editorial
illconsidered | May 23, 2009By the by, I have another post up on The Energy Grid called The Blame Game.
This week's question is one of finding fault. What brought us to the current confluence of crises? Was it a failure of the political, or the technological?
Unlike the beltway pundits and the political scoundrels they defend, who use the phrase "blame game" to mockingly to retreat from accepting responsibility for, well anything, I don't think blame is just a game. Insanity is sometimes defined as trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, if you never bother to revisit your…
illconsidered | May 1, 2009It`s kind of nice to hear an expert in the field making the same observation I often have about the economic arguments that swirl around the climate policy debates.
Specifically, opponents to mitigation policy have no trouble relying on the magic of the market and technology to rescue us from any possible difficulty climate change might visit upon us. This of course includes the loss of huge services nature provides us for free. You know, things like rain and sea food and forests.
Yet, make a suggestion that CO2 emissions need to be forced lower and the Pollyanna`s instantly become the most…
illconsidered | April 20, 2009I'm sure most of us remember how incoherent Sarah Palin was about climate change (well, okay, about most things), but John Boehner seems to have his sights set on out doing the master!
In an interview with George Stephanopoulos (partial transcript here) his mangling of anything even remotely resembling an intelligent thought is really quite astounding!
His answer to climate change incredibly includes:
we need American-made oil and gas
Because foreign CO2 has such a higher greenhouse potential than good ol' American CO2.
Boehner offers this boner about the recent EPA ruling:
the idea that…
bioephemera | March 19, 2009
Illustration by David Parkins, Nature
Today, Nature released a news feature by Geoff Brumfiel on the downturn in mainstream science media. We've all known that this is happening; the alarms become impossible to ignore when Peter Dysktra and his team at CNN lost their jobs last year. For mainstream outlets like CNN or the Boston Globe to cut science may seem appalling - but in an unforgiving economic climate which has already triggered the collapse of major newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, such cuts are logical, because science reporting isn't a big money-maker. The question…
illconsidered | March 16, 2009Elizabeth Kolbert, journalist and author of "Field Notes from a Catastrophe", is interviewed by Yale Environment 360 editor Roger Cohn.
The interview was put on their site mid-last week and readers might find it quite interesting.
Kolbert discussed a wide range of issues: how the media and scientists are both responsible for the lack of public understanding on climate change; the Obama administration's chances of passing climate-related legislation; and the prospects of geoengineering the planet to mitigate the effects of warming. On whether there is a moral or ethical dimension to this issue…
bioephemera | March 9, 2009Yuval Levin has an editorial in today's WaPo that makes a very good point:
Science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. In science policy, science informs, but politics governs, and rightly so. There are, of course, different ways for politics to exert authority over science. To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities -- economic, political and ethical -- in…
illconsidered | February 28, 2009So a couple of month's ago I signed up for the Global Population Speak Out, which (you are better off to follow the link) is a simple project intended to draw attention to the problem posed by the world's growing human population. My obligation is pretty small, fortunately, in that I was asked only to at least mention the issue in some way, some where.
I say "fortunately" because it has turned out to be a hard thing to write about for me.
It is clear that current population growth is unsustainable, and I would suspect that the current population as it stands now is itself unsustainable. The…
illconsidered | February 26, 2009Today's DemocracyNow! has a segment with Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other guest discussing worsening outlooks of future warming and increased lobbying efforts from the fossil fuel industry.
We speak to Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about his warning that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising more rapidly than expected in recent years. Field says the current trajectory of climate change is now much worse than the IPCC had…
illconsidered | February 21, 2009Michael Tobis has another well written and thought provoking essay on In It for the Gold asking if continuing developments in climatology are going to affect mitigation policy.
It can be argued that climatology is not an important input into climate change related policy. It is premature to take climatological input into account in adaptation strategy, while on the other hand as far as mitigation goes (i.e., on the global scale) the picture has pretty much stayed about the same for some substantial time.
That idea does not fit in very well with the common denialist refrain that climatologists…
illconsidered | February 18, 2009In the climate debates, I hear it all the time: why should the US do anything when China and India are the fastest growing and largest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet? Though I make it a personal policy to never discussion mitigation policies with characters who will not even accept the reality of the problem, the question does, on its own merits, deserve a thoughtful answer.
Clearly, climate disruption due to accumulating greenhouse gases is a global problem and requires a cooperative and global solution. We all share the same planetary atmosphere, and CO2 is a well mixed gas in…
illconsidered | February 16, 2009I recently wrote about the tragic bushfires in Australia and how it seems to me that it is reasonable to ask if this would have happened without anthropogenic climate changes.
Real Climate has the details on this in their latest post: Bushfires and extreme heat in south-east Australia.
The post is by David Karoly, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He identifies four factors in the fire's ferocity - maximum temperatures, relative humidity, wind speeds and the ongoing drought - and discusses the possible role of climate change in each of them. For three of…
illconsidered | January 24, 2009Nature magazine recently published a paper showing that Antarctica has actually been warming about .1oC/decade since the 1950's. It was the cover story:
A new reconstruction of Antarctic surface temperature trends for 1957-2006, reported this week by Steig et al., suggests that overall the continent is warming by about 0.1 °C per decade. The cover illustrates the geographic extent of warming, with the 'hotspot' peninsula and West Antarctica shown red against the white ice-covered ocean.
That the antarctic seemed to be slightly cooling despite elevated greenhouse gas levels has been a…
illconsidered | January 13, 2009A frequent commenter on many of my "How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic" articles has just taken me to task for what he sees as revealing inconsistencies.
'paul', who is generally respectful but still very antagonistic to the whole AGW concept, quotes me from various places saying at one time "The translation of what the science is
saying into the language of the public is this: Global warming is
definitely happening and it is definitely because of human activities and
it will definitely continue as long as CO2 keeps rising in the atmosphere." and in other places saying or agreeing with the…
illconsidered | January 8, 2009So I get a lot of "sceptical" comments on the "How to Talk to a Sceptic" guide, as one might well imagine. They cover quite a range from subtly misguided to poorly informed to angry political rants. I always try to answer if it seems like there might be a point.
A recent comment, made on the main guide page (usually a bad sign), is a bit of a head scratcher in terms of assessing whether it is sincere and whether there is a point in replying.
While, as I said, it is posted on the main page, Frederick targets the "It's cold in Wagga-Wagga" article and he is upset at me because I imply that it…
illconsidered | November 11, 2008How far do you have to lower your standards if you are the Heartland Institute and want four Texans for a list of "experts" on global warming?
Pretty low. Despite "dozens if not hundreds" of working climate scientists in Texas, to get four deniers for their list, the Heartland Institute had to use an energy expert, a policy analyst, an emergency physician and a petroleum engineer!
Like damning with faint praise, that list says alot about the opinions of the actual community of experts.
illconsidered | October 22, 2008"It's not really that hard to understand" is the catch phrase in this YouTube video featuring Herman Daly, the subject is the insanity of the economic cult of perpetual growth:
I got this from the most recent posting at Things Break, which you should read and be sure to follow the links.
I would also offer here the very compelling image from New Scientist that isn't actually clickable from TB's post.
(this image is courtesy of New Scientist and is part of this article)
illconsidered | October 21, 2008As you can imagine, the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide attracts a lot of comment from people who are less than inclined to agree with the general thrust of the material. Most can be easily answered with a pointer to another article or a rephrasing or expansion on one of the points in the post above it. (I'm not trying to claim that usually satisfies my skeptical visitors, but I don't often go to more trouble than that. I try not to bang my head too hard against any brick walls that come my way!).
But I had one recent commenter who asked a very straightforward question that seemed…
illconsidered | October 5, 2008[UPDATE: turns out this one was actually too funny to be real...oh well, I can't tell reality from satire since McCain put Palin on his ticket, his soulmate and all that...apologies and how embarassing and all that.]
If too funny to be real, or too real to be funny is what you find yourself wondering about this whole Palin for VP thing, then you have got to read this. It is Todd Palin live blogging the debate (or as much as he could watch before being so bored he starts channel surfing!) and it includes gems like this:
9:30 - OK, got a little lost there. I think that energy independence is…
illconsidered | September 29, 2008The following article is a guest post by H. E. Taylor, who you might recognize as the one who graciously provides us with the weekly GW news roundups. Enjoy!
The New AgeAn Argument for Geo-engineeringIf you study civilizations of the past which have collapsed [1, 2, 3, 4], a curious fact emerges. Look at Rome, Sumeria, the old kingdom of Egypt, the lowland classic Maya, the Olmec, the Huari Empire of the central Andes, the Chacoan and Hohokam of southwestern America, the Minoans, the Harrapans of the Indus valley, Easter Island. These cultures all had different religions, different economic…