Climate
hrynyshyn | March 28, 2008Not only is Al Gore -- and by extension every member of his Climate Project army of slide-show presenters, including me -- wasting everyone's time trying to wake up the world to the perils of climate change, but the whole mission could actually be making things worse. That's what you'd have to conclude if you buy the results of a study of public attitudes that just appears in the journal Risk Analysis.
The authors of the study, "Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States," work at Texas A&M. (Two of the three…
voltagegate | March 27, 2008
The black caiman is just one of the endangered species that inhabits the Guiana Shield.
Back in November, the president of Guyana, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, offered the entirety of his country's rainforest to a British-led international body in return for help with development. Jagdeo was searching for alternatives to an obvious, but morally objectionable solution.
"Maybe we should just cut down the trees. Then someone would recognize the problem," said Mr Jagdeo. "But I want to think we can fulfill our people's aspirations without cutting down the trees."
British…
hrynyshyn | March 14, 2008The protocols of polite company would discourage labeling anyone a liar, but it is hard to come up with a more appropriate way to describe those who receive their paychecks from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. This conservative think tank has in the past proved themselves to be enemies of reason and democracy. To that list we will have to add the truth, what with the appearance of its latest television ad designed to undermine support for action on the climate crisis.
In fact, I would challenge anyone still working with the CEI, or anyone associated in any way with the institute to…
hrynyshyn | March 10, 2008The atmosphere is lethal
But I will fear no evil
Because it's not too late,
It's not too late.
-- T-Bone Burnett
Marvelous musician and cracker-jack producer that he is, (responsible for last year's stellar Alison Krauss-Robert Plant collaboration), T-Bone may be dead wrong when it comes to doing something about the climate crisis. So conclude a quartet of researchers from Princeton University and the Brookings Institution. The problem is, we may have waited too long to start bringing down greenhouse-gas emissions.
"Atmospheric stabilization and the timing of carbon mitigation" appears in the…
hrynyshyn | March 5, 2008Time was when what we call science was known as "natural philosophy." For the last couple of hundred years or so, however, science has become something quite different from the other branches of philosophy. Modern-day philosopher-scientists like Janet "Adventures in Science and Ethics" Stemwedel could very well take issue with this, but it seems to me that recombining the two is no longer feasible. Thus we have the problem of Climate Debate Daily, a web aggregrator of arguments for and against doing something about global warming.
The site is the brainchild of a pair of philosophers. Here's…
hrynyshyn | March 4, 2008Further to recent chatter about how silly it is to mistake blasts of cold weather for a reversal of long-term climate change, here's the latest missive from James Hansen:
The past year (2007) witnessed a transition from a weak El Nino to a strong La Nina (the latter is perhaps beginning to moderate already, as the ocean waters near Peru are beginning to warm). January 2007 was the warmest January in the period of instrumental data in the GISS analysis, while ... October 2007 was # 5 warmest, November 2007 was #8 warmest, December 2007 was #8 warmest, and January 2008 was #40 warmest.…
hrynyshyn | March 3, 2008An unlikely trio has just made available the results of their quasi-scientific survey of climatologists, who were asked how much they agreed with the latest report from the IPCC. It makes for fascinating reading, even if its response rate of less than 10 % is a bit disappointing. Despite attempts from some quarters at spinning the results to suggest the climate change "consensus" is weaker than often described, the survey actually finds remarkably strong support for the notion that we are headed for trouble.
Roger Pielke Sr., one of the authors, supplies a web version of the PDF linked above…
hrynyshyn | February 29, 2008It's almost not worth mentioning, but Mount Kilimanjaro exemplifies the central weakness of the climate change pseudoskeptic's case. Does it matter how much snow lies at the top of Africa's tallest peak? No. And for the same reason that it doesn't matter that this past January was particularly cold in some parts of the world. It all goes back to the difference between climate and weather. So, one more time, here goes.
Climate is like a road trip from San Francisco to Denver. Weather is like one hour of that road trip. Some hour you might be driving up a hill, the next you might be driving…
hrynyshyn | February 27, 2008Joseph Romm of the Climate Progress blog makes a case this week in Salon for the retirement of the term "consensus" when it comes to discussion the science of the imminent climate crisis. It's an Interesting proposition, and although I suspect it's ultimately doomed to fail, worth examining.
Romm's central thesis is wrapped up in the observation that the official reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seriously underestimate the severity of climate change. This is not a particularly new or even remarkable idea. The IPCC cut off submissions of science for consideration in…
hrynyshyn | February 26, 2008It's got to be one or the other. How else to explain the latest attempt by GM vice Cchairman Bob Lutz to attract attention to himself and his company, which continues to hemorrhage money? "Global warming is a total crock of shit," Lutz reportedly said told journalists at a Texas restaurant. "I'm a skeptic, not a denier."
Those bon mots represent one of the most unambiguous denunciations of an entire body of scientific knowledge ever uttered by an American corporate executive. They trounce even Sen. James Inhofe's ever-so-slightly hedged claim to have presented "compelling evidence that…
hrynyshyn | February 20, 2008British Columbia's right-of-center government has just introduced a carbon tax, making it the second jurisdiction in North America, after Quebec. It's hard to believe, coming from such an administration, but perhaps this is a sign of things to come. On the other hand ...
The BC tax, which will mean small increases in the consumer cost of fossil fuels, is only a baby step toward actually bring down greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, calling it a baby step is generous. For example, the tax means gasoline will cost an extra 2.4 cents a litre (about 10 cents a gallon), this year, and rising to 7.…
hrynyshyn | February 19, 2008Towards the tail end of Michael Specter's rambling feature on carbon footprint accounting in the latest issue of New Yorker, we are reminded that the single most effective and cheapest way to bring down atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels is preserving and restoring tropical rainforests. We're hearing that a lot these days, and with good reason.
Specter's article deals mostly with the challenges of assigning "carbon footprint" numbers to consumer goods, as the U.K's Tesco supermarkets are trying to do. The problem is, as usual, in the myriad details. But as becomes clear later in the article,…
hrynyshyn | February 18, 2008The New York Times' Andrew Revkin asks in his latest Dot Earth blog post if there might be "more effective ways to describe human-caused global warming." The problem with "global warming," he says, has been summed up by Seth Godin thusly:
The muted reaction to our impending disaster comes down to two things:
1. the name.
Global is good.
Warm is good.
Even greenhouses are good places.
How can "global warming" be bad?
I'm not being facetious. If the problem were called "Atmosphere cancer" or "Pollution death" the entire conversation would be framed in a different way.
Neither of those…
hrynyshyn | February 15, 2008North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley must think that electricity just oozes out of the ether, free for the picking. How else to explain his enthusiasm for a network of electrical outlets along highways to allow drivers to recharge their plug-in hybrids?
Believe it or not, this is our governor speaking, as relayed earlier this week by the Asheville Citizen-Times:
Progress Energy and Duke Energy have agreed to install a statewide network of stations along the highways where motorists can charge their cars like a cell phone or even sell back to the companies their unused power.
"It sounds like the…
hrynyshyn | February 13, 2008Let's return now to climate change "tipping points," or as a group led by Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia has renamed them, "tipping elements." They're important because if we can nail these down with a fair degree of confidence, we'll finally have some tangible policy advice to offer the powers that be.
Lenton et al have turned a 2005 meeting on the subject into a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. It's full of predictions about just how far away we might be from triggering dramatic shifts in critical features of the Earth's climate. But…
hrynyshyn | February 11, 2008The past few days have seen wild thermometer swings in my neck of the Blue Ridge woods. Overnight lows are hitting a few degrees below freezing and by the mid afternoon it's almost room temperature. Measuring all that in Fahrenheit only makes more confusing. What this country really needs, says this Canadian ex-pat, is a presidential candidate who thinks in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit....
OK. Not really. I'm talking metaphorically. But for me there really is a connection between American resistance to the metric system and the absence of anything more than lip service paid during this…
hrynyshyn | February 1, 2008Having torn a thin strip off statician William Briggs recently for what seems to me to be a disingenuous attack on the climatology community, it seems only fair to commend him for a succinct and poignant post, this time on the nonsensical argument over who's allowed to criticize.
Briggs, tired of being criticized for criticizing the anthropogenic global warming consensus because he's not a full-time climatologist, points out that
...the public-comment restriction must, by logic, go both ways. If you are not allowed to offer negative commentary because you are not a climatologist, then you are…
hrynyshyn | January 29, 2008Upon the advice of Roger Pielke Jr., who in a recent post at Prometheus praises the appearance of two new blogs, I checked out William M. Briggs, Statistician. Although the most recent post there, "Is climatology a pseudoscience?" begins with an intriguing premise, it eventually deteriorates into a sad self-parody by invoking the venerable Bob Parks' Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science.
Here's how Briggs starts out:
...suppose, if you are able, that significant man-made climate change is false; further, that it cannot happen, and that all changes to the climate system are due to external…
hrynyshyn | January 25, 2008The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell says "after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand." This in an email from Jeroen van der Veer to his staff. Hmmm.
That means two things: even more demand for the expensive stuff, like Alberta's tar sands, and really expensive gasoline. Unless, that is, van der Veer's more optimistic scenario comes to pass:
The other route to the future is less painful, even if the start is more disorderly. This Blueprints scenario sees numerous coalitions emerging to take on the challenges of economic development, energy security and…
hrynyshyn | January 23, 2008Will a warmer world mean fewer hurricanes hitting American soil? Nobody really knows. But a study just published in Geophysical Research Letters is bound to provide fodder for those who enjoy heralding every little morsel of evidence to support their contention that climate change is a communist plot.
"Global warming and United States landfalling hurricanes," by Chunzai Wang of NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, connects the dots between wind shear patterns (the difference between high- and low-altitude wind speeds) and long-term trends in storms that hit the U.S. (…