hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
September 20, 2007
Georetown University's Jacques Berlinerblau has some strange ideas, but they're usually provocative and sometime worth sharing, which is the case today with his slightly tongue-in-cheek proposal that atheists run a candidate for president. The goal: "This is not about winning or losing. This is…
September 20, 2007
We'll never know what role, if any, the mockery of the New Atheists had in the decision taken yesterday by the Toronto Catholic District School Board to let the girls in their charge get the HPV vaccine. But for once, it feels good to pass on the news that empirical evidence has trumped irrational…
September 19, 2007
Allow me to be among the first bloggers to take advantage of the end of the New York Times Select subscription-only firewall, by pointing to Thomas Friedman's explanation of "why I remain a climate skeptic -- not a skeptic about climate change, but a skeptic that we're going to be able to mitigate…
September 18, 2007
The best line from the Emmy's on Sunday night was Stephen Colbert, replying to Jon Stewart's suggestion that award ceremonies might bewasteful and bad for the environment:
Colbert: Jon. If entertainers stop publicly congratulating each other, then the earth wins.
Of course, I didn't actually watch…
September 18, 2007
Last week it was the disappearing polar ice cap. This week it's the melting permafrost, which contains a heap big quantity of greenhouse gases, which, if released to the atmosphere, "the Kyoto Protocol will seem like childish prattle," according to one expert. But how worried should be really be…
September 17, 2007
Forget about framing for a second. What about the messengers? Speaking to the BBC's World Service, Jim Hansen bemoans the dearth of good science communicators. Given the context of the interview, I think he's referring specifically to climate science communicators. The entire interview is online,…
September 16, 2007
A pair of stories in Saturday's Washington Post would have us believe that atheism is on the rise in America and in Europe. And despite the popularity of the subject here on ScienceBlogs, the culture of science barely rates a mention in either story. Also missing are much in the way of quantitative…
September 15, 2007
Everyone, even Wired magazine is jumping on the "news" from the European Space Agency that the Northwest Passage is open, right across the Arctic Archipelago. Which is odd because American researchers made the same announcement earlier this summer. We need better media coverage of the effects of…
September 13, 2007
This is not good. A report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme says toxic pollutants, presumably estrogen mimics and other organochlorines, are skewing the sex ratio in Greenland.
The Guardian reports:
Twice as many girls as boys are being born in some Arctic villages because of…
September 13, 2007
That's the big question I take away from a surprisingly fascinating exchange on the what I thought was a tired "how to promote atheism?" debate, in which ...
... Jake Young of the Pure Pendantry blog makes a respectable, if somewhat lengthy, attempt to argue that linking science with atheism too…
September 13, 2007
Bjorn Lomborg's new book, Cool It! is getting less than sympathetic reviews from those whose job it is to understand climate science. No surprise there. But here's a review by an economist, in Nature no less. Given that Lomborg approaches the question of what to do -- and what not to do -- about…
September 11, 2007
Monday we heard that a group of rogue Makah Indians killed a gray whale without going through the red tape that they're supposed to (or bothering to land it). Tuesday comes a new study that shows the eastern Pacific gray whale population, from which the doomed creature was taken, isn't doing as…
September 10, 2007
Well, for what it's worth, the U.S. Geological Survey has confirmed what just about every independent observer of the polar bear has been saying for years: time's running out. According to the executive summary of the service's initial findings as part of its investigation into whether to add Ursus…
September 10, 2007
Why are so many economists so dismissive of attempts to do something about climate change? Adam Finkel, a regulatory law expert at the University of Pennsylvania, has a wonderful take on that question, in a comment posted at The Intersection, in response to a recent Newsweek column by Robert…
September 7, 2007
Among the axioms of the day is that we live in a time of change, and those changes are taking place at breakneck speed and accelerating. So rapid are the changes that science fiction writer William Gibson has given up trying to stay ahead of the curve. Historian-journalist Gwynne Dyer argues Gibson…
September 6, 2007
It's easy to feel superior when we read stories like "Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god." But are we in the Enlightened West really any better than this sort of thing:
KATHMANDU (Reuters, Sept 5) - Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab,…
September 4, 2007
Read the Science Creative Quarterly's list of 15 statements that are as close to being true as we can get without invoking dogma. You won't learn much, but I might win an iPod, allowing my wife and me easy access to our music collection without having to figure out a way to keep all those CDs…
September 4, 2007
Everybody loves dolphins. They say wild dolphins have been known to save a human's life every now and then. So it only makes sense that swimming with dolphins would be a good thing, right? Wrong. A recently published meta-analysis of the last few years of studies of the alleged benefits -- so-…
August 31, 2007
Naomi Oreskes, the researcher who could find not a single peer-reviewed climate science publication that disagreed with the consensus that humans are largely to blame for global warming, defends herself against a pathetic attempt to show that she was wrong. (thanks Stranger Fruit.) But in her list…
August 31, 2007
Talk about alarmist climate science. A new study has confirmed earlier propositions that the most recent ice age will be the last, for at least half a million years, if we don't stop burning fossil fuels. But I say, this is not something we should be worried about.
In "The long-term legacy of…
August 29, 2007
PZ Myers suggested I might have something to say in response to Bjorn "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Lomborg's resurfacing. Indeed I do. The Danish boy wonder is back with a new book, Cool It, in which he makes his case, yet again, that climate change isn't all that bad. He was wrong with his…
August 29, 2007
The North Polar ice sheet continues to recede, setting yet another record:
Sea ice extent continues to decline, and is now at 4.78 million square kilometers (1.84 million square miles), falling yet further below the record absolute minimum of 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square…
August 28, 2007
Robert Fisk does not deserve to be the inspiration a net-derived term describing a point-by-point debunking of one's argument. He has consistently brought his readers insightful stories about the real world of the Middle East. But my admiration for his skills as a witness to history suffered a near…
August 27, 2007
The climate change denial gang is so predictable. Even when the science as written, and as covered by reputable science journalists, makes it clear that the new evidence bolsters the general consensus, there are those who will give the findings the opposite interpretation. Today's topic is sunspots…
August 24, 2007
So Leonardo DiCaprio is picking up where Al Gore left off in the battle to keep Earth habitable. Is this a good thing?
Set aside, for the purposes of this discussion, any misgivings you might have about DiCaprio's acting prowess or lack thereof. They guy has a certain ineffable quality that has…
August 24, 2007
The New York Times' Sandra Blakeslee reports today that a group of researchers has managed to induce the famous "out-of-body" feeling that sometimes accompanies near-death experiences. So goes another piece of evidence for the "soul." They employed virtual reality gear to play havoc the senses:…
August 23, 2007
The argument that atheists should try hard not to offend people of faith, lest we further polarize the two factions, assumes that the meek will inherit the earth, not the rhetorically courageous. But what historical evidence is there for this assumption? Or does history make the opposite case?…
August 22, 2007
It's the big question that bedevils climate science and politics: how close are these "tipping points" beyond which things get very bad very fast? Tim Lenton of the Laboratory for Global Marine and Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of East Anglia doesn't have any definitive answers, but he…
August 21, 2007
Actually, burning it would probably be better than this. A barge overturned and dumped a loaded diesel truck in waters just metres from Robson Bight, one of those areas where the term "ecologically sensitive" just doesn't do seem to do justice.
Robson Bight, up near the northern end of Vancouver…
August 20, 2007
Half of the Scienceblogging team converged on New York City this past weekend to do what science geeks do best: drink someone else's beer and wine and argue about the allegedly non-overlapping magisteria (the science-religion divide to the rest of you). Of course, we talked a lot of science, but we…