Posts by author:

Bryan Walker

Michael Mann fights back

by Bryan Walker 14 March 2010

One sometimes wonders how the scientists most reviled by the denial industry are bearing up under the onslaught.  Michael Mann is one of them, so I was interested to listen to him being interviewed by Chris Mooney on a recent Point of Inquiry podcast. Here is a summary of some of Mann’s responses (not an accurate transcript, [...]

22 comments Now read on...

Fight back, scientists urged

by Bryan Walker 11 March 2010

“The response to the [email] vandals is to bury them with the data and experience of a century of scholarly research and analysis. The information that is important in making the decisions as to how to manage our world is unequivocal and must be advanced, not as questions at the edge of scientific knowledge where [...]

24 comments Now read on...

The Lomborg Deception

by Bryan Walker 10 March 2010

Is it worth spending a whole book dissecting the writing of Bjørn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist”?  Certainly not in terms of the quality of Lomborg’s argument, which simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  But Lomborg’s writing has been permitted to exercise a widespread and harmful influence. For that reason Howard Friel’s painstaking book The Lomborg [...]

1 comment Now read on...

US trial for Aquaflow technology

by Bryan Walker 7 March 2010

Blenheim company Aquaflow which works on the production of bio-fuel from algae, and whose progress Hot Topic has reported on several times (follow the Aquaflow tag) has announced a new venture, this time in the US.   They will be working with a Honeywell company at an industrial site in Hopewell, Virginia. The aim of the [...]

0 comments Now read on...

Seeing Further

by Bryan Walker 5 March 2010

The name of Bill Bryson attracted me and I obtained through the library a copy of his new book Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, only to find that he is the editor, not the author. But he has done a splendid job as editor, collecting contributions from 21 authors, in [...]

4 comments Now read on...

CRU’s Jones on the stand: Pearce offers opinion as news

by Bryan Walker 2 March 2010

Fred Pearce is obviously unrepentant over the unjust treatment he meted out to Phil Jones in his unfortunate series of artices on the UEA emails, one of which I commented on here. He has just produced an extraordinarily slanted account of Jones’ questioning from the Parliamentary committee set up to look into the affair. How’s this [...]

107 comments Now read on...

Al Gore going strong

by Bryan Walker 1 March 2010

That travesty of a news outlet, Fox News, carried an article last Thursday (in its science and technology section, believe it or not) which opened as follows:
“Al Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. But in the last three months, as global warming has gone from a scientific [...]

1 comment Now read on...

Global Sustainability – A Nobel Cause

by Bryan Walker 1 March 2010

In late 2007 I kidded myself that I was present at a gathering of Nobel Laureates as I spent some hours watching a website video record of their proceedings. They had assembled with a variety of other distinguished experts for a three-day symposium on global sustainability. I can remember being very impressed, particularly by some [...]

176 comments Now read on...

Denialism’s allies: nasty work in Australia

by Bryan Walker 24 February 2010

 Climate change denialism has plugged into some very sick strains in society according to  the behaviour described by Clive Hamilton in the first of a series of articles in the debate forum on the ABC website.  He describes how Australia’s most distinguished climate scientists have been subjected to a torrent of  aggressive, abusive and at [...]

2 comments Now read on...

Methane rise continues

by Bryan Walker 23 February 2010

More cautionary news on rising methane levels is reported in yesterday’s Independent. Two leading experts on CH4 in the atmosphere, Euan Nisbet and Ed Dlugokencky, were due to reveal at a conference that, after a decade of near-zero growth, “globally averaged atmospheric methane increased by [approximately] 7ppb (parts per billion) per year during 2007 and [...]

23 comments Now read on...

← Previous Entries