overall inflation of Mayon since the unrest began a few weeks ago. PHIVOLCS will be checking the sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide output of the volcano soon as well.
Lots of articles this week about the "…
khannula | July 8, 2009Five students (three from the US, two from Brazil) were arrested last month while doing paleoclimate research in Brazil. They were collecting sediment cores from lakes and wetlands, in order to understand past climate change in western Brazil. The charges were based on Brazilian laws dealing with unauthorized extraction of mineral resources. (The group had research permits which they believed to be valid, but apparently they did not cover all members of the group.) The students have been released on bail, but the American students have to stay in Brazil until the legal process is complete -…
hrynyshyn | July 6, 2009For at least as long as I've been paying attention, Roger Pielke Sr. hasn't been all that popular among those are doing their best to convince the world to take the threat of climate change seriously. He's a genuine, and until recently, reputable scientist at a genuine and reputable institution of higher learning, Colorado State University. His hard-line skepticism has at times proven useful when it comes to keeping the rest of the climatology community on its toes. He accepts that humans are contributing to climate change, but is concerned that the general focus on carbon dioxide as the…
hrynyshyn | July 2, 2009And now we turn to a voice of reason. Ken Caldera, discussing the nuts and bolt of science, and climatology in particular, as part of a group interview with Discover magazine, reminds us all just how silly it is to argue that anthropogenic global warming is bothing but a conspiracy theory propagated by disingenuous researchers (and former vice-presidents) who are only trying to line their own pockets:
There was a climate contrarian who testified before the Senate last week. He made the claim that climate scientists were some kind of club and they all made money by somehow supporting each…
hrynyshyn | July 1, 2009 I have an extremely low attention threshold for any mention of the small town of Inuvik, NWT, tucked away in the northwest corner of Canada's Northwest Territories. Not because it's a particularly beautiful place, or politically, economically or scientifically significant, but because I spent 14 months there back in the early 1990s as editor its newspaper, the Inuvik Drum. So when a former premier of one of Canada's provinces makes a speech there, I'm one of the few people outside of Inuvik who perk up. More so when the former premier is speaking about extracting more fossil fuels from…
hrynyshyn | June 29, 2009Even the most optimistic elements of the environmental community know that Friday's passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act by the U.S. House of Representatives was the easy part. Getting something comparable through the Senate will be much tougher. Paul Krugman says it best:
Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday's debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a "hoax" that has been "perpetrated out of the scientific community." I'd call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to…
hrynyshyn | June 25, 2009I've been agonizing over this for weeks. My initial stance was yes, because if Waxman-Markey (a.k.a. the American Clean Energy and Security Act) doesn't make it, I doubt we can afford to wait for Congress to take another stab at it. But the lobbying over the past few days has been fierce. I get emails from both sides, and by both I mean both sides of the environmental community.
The argument against ACESA is compelling. For example, the Climate Crisis Coalitions' latest email enumerate the weakness of the bill thusly:
1) Weak cap. ACESA's cap on greenhouse gas emissions represents reductions…
hrynyshyn | June 25, 2009IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri is no intellectual slouch. But I have no idea where he gets the idea that news media are doing are bang-up job covering the science and politics of climate change. He recently wrote this baffling piece:
It is therefore fair to say that the media has (sic) helped turn public opinion in favor of action on climate change. And this attitude has seeped into the negotiations that began with the 2007 Bali meeting and continued in Poznan, Poland, late last year.
...
There is also every reason to believe that the way the media engages with this issue over the next six…
hrynyshyn | June 24, 2009Here's the headline I would have written if I was editing the West Virginia Gazette's coverage of Tuesday's protest against mountain-top coal mining:
Top government climate scientist arrested in coal protest
Here's the headline the editor(s) chose instead:
Daryl Hannah, scientist among 30 arrested at W.Va. mine protest
Sigh. Have we slid so far down the hole of celebrity worship that a second-string Hollywood personality (who hasn't made a memorable appearance on the silver screen since 1982's Blade Runner), gets top billing over the country's most senior and respected authority on the…
hrynyshyn | June 23, 2009The Congressional Budget Office is the probably the closest thing to a non-partisan source of economic analyses. On Friday it released its best guess on how much the ACES bill, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey, will cost the U.S. economy by 2020.
the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion--or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost of restructuring the production and use of energy and of payments made to foreign entities under the program, but it does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2009James Lovelock hates wind turbines, likes nuclear power and generally makes it difficult for anyone who wants to pigeonhole him in the pantheon of environmental heroes. But there's little point in denying that few earth scientists have a better grasp of the big picture when it comes to planetary ecology, so it's always worth asking him for his take on the climate crisis. His most recent pronouncements seem a little less bleak. Relatively speaking.
Here's Lovelock in 2006, on the occasion of the release of his book, The Revenge of Gaia:
We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2009Deutsche Bank recently turned on 41,000 LED lights that keep track of the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. Nice idea, but I respectfully suggest a much better one.
"If you flipped on one of the news channels that covers the financial news ... and there was a number that was updating once every five years, the commentators would have a hard time finding something to talk about," Kevin Parker, the global head of Deutsche's asset management team, told reporters. "The minute you convert that to a real-time number, it can serve as a backdrop for lots of conversations."
Those…
khannula | June 21, 2009Two summers ago, the extent of Arctic sea ice reached a historic low. What's it going to do this year?
Chuck at Lounge of the Lab Lemming has opened a betting pool. No money involved; winner gets to make him blog on a topic of the winner's choice. (This is a good prize; Chuck is funny.) Bets are in the form of extent and uncertainty, and Chuck's got a useful graph that illustrates how he plans to judge the winner. (It also includes all the sea-ice minima since 2002 in a handy graphical form, which is useful for those of us who prefer pictures to words and numbers.)
He's also interested in…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2009The New York Times' Andy Revkin has decided that marine biologist turned filmmaker Randy Olson is the go-to guy for advice on how scientists should communicate with the public when it comes to the threat of climate change. On Dot Earth, he writes about SEED's recent survey of advice from some of the better known suspects, and then puts the same question to Olson. Though Olson's past efforts on the subject haven't attracted much attention ;;;; the comic documentary Sizzle evaporated quickly upon release ;;;; this time he has some thoughts that are worth reviewing:
... humans respond to human…
hrynyshyn | June 12, 2009Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Thursday that Canada is getting out of the medical isotope business. The implications of the decision, which appears to be motivated primarily by a desire to avoid further political embarrassment, go beyond the confines of the country's health-care system. It also hints at some tough times ahead for those responsible for overseeing the world's nuclear industries.
First, Canada until recently produced close to 40% of the world's supply molybdenum-99, a radioactive isotope that decays quickly to technetium-99, which is widely used to help diagnose cancers…
hrynyshyn | June 10, 2009Inspired by a letter to New Scientist by Londoner Guy Robinson, herewith a not-so-abstract thought experiment based on the trillionth-ton climate change concept.
According to a pair of papers recently published in Nature, the Earth stands a good chance of warming more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels if our cumulative atmospheric emissions of carbon since those days reaches a trillion tons. So far, we've emitted about 520 billion tons. leaving us with just 480 billion tons before we enter into dangerous global warming territory.
But some of our total emissions are tied to agricultural (…
khannula | June 8, 2009Much of the celebration of World Oceans Day focuses on the ocean's importance as an ecosystem, especially in relation to climate change. But the bottom of the ocean is still relatively unknown - I've been told by marine geologists that we know the topography of Venus better than that of our own planet, because we know so little of the ocean floor. The little that we learned before the late 1960's transformed the understanding of geology on land, as well - if it weren't for exploration of the oceans, we wouldn't know about plate tectonics.
So in honor of World Oceans Day, I give you links to…
hrynyshyn | June 8, 2009Assigning any group to one of just two categories is usually little more than an exercise in stereotyping. What do you do with someone like Francis Collins, for example? On the one hand, he's a brilliant genome sequencer, on the other he confuses (as Bob Park aptly writes) a "hormone rush" with "an encounter with God." But every now and then, plotting attitudes on an x-y grid and dividing the Bell curve into left and right halves can be a useful way of looking at a problem. NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt essentially does this in an interview with Salon's Peter Dizikes, and in doing so helps…