hrynyshyn | September 3, 2010Long 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 mystery is whether that in turn will produce a positive or negative feedback. Lemonick's take-home message is that the evidence is beginning, just, to tilt in favor of the bad-news scenario.
And although researchers are still far from certain whether an anticipated increase in cloudiness will…
hrynyshyn | August 31, 2010Much 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 this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming."
Is this worthy of a blog post? In a perfect world, no. But then, in a perfect world, I would be…
hrynyshyn | August 30, 2010Former 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 back to assume the role of senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University, Revkin has maintained his quasi-journalistic role as the blogger behind the times Dot Earth blog. But the big change over the past year or so involves his reputation among other climate bloggers.
It's not…
hrynyshyn | August 26, 2010I'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
hrynyshyn | August 26, 2010The 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 explain why the planet cooled for the three decades following the Second World War, bookmark this post.
Just a tease:
... the 1940-1975 time period experienced anthropogenic global cooling. This cooling was from the same root cause as volcanic cooling, namely aerosols (mostly sulfate aerosols) in the…
hrynyshyn | August 24, 2010A 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 mind, there are two noteworthy aspects to their research, which just appeared in Science. Both led to me to the phrase that is the title for this post, although each use carries distinct meanings.
First, "Drought-Induced Reduction in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 2000 Through 2009"…
hrynyshyn | July 26, 2010In 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 legislation dealing with reducing fossil-fuel emissions this year should give us all pause. The recent near-collapse of Scienceblogs a few weeks ago introduced a complicating factor with which I still haven't completed come to grips. Plus there's logistical issues: I'm busy doing things that actually pay…
hrynyshyn | July 20, 2010Stanford 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 public policy challenge posed by anthropogenic climate change if it appears under the byline of such a scientific luminary. One would, in this case, be wrong.
Laughlin's thoughts are laid out in in an essay titled "What the Earth Knows" in American Scholar. The not-so-groundbreaking thesis is that…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2010Andy Revkin is reporting that Stephen Schneider, one of the most important scientific voices on the climate change front, has died.
hrynyshyn | July 15, 2010It 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 against John Abraham of St. Thomas University for daring to demolish the former's mendacious presentations on global warming. Abraham's repost is thorough and devastating. So devastating and damaging to Monckton's credibility is it that Monckton is asking for his acolytes to flood the university…
hrynyshyn | July 12, 2010There'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 single square millimeter of the planet's surface is experiencing dramatic climate shifts. As we should. But many of us take a peek, every morning, at the daily version of a graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center depicting current sea-ice extent in the Arctic.
We know that what happens…
hrynyshyn | July 8, 2010It 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 be found in an email I received Thursday from a friend of the family. She had copied me on a letter she had written to SB CEO Adam Bly:
I am just a lay reader but reasonably well educated (law degree, clinical psychology BS summa cum laude). I follow climate and science issues as closely as I can -…
hrynyshyn | July 7, 2010Class M is on an indefinite hiatus. For an explanation, please see this post by Grrlscientist.
hrynyshyn | July 7, 2010Yet 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 openness."
"We find that their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt." There. Can we move on now? I'm losing count of the number of inquiries that come to such a conclusion.
hrynyshyn | July 1, 2010Penn 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 Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University.
More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing,…
hrynyshyn | July 1, 2010My 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 so many times now, the standards of what passes for new and remarkable are getting rather high.
That didn't stop Andy Revkin, Joe Romm, and Evil Monkey from posting lengthy and hard-hitting responses, though. So I gave it a second look, and I've now concluded that "Do Scientists Understand the Public…
hrynyshyn | 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 of nature at risk from climate change is doing their bit to push those species that much closer to extinction. A paper published recently in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism tries to quantify the irony. "The carbon cost of polar bear viewing tourism in Churchill, Canada" (Subs req'd) looks at the…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2010The 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 National Academy of Sciences.
This comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone working in or following the field. But scientists like to put numbers to things, and the paper, "Expert credibility in climate change" does a pretty good job of doing just that.
There's a marvelous, interactive, graphical…
hrynyshyn | June 21, 2010Few 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 unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise." As pretty much anyone without an ulterior motive who bothered to look into the matter quickly discovered, that wasn't true. Now, more than five months later, the Times has apologized for the story.
Joe at Climate…