climate change
hrynyshyn | January 6, 2010Over at Linked In, the professionally oriented social networking service, there's a discussion group called "Climate Change - I care!" Most of its members are those who share a concern for what anthropogenic global warming is threatening to do to civilization as we know it. Until this week, membership was open to anyone. But the moderator just ejected one member who has, shall we say, a contrarian point of view. Was that a wise thing to do?
The member, Leigh Haugen, only posted pseudoscientific rants about the conspiratorial nature of the entire climatology community, and if he does actually…
hrynyshyn | January 5, 2010Well, I thought I'd see it all, but I was wrong. Of course, it's been a long time since anyone whose opinion I respect considered Fox News a serious source of news and analysis. Still this example boggles the mind. Here's Brit Hume, the network's senior news analyst, discussing the most important topic of our time:
And here's Brit Hume a few weeks ago on what many of us who don't watch Fox News consider the most important topic of our time:
In a different world, repeatedly misrepresenting the facts about a serious public policy issue would be cause for an employer to reexamine the status of…
hrynyshyn | January 4, 2010Storms of My Grandchildren
The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe
And Our Last Chance to Save Humanity
by James Hansen
Bloomsbury USA, 304 pp.
Another year, another plea for scientists to start communicating better. Here's Chris Mooney, reminding us yet again that
Scientific training continues to turn out researchers who speak in careful nuances and with many caveats, in a language aimed at their peers, not at the media or the public. Many scientists can scarcely contemplate framing a simple media message for maximum impact; the very idea sounds unbecoming.
Well, James Hansen,…
hrynyshyn | December 30, 2009It's taken me a while to assemble something cogent about the outcome of the CoP15, the Copenhagen conference that produced what some are calling "better than nothing." There are those who consider it a complete failure because the final accord, which didn't receive full approval, includes no specific carbon emissions reductions targets. Others point out that just getting China to agree to a watered-down provision on verification protocols was a major achievement and the best that could be hoped for. I doubt a useful evaluation will be forthcoming until much later in 2010. History's like that…
sastyk | December 30, 2009The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a…
sastyk | December 28, 2009Energy Bulletin ran this excellent piece from the New York Times on a crisis facing Mongolian Goat Herders who are attempting to deal with unstable world markets, climate change and overgrazing. I was fascinated by the clear way that the author of the piece lays out the vicious circle that they've entered into, and I was struck by how useful an example it is of the kind of ecological vicious circle that we face all the time:
To compensate for low prices, herders have been increasing supply by breeding more goats -- a classic vicious circle. Mongolia's goat population is now approaching 20…
grrlscientist | December 25, 2009tags: Polar Bear Versus Walrus Colony, nature, global warming, climate change, BBC, Planet Earth, documentary, streaming video
This video documents an awesome fight for survival as a grown male polar bear takes on a walrus colony at the edge of the Arctic circle. This was a truly epic battle, phenomenally captured in high quality, from the BBC natural history masterpiece, Planet Earth.
What surprised you most about this footage? I was surprised that the walruses did not work together to defeat/get rid of the polar bear.
sastyk | December 24, 2009I spend much of my life making the case for changing one's life (and not just one's life - for supporting political and social change that is associated with it) in fairly radical ways, very quickly. I spend a lot of my time writing, and periodically I get on a train or a bus or something and go stand up in front of people and make the same case. I know this is a diffcult thing for many people, whose infrastructure envelopes them and pushes them powerfully towards a particular way of life, so I try to make good arguments for doing it now. I make moral arguments, about the use of a fair…
sastyk | December 20, 2009Dear Sharon: Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. But I really need to know if there is. My Mom has been telling me about something called global warming, and I'm worried about Santa, because he lives up at the North Pole, and if it melts, he'll be in trouble. My Mom said some grownups were working hard in a place called Copenhagen to fix the problem, and I heard someone on the news say they decided something and someone else said they didn't. What happened in Copenhagen? Is there really a Santa, and what's going to happen to the North Pole? Please tell me the truth!…
sastyk | December 18, 2009You've got to give our Secretary of State credit - she knows how to make an entrance. Show up at the door with 100 billion and people can't look away. Of course, she didn't promise 100 billion from the US, but to raise it collectively with some unspecified other folk by 2020, but still, it is an impressive number, and it isn't wasn't a bad way to get attention. That doesn't change the fact that the rich world is still trying to blame the poor, or that the climate talks are still failing.
Meanwhile, a new UN report released confirms what we already knew - that everything presently on the…
hrynyshyn | December 16, 2009James Randi has few peers when it comes to applying scientific rigor to claims of paranormal or supernatural activity. He's been doing it for what seems like eons, all without any formal scientific training. So when he even hints that climate change denialists might have a point, it's time to see what's up. After all, he's made a honorable career of attacking pseudoscience, not science itself.
The most recent post at his blog, named after Johnathan Swift is a bit on the rambling side, and little inconsistent. The most surprising paragraph is:
I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may…
sastyk | December 16, 2009Not long ago I was out at a dinner of climate activists, at the beginning of a conference I was at, and as we were climbing into the car of one of the program leaders, there was talk about whose car was messier. This is a competition I always win - I mentioned to them that not only do I have little kids in my car, messing it up, but I drive goats around in my Taurus.
Several people asked me why I drive goats in a car, (which even to me seems like a reasonable question). The answer is that I am a farmer with goats, but I don't have a pick up truck, so when they go to be bred or to the vet,…
hrynyshyn | December 15, 2009Following yesterday's Yes Men hoax, in which Canada's position on greenhouse-gas emissions was mocked, the country's minister of the environment seems to have become a persona non grata. At least, that's how it looked to a Toronto Star blogger reporting from Copenhagen:
Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice just finished his press conference and he dismissed the hoax press releases, saying "I am here to negotiate." The Minister's press people distributed a release for a photo-op of U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Prentice to occur shortly after the press conference, outside of the…
hrynyshyn | December 15, 2009The good news is Andrew Revkin will continue to post at his Dot Earth blog for the foreseeable future. The bad news is he will be doing so not as a staff reporter for the New York Times, which has allowed him the rare honor of specializing in something as specialized as climate change, for many years. Instead, it will be as Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University's Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies.
As a "mainstream" journalist, Andy operated under the constraints, baggage and inertia of a system that was ill-suited to cover a subject that fused science…
hrynyshyn | December 14, 2009It would be funny if so much weren't at stake.
Anonymous culture-jammers (probably the "Yes Men") earlier today apparently managed to fool the Wall Street Journal into reporting that Canada has abandoned it established greenhouse gas emissions reductions target of just 3% below 1990 levels by 2020. Instead, it would henceforth support something more in line with what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- and most of the developing world -- say is necessary to avoid dangerous interference in the global climate: 25-40% below 1990 by 2020.
Within an hour, the Canadian government had…
illconsidered | December 14, 2009 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News December 13, 2009 Chuckles, COP15, COP15 Dailies, COP15 Tools, COP15 Alternate Forums, COP15 The Editorial, COP15 Demonstrators GermanWatch, Mediterranean Flood, CRU, Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, In the Balance Melting Arctic, Arctic Mode Switch, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Pledges, Baseline…
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2009Forget Copenhagen for a moment, and turn your attention back to the U.S. legislative process, into which has just been thrown a new option, a "third option" that just might be able to satisfy both the "it's the only game in town so let's support the cap-and-trade bills now before Congress" gang and those who call cap and trade a scam that's doomed to fail.
The cap-and-trade approach to reducing carbon emissions is the core of both the bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and the one already circulating in the Senate. It embraces the wisdom of the marketplace set us down the road…
sastyk | December 10, 2009The IEA has pretty much conceeded peak oil, announcing that growth to meet demand in the coming decades will come from entirely mythical sources. Ok, they didn't say that, what they said in the latest World Energy Outlook was that the majority of oil production by 2030 will be coming from "fields yet to be developed or found." But what that means is "we're hoping someone with magic powers will come and reverse the long-stand trend towards decline in oil discovery." Because we know that oil discovery peaked in 1964 and has been declining ever since, so that we are consuming oil five times…
hrynyshyn | December 10, 2009Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science. In an op-ed published in today's Washington Post, he excoriates Sarah Palin for her illterate essay, published earlier this week, on the topic of climate change.
While former Alaska governor Sarah Palin wrote in her Dec. 9 op-ed that she did not deny the "reality of some changes in climate," she distorted the clear scientific evidence that Earth's climate is changing, largely as a result of human behaviors. She also badly confused the concepts of…
sastyk | December 10, 2009There's an old Far Side cartoon, with a split panel, one side showing St. Peter greeting people passing the pearly gates, saying "Welcome to Heaven, here's your harp." On the other panel, the Devil greets folks at the gates of Hell, saying "Welcome to Hell, here's your accordion." My guess is that getting off the plane in Copenhagen to attend the climate talks, is, for most of the truly sincere people who care so much about the climate, a lot like entering into the warmer territories - oh, goody, you get polkas too! No torment will be denied!
Here's what we know about Copenhagen so far -…