Environment
Pharyngula
Category archives for Environment
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: The Too-Common Sludge Duck
Posted by PZ Myers on April 9, 2013 This is a very special bird from Arkansas that will become much more common with more oil pipelines running through the middle of the country. Won’t it be great to be able to readily make an entry in your birding book, soon enough?
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Denizens of the icy deeps
Posted by PZ Myers on April 1, 2013 You know those deep icy fields of methane hydrates Japan wants to tap for natural gas? (One of the worst ideas ever, by the way.) They’re inhabited, by polychaetes like Hesiocaeca methanicola. (via NatGeo, which is a bit too uncritical of the idea for my taste.)
Halos in the sky
Posted by PZ Myers on February 27, 2013 I just got back from this evening’s Cafe Scientifique — where were you guys? — and I got to see lots of pretty pictures of halos and sundogs and light pillars. One of the nice things about living in Morris is that we actually get a lot of that weird atmospheric phenomena here, because we…
SICB opposes “drill baby drill”
Posted by PZ Myers on February 7, 2013 It’s always gratifying to see a scientific organization step up and use their collective expertise to make a clear statement on a political and economic issue. The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) has published an open letter to President Obama rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline is a ghastly stopgap that hinders…
Another conversion story
Posted by PZ Myers on July 29, 2012 Richard Muller used to be a doubter — he didn’t think global warming was a concern, and he didn’t think people were responsible for it. Now he has changed his mind, and he explains why. Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw…
Why am I not surprised?
Posted by PZ Myers on March 17, 2012 James Inhofe, the ridiculous climate change denier, appeared on the Rachel Maddow show and made a series of ridiculous claims. Among them was the claim that those wacky environmentalists were greatly outspending the entire energy industry on propaganda. Wait, what? The top five oil companies made $1 trillion in profits from 2011 through 2011, and…
The problem with evo devo
Posted by PZ Myers on February 21, 2012 Last week, I gave a talk at UNLV titled “A counter-revolutionary history of evo devo”, and I’m afraid I was a little bit heretical. I criticized my favorite discipline. I felt guilty the whole time, but I think it’s a good idea to occasionally step back and think about where we’re going and where we…
No sympathy for the devil
Posted by PZ Myers on February 21, 2012 I don’t get it. First there was Climategate, in which hackers illegally broke into a server at the University of East Anglia and stole a pile of emails from climate researchers. The denialists seemed to be fine with that, and quote-mined the heck out of the documents to find damning statements, lying and claiming that…
Today is Shawn Otto day at UMM
Posted by PZ Myers on January 26, 2012 We’re having a visit today from Shawn Lawrence Otto, a fellow who has been fighting against the un-American war on science on the web and in a book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. He’s speaking on campus tonight at 7:30 Central, in the HFA Recital Hall — I urge local…