Climate
hrynyshyn | July 11, 2008If you had to identify the most popularly cited threats posed by a changing climate, rising sea levels would be a strong contender. While no one would argue that the fate of hundreds of millions of humans who live in low-lying coastal regions is not a good enough reason to put the brakes on global warming, I'd like to see more attention paid to what's happening beneath the ocean surface at its current level. I'm talking about the possibility of mass coral extinction. It's the subject of a new analysis in Science by an impressive list of 39 scientists from an even more impressive list of…
hrynyshyn | July 10, 2008Not everyone here at ScienceBlogs is happy about a new project appearing here, under the auspices of SEED, and underwritten by none other than Shell. Yes, that's right, the big bad petro products transnational. "The Next Generation of Energy Ideas" is another blog collective, featuring some ScienceBloggers (including me) and a couple of others, most notably Joe Romm of Climate Progress. We'll be tackling a different question, put to us by a SEED editor, each week, and taking turns spewing forth. In return we will be paid for each post. My contributions appear Monday. How do I justify taking…
hrynyshyn | July 9, 2008What's not to love about Hawai'i? Well, Honolulu's a bit much, but the island state as a whole seems to understand what it's going to take to beat this whole global warming thing. It just put into a law a requirement that beginning in 2010, all new homes must incorporate solar water heaters.
In so doing, Hawai'i becomes the first state in the union to join the solar water heater bandwagon. It follows Israel, where 90% of homes already have them.
It turns out that, if you happen to live somewhere with plenty of sunshine, solar water heaters make so much sense you'd have to be an idiot not to…
hrynyshyn | July 7, 2008Some guy named Ken Sprague had a thousand pounds of British currency to throw around each year so he decided, for the second year in a row, to hold a competition for editorial cartoons dealing with "climate change and other threats to the environment." Not too surprisingly, many of the entries aren't so much funny as poignant reminders of human stupidity. The Independent offers a slide show of the two dozen best. Here's my favorite by Ukraine's Igor Kondenko. It manages to incorporate a variety of ideas, including a dig at the American can-do spirit, in one simple image:
hrynyshyn | June 24, 2008It shouldn't be all that difficult to figure out. Do we have the means at our disposal, now, to replace fossil fuels with clean alternatives that won't bankrupt us all? The only two variables we need consider are the energy conversion efficiency ratios of each candidate technology and the costs, up front or amortized, of same. So why can't we agree on this simple question?
Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress, and the blogger responsible for Climate Progress, sums up the disparity in an opinion piece in Nature:
Although it has recently been argued that "enormous advances in energy…
hrynyshyn | June 20, 2008Sixty years is a blink of the metaphorical eye on geological time scales, and it's still damn fast when you're talking about climate change. While it may be far too long for Wall Street to worry about, six decades is safely with human lifespans, and a study that concludes temperatures in Greenland can shift by 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10°C) in such a short time merits more than a passing mention.
We've known for a few years now that regional climate patterns can shift dramatically with a decade or two, but precise details have been hard to come by, primarily because we just didn't have the…
hrynyshyn | June 17, 2008The man that Republicans believe is the best candidate for president their party has to offer says that lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling would "be very helpful in the short term resolving our energy crisis." This may not be the least intelligent statement to be made in the 2008 campaign to date ;;;; Ed Brayton prefers McCain's demonstration of his lack of understanding of basic legal principles ;;;; but it still boggles the mind.
No one even tangentially familiar with the petroleum industry would dare suggest that the time-frame involved in exploring, reviewing…
hrynyshyn | June 13, 2008Among the most common arguments to emerge from attendees of the climate-change slide show we members of Al Gore's Climate Project hear is "what about nuclear energy?" After all, it doesn't produce any greenhouse gas emissions, at least not while operating, and the technology is already available. Well, there are three reasons why nuclear energy isn't part of a realistic solution to climate change.
One is the time it takes to get a nuke running. First you have to conduct an environmental review of the project and site. Then you apply for federal and local permits. Then you sit through long…
hrynyshyn | June 12, 2008I have exaggerated and generalized to grab your attention. But it's not that much of a stretch to put reviving the North American continent's moribund passenger rail network at the heart of what really matters in this election year. By this, I mean how the American presidential and congressional candidates, and their analogs in Canada, approach the subject of mass transportation will tell you a lot about whether or not they understand the most important challenges facing society.
OK. I'm still exaggerating. But not much. Passenger rail and other forms of efficient ways of moving people…
hrynyshyn | June 9, 2008Earth: The Sequel
The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming
by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn
Has the climate crisis got you down? Cheer yourself up with yet another dose of (almost) unbridled optimism from the president of the Environmental Defense Fund (Fred) and one of his staffers (Miriam). Don't be fooled by the odd choice of title; this is actually an ode to the free market.
We've been here before. Last year came a compendium of attractive investment options in the form of The Clean Tech Revolution by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder, and for those who really can't stomach the idea…
voltagegate | June 9, 2008Critterthink, the blog of the Center for Native Ecosystems in Denver, CO has posted a guide to the 2008 Farm Bill from a conservation perspective, highlighting what they call the good, the bad and the ugly. If you haven't had time to review the bill yourself, take advantage of the hard work these folks put into breaking it down for us.
The Farm Bill is an omnibus bill passed every few years, setting a policy toolkit for agriculture in the US. It has massive implications for industry, food, foreign policy and, for our purposes, conservation and the environment.
Here are a few things that stuck…
hrynyshyn | June 5, 2008Given just how much we don't understand about the Earth's climate, it's understandable that a newcomer to the science of global warming would doubt that we are capable of predicting much of anything. Many a climate change pseudoskeptic makes this argument, which can be compelling, but only if you don't understand how science works. A paper in this week's Nature Geoscienceis a perfect example of why so many people who otherwise consider themselves skeptics, people like me, find the anthropogenic explanation for climate change so persuasive. It's not so much what we know as the trends…
hrynyshyn | June 3, 2008The report of NASA's Office of the Inspector General on the clumsy attempts to censoring climate science makes for a most enjoyable read. We can laugh now that it's over, I mean. There are lots of gems among the overall finding the a small cabal of political appointees in the public affairs office tried to delay or bury new findings on climate change. Here, then are some of my favorites:
...we believe that many of these scientists (and the majority of career Public Affairs Officers interviewed) would argue that the actions of NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs -- in delaying, unduly…
hrynyshyn | June 2, 2008Wired magazine's June cover story would have the entire environmental movement drop everything but one campaign. You don't need to see the cover to know they're talking about climate change. Does such single-mindedness make even the slightest bit of sense? Sort of. But not for the reasons the editors provide.
First, it should be noted that Wired's attempt to explain why you should "Keep your SUV. Forget Organics. Go nuclear. Screw the Spotted Owl" and instead focus on just one thing: cutting carbon, is accompanied by a counterpart that makes eminently more sense. In his rebuttal, Alex Steffen…
hrynyshyn | May 30, 2008This may strike some as a bit much, but why the heck not? An opera based on "An Inconvenient Truth." The only problem is, how will the librettist keep the science of climate change current with an expected opening (at La Scala) of 2011? By then, we may be looking at a tragicomedy. Or perhaps an opera buffo, depending on how hot things get.
From the Guardian's story on the announcement:
La Scala's artistic director, Stephane Lissner, told a press conference the new opera had been commissioned from an Italian composer, Giorgio Battistelli. He said it would be staged in 2011.
"Lissner has had…
hrynyshyn | May 29, 2008Climatologists have long puzzled over what caused an abrupt drop in global average temperatures in 1945. To explain the anomaly, which, unlike most other similar rapid falls, is not associated with a volcanic eruption, most invoke an increase in airborne industrial activity following the end of the Second World War, even though the ocean temperature dip begins several years before industrial activity takes off. The idea is the clouds seeded by the extra aersols reflected more sunlight before it could be trapped in the atmosphere. But that was always a guess, and now it seems there was a…
hrynyshyn | May 27, 2008We've all heard economics described as the "dismal science," yet it still qualifies for a Nobel prize. Many still grumble about the decision to tack on economics to the short list of true science Nobels, and while I don't know whether such complaints are justified, there is good reason to remain highly skeptical of the field's predictive powers in general. Take the just-released Tufts University study on the cost of climate change.
The main authors of the study, which was commissioned by the Natural Resources Defence Council, are economists from the Global Development and Environment…
hrynyshyn | May 26, 2008I love Alaska. I really do. Not the political jurisdiction; the geographical entity that Michelle shocked felt compelled to remind her fans is the largest in the union. It's full of spectacular, mostly pristine wilderness. There's Denali, the fjords of the panhandle, its salmon, whales, eagles and bears, incomparable glaciers and some of the best aurora viewing on the planet. Too bad, then, that its human population seems hell-bent on doing everything it can to destroy what makes the place special.
The latest affront to reason to emerge from Alaska comes in the form of a lawsuit challenging…
hrynyshyn | May 19, 2008...read the backgrounder produced by Real Climate's Rasmus Benestad. It's another example of the kind of reseach journalists need to do before writing about climate change research.
Rasmus provides an excellent overview of how much we know, and how much we don't know, about the hurricane-climate relationship, which is the subject of a new paper in Nature Geoscience. And the accompanying comments are, as usual, almost as useful as the post itself.
At the heart of the discussion is Rasmus' observation that
Of most fundamental significance to assessing the reliability of these current…
hrynyshyn | May 16, 2008Should scientists place bets on how well they can predict the future? I'm not talking about inter-lab wagers on the outcome of some arcane experiment. Such games are commonplace, and usually involve ersatz currencies such as beers or domestic services. But what about real money on something as consequential as a computer model of climate trends? Is that consistent with the professional detachment that's supposed to accompany honest research?
The Real Climateers argue that there are cases in which such bets can help explain the science, or at least, the degree of confidence that scientists…