Crawford Killian, who publishes the excellent H5N1 blog, has a cheerful article about five disasters that could befall British Columbia. Of course, the biggest would be a megathrust earthquake and subsequent tsunami generated by the Cascadia subduction zone, but there are a few others to worry about.
Archive for the ‘environment’ Category
Five Disasters to Befall BC
Monday, April 30th, 2012Just because you’re an astronaut
Friday, April 20th, 2012Doesn’t make you an expert on climate science. That seems to be the case with a letter written to NASA recently by a group that includes some ex-astronauts. It’s gotten some notice in the press recently, because apparently some people think that just because you’re an astronaut, you now know everything. Well, they’re wrong, as Phil Plait points out in the Bad Astronomy blog.
I’ve been getting lots of email and other notes about a group of 49 people — including some ex-astronauts — who have written a public letter to NASA complaining about the space agency’s stance that global warming exists and is caused by humans.
You can guess how I feel about it. But to be clear: it’s more denialist spin, nonsense, and noise. You can read the original leter here, and then I strongly suggest reading Shawn Otto’s devastating deconstruction of it. You can also read the response to this letter by NASA’s Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalatim if you’d like.
I’ll note that it doesn’t matter that former astronauts signed this propaganda letter — I’ve written about Apollo 17′s Harrison Schmitt and his climate change denialism before — but I note it does matter that of the 49 signatories on that letter, not one is an actual working climate scientist. That should give you pause. I’ll also note that 49 former NASA employees is a tiny, tiny fraction of the total. It’s not hard to find statistical outliers in a group that big. I knew a creationistwho worked for NASA!
Oceans acidifying at unprecedented speeds
Monday, March 5th, 2012I’ve posted before about the problem of ocean acidification caused by global warming. New Scientist reports that not only is acidification increasing but the rate is faster than an time in the last 300 million years. This is one of the key problems with global warming and climate change – it’s not just the degree but the rate – it’s happening so fast that natural systems can’t cope.
The best match for current changes was the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum of 55 million years ago, when vast amounts of methane were released into the atmosphere causing rapid global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. But even then, it took at least 3000 years for ocean pH to drop by 0.5. “That is an order of magnitude slower than today,” Hönisch says.
The real Climategate
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012A couple of years ago I posted about the campaign to manufacture doubt about climate change. Now, one of the key groups behind that campaign, the Heartland Institute, has been unmasked and many of their internal documents and emails leaked.
Internal Heartland Institute strategy and funding documents obtained by DeSmogBlog expose the heart of the climate denial machine – its current plans, many of its funders, and details that confirm what DeSmogBlog and others have reported for years. The heart of the climate denial machine relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from U.S. businesses including Microsoft, Koch Industries, Altria (parent company of Philip Morris) RJR Tobacco and more.
This is the real Climategate.
The world in 2032 and 2092
Monday, January 9th, 2012At the beginning of each year, The Economist magazine publishes an issue that looks at the state of the world and what it means for the coming year. SF authors often do the same thing but they tend to look a bit further ahead. In the case of Charlie Stross, he’s taken a look at what the world might look like in 2032 and 2092. Stross is one of the few SF authors who’ve seriously attempted near-future SF, which is one of the hardest sub-genres to work in, and he’s got the chops to try this. If you want to get an idea of what the world your children will be inhabiting, read this post. It’s quite long, but well organized and absolutely fascinating. Here’s some of what he has to say about 2032.
Energy: oil will still be available and planes will still be burning it. Prior to Fukushima I was predicting a big renaissance in nuclear power. Now … I’m still predicting it, but I think it’ll take an extra 10-20 years and people are going to be a lot more cautious. Chernobyl could be written off as Soviet mis-management, but Fukushima, while a lot better managed and less damaging, is in some ways more alarming because it underscores the need to design nuclear plant to be fail-safe even in the face of a once-per-thousand-years event. Which drives the cost of nuclear right up from an already high baseline.
Solar is getting cheaper rapidly, and is now actually rolling out in significant quantities, but runs into the “how do you store it?” problem. What I think we may see is solar plant that, rather than producing electricity, is designed to produce electrons and use them immediately to electrolytically split water, liberating hydrogen, which can then be converted into something more storable … like methane (using atmospheric CO2 as a carbon source).
Coal is going to get deeply unfashionable. It’ll still be with us in 2032, but with expensive scrubbers and carbon capture plant and, more likely, subterranean gasification. Which is still fossil fuel, but is less obvious to the naked eye from the spoil heaps.
Fusion will be 30 years away. But by that, I mean commercialfusion reactors. There will be a prototype under construction, with a turbine hall that will deliver base load to someone’s grid (probably France’s), when it’s running. Which won’t be most of the time, because it’ll be a prototype and a hangar queen. And they’ll still need 30 years of research into the effects of neutron embrittlement on construction materials before they’re ready to start building them on production lines.
Climategate 2 – the quotes and the context
Monday, November 28th, 2011Recently, a second set of “climategate” emails was mysteriously released, conveniently just in time for the Durham climate conference. Peter Hadfield looks at the second batch of emails and finds that they don’t make much of a conspiracy, just like the first batch. As Charles Johnson of Little Green Footfalls says:
The climate change deniers promoting this nonsense are flat out lying to the public about a deadly serious problem that will affect the entire world — and that’s the real scandal here. When will the mainstream media start telling this story of blatant dishonesty and character assassination, instead of blindly repeating the false propaganda?