January 26, 2013
It has become increasingly difficult to understand the motivation behind climate science denialism. The Earth’s climate is changing, mainly in the form of increased temperatures of the oceans and the atmosphere, because of the release of copious amounts of previously trapped Carbon through the…
January 26, 2013
From the NCSE:
The Next Generation Science Standards represent a tremendous opportunity to strengthen science education in the United States, but also a tremendous risk.
Dozens of states have signed up to consider replacing their existing standards with these new ones. NGSS could revolutionize the…
January 25, 2013
The Wall Street Journal recently published and editorial by Bjorn Lomborg which uses misleading statistics to justify utterly inappropriate delays in addressing climate change. I would like to direct you to a response to that editorial:
In WSJ op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
January 25, 2013
With Masters, Mann, Hayhoe and Douglass. From Climate Denial Crock of the Week.
January 24, 2013
Michael Mann is one of the key climate scientists of the day. History will crown Mann as one of the great heroes who defended the freedom to do science rationally despite constant attacks from mean spirited and ignorant, self interested, politically motivated, oil-money-soaked climate science…
January 24, 2013
We were talking about insects, and eating insects, and this reminded me of something funny. I was traveling in the most remote part of Central Africa, several days walk from any place you could possibly drive a car, visiting uncharted villages mainly occupied by people who had moved into the deep…
January 23, 2013
I may want to do a poll here in the medium future, and I thought I'd try out some different methods to see what works. This first one is from this site.
If there was a poll on this blog, would you participate?
Yes
No
pollcode.com free polls
From the same site, a different…
January 23, 2013
In a good way!
This is a very interesting story; I'm going to pass along the press release without modification:
NEA PRESIDENT SUPPORTS SEATTLE EDUCATORS WHO REFUSE TO GIVE FLAWED STANDARDIZED TEST
***Standardized test takes away from student learning***
WASHINGTON—National Education Association (…
January 23, 2013
NOAA says 2012 was the hottest year on record.
According to the National Climatic Data Center of NOAA, 2012 was the hottest year on record in the US lower 48:
According to NOAA scientists, the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. for 2012 was 55.3°F, which was 3.2°F above the 20th century…
January 23, 2013
This is smallish, but many of you will appreciate it: Comments now have numbers, like they should! So, we'all can more effectively yell at each other in the comments section! Yay!
January 22, 2013
There will be no Falcons in the Super Bowl, only Ravens, this year. But, there has been a lot of talk about Falcons lately so I jotted down a few notes and thought I'd share them with you.
One year after moving to Minnesota, I relocated to the city of Falcon Heights. If you know the Twin Cities…
January 22, 2013
Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis: Volume 1 - The Physical Climate is a new book you may be interested in, authored in part by my friend John Cook of Skeptical Science. Importantly, the project deals not only with climate change, but also, with important aspects of the politics of climate…
January 22, 2013
For starters, I've put a bunch of videos including a must see by Jon Steward and another must see by Melissa Harris-Perry HERE. Following is a veritable carnival of topical and timely posts, stories, and sites:
Warning shot: Gun violence lands US lowest life expectancy among rich nations…
January 21, 2013
Never mind Fresh Water Diatoms hitching a ride on meteors. We've got a possible Gamma Ray Burst in about 774 or 775 CE to talk about. Phil Plait has described the phenomenon which is reported here.
The tl;dr: Extra 14C Beryllium in tree rings laid down at that time had to come from somewhere,…
January 21, 2013
Some may deny the science of climate change, but we're not listening to them any more.
Hat tip to Peter Sinclair for this clip:
January 19, 2013
As you know, I often mention reports from the Ohh Shoot blog, which chronicles the virtually daily instances of someone doing something accidental with a gun and the associated serious wounding or killing of one or more other individuals. These events are not part of the large number of suicides…
January 19, 2013
Happy Gun Appreciation Day!
Let's spend a little time to appreciate guns. Because this is the very first Gun Appreciation Day! I'm not sure why we've never had a Gun Appreciation Day before, but now that we have one let's celebrate with a review of the last month's interesting stories about guns…
January 18, 2013
As I mentioned, I'm busy, so I'll just do this in pictures, kinda like a cartoon:
There was no "walk back" by Joe. He merely added some links.
The results of the poll so far:
Personally, I'm hoping for "Force him" ... that would be fun to watch.
Meanwhile, there is a lesson here. Science…
January 18, 2013
... in preparation for an attack.
Also, more evidence, which you did not need, of how many people are in cars at any given moment, apparently!
This is a map where there are dots representing each and every person in the US and Canada. It is zoomable. Is is HERE. It is pretty freakin' cool.
It…
January 17, 2013
Sometimes, a person shows up at a gun range, checks out a gun ostensibly to use in target practice on the range, but instead uses the gun to commit suicide. In one case not long ago, a woman brought her teenage son to the range, and checked out two pistols. They took turn shooting for a while, then…
January 17, 2013
I know, right?
Anthony Watts, of the science-denialist Whats Up with That blog, has got his shorts in a knot because of a post I wrote indicating that he is a boob. He is upset because in a screen shot of him talking about a totally absurd pseudo-scientific claim that should have been rejected out…
January 16, 2013
President Barack Obama has signed 23 Executive Orders intended to reduce gun violence in the United States. This alone will not be sufficient--Congress must pass new laws to address this problem as well, and the citizens of the united states have to make some cultural adjustments--but it is a…
January 15, 2013
You may know the blog What's Up With That. It is Anthony Watt's anti-science blog, dedicated to climate change denialism.
A current post reports the finding of life forms from another planet, in a meteorite.
This looks to be a huge story, the first evidence of extraterrestrial life, if it holds…
January 15, 2013
We were discussing insects. What about eating insects?
When it comes up that I've lived in the Central African Rain Forest, certain questions often come up, and one of them is: "Did you eat bugs?"
Every one has seen those National Geographic specials where some natives somewhere are eating…
January 15, 2013
I was a graduate student in Harvard’s Anthropology Department, which meant I had no funding. I was in the final writing stage of my thesis, and the problem I had was that teaching interesting biological anthropology (which I could do full time if I wanted) was too distracting from the mundane yet…
January 15, 2013
Usually, it’s “Bird eating fish” but here we have a case of a “Bird-eating fish.”
The Wels Catfish, Silurus glanis, is the second largest fish in its range, which covers much of Europe and parts of West Asia. In parts of Western Europe, it is considered to be “exotic” because it has been introduced…
January 14, 2013
A Draft National Climate Assessment has been released by the “National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee.” You can download it here … warning: it is a PDF file way over 100 megabytes
The report affirms that climate is changing and that this change is primarily caused by human…
January 13, 2013
I knew a couple who had spent a lot of time in the Congo in the 1950s. He was doing primatology, and she was the wife of the primatologist. And when she spoke of the Congo or Uganda, where they spent most of the time, she always said "The thing about Africa is that there's no place to sit down…
January 12, 2013
The UK Met Office, a climate agency, released some information about the immediate future, based on modeling. Briefly, it notes that natural cooling effect may temporarily ameliorate the increase in temperatures caused by global warming in some locals; it does not say that global warming is…
January 11, 2013
It is Influenza Season in the Northern Hemisphere. So, this is a good time to talk about the flu. Three years ago we had an unusual flu season, with a nasty variant about that seemed to be threatening a pandemic, and that's the year Huxley was born (in November) so we faced the problem of getting…
