Communication and Politics
hrynyshyn | October 11, 2011How old do you have to be before it's acceptable for your high-school teacher to expose you to propaganda?
Last week I had the honor of taking part in a video chat with a class of eighth graders at a private school in Atlanta. I got involved through a personal connection and then took a strong interest when I learned that the students would be sitting through both Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Martin Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle as part of an environmental writing section of their English course. Then their teacher, in an effort to nudge his students toward something…
hrynyshyn | October 4, 2011Climatologist Michael Mann is fed up. Actually, he's been fed up a long time, given that he's been the subject of mean-spirited investigations and slander for years now. We probably need more of this kind of rebuttal:
These are just lies, regurgitation of dishonest smears that have been manufactured by fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers, and those who do their bidding by lying to the public about the science.
Mann wrote that in an op-ed for the Vail Daily. It's not the New York Times, but that's the point. The climatology community needs to respond every time some ignorant…
hrynyshyn | October 3, 2011Kate at Climate Sight remind us this week of just how challenging it can be for a mainstream media outlet to accurately report on climatology. Even when the reporter gets it right, a headline-writing editor can inject just enough obsfucation to leave readers puzzled or misinformed.
This particular piece of evidence attesting to the need for all journalists to possess more than just a passing knowledge of the field in question involves a new paper in Nature, "Unprecedented Arctic ozone loss in 2011." The implication of the authors' finding is that the Arctic's UV-radiation-blocking ozone…
hrynyshyn | September 30, 2011This story has been around a while, but I haven't been blogging much lately so I am only getting around to it now.
"..the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones."
So says a new paper. Troubling findings. Something's not quite right, and am hoping to nail it down. "The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change," by Harvard's Dan Kahan et al. tested a sufficiently large sample size of…
hrynyshyn | September 20, 2011Drawing attention to misinformed pseudoskeptical analyses of peer-reviewed climatology studies is usually counterproductive. But in this case, it's worth mentioning because the author makes such a common mistake that exploring the error might actually help shed light on the why so many people are easily led astray.
The offender is Anthony Watts, who is arguably (depending on how much weight you assign to blog popularity polls) among the most influential anti-science bloggers out there. His error was to confuse (or conflate, to use a fancier term beloved by social scientists) a direct effect…
hrynyshyn | September 19, 2011More than a few writers have gotten a lot of mileage out of comparing the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries' propaganda efforts to counter rapidly rising mountains of science that counter their "it's all good" message. Al Gore featured it in his slide show. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway wrote an entire book, Merchants of Doubt.
The fact that not only were the denial tactics similar, but so are some of the PR firms and even individuals involved makes for compelling storytelling. But maybe we haven't taken the analogy far enough. Über-foodie Michael Pollan just wrote a piece in The Nation that…
hrynyshyn | September 19, 2011Fill in the blanks:
It is customary in the popular media and in many journal articles to cite a projected _________ figure as if it were a given, a figure so certain that it could virtually be used for long-range planning purposes. But we must carefully examine the assumptions behind such projections. And forecasts that ________ is going to level off or decline this century have been based on the assumption that the developing world will necessarily follow the path of the industrialized world. That is far from a sure bet.
That comes from an essay at Yale's e360.
Given that you're reading a…
hrynyshyn | September 9, 2011A letter in Climatic Change looking at the life-cycle greenhouse warming potential of natural gas raised a lot of hackles a little while back. If, as the authors posit, replacing coal and oil combustion with gas-fired turbines could actually accelerate global warming rather than slow it down, then we have a serious problem, given the investments being made in gas.
Much the skepticism about that study could be traced to the background of the lead author, Robert Howarth, who happens to have a history of opposing gas fracking. Of course, Howarth's scientific credentials, or his activism, have…
hrynyshyn | August 31, 2011Number of hits returned when Googling news sources for "James Hansen" (head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and perhaps the world's best-known climatologist, who was arrested in front of the White House this week as part of a coordinated climate change campaign) and "Keystone" (XL, the expansion of a continental oil pipeline that will bring Canadian oil sands product to refineries in the southern U.S.): 208
Number of hits returned when Googling news sources for "Daryl Hannah" (Splash and Blade Runner actress) and "Keystone": 659.
(Searches carried out Aug. 31, 2011 at 8:50 a.m.)
hrynyshyn | June 20, 2011Debating the merits and dangers of fracking shale gas has become a major obession of those who worry about energy and the climate. Yale's e360's latest contribution comes in the form a forum that includes a wide variety of perspectives pro and con.
For me, the wisest observation, and the one that really trumps all others, comes from Kevin Anderson, who directs the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research's energy program:
... the only responsible action with regard to shale gas, or any "new" unconventional fossil fuel, is to keep it in the ground -- at least until there is a meaningful…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2011The title of this post won't mean much until you read this contribution to The Conversation, a new and laudable attempt by climatologists to get out the message that time's a wastin,' folks. Here's a taste:
We're only a few decades away from a major tipping point, plus or minus only about a decade. The rate at which the ice sheets would melt is fairly uncertain, but not the result that says we are very close to a tipping point committing to such melt and breakdown.
...
Is it irresponsible or "alarmist" of climatologists to point this out? The science brief for policy is not to prescribe…
hrynyshyn | May 26, 2011OK. Taking on logical flaws in Wall Street Journal op-ed items is about as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel, but I can't let Matt Ridley's latest affront to common sense pass without firing off a few rounds for practice if nothing else.
Under a staggeringly unimaginative headline of "Inconvenient Truths About 'Renewable' Energy," Ridley argues that renewable energy isn't really renewable, or at least no more renewable that fossil fuels. How does he go about this without shattering his backbone? By pointing out that Haitians are destroying their half of their island home by cutting down…
hrynyshyn | May 23, 2011David Appell at Quark Soup draws our attention (via Stoat) to a graph in the recent America's Climate Choices report from the NAS/NRC. If the forecasts on which the authors rely come to pass, it's going to take almost a couple of decades for U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions to return to post-recession levels. Sounds like good news.
Two years ago, Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute wrote of a watershed moment, and while it looks like he was a bit too enthusiastic -- long-term, carbon emissions still rise -- he might have been on to something.
The United States has ended a century of…
hrynyshyn | May 20, 2011A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was a 21-year-old journalism student spending a couple of weeks as an intern at Science Dimension, a government-funded magazine (there weren't any private science magazines in the country). I was assigned two short features while there: one on canola bioengineering and another on Canada's asbestos industry. Both amounted to free publicity for industries heavily supported by the Canadian taxpayer, but I think the canola story withstood professional scrutiny. The asbestos piece? Not so much.
That story continues to haunt me. The only good thing I can…
hrynyshyn | May 3, 2011Climate change activists in Canada are understandably depressed by the results of Monday's federal election, which produced a majority Conservative government run by a party with zero interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There are shards of good news lying in the rubble, although they only hint at the possibility of progress in the far-off future.
The fact that the new Official Opposition, the New Democrats, support cap-and-trade legislation isn't as positive a development as it could be, considering that they have no chance of influencing government.
More interesting is the…
hrynyshyn | April 1, 2011No one is more surprised than I to see something worthwhile reading in The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's iPad magazine. You might even be forgiven for suspecting an April Fool. But there it is. It's an editorial by Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst at frequently misnamed Reason Foundation, exploring the fundamental problem with nuclear power. Dalmia's indictment goes far beyond the nuclear industry, though. Intended or not, it strikes at the heart of the economic philosophy that dominates pretty much the entire planet To wit:
The liability cap effectively privatizes the profits of nuclear and…
hrynyshyn | March 22, 2011James Delingpole's relationship with what is commonly understood by the term "journalism" is not readily apparent.
1. PLOS One publishes a peer-reviewed paper by some of the world's leading marine biologists with an interest in the effects of underwater noise pollution. The paper tests the idea that naval sonar could have an impact on whale behavior. It makes no mention of wind farms.
2. The Telegraph publishes a story, "Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales" citing the paper, which has the conveniently precise title of "Beaked Whales Respond to Simulated and Actual Navy Sonar."
4.…
hrynyshyn | March 15, 2011The journal Nature inadvertently (I suspect) reveals why the nuclear power industry has a public-trust problem:
Robin Grimes, director of the Centre for Nuclear Engineering at Imperial College London ... says that he believes the [Fukushima] event actually proves the safety of nuclear power plants. Despite being more than 30 years old, and having faced the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan and a towering tsunami, the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi have, so far, largely contained their dangerous radioactive fuel. "Actually, it's a success," Grimes says, then adds: "Although do I think…
hrynyshyn | March 9, 2011"What is the optimum temperature for man?" asked Virginia Rep. Morgan Griffith at yesterday's Congressional hearings on a bill that would remove the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions "Have we looked at that? These are questions that, believe it or not, I lay awake at night trying to figure out."
Call me crazy, but I don't believe it. I worry about climate change every day of my life and this is not something that keeps me awake at night. Although, if I understood as little about the basic facts of human history as you, who knows what would keep me up night?
The truth is, we…