Category Archives: Environment

Those Who Forget History…

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… will be duped by the Wall Street Journal. Two years ago George Will tried to make a dubious claim about there being no evidence of recent global warming, and I objected and showed why the interpretation was wrong.

Now we get a re-hash of that claim, along with some other tired canards, from an op-ed in the WSJ. There’s no shortage of people calling them out on it.

The latest I’ve read is at Bad Astronomy, where Phil has included a graph of temperatures over the last ~40 years. It’s a noisy graph. So noisy that (as with the George Will article) if you took any 10- or 15-year period, you could conceivably draw a straight line through it and consider it a possibility. But when you look at a longer data set, the rise is unmistakeable. Incontrovertible, one might say.

However, I must repeat my prior analysis: a slope larger than the best fit is equally plausible as a straight line through any short data set. Which is why saying that there is no statistically-significant evidence of warming — zero increase isn’t statistically excluded — is a very different statement from saying that there has been no warming. That latter statement implies that you can statistically exclude an increase, which is a ludicrous claim.

Phil goes on to mention another turd of an article that came out recently. In it they make some dubious claims, including a no-recent-warming assertion similar to the WSJ, and conclude that the climate models must be wrong. Anyway, the Bad Astronomy post has lots of links if you are interested in the followup to all this.

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

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The Great Global Warming Fizzle

As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

Any time science gets compared to religion it just, as Dean Keaton might say, makes me tired all over. It’s where you go when you can’t actually discuss science, because you have nothing.

It Worked the First Time

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“Climategate” Redux: Conservative Media Distort Hacked Emails … Again

Anonymous hackers recently released another batch of emails taken from a climate research group at the University of East Anglia in 2009, along with a document containing numbered excerpts of purportedly incriminating material. Many of these selections have been cropped in a way that completely distorts their meaning, but they were nonetheless repeated by conservative media outlets who believe climate change is a “hoax” and a “conspiracy.”

I Feel That Ice is Slowly Melting

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Here Comes the Sun

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

Contradictions

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It’s pretty standard fare (with too few notable exceptions) for the GOP to take anti-science stances on topics like evolution and, more recently, global warming. From my perspective, it’s interesting to note that those candidates who have declared global warming to be false are taking a position that’s contrary to that of the military — the people who have a vested interest in the science as far as it involves the security of the US, and who do not have to take positions in order to “align” themselves with voters.

This is a video of the Oceanographer of the Navy, RADM David Titley, who was formerly the commanding officer of the Meteorology and Oceanography command (i.e. my boss, several levels up). It also turns out that I grew up less than a mile from him, and while I am junior enough that our paths did not cross in high school, a younger brother of his was my patrol leader in the Boy Scouts. It made for an interesting exchange when I got a chance meet him when he toured the lab — a comment from left field (not being related to the science and technology) and it took him a second to mentally shift gears and process it.

Anyway, he was a skeptic until he got a good look at the science, and now it’s his job (and others) to worry about the impacts of global warming on our nation’s defense. So I wonder how a GOP candidate — who usually comes with a “strong on defense” label already attached, would reconcile these opposing positions? Are they really willing to weaken our defense by ignoring global warming? Would voters be swayed from a denialist stance, knowing that the navy accepted it as good and valid science and takes it very seriously?

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Oceanographer for the U.S. Navy, RADM David Titley discusses the hot topic of climate change, and its impending ramifications on national security. Listen as he details some of the top facts and figures you should know about climate change and your future, explained in terms that even the most unfamiliar with science would be able to understand.

I love the observation that ~390 ppm, dismissed as inconsequential by global warming denialists, is enough to get you a bit drunk if it’s alcohol in the blood.

Five Manufactured "Truths" About the Climate Change Discussion

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Five Truths About Climate Change

I’m going to start by quoting the conclusion

It’s time to move the debate past the dogmatic view that carbon dioxide is evil and toward a world view that accepts the need for energy that is cheap, abundant and reliable.

There are two possible lines of argument in the discussion: science and policy. The best science establishes that anthropogenic global warming is true, and from that you decide what, if anything, you do about it.

The first point is about political reality

The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.

Here’s a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

i.e. the politicians of the world couldn’t get their act together and actually do anything. Somehow, that must falsify anthropogenic global warming. In the real world, though, nature doesn’t take its cue from politics. Some legislature could declare a gravity-free day, but you aren’t going to float off into space as a result. So really this is just a celebration of the fact that the denialists in the government have been successful. It doesn’t mean they were right.

2) Regardless of whether it’s getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.

That’s a non-sequitur. The need for energy has absolutely no effect on the correctness of the science. It’s also not true that we need a lot more energy — our energy use growth has been a meager 0.4% a year the last decade — and it also doesn’t mean that added capacity can’t be “green”.

3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore.

It never was. The author plays some games with statistics, but we’re still the biggest producer of CO2 per capita of the regions mentioned. So, whoop-de-doo that we’ve lowered our emissions 1.7%, when they are twice as much per person than in European countries or three times as much as in China. While the author is happy to pass the buck and complain that what others are doing isn’t working, we in the US can only be responsible for what happens in the US. We’re not in a position to try an influence anyone else if our own house isn’t in order.

Nearly all of the things we use on a daily basis—light bulbs, computers, automobiles—are vastly more efficient than they were just a few years ago. And over the coming years those devices will get even better at turning energy into useful lighting, computing and motive power.

This is despite the GOP trying to kill the measure that increases lighting efficiency, and that the improvements in things like computers, appliances and cars are driven by government regulation (energy star and cafe standards).

The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Seriously? Neutrinos were measured (probably incorrectly) to be FTL, and that means global warming is wrong? The weasel is strong in this one. This is a standard denialist tactic — science has been wrong in the past, therefore we can’t trust science. Which seems terribly hypocritical when presented by someone using the advances of science, probably on a daily basis. I’m just guessing, but I’d wager that the author doesn’t think his computer or car run because of magic.

Unbalanced is Unfair

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‘Shape of the Earth – Both Sides Have a Point’

The argument is that the mainstream news media attempts at all costs to appear “balanced”, by giving both sides of any dispute equal footing — as opposed to simply trying to report what is actually accurate. Thus, in the debate over climate change, they give undue emphasis to arguments claiming that climate change lacks scientific consensus, when in fact the opposite is true.

Make Like a Tree and Leaf Less Energy Uncollected

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Young Naturalist Award — Aiden: The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees

My investigation asked the question of whether there is a secret formula in tree design and whether the purpose of the spiral pattern is to collect sunlight better. After doing research, I put together test tools, experiments and design models to investigate how trees collect sunlight. At the end of my research project, I put the pieces of this natural puzzle together, and I discovered the answer. But the best part was that I discovered a new way to increase the efficiency of solar panels at collecting sunlight!
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The tree design takes up less room than flat-panel arrays and works in spots that don’t have a full southern view. It collects more sunlight in winter. Shade and bad weather like snow don’t hurt it because the panels are not flat. It even looks nicer because it looks like a tree. A design like this may work better in urban areas where space and direct sunlight can be hard to find.

Update: I missed that he was measuring the open-circuit voltage output, not current, for his arrays.