hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
September 3, 2010
Long weekend reading: Over at e360, Climate Central's Michael Lemonick sums up the latest thinking on the big question of whether clouds will alleviate or accelerate global warming.
It's no small detail. Just about everyone agrees that anthropogenic climate change will produce more cloud cover. The…
August 31, 2010
Much 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…
August 30, 2010
Former New York Times environment reporter Andrew C. Revkin was, once upon time, considered the leading light in that small community of professional journalists who have the luxury of devoting most of their working hours to climate change. Not so much anymore.
Since leaving the Times a few months…
August 26, 2010
I'll be reviewing Heidi Cullen's new book Weather of the Future shortly. She's already on the talk show circuit. Here's her appearance on Colbert:
The Colbert Report
Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Heidi Cullen
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes
2010 Election
Fox News
August 26, 2010
The invaluable pseudonymous Tamino has a brilliant explanation of the causes of the "global cooling" trend in the mid-20th century. There's nothing new, except the clarity of the writing. So if you've ever been stumped by a skeptic who suggests that anthropogenic climate change theorists can't…
August 24, 2010
A 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…
July 26, 2010
In case anyone was wondering, blogging will be light for the rest of the summer, as I try to step back and once again consider just what my role, and that of this blog, will be in the dialog over what to do about our changing climate.
The news that the U.S. Senate will not pass any kind of…
July 20, 2010
Stanford 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…
July 19, 2010
Andy Revkin is reporting that Stephen Schneider, one of the most important scientific voices on the climate change front, has died.
July 15, 2010
It would be preferable to simply ignore Christopher Monckton's seemingly laughable attempts to undermine climatology, but given the power of the Internet to turn long-discredited arguments into serious threats to academic freedom, such a strategy would not be wise. Monckton has launched a campaign…
July 12, 2010
There's more than a few climate bloggers who have a dirty little secret. We like to excoriate those who can't tell the difference between weather and climate, or herald every momentary drop in temperature as evidence that global warming has ended, or revel in each new report that suggests not every…
July 8, 2010
It took a couple of days, but the overlords at SEED Media Group have aborted the Food Frontiers blog. If anyone is still wondering why so many members of the Scienceblogs community abandoned ship after we learned that Pepsi had bought itself blogging space at SB, as good an explanation as any can…
July 7, 2010
Class M is on an indefinite hiatus. For an explanation, please see this post by Grrlscientist.
July 7, 2010
Yet another vindication for climatology. The Muir Russel inquiry into the behavioral ethics of the climatologists at the heart of the CRU email nonsense has found...
...nothing to substantiate the complaints. Except to say that the researchers should in the future exhibit "the proper degree of…
July 1, 2010
Penn State's internal investigation into climatologist Michael Mann's integrity is over. The conclusion:
The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of…
July 1, 2010
My first reaction to the papier du jour among climate communications activists was "meh." It's not that Chris Mooney's latest ruminations on the gap between what the public thinks about scientific issues and what scientists have to say isn't worth reading. It's just that we've been down this road…
June 23, 2010
"I thought I better come see the bears because the next time I am in this country they will be all gone."
-- Polar bear tourist in Churchill, Man.
Ecotourism. Sounds so responsible, or least, non-exploitative. But let's face it: Anyone who flies long-distance to get close to some endangered piece…
June 22, 2010
The more peer-reviewed papers a climatologist has published and the more often those papers are cited, the more likely it is that the researcher supports the science underpinning anthropogenic climate change (ACC). That's the conclusion of a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the…
June 21, 2010
Few stories about climatology generated as much attention, positive and negative as one by Jonathan Leake in London's Sunday Times back in January. "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" claimed that references to threats to the Amazon rainforest from global warming were "based on an…
June 18, 2010
From WaPo's Toles comes the ultimate answer to our climate problems:
June 17, 2010
What happened at Three Mile Island in 1979 led to a new regulatory environment that increased the costs of building and running nuclear power reactors in the U.S. The environment was so hostile to the industry that no new reactors have been ordered since then. There are several in the planning…
June 16, 2010
The most intelligent thing I've read so far about Obama's speech Tuesday night, the one that included not a single mention of climate change, comes from Ezra Klein at the Washington Post. He's talking about the assumption that fear doesn't motivation people, only inspiration does.
But that strikes…
June 16, 2010
The latest report from the National Climatic Data Center reminds us that the planet is continuing to warm as expected. Most of the attention will be afforded to the global picture, for good reason:
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2010 was 0.69°C (1.24°F)…
June 15, 2010
In a desperate bid to help staunch the propagation of a particularly insidious meme, I offer this attempt to help clear up any confusion:
Mike Hulme and Martin Mahony of the School of Environmental Sciences University at East Anglia have a paper forthcoming in Progress in Physical Geography that…
June 14, 2010
Smoke and Mirrors:Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century
By Burton Richter
Cambridge University Press, 218 pages.
Do we really another book summarizing the science of climate change and the available response options? Sure. Why not? What's the harm? In this era of hyperfractionated audiences…
June 11, 2010
I've never been completely comfortable using the fate of small island states -- places like Tuvalu and Kiribati and the Seycelles that might be the first to go under as sea levels rise -- as poster kids for the consequences of climate change. For one thing, as difficult as it would be for their…
June 10, 2010
A debate at TED in February over nuclear power's merits as a clean source of electricity featured Whole Earth Catalog guru Steward Brand (pro) and Stanford energy systems analysts Mark Jacobson. A lot of ground covered in 23 minutes, including just how much ground various clean energy options cover…
June 9, 2010
NASA's James Hansen has few peers when it comes to the title of leading climatologist-turned-policy-wonk, but Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia (yes, that university) is giving him a run for his money. Hulme's latest entry is a cautionary tale involving the challenges involved in…
June 8, 2010
There's a small community of bloggers and activists who spent the weekend scratching their collective heads in hopes of figuring out what was behind a story that came out of a little place called Beeville, Texas. Last week word came from a local paper than a fourth-grader had won a "National…
June 4, 2010
Hard as it is for someone who isn't familiar with intricacies of U.S. government-run climate science to believe, there is no climatology analog of the the immigration or revenue services, something responsible for overseeing the big picture. Sure, there's NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies…