Consequences
hrynyshyn | May 5, 2011I like Tim's Lenton's style, and his substance. He has his detractors -- and his latest essay in Nature is a little light on supporting data -- but he's almost always worth reading. This one is probably a doomed to be ignored because it advocates focusing climate policy efforts on the complex issue of radiative forcing instead of politician-friendly temperature rise, but he's probably right. A teaser:
Ongoing negotiations for a new climate treaty aim to establish a target to limit the global temperature rise to 2 °C above the average temperature before the industrial revolution. But that is…
hrynyshyn | April 28, 2011What if we could avoid hundreds of thousand of deaths, billions of dollars in crop losses and trillions of dollars in healthcare expenditures simply by spreading off-the-shelf technology and industrialized-world regulations to developing nations? Oh, and along the way, we'd mitigate a fair bit of global warming. Sounds like a plan?
I'd say such a plan would be worth considering. Such a plan is outlined by a team led by NASA's Drew Shindell in Nature Climate Change, which has generously made their paper, "Climate, health, agricultural and economic impacts of tighter vehicle-emission standards…
hrynyshyn | April 15, 2011Proponents of shale gas extraction are not particularly pleased with the attention drawn this week to a new study in Climatic Change that found widespread development of Marcellus natural gas may actually accelerate climate change rather than slow it down. Unfortunately for them, their primary argument rests on a lack of hard data on 1) the actual greenhouse-warming potential of methane; and 2) how much methane finds its way into the atmosphere during drilling and transmission of natural gas. You can find a good summary of the defense's case at something called the Marcellus Shale Coalition.…
hrynyshyn | April 12, 2011It was in Bill McKibben's first, and arguably best, book, The End of Nature, that I first came across the challenge posed by fugitive emissions. Back then -- just 20-some years ago -- natural gas was touted as a cleaner alternative to coal and oil because the combustion of its primary constituent, methane, results in markedly fewer CO2 emissions than other fossil fuels.
That argument is being made even more forcefully now. Everyone and his or her dog is touting the advantage of converting coal mines and car engines to natural gas as a way to mitigate global warming, as well as reduce oil…
hrynyshyn | April 5, 2011See that black box over on the left-hand side of this blog? The one with the numbers counting down? That's a little widget I assembled by rejigging one from trillionthtonne.org. The basic idea is that, if our climate can be expected to suffer severe disruption at a certain amount of global warming due to a certain amount of carbon emissions (since the beginning of the fossil-fuel era around 1850), then our best strategy should be to limit the cumulative carbon emissions to somewhere below that level, in this case 1 trillion tonnes of carbon.
But there's plenty of uncertainty surrounding the…
hrynyshyn | April 4, 2011A new review paper in Nature makes a stab an answering the question "Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?" In an apparent effort to satisfy a variety of audiences with different evidentiary and skepticism standards, Nature and the reviews authors, led by Anthony D. Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley, offer a variety of phrasings.
First we have the paper's abstract, which wraps up with:
Our results confirm that current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record, highlighting the need for effective conservation measures.
Then we…
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 30, 2011Last year much was made by climate-change deniers of a poorly referenced section of one of the IPCC reports of 2007 that said "up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall." It turned out that the claim was based on solid science, despite the best efforts of those who just can't bring themselves to trust professional climatologists. You can read the whole sordid tale here. I revisit the issue because of a new paper about to be published by the American Geophysical Union that bears on this question.
"Widespread Decline in Greenness of Amazonian Vegetation…
hrynyshyn | March 25, 2011Just case you were wondering what was going on up North:
Arctic sea ice extent appeared to reach its maximum extent for the year on March 7, marking the beginning of the melt season. This year's maximum tied for the lowest in the satellite record -- NSIDC, March 23
hrynyshyn | March 21, 2011There's an amusing little video making the rounds, and receiving a largely positive response. Which is unfortunate, because it's little more than government-industry propaganda that glosses over the colossal abrogation of responsibility that led to the Fukushima crisis.
At first glance, the cartoon does an exemplary job explaining the situation to Japanese schoolchildren too young to understand half-lives and the role of water as a coolant and moderator in boiling-water reactors. But there's a gaping omission right at the beginning. Nuclear Boy has a stomach ache. No kidding. Why? This is…
hrynyshyn | March 16, 2011How nuclear power is perceived by the general public will take decades to return to what it was a week ago. (Kind of like radioactive decay.) But the list of immutable and defining characteristics of the technology is long one and nothing that happens in Japan is likely to change them. First up: the daunting economics.
Each gigawatt reactor costs upwards of $14 billion these days. And climbing. As the increasingly useful Climopedia at Climate Central puts it: "the question on many peoples' minds today is not what the last nuclear power plant cost, but rather what the next nuclear plant will…
hrynyshyn | March 14, 2011At one end of the hyperbole scale we have Helen "If you love this planet" Caldicott, who raises the specter of "cancer and genetic diseases" if things get any worse at the growing list of nuclear power reactors crippled or destroyed by last week's earthquake in Japan. At the other we have Republican congressman Mitch McConnell, who argues that we shouldn't abandon nuclear power, especially "right after a major environmental catastrophe."
In between the pundits and genuine experts are pointing out that the mining, processing, and burning of fossil fuels kill hundreds or even thousands of times…
hrynyshyn | March 10, 2011I don't drink much coffee. So the news that some coffee producers are finding it tough to deal with changes in growing conditions that could be an early taste of what global warming will bring doesn't strike close to home. And of course, "scientists are uncertain whether the peculiar weather patterns in the area are directly related to warming."
Still, what if the fears are warranted? Is "peak coffee" around the corner? Given how much coffee Americans guzzle, I wonder what would happen if prices started spiking -- just as they are about to do with the another habit-forming commodity.
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…
hrynyshyn | February 17, 2011Media outlets both main and sidestream are abuzz (atwitter?) with the story that scientists are finally daring to link specific weather events with anthropogenic climate change. A pair of papers in Nature are to blame. One, Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes, concludes that the titular events "have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas." The other manages to summarize the whole thing in its tile: "Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to…
hrynyshyn | January 28, 2011Fast Friday feature (from Utah!):
Climate Science in a Nutshell #9: How Bad Could it Get? from Planet Nutshell on Vimeo.
My only comment is to draw your attention to the video's assumption that the 350 ppm CO2 target is widely accepted as the maximum necessary to avert catastrophic change. It's certainly spreading, but I suspect there are still many who would argue that the science behind it is less than conclusive, as opposed to 450, say.
hrynyshyn | September 9, 2010There's always room for one more post about oceanic acidification. Even Sheril Kirshenbaum understates the threat that it poses to the planet's ecosystems and civilization when she describes it a "huge deal." First, let's get one thing straight:
Falling pH levels in the seas do not constitute global warming's "evil twin." That would imply that global warming is oceanic acidification is global warming's good twin. Both are evil. The malapropism was used in a paper published earlier this year in Trends in Ecology & Evolution by a trio of researchers from Spain and Australia, but it's been…
hrynyshyn | August 31, 2010Much is being and will be written about Bjorn Lomborg's volte face on climate change. After a decade of denial -- not of the reality of anthropogenic warming, but of the threat it poses to civiliation -- the Skeptical Environmentalist now says:
"If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming."
Is this worthy of a blog post? In a perfect world, no. But then, in a perfect world, I would be…
hrynyshyn | August 24, 2010A couple of scientists at the University of Montana say they have detected a small but non-negligible decline in global terretrial "net primary production." NPP is basically a way of measuring plant growth -- how much carbon they're removing from their surroundings and turning into biomass. To my mind, there are two noteworthy aspects to their research, which just appeared in Science. Both led to me to the phrase that is the title for this post, although each use carries distinct meanings.
First, "Drought-Induced Reduction in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 2000 Through 2009"…
hrynyshyn | July 20, 2010Stanford physicist Robert B. Laughlin shared a Nobel prize in 1998 for helping explain something called the fractional quantum Hall effect. That particular phenomenon has nothing to do with climatology, and neither does the rest of Laughlin's c.v. Still, one might expect something cogent about the public policy challenge posed by anthropogenic climate change if it appears under the byline of such a scientific luminary. One would, in this case, be wrong.
Laughlin's thoughts are laid out in in an essay titled "What the Earth Knows" in American Scholar. The not-so-groundbreaking thesis is that…