April 6, 2014
I just watched a report on ABC news about anti-vaxers causing the current and alarming measles outbreak. It was a reasonable report for MSM though I missed large parts of it because I was multitasking ineffectively. But an idea came to me that would go a long way to manage this problem of anti-…
April 4, 2014
April 27th, I'll be giving a talk hosted by Minnesota Atheists at the Maplewood Library, 3025 Southlawn Dr, Maplewood, Minnesota. Details are here.
Details:
You may attend any part of the meeting you wish, here's the schedule:
1:00-1:15 p.m. – Social Time
1:15-1:45 p.m. – Business Meeting
1:45-2…
April 3, 2014
I grew up (and beyond) in the US northeast. There, the weather was pretty good at coming at us from the West, though a nor'easter blowing in from the North East (unsurprisingly) was not uncommon in New England. Although I had studied sea level rise and some Pleistocene climate reconstruction, when…
April 3, 2014
The 538 comment system appears to not be working, probably because of my current highly suspicious location, so I figured I'd put my comment here (since I spent a whole minute writing it):
"Long-range forecast models have come to a consensus recently that a minor to moderate El Niño pattern may…
March 31, 2014
Compare this:
with this:
March 31, 2014
STFU.
Seriously. For your own good.
Every time you make a move you seem to create your own pile of dog do and step in it. The latest own-goal for those who deny climate science was scored after an unreasonable and obnoxious attack on Professor Lawrence Torcello, of RIT. Details here and here.…
March 28, 2014
I'm going to update this graph every now and then.
There are 12 lines on this graph.
The colorful squiggles up along the top are the first ten years of Arctic Sea ice extent for the period for which we have really good data. So this is 1979 - 1988. There is reason to believe that this is the "…
March 27, 2014
Salamanders can be a proxyindicator for climate change. Changes in salamanders have been linked to climate changes during ancient times, and in a very recent study, salamanders in the US Appalachians seem to have changed in relation to anthropogenic global warming. In fact, the changes observed in…
March 27, 2014
Michael Mann, Byron Steinman, and Sonya Miller have just put out a new paper on climate change which addresses a number of key concerns. The paper is called “On Forced Temperature Changes, Internal Variability and the AMO.” Here’s the abstract:
We estimate the low-frequency internal variability of…
March 26, 2014
We know know what the famous announcement by the European Southern Observatory is. They found an asteroid with ring! Two of them!
...the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings.
Telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-metre Danish and…
March 26, 2014
Above is the nifty interactive graphic from the National Snow and Ice Data Center showing sea ice extent in the Arctic for the current year (the lower squiggle). This year's squiggle looks like a peak, and it is possible that Arctic Sea ice extent is now on the decline. Minimum extent is typically…
March 26, 2014
This is a followup on Are the climate science deniers criminals?, which explored recent work by Lawrence Torcello, a philosopher at Rochester Institute of Technology. (See: Is Organised Climate Science Denial Criminally Negligent?)
Professor Torcello's point was made in part by reference to the…
March 26, 2014
Trigger warning: Explicit video of a homeless man being executed by the cops.
I strongly recommend that you don't call the police. If you do, because for some reason you have to, get the hell out of there before they arrive. Why? Because our Post-9/11 first responder philosophy is not the first…
March 26, 2014
From meteorologist Paul Douglas:
Published on Mar 14, 2014
Weather seems to be staling. Look into how the speed of the jet stream causes this "stuck in a rut" weather pattern. Meteorologist Paul Douglas also takes a look back as to how this winter compares to years past. Checking out extreme…
March 25, 2014
Today, Wednesday, an immense storm will move into the Canadian Maritimes after grazing the US East Coast. In the US the storm may severely affect Cape Cod with many inches of snow and hurricane force winds. At sea, in the northern Gulf of Maine and points north, there is a severe risk to boats…
March 25, 2014
UPDATED: THIS is the discovery.
The European Southern Observatory will make an announcement tomorrow (or later today depending on where you read this, but Wednesday) about an amazing new discovery they made in outer space.
I'm not going to tell you what they found because it is top top secret.…
March 25, 2014
Dean Snow was one of my two advisors in undergraduate school. I have fond memories of all six months of college. But that's another story. Anyway, several years ago, Dean got wind of the research showing that humans exhibit sexual dimorphism in the ratios of the middle digits of the hand. It is…
March 25, 2014
After 16 minutes, Michael Mann on climate change, climate sensitivity, etc.
Why does Joan of Arc Being look so worried? The fire hasn't even touched her!
Mann uses the analogy of a person jumping (or being thrown?) off a tall building, and as he passes the third floor notes that everything is…
March 25, 2014
It is very hard for me to view the world without my Anthropological glasses, since I’ve been one kind of Anthropologist or another since I was 13 years old. Thinking about climate science deniers, I realized what makes them annoying to me. Let me tell you what I mean.
The ongoing conversation at…
March 24, 2014
If we, Western Civilization, had started out with electric cars, and a century later someone came along with the idea of exploding little dollops of gasoline mixed with air to propel them, that person would be thought insane.
Depending on price, the cost of energy to propel an electric car a given…
March 22, 2014
This is more than a policy. It is a philosophy.
March 22, 2014
WTF Frontiers in Psychology Journal? Scientists publish a peer reviewed paper in your journal, a bunch of cranks complain about it, and successfully bully you into taking the paper off your web site? Do you seriously want the rest of the scientific world to take you seriously, ever, from now on? I'…
March 21, 2014
Aside from its tragic nature and its apparent media value as a mystery greater than who will be the Next American Idol, the apparent disappearance of flight 370 has another meaning, I think, that has been entirely missed as far as I can tell.
The other day I was having a conversation with some…
March 18, 2014
Well before mid century we will probably pass a threshold beyond which we'll really regret having not curtailed the release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere in the form of Carbon Dioxide. The best case scenario for "business as usual" release of the greenhouse gas is that some of the carbon,…
March 18, 2014
A few days ago I made a prediction for this year's minimum Arctic Sea Ice extent. That's still valid. Or not. Either way, it's still my prediction.
But looking at the ice over the last few days, we see that for the first time in a while the extent of ice estimated by the NSICD has stopped…
March 18, 2014
The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) was launched in January 2012 by Scott Mandia and Joshua Wolfe to provide valuable legal resources to our climate scientists who are in need. CSLDF needs your help.
CSLDF needs to raise $80,000. The great news is that philanthropist Charles Zeller has…
March 16, 2014
I'm not big on Saint Patrick's Day. And yes, that's because I'm Irish.
But I thought this was OK:
Not his best work. So I'll add this:
March 16, 2014
Our future is at risk. The science is settled, in the main, though there are many details to continue to work out and there are unknowns. But no one doubts that business as usual release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere mainly as the greenhouse gas Carbon Dioxide spells big trouble for humanity…
March 15, 2014
Sounds like kind of a technical question.
In Irritable Bowl Disease, including Crohn's Disease, it may be the case that bad bacteria cause intestinal wall inflammation. Or, inflammation could allow bad bacteria to do better than good bacteria. And, that might be an oversimplification because…
