hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
March 3, 2009
My first take on Andy Revkin's odd little story effectively equating the climate change "hyperbole" generated by Al Gore and George F. Will was a quick shrug. Now I am not so sure.
While making such a comparison is clearly out of line, it seemed to me that anyone reading the story would come away…
March 2, 2009
Last week we learned from the Washington Post's ombudsman that George F. Will had supplied a list of 20ish internet references to Post editors in support of his much-criticized Feb. 15 column. That column repeated his long-standing belief that the world is not warming according to the prevailing…
February 28, 2009
Like Carl Zimmer, I can't get past the George F. Will/WaPo climate change denial scandal. Carl's latest piece delves deeper into the nature of journalism and fact-checking at the Post, and I'm going to weigh in with my observations of working at newspapers off and on for the past 22 years.
First,…
February 27, 2009
How do I put this politely?
It is not possible for a reasonable person equipped with a secondary education to read the material George F. Will cites in his columns arguing against the scientific evidence for global warming and come to the conclusions that Will reaches.
It's been less than a day,…
February 26, 2009
I owe author Eric Roston a book review. He was kind enough to send me a copy of The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat late last year. It took me a while to get around to it, and I regret not reading it earlier.
The Carbon Age is not the best piece of…
February 25, 2009
My apologies if you're weary of posts revolving around George F. Will and his inability to accept responsibility for getting climate science completely wrong. But the contrast between that sorry episode in one non-scientist's efforts to communicate science with those of Al Gore's is too stark to…
February 23, 2009
I just returned from delivering an hour-long presentation on climate change to the local chapter of American Association of University Women. It was one of the most intelligent and educated audiences I've had the pleasure to appear before. Followup questions were poignant and well-considered. But…
February 20, 2009
The focus has shifted from George F. Will's refusal to accept the science of climate change to the Washington Post's refusal to accept responsibility for Will's breach of journalism's most sacred tenets. I don't have more to say, but Carl Zimmer's second analysis of the problem is bang on. There's…
February 19, 2009
Barack Obama and his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, just wrapped up a joint press conference. Of course, no one said anything particularly newsworthy, but a few comments are worth mentioning.
First, Harper said his approach to climate change, an approach that favors Bush-style emissions…
February 19, 2009
I'm dwelling on George F. Will's latest violation of journalistic ethics because it seems to have hit a nerve. Journalists ordinarily too polite to attack another journalist for fear of appearing biased and unprofessional have broken with their habits to call Will on his misrepresentation of the…
February 18, 2009
There's bound to be some fuss over a new film scheduled for release later this year. Creation follows Charles Darwin as he ponders whether to write On the Origin of Species. Sounds like a great subject, but there are some worrying signs. PZ Myers, for example, doesn't like the producers' decision…
February 15, 2009
George F. Will has once again waded, some might argue over his head, into the hazardous waters of climatology. His latest Washington Post column restates long-discredited arguments against anthropogenic global warming. Rather than waste an entire afternoon examining the flaws in Will's case -- if…
February 13, 2009
A Reuters story about startling high levels of carbon dixoide in the air near the North Pole caught my eye this week.
Levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities, rose to 392 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere in Svalbard in December....
392?
That seems awfully…
February 12, 2009
The British (including the Northern Irish) have all the fun. Guardian columnist George Monbiot has just launched the Christopher Booker prize, to be awarded to whoever "manages, in the course of 2009, to cram as many misrepresentations, distortions and falsehoods into a single article, statement,…
February 12, 2009
I must confess to being pleasantly surprised by the amount of attention Charles Darwin is drawing on this, the 200th anniversary of his birth. And although anything I contribute is almost certain to be redundant, I feel obliged to chime in. So:
Yes, Darwin was brilliant. One of the top scientific…
February 11, 2009
Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office Hadley Centre, says scientists should be careful not to exaggerate the evidence for climate change:
The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change. This…
February 11, 2009
Start with An Inconvenient Truth, add some real actors and remove most of the scientific attribution. What would you get? If you believe the producers, you get "The Age of Stupid," which is scheduled for release in the US in April.
The Age of Stupid: final trailer Feb 2009 from Age of Stupid on…
February 11, 2009
A member of the audience at one of my climate change slide shows asked me why I hadn't mentioned the benefits of switching to vegetarianism when it comes to things we can do to lower our carbon footprint. I replied that I thought eating less meat will be as much as consequence of our actions as a…
February 10, 2009
Northern Ireland's Environment Minister, Sammy Wilson, has banned an advertising campaign promoting efficient use of electricity on the grounds that the central thesis of the campaign is "patent nonsense" and "insidious propaganda." Even if it were true, since when are either attributes grounds for…
February 9, 2009
Not to diminish Charles Darwin's brillance in the slightest, but there's a nice little essay in the New York Times by Nicholas Wade that helps explain why the guy managed to get so much so right so long ago. The money quote:
One of Darwin's advantages was that he did not have to write grant…
February 7, 2009
For those in need a splashy video rebuttal to typical climate denial talking points, there's a great little feature on YouTube called Climate Denial Crock of the Week by one Peter Sinclair. Here's a recent one:
February 3, 2009
The U.S. Climate Change Science Program finally managed to release its Final Report of Synthesis and Assessment a couple of weeks back. There's not a lot of new material in the first four of five volumes which deal with the state of the science, mostly because the report was supposed to be…
February 2, 2009
The dominant subject among climate change campaigners these days is economics. One could consider this good news, insofar as we've moved on from debating the science of global warming to the debate over how to deal with it. The bad news is most of what passes for debate in economics makes little…
January 30, 2009
There's nothing new, scientifically speaking, in the Monaco Declaration. It's just another plea from 155 scientists representating 26 nations that "sets forth recommendations, calling for policymakers to address this immense problem." The problem is ocean acidification.
It's a problem that got a…
January 28, 2009
So a fair degree of warming is inevitable, eh? That's the conclusion of a PNAS paper making the rounds this week. (I wrote about it yesterday.) But just how "irreversible" are the coming changes? As Arthur C. Clarke said, "When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
The…
January 27, 2009
Can't let this week slip any further past without drawing your attention to a new paper on "Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions," which has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (It can be found here), and I have a copy and will…
January 26, 2009
New Scientist's recent cover that heralded the stunning news (not) that "Darwin was wrong" has generated an enormous amount of antipathy in these parts. Bora's keeping notes, and the feature article's author, Graham Lawton, surely doesn't deserve the vitriol. (Although with the umbrage he takes in…
January 26, 2009
Last week, I wrote to John Tomlinson, "a local conservative columnist" for The Flint (Michigan) Journal to ask him for the sources he used for a recent column on the scientific evidence against global warming. He indulged me, and "thousands" of others" who expressed interest by supply those sources…
January 23, 2009
No sooner had I finished writing about the Eos poll on the near unanimity of the climatology community on the anthropogenic cause of global warming than I came across another poll on the general public's position. And I did not take heart.
The authors of the Eos paper referred to a 2008 Gallup…
January 21, 2009
Tim Lambert beat me to it (surprise), so you can read Deltoid's take on the new poll of the Earth sciences that finds that the more your working life is dominated by climatology, the more likely you are to accept the basic conclusions of the anthropogenic global warming consensus. I'll just add a…