Musings
hrynyshyn | June 30, 2017Anyone asked to identify the two biggest forces for change in the world today could do worse than choose artificial intelligence and climate change. Both are products of technology whose effects are only beginning to be felt, and the ultimate consequences of both will almost certainly be transformative in every sense of the word. Other than that, there hasn't been much tying them together. Until now.
Welcome to Climate City, a label that a group of current and former data analysts and entrepreneurs has applied to Asheville, N.C. It might seem an unlikely spot for revolutionary thinking on…
hrynyshyn | November 8, 2013Apologies for the blatant exploitation of an ostensibly tangential news story to drive traffic to this blog. But I think there is a connection, and it's high time I resurrected Class M.
The spark is, of course, the revelations about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's contempt for the people who elected him. Toronto doesn't deserve to be embarrassed, at least not in this manner. The latest affront to decency comes in the form of a drunken rant during which the mayor threatens to kill someone. Sooner or later, the city will be relieved of Ford, but in the meantime, we can contemplate how it is that a man…
hrynyshyn | November 1, 2012The other day I found myself looking for reading material in a clinic waiting room and for the first time ever I picked up a copy of Bloomberg Businessweek. It's not that I never used to care about business. I just found business publications and business journalists rarely demonstrated a decent level of understanding of the forces behind the financial numbers that dominated their reports. (And yes, I include The Economist in that generalization.)
But BBW was different. The edition contained a half dozen science, environment and technology stories that tweaked my interest and all of them were…
hrynyshyn | January 6, 2012Barring a miraculous revival of the fortunes of Jon Huntsman, Republicans this year will, for the first time, elect a presidential nominee who does not believe that humans are responsible for global warming. How did things get this bad?
The Climate Desk team found a few of the last Republicans among the party's leadership who break with this new orthodoxy and spliced their heresies together in this video.
One can also dredge up a few brave souls who are trying to make difference at the GOP's grassroots, groups like Republicans for Environmental Responsibility. This particular collection of…
hrynyshyn | November 17, 2011"Major storms could submerge New York City in next decade" cries a randomly selected mainstream media outlet over a story about a new report warning residents that climate change could make life difficult in the not-too-distant future. The report, from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, is pretty standard stuff for those who have been paying attention to the growing link between global warming and extreme weather. And maybe it will spur New Yorkers to take the subject a bit more seriously.
But there's a certain set who will welcome this 600-page conpendium of…
hrynyshyn | November 14, 2011Kevin Trenberth's latest paper, which appears in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is uncharacteristically and refreshingly blunt right from the first few words of the introduction:
Humans are changing our climate. There is no doubt whatsoever. There are arguments about how much and how important these effects are and will be in future, but many studies (e.g., see the summary by Stott et al.1) have demonstrated that effects are not trivial and have emerged from the noise of natural variability, even if they are small by some measures. So why does the science community…
hrynyshyn | October 26, 2011Everyone talks about global warming, but it's not easy to get one's mind around just how much heat we're talking about. Even more difficult is putting that heat energy in terms that the average layperson can grasp. Fortunately, some scientists are making an effort to do just that.
In a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters, "Observed changes in surface atmospheric energy over land," Thomas Peterson, of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC, Katharine M. Willett of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK, and and Peter W. Thorne, who works alongside Peterson at the…
hrynyshyn | October 20, 2011There's this notion among the climate denial community that somehow the entire professional climatology community has overlooked an obvious flaw in the science behind anthropogenic global warming. Their hypothesis is that too many of the thermometers used to record temperatures over the last 200 years have been located in or near cities, and so have produced a warming bias produced by the waste heat generated in urban areas.
It sounds plausible. The problem with the notion, of course, is that it's so obvious a potential bias that climatologists long ago learned to take the "urban heat island…
hrynyshyn | September 30, 2011This story has been around a while, but I haven't been blogging much lately so I am only getting around to it now.
"..the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones."
So says a new paper. Troubling findings. Something's not quite right, and am hoping to nail it down. "The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change," by Harvard's Dan Kahan et al. tested a sufficiently large sample size of…
hrynyshyn | May 20, 2011A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was a 21-year-old journalism student spending a couple of weeks as an intern at Science Dimension, a government-funded magazine (there weren't any private science magazines in the country). I was assigned two short features while there: one on canola bioengineering and another on Canada's asbestos industry. Both amounted to free publicity for industries heavily supported by the Canadian taxpayer, but I think the canola story withstood professional scrutiny. The asbestos piece? Not so much.
That story continues to haunt me. The only good thing I can…
hrynyshyn | April 8, 2011Tennessee's House passed this disingenuous piece of legislation the other day. They're not to the first to try this sort of thing and they probably won't be the last.
HB0368
00242666
-1-
HOUSE BILL 368
By Dunn
AN ACT to amend Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 49,
Chapter 6, Part 10, relative to teaching scientific
subjects in elementary schools.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE:
SECTION 1. Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 49, Chapter 6, Part 10, is amended by
adding the following as a new, appropriately designated section:
(a) The general assembly finds that:
(1)…
hrynyshyn | March 4, 2011Andy Revkin recently asked us to consider this 1881 New York Times article and judge whether it's an example of early global warming alarmism or satire. It was unearthed by pseudoskeptic Steve Goddard, prompting Andy to write:
For some reason Goddard avoids pasting into his blog post the humorous, almost Twain-like, elements later in the article that clearly show the author was not exactly taking the astronomer's assertions very seriously.
By the time I got to Goddard's blog, he added this to his post:
[addendum] This 1881 article is satirizing one of the more alarmist explanations for the…
hrynyshyn | March 2, 2011One of the things that keeps me from throwing in the blogging towel in an era when climate change denial seems to be a prerequisite for membership in the party of Abraham Lincoln is the quality of the comments I get. The praise is nice, the thoughtful exploration of the ideas I introduce is better, but what I really enjoy are the snarky swipes at my character by those who can't come up with anything more cogent to post than a dismissive reference to Star Trek. See here for a typical example,
The first thing that occurred to me when such comments began to appear -- almost immediately after I…
hrynyshyn | February 23, 2011Ray Kurzweil might be right. It could very well be that Moore's law can be applied to all forms of technology, and within a couple of decades clean, renewable forms of power production will be so cheap they will have replaced all fossil fuels. Hey, it could happen. Maybe even it's not just possible, but probable. Kurweil calls it the law of accelerating returns:
Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly -- we are only a few years away from parity. And then it's going…
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 3, 2010Much has been written of late about the nature of denialism. New Scientist a couple of issues back produced a special report on the subject, for example, and the New Humanist explores the idea of "unreasonable doubt."
There's plenty more out there. The most provocative I've come across (thanks to Joss Garman via DeSmog Blog's Brendan DeMelle) is a 2009 paper in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics by Jeroen van Dongen of the Institute for History and Foundations of Science at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His thesis is ideologically based denialism of…