Category Archives: Science

According to "The Numbers Guy" at the Wall Street Journal, the flap over a tiny error in the calculation of the warmest year by NASA is much ado about nothing. Even Steve McIntyre, the former mining official behind ClimateAudit who first came across the correction, admits this slight recalculation on NASA’s part in no wayContinue reading “Flap Over 150th of a Degree Does Not Disprove Global Warming: WSJ”

Kevin Trenberth is not just another boring scientist. He is the head of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and he’s also unusually outspoken on the subject of global warming. When attacked by notorious denier Fred Singer, a decade ago, he defended himself briskly. He told Congress this spring that the planetContinue reading “Kevin Trenberth: Imitating a Volcano to Avert Global Warming Could Be Disastrous”

Take a look at this world, as described by a new study on how global warming is leading to substantial increases in rainfall in some regions, substantial decreases in others. Here’s the abstract in Nature,, and here’s a nice recap from GreenCarCongress, along with a graph from the study by Francis Zwiers and seven coauthors.Continue reading “Graph of the Week”

An excellent front-page story in the New York Times looks at the alarmingly rapid retreat of glaciers in India. This is a disaster in the making: although floods are expected in the next couple of decades, then water supplies will rapidly diminish…for one/sixth of the world’s population. According to another first-hand account reporting on theContinue reading “Tracking Glaciers, Now and Then”

Though it will likely be self-evident to my readers that scientific truth does not always match our instincts, nonetheless Daniel Barash lays out the idea cleanly and wittily, borrowing a concept from Stephen Colbert, in an op-ed for the LATimes, entitled  "Gut Instinct Isn’t Science." After all, the sun moves through our sky, but itContinue reading ““Truthiness” vs. Science”

James Hansen, whose important address to the American Geophysical Union in December inspired a clumsy attempt to muzzle him by a young public relations official from the Bush/Cheney campaign, has become something of a media star. The good news is that the controversy, a humiliation for a once-revered agency, has inspired a good faith pledgeContinue reading “The Scientist Becomes a Star–And Passes the Baton to Al Gore”

It’s one solution to global warming: let our environmental satellites "collapse." From a CNN story: Scientists warn that the consequences of neglecting Earth-observing satellites could have more than academic consequences. It is possible that when a big volcano starts rumbling in the Pacific Northwest, a swarm of tornadoes sweeps through Oklahoma or a massive hurricaneContinue reading “Seeing No Evil–Nor Any Global Warming”

As mentioned a month or so ago, this blog wants to challenge the notion that enviros are inherently doom and gloomsters. Yesterday came an actual rash of semi-good news on the topic of pollutants, which is not what most folks think of when they want to perk up their day. But the fact is, thereContinue reading “Another Positive Post”

A day after a Oregon congressman called for an investigation into the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to cut off funding to Oregan State University researchers who dared publish a study that contradicted the Bush administration’s forest policy…the BLM changed its mind and restored the funding. Gee, I wonder why. In the Oregon State DailyContinue reading “BLM: We Didn’t Mean It! Honest!”

From today’s Oregonian, yet another story about the Bush adminstration trying to stifle scientists who dare to express views inconvenient to the administration’s anti-environmental agenda: The federal government has abruptly suspended funding for Oregon State University research that concluded federally sponsored logging after the 2002 Biscuit fire in southwest Oregon set back the recovery ofContinue reading “Bush Adminstration Lashes Out at Irksome Scientists…Again”