Environment
illconsidered | January 30, 2013(sorry to be so late this week, it was Australia Day weekend and I guess it threw off my rhythm!)
Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week of Global Warming News
Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
January 27, 2013
Minamata, NEEM, Australia, GreenPeace, Tyee, EEA, Oh Oh Squad
Bottom Line, Subsidies, WB, Pricing Nature, Thermodynamics, Cook
Fukushima Note, Fukushima News
Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics…
gregladen | January 29, 2013Whispers from the Ghosting Trees
A guest post by Gail Zawacki, who blogs at Wit's End.
While we hustle busily through the necessities of our lives, wrapped up in our daily preoccupations - our obligations to our families, our jobs, and our dreams - at the same time all around the world, trees are silently expiring. For those who take the time to look, we can see that the forests are being transformed before our helpless and incredulous gaze into spectral mausoleums, as even the most ancient living wood is consumed by a raging tsunami of pathogens unprecedented in scale and virulence. What has…
illconsidered | January 21, 2013Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week of Global Warming News
Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom
January 20, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, Mercury, Bond, Australian, The Holmes, Attributions
Bottom Line, Thermodynamics, Cook,
Fukushima Note, Fukushima News
Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production
Hurricanes, Monsoon,…
aardvarchaeology | January 17, 2013
Paul Peters, Hindawi Publishing
The Scholarly Open Access web site says that Open Access journal house Hindawi Publishing may show some predatory characteristics. I've simply called Hindawi "dodgy". Their Chief Strategy Officer Paul Peters commented here on the blog and then swiftly replied to some questions of mine, showing that the firm realises that its on-line reputation is important to success. Here's what Mr. Peters says.
MR: Why did Hindawi's Journal of Archaeology go on-line months before it had any papers?
This is generally the case for all new journals that we launch, and I…
gregladen | January 15, 2013I 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 mentally challenging task of writing a PhD thesis. So, I got a job as a secretary at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Since I was able to follow instructions and was also not intimidated by Big Scary Professors as most temps were, I quickly rose through the ranks and became Richard…
illconsidered | January 15, 2013Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week of Global Warming News
Information Overload is Pattern Recognition
January 13, 2013
Chuckles, Hottest Year, Australia Burning, Holmes Family, Retrospectives
Bottom Line, Subsidies, Thermodynamics, Cook
Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy
Melting Arctic, Orca, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food…
aardvarchaeology | January 11, 2013Two years ago I was dismayed to find that a pair of crank authors had managed to slip a pseudo-archaeological paper into a respected geography journal. Last spring they seemed to have pulled off the same trick again, this time with an astronomy journal. Pseudoscience is after all a smelly next-door neighbour of interdisciplinary science.* When I realised that the second paper was in a bogus Open Access journal, I drew the conclusion that the authors had fallen for a scam, paying the OA fee to get published in a journal whose academic standing they had severely misjudged. That's still my…
illconsidered | January 7, 2013Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week of Global Warming News
Sipping from the Internet Firehose...
January 6, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, Object Lesson, Tasmania, Retrospectives
Bottom Line, Pricing Nature, Thermodynamics, Cook
Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy
Melting Arctic, Kulluk, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Food…
illconsidered | January 1, 2013Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week of Anthropocene Antics
Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
December 30, 2012
Chuckles, Seasonal, COP19+, Bromwich, Arctic Cyclone, Retrospectives
Bottom Line, Thermodynamics, Cook
Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Suing TEPCO, Nuclear Policy
Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, Food Production
Hurricanes, Temperatures…
illconsidered | December 25, 2012Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week of Anthropocene Antics
Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom
December 23 2012
Chuckles, Bouquet, Solstice, COP19+, Post-Doha, Hargreaves, Retrospectives
AR5 Leak, Subsidies, WB, Thermodynamics, Cook, TV Meteorologists
Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy
Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food Crisis, Fisheries,…
illconsidered | December 17, 2012Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week of Anthropocene Antics
Information Overload is Pattern Recognition
December 16, 2012
Chuckles, COP19+, Post-Doha, Post-AGU, AR5 Leak
1990 Projections, Detectors, Retrospectives, Subsidies, WB, Cook
Fukushima Note, Fukushima News
Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, GMOs, Food Production
Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures…
illconsidered | December 10, 2012Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week of Anthropocene Antics
Sipping from the Internet Firehose...
December 9, 2012
Chuckles, COP19+, Doha: Results, Reactions, Process, Kyoto, Finance, Dailies, Irony
AGU, Bottom Line, Subsidies, World Bank, Cook, Weathermen
Fukushima Note, Fukushima News
Melting Arctic, Arctic Report Card, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, Food vs.…
illconsidered | December 3, 2012Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week in the Planetary Crisis
Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
December 2, 2012
Chuckles, Doha - COP18: Misc., Irony, Kyoto, Finance, Dailies
Grafton, Bednarek, Rahmstorf, Shepherd, Subsidies, WB, Equador, Cook
Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy
Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food vs. Biofuel, IP…
gregladen | December 3, 2012Despite rumors to the contrary, NASA actually does real, non-Parody science! And the famous press conference about Mars Rover happened today, and it was exactly as I predicted. Very, very interesting.
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has used its full array of instruments to analyze Martian soil for the first time, and found a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. Water and sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, among other ingredients, showed up in samples Curiosity's arm delivered to an analytical laboratory inside the rover.
Detection of the substances during this…
gregladen | December 3, 2012I might be exaggerating slightly about the ready availability of the materials...
Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves by George Church and Ed Regis looks like a futurist tome on what could happen when technology finally catches up with human imagination and everything changes. Except it isn't. Most futurists are people with some knowledge of technology, a fertile imagination, and a publicist. Regenesis is by a scientist (working with a writer) who is busy making a different future and who has been involved in every stage of development of the technology under…
esiegel | December 2, 2012"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." -Henry David Thoreau
Every day that we have free or leisure time, there's this great conflict as to how we spend it: working to better ourselves and improve our knowledge, and taking the time to enjoy our lives in whatever way we see fit. Sometimes, this goes horribly awry, as the B-52s would attest in their (relatively) new song,
Funplex.
But there's often no better way to combine these two pursuits than by reading a good book.…
illconsidered | November 26, 2012 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundupskip to bottom Another Week in the Planetary Crisis Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom November 25, 2012 Chuckles, COP18+, Pre-Doha Reports: WRI, AII, EEA, UNEP, WB, PwC, IEA Bottom Line, PDSI-Sheffield, Pricing Nature, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…
sastyk | November 25, 2012A friend of mine who volunteered at a shelter in New York City told me this story over Thanksgiving. The shelter she worked in responded to the range of people affected by the crisis. Many of them, as always in a crisis, were those who were already struggling and marginalized - illegal immigrants afraid to go anywhere else, the already-homeless whose usual shelters and places of refuge were closed or underwater, the mentally and physically ill who had to be evacuated from hospitals in the flood zone. Many of the rest were storm evacuees from some of the city's most expensive neighborhoods…
gregladen | November 21, 2012A probabilistic quantification of the anthropogenic component of twentieth century global warming is a paper just out that examines an important conflict in the conversation about climate change and global warming. Before getting to the details, have a look at this graph from the paper:
This is temperature increasing on the earth over a century or so. Notice that there is what looks like a warming around 1940 on top of an otherwise mostly warming trend, followed by a bunch more warming.
The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, in 2007, referring to data that ran up to 2005 inclusively, said…
oracknows | November 19, 2012As I looked over the ol' blog last night, I was shocked to realize that I haven't blogged about the antivaccine movement and its offenses against science in nearly three weeks. That's right! The last time I did a vaccine post was when I examined a particularly egregiously bad paper from a couple of scientists who have drunk deeply of the antivaccine Kool Aid and as a result are trying to blame the HPV vaccine Gardasil for the death of an 18-year-old woman in Australia and a 14-year-old girl in Quebec. It's amazing but true. Rarely do I go that long without antivaccine pseudoscience attracting…