August 23, 2013
Paul Douglas has also been following the Al Gore OMG Category Six!!1!!! discussion. Here's what he has to say about the thing I just wrote about:
I'm thinking we might need to add some degrees onto the thermometer next week!
August 23, 2013
These things are all connected.
A couple of days ago a good ally in the climate change fight ... the fight to make people realize that climate change is not some librul conspiracy to raise taxes on the rich ... goofed. It was a minor goof, barely a goof at all. We do not yet know the nature of the…
August 22, 2013
I was surprised to find a link to this in my inbox this morning. Here's a picture:
It appears to be unironic.
August 21, 2013
Neil Tappen is probably most well known for having worked out the species and distribution of species in Central and western East Africa in the 1950s, as everyone who has worked in the area since then, from Jane Goodall to Richard Wrangham, has used his work as a tool in their own study of apes and…
August 21, 2013
Let's say you want to do a market-related study in which you gain entry to one thousand homes representing sets of people defined by the usual variables of income, ethnicity, urban-suburban lifestyle etc. The first thing you do is to ask a few people, real nice like, if you can go through their…
August 19, 2013
I thought I was being a nice guy by not blocking John Kwok the moment he tried to friend me on Facebook. But that was a mistake.
At first, there was only the occasional strange note from him via Facebook "email." But then, several hours ago, the dam broke and the Kwok just poured in. The…
August 19, 2013
Science communicator and policy expert Sheril Kirshenbaum has joined Scientific American's "Plugged In" blog. Sheril is Director of The Energy Poll at The University of Texas at Austin. Go visit her introductory blog post and find out what she's up to (and also, links to the various books she…
August 18, 2013
The last several decades of climate change, and climate change research, have indicated and repeatedly confirmed a rather depressing reality. When something changes in the earth's climate system, it is possible that a negative feedback will result, in which climate change is attenuated. I.e.,…
August 17, 2013
If you are a meat eater, you probably appreciate the texture and flavor of a nice piece of loin, or a properly cooked pork chop, or a chicken breast that is moist and flavorful. But what is it about hot dogs that you appreciate? The pasty enigmatic texture? The idea that the casing either is, or…
August 16, 2013
I recently discovered that there is a widespread belief that there is a huge, gaping, plot hole in Harry Potter Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowlings. Or so people say. Greta Christina pointed it out on a Facebook post of Sarah Moglia's, and when I googled it, I discovered widespread dismay about the…
August 16, 2013
Patrick J. Kiger at National Geographic News has an excellent summary of the current situation at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The plant continues to leak radioactive material into the sea, though at a rate much lower than the massive release that happened at the time of the accident.…
August 15, 2013
And a little taste of what the beginning of the end of civilization might look like. Maggie wrote this book and here she is on TV:
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I was in South Africa for this. No problem with the lights there.
August 15, 2013
Every northern summer Arctic Sea ice melts away and reforms for winter, but how much melts away seems to be increasing on average, at a rate that surprises climate scientists.
But there are some who see variation from year to year, and there is variation, in a rather unrealistic way. Here is a…
August 14, 2013
You know about the Hobbit. Not The Hobbit (TM) but the hominid from Flores, Indonesia. Mike Morwood was a key investigator in that research (though he did lots of other research as well).
He was born ...
... in Auckland, New Zealand, studied archaeology at the University of Auckland and gained…
August 14, 2013
There are at present two systems in the Atlantic that have a good chance of producing tropical storms and possibly, eventually, hurricanes. One is east of the Yucatan, the other is very near the coast of West Africa.
Here's the report from the National Weather Service. I've used a rough routine…
August 14, 2013
Or, at least, I'm surprised that this earlier implemented solution has not been mentioned in all the discussion about NSA spying.
Richard Stallman invented an approach to obviating the NSA's attempts to spy on email. He included it in emacs, the world's greatest text editor. Here how it works,…
August 12, 2013
Whitey Bulger has finally been convicted of a small percentage of all the bad things he is said to have done. The Boston Globe has the details.
James J. “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster who rampaged through the city’s underworld for decades before slipping away from authorities and…
August 11, 2013
I do not have an unquestioned respect for Edwared Snowden or those other guys who swore an oath of secrecy in service of their government and then stole piles of secrets and gave them away. I'm also not especially impressed with the uncritical crush so many people have on them for doing what they…
August 7, 2013
Update: Never mind, Never mind! Scientific American Blogs has taken down Dr. Stollznow's post. So, I guess everything is OK now! False Alarm, everyone go home. Nothing to see here.
Say you are a woman in the Skeptics or Secular movement, professional, possibly working for one of the big…
August 6, 2013
Every year the federal government wastes tens of millions of dollars a year, possibly hundreds, supporting old versions of the Internet Explorer browser (below version 9).
Web development teams typically use 30%-40% of their time (or more) adapting sites to display properly in these browsers.
There…
August 6, 2013
Large ponderous entities like the IPCC or government agencies like NOAA take forever to make basic statements about climate change, for a variety of reasons. They are going to have to speed up their process or risk losing some relevance. Among the coming problems we anticipate with global warming…
August 6, 2013
Remember those puddles at the North Pole that at first everyone said were not important, then when someone realized that they were only puddles so a new meme formed and everyone said they are not important? They're important. From the abstract of a new study, just out:
The surface albedo of the…
August 5, 2013
Originally posted on Mar 18, 2012
Communications expert George Marshall offers six strategies for talking to people who don't accept that climate change is happening Drawing on his workshops in climate communications and the latest social research he proposes a respectful approach that responds to…
August 4, 2013
From Nick Breeeze, "This video contains excerpts from interviews with Dr James Hansen. Here he gives his view on how we can get emissions from burning fossil fuels under control."
August 3, 2013
Follow Climate Crocks for regular updates on the Dark Snow project. Meanwhile, have a look at this TED talk.
August 3, 2013
I think there is a belief that pipelines are safer than trucks,trains, or boats for shipping liquid hydrocarbon fuels. That may actually be true. I don't know what would happen if we stopped all the pipelines and switched to vehicles. But the idea that pipelines are safe is absurd and it is time…
August 3, 2013
This is early in the year for Atlantic hurricanes, though we are already up to "D" in named storms. The current mane floating around in the Atlantic is "Dorian" which the National Weather Service is shortly going to rename "Dorian The Zombie." Dorian was a named tropical storm several days ago,…
August 1, 2013
Emily S Cassidy, Paul C West, James S Gerber and Jonathan A Foley, from the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment, have produced a very important study for IOP Science Environmental Research Letters. (This is OpenAccess so you can access it openly!) You know Emily as one of the…
August 1, 2013
As I suggested might happen, the town of Gilberton, Pennsylvania suddenly realized that having an over the top crazy gun nut as chief of police use town weapons to make his own YouTube video threatening a large percentage of the citizens of the United States was not a good idea. When Kessler…
August 1, 2013
This is a sea change, possibly one of the most important political changes to happen in US history. I've mentioned it before, we'll talk about it more, but for now, just watch this. Also, Michael Mann is interviewed:
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