hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
June 25, 2009
IPCC 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…
June 24, 2009
Here'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…
June 23, 2009
The 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…
June 22, 2009
James 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…
June 22, 2009
Deutsche 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…
June 19, 2009
And now for something completely different.
Nothing to do with climate change, pseudoscience, religiosity or even Twitter. I post it here because I am a freelancer. And everyone who has ever freelanced, or used a freelancer, or thought about freelancing, or thought about using a freelancer, should…
June 17, 2009
.. climatologists are right when they say we should be worried about what we're doing to the global heat balance.
A commenter on my previous post asked
What aspects of the science do you feel are most convincing in demonstrating the link between fossil fuel emissions and rising global average…
June 15, 2009
The 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…
June 12, 2009
Prime 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…
June 10, 2009
Inspired 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…
June 8, 2009
Assigning 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…
June 4, 2009
For your consideration: Two possible, if not probable, future scenarios for the human race should the business of fossil fuel combustion continue as usual for the next few decades. The first, an ABC-TV special that aired this Tuesday night, "Earth 2100." The second, a film by UK documentarian…
June 3, 2009
This morning, for the first time this year, the experts who monitor air pollution in these parts issued an "orange" alert. Folks who might have trouble breathing should minimize outdoor activity. As we live in a rural area near the leeward side of the Great Smoky Mountains, this is always a…
June 2, 2009
It's hard for me to ignore a headline like this: "Climate deal uncertainty clouds carbon market -- survey." According to a Reuters story, a poll of companies around the world with an interest in trading permits to emit greenhouse gases finds that "over half of respondents expect a major climate…
May 29, 2009
A coalition of 15 environmental organizations has released a joint statement explaining why they can't get behind the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey. They complain that it:
sets targets for reducing pollution that are far weaker than science says is necessary to avoid…
May 27, 2009
Peter Behr at Scientific American has a wonderfully clear explanation of just how the cap and trade mechanism prescribed by the Waxman-Markey bill will work, should it make it through Congress. It's not rocket science, but my suspicion is that a lot of observers feel intimidated by the concept and…
May 26, 2009
There's an interesting but frustrating little essay up at Grist, which has become the go-to publication to follow the fate of the Waxman-Markey bill as it wends its way through Congress. Frequent columnist Gar Lipow argues that
Mainstream environmentalists who take the position that the Waxman-…
May 25, 2009
SEED magazine has just published my report on the 2009 Summit of The Climate Project, Al Gore's effort to spread the word on the climate crisis with the help of 2,500 volunteers trained to present his "Inconvenient Truth" slide show. Here's the intro:
Polling data leading up to last week's summit…
May 21, 2009
Al Gore wants Waxman-Markey to pass. Business (Shell, Duke, Alcoa, etc) likes Waxman-Markey. Joe Romm likes Waxman Markey. Everybody wants this last, best hope to do something about climate change to survive. Everybody, but a few stubborn extremists, like Greenpeace. I say that's a good thing.
I…
May 16, 2009
With around 1,000 pages to digest, only the most committed of climate policy wonks can give you an an honest assessment of the just-released draft of H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill that may or may not get the U.S. on the road to climate repair. Reaction so far is, predictably enough, mixed.…
May 15, 2009
While I attend (and cover for SEED) the North American Summit of the The Climate Project -- a reunion of members of Al Gore's army of climate change slide show presenters -- this weekend, I won't be posting much. Not that I ever post much on the weekends. Meanwhile, however, there's a new mini-…
May 13, 2009
Canadians had a chance to introduce a national carbon tax last year during a federal election, but failed to elect the party that was pushing it. Yesterday's provincial election in British Columbia produced the opposite result: the governing party, which had introduced a carbon tax last year,…
May 12, 2009
The "whither twitter" debate is irrelevant. Evidence hinting that its popularity may be short-lived is not hard to find, but I wouldn't place any money on it either way. It's just too hard to predict what will take hold in the ever-shifting sands of the semi-arid intellectual desert that some still…
May 8, 2009
The Real Climate gang rarely disappoint. But the latest post from Gavin Schmidt is not just useful, but downright brilliant:
Imagine a group of 100 fisherman faced with declining stocks and worried about the sustainability of their resource and their livelihoods. One of them works out that the…
May 6, 2009
Here's how I would have liked to have introduced this post:
The good news is that, other than for an increasingly marginalized minority, the focus of attention on climate policy has shifted from the reality of global warming to the economic tools needed to address the problem.
Sadly, climate change…
May 5, 2009
The more I read about the trillionth ton (or tonne for our non-American friends), the more intrigued I am by its power to change the way we approach the threat of global warming. I wrote last week about the idea, which represents a whole new way of thinking about carbon emissions, but I'd like to…
May 5, 2009
Which of these recent developments raises your eyebrows the highest?
Russia is planning a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves, causing widespread alarm among environmentalists. (The Guardian, May 3, 2009)
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has…
April 30, 2009
This comment, posted to a Yahoo Finance forum by one dianasullivan1953 in response to a pointer to my recent post about the possible end of coal, was a great start to the day. I laughed for ages.
Some one smoking left handed cigarettes. wrote this memo.
What are the replacing coal with?
wHEN ARE…
April 30, 2009
This week's Nature includes a trio of climate features, book reviews, an essay, a pair of new papers, and and editorial highlighting how little wiggle room we have left if we want to avoid warming the planet 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. It's science journalism at its best. Sadly, it's up to us…
April 29, 2009
In the past week both Canada and the UK have announced a phase-out of conventional coal-fired power plants. Could this be the beginning of the end? Are we seeing the first stages of a global moratorium? Too soon, to tell of course. But it's encouraging.
First, came the British news:
Any new coal-…