Climate
hrynyshyn | January 22, 2008Too much of anything is a bad thing, and skepticism is no exception. Indeed, without some degree of trust, modern society would be impossible. Which brings us to another of those questions that dominated last weekend's North Carolina Science Blogging Conference: Just what are bloggers good for, anyway?
Thousands of years back, long before the advent of toll-free product help lines, the typical member of Homo sapiens was entirely capable of evaluating the advice and opinions of their family, friends and hunting-party colleagues. Most knowledge was essential, and therefore shared by all members…
hrynyshyn | January 19, 2008Coal is everywhere in the news. Which is a good thing. Especially when the news is bad. For example:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The country's fourth-largest coal producer, Massey Energy Co., has agreed to a $30 million settlement with the government over allegations that over seven years it routinely polluted hundreds of streams and waterways in West Virginia and Kentucky with sediment-filled waste water and coal slurry.
...
The pollution "destroyed streams, destroyed fish habitat. There was definitely an environmental impact here," Granta Nakayama, the assistant EPA administrator for enforcement,…
chaoticutopia | January 18, 2008 The following fractal is a tribute to our new overlords, Dendroctonus ponderosae.
Lindenmayer Trees and Fractal Brownian Motion
I wrote about the role of pine beetles in Colorado’s future last week. The conclusion of that piece: a slight rise in temperatures means a strong advantage for pine beetles, which will be able to decimate Colorado’s vast lodgepole pine forests, thus increasing fire danger and erosion, not to mention damaging our tourism. Well, our annual aerial survey of the forests was completed recently, and the news isn’t good:
The growth of the beetle epidemic affecting…
hrynyshyn | January 18, 2008So, there's this town in Montana, see. Name of Choteau. And seems that science ain't so popular in those parts...
School authorities' cancellation of a talk that a Nobel laureate climate researcher was to have given to high school students has deeply divided this small farming and ranching town at the base of the east side of the Rocky Mountains.
The scholar, Steven W. Running, a professor of ecology at the University of Montana, was scheduled to speak to about 130 students here last Thursday about his career and the global changes occurring because of the earth's warming. Dr. Running was a…
voltagegate | January 15, 2008This is the kind of crap I get in my email:
I blog about ecology therefore I'm one of the morons that watches this sensationalized garbage and considers it a "teaching tool".
hrynyshyn | January 15, 2008Now you can say that I've grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there's a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices ... In the tower of song
;;;; Leonard Cohen
Predicting the future is rarely a wise move, even for a scientist whose job it is to come up with ways of doing just that, if one cares about a public reputation. Fortunately, there are some courageous researchers out there willing to take a stab. The emerging consensus in climatology is that 2008 will be...
... nothing special.
A…
chaoticutopia | January 14, 2008A new concern arose around the turn of the 21st century, among the advancements in technology and science: what is the future of our planet's climate? This is a bold question, considering traditional problems with predicting the future. We have no evidence of future events, due to the asymmetry of time. It is difficult even to reconcile different interpretations of present conditions, because of epistemological flaws in our methods of observation. In the face of such uncertainties, and with fortunetelling abandoned along with magical thinking many years before, can science provide useful…
hrynyshyn | January 14, 2008A new study of Antarctic ice trends by an impressively international group of scientists has raised the alarms bells, and not just in the blogosphere, either. We should always take notice when reputable researchers find things are worse than expected, but let's not put out tenders for the Ark just yet.
The first thing to note about "Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling" in the latest edition of Nature Geology (doi:10.1038/ngeo102) is that the abstract begins with "Large uncertainties remain in the current and future contribution to sea level…
chaoticutopia | January 13, 2008Something about climate change makes people want to argue. Take Greenland, for instance. A few weeks ago, I posted a photo essay about the recent acceleration of melting in the Greenland Ice Sheet. Not only is the entry is still getting comments, but it also spurred a discussion on a political message forum that went on for six pages. Watching all these opinions fly, there were a number of times that I wanted to dive in and start defending science... but I’m a hermit, and it is more fun to lurk and watch. Besides, every point that I wanted to bring up can be found in a paper I’ve been waiting…
hrynyshyn | January 12, 2008I've been presenting Al Gore's climate-change slide show for a year now, spreading the "message" to anyone prepared to receive it on the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My version has evolved, along with the science, and the social and political landscape. But one part of Gore's presentation that I never embraced was his conviction that global warming is a moral issue. Now I finally can point to someone who can explain why it's a mistake to confuse moral imperatives with environmental advocacy: Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, whose essay in this coming Sunday's New York Times…
chaoticutopia | January 10, 2008Citizens of Colorado seem to enjoy pointing out the fortuitous nature of the state’s climate. "Don’t like the weather?" they say, "don’t worry, it’ll soon change." If it is difficult to predict the weather on a day-to-day basis, how could anyone hope to predict the effects of climate change in the future? Even the most generalized predictions are helpful, as the same attractions that bring people to live in Colorado--skiing on snowy mountains or hiking in lush evergreen forests--are dependant on the climate. The same folks who comment on the climate depend on it as much as natural ecosystems-…
hrynyshyn | January 10, 2008We may never live it down. The sight of George W. Bush traipsing about his ranch in Texas, extolling the virtues of switchgrass-derived ethanol as a replacement for gasoline generated more than a few chuckles among scientifically literate environmentalists. Yet another example of the commander in chief's fanciful world view, right? Probably. But a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that maybe, just maybe, he was on to something real.
"Net energy of cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass" by M.R. Schmer, et al. at the University of Nebraska…
voltagegate | January 9, 2008Man that's an ugly title.
Not much time to post today (until later perhaps) but I did come across an interesting study that improves on geographically-driven predictions of adaptations to climate change. I blogged about a paper on British butterflies earlier this year that studied how much each species depended on the particular climate, and whether or not they would be susceptible to a climate shift based on their environmental preference.
This new study is trying to make migratory predictions based on the organism's physiology, rather than the changing climate of a particular habitat:
Most…
hrynyshyn | January 9, 2008Are the ice sheets about to melt away? Andrew Revkin of the New York Times offers a news story and a blog post that explores what the scientists trying to answer the question have to say. Both are worth reading, but I found the "Dot Earth" blog post, which is just as journalistically sound as the "official" story, more interesting. The headline on the blog post is an excellent summary: "Melting Ice = Rising Seas? Easy. How Fast? Hard."
For those with even less time than I have to keep up with the flood of information on this more critical question, here are the highlights from Revkin's blog:…
hrynyshyn | January 1, 2008Climate-change chatter in the blogosphere over the Christmas holidays revolved around a provocative op-ed essay in the Washington Post by Bill McKibben, for whom 350 is the most important number. As in 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a curious new strategy from one of the leading global warming activist types, and it bears exploring if for no other reason than it originates in the mind of none other than Jim Hansen.
Yes, that Jim Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Seems he gave an academic talk last month that got lost in the all attention…
chaoticutopia | December 28, 2007It is nearly a magical sight to wake up to the gentle snowfall on Christmas morning. When the snow is still falling two days later, the magic starts to fade. Eventually, while poking at several inches of ice, buried beneath ten inches of snow, in hopes of finding your car, what was once magic soon becomes kicking and cursing: "&#%!@* MELT ALREADY!"
But that’s the story in Colorado, at least. Elsewhere, say atop the sheet of ice covering Greenland, you might hear similar expletives, with a different tone. "&#%!@* MELT ALREADY!?" Because, as feared, Greenland is melting... but far more…
hrynyshyn | December 24, 2007The question comprises the headline of an essay in the New Statesman from David Whitehouse, a former BBC science editor and astronomer ;;;; not someone easily dismissed as a psuedoskeptical crank. His argument getting a lot of traction, and I've even been asked "is this legit?" The answer is ...
No.
Whitehouse, of course, says it has stopped. Otherwise, he wouldn't have asked the question. But the flaw in his argument appears early in the essay:
The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001.Global warming has, temporarily or…
hrynyshyn | December 21, 2007Matt Nisbet once again points out that nobody in America cares about climate change. With all due respect to the Pew survey gang, I doubt things are really that bad. Consider a recent poll of Canadians that puts the environment at the top of their political priorities. As a Canadian living in America, I find that disparity hard to explain. We're just not that different.
Matt writes that "you should not be surprised that climate change fails to crack the top 20 most followed issues or the top 20 most covered topics of 2007." Canuck pollster Angus Reid, commenting on the declining popularity of…
hrynyshyn | December 16, 2007The failure of the negotiators at Bali to reach any kind of agreement on a schedule for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has left many observers wondering if maybe it's time to resort to Plan B. Instead of adapting our industrial economy to the physical realities of radiative forcing and positive feedbacks, we should begin the process of adapting ourselves to a much warmer world. And why not? If there's one thing that sets Homo sapiens apart from the rest of the primate gang, it's our ability to adapt. Because planetary ecology isn't that simple, that's why.
Already, the confused logic of…
hrynyshyn | December 12, 2007Just how out of touch with science is Bush's science adviser? Ray Pierrehumbert, a University of Chicago climatologist, bring us a report on a speech by John Marburger at the current meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Unfortunately there are noreal surprises, just the usual denial.
Pierrehumbert prefaces his post at RealClimate by summarizing what he heard about how fast Greenland's ice is melting, which described as "interesting science, fascinating if scary" in part because it represents "changes in the ice that could raise sea level far beyond the projections given in the IPCC…