Environment
kcollins | October 28, 2011Be sure to check out this great new page by Oxford University graduate student April Le about hot careers in science & engineering! It can be found on the USASEF web site under 2012 Festival/School Programs.
The recent atmospheric and geological developments in the news provide an opportunity for the budding geologist or earth scientist in your family to explore a topic that imparts a clear and direct impact on their daily lives. Whether he or she enjoys "build and destroy" activities or virtual simulations of earthquakes volcanic eruptions, there are many ways for students of all ages…
illconsidered | October 24, 2011 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
skip to bottom Another week in the Ecological Crisis Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not WisdomOctober 23, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Monsoon, BEST Albedo, Drought, OWS, Monnett, Subsidies, GFI, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, IP Issues, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes,…
sastyk | October 17, 2011Brian Davey of FEASTA argues that we could do debt cancellation ethically, while leaving the larger financial system intact, and that OccupyEverything should focus its message on the idea of Jubilee.
Instead we need a scheme with a pattern of rewards and incentives that is more appropriate to the times that we live in. This could be achieved by giving people the wherewithall to reduce their debts if they have debts, but also giving the same amount to people who have no debts, or have low debts, which they could use too - not on a consumption binge, but on green investment to bring down our…
illconsidered | October 17, 2011 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
skip to bottom Another Week in the Ecological Crisis Information Overloadis Pattern RecognitionOctober 16, 2011 Chuckles, OWS, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Carbon Bill, Drought Monsoon, Bottom Line, Subsidies, Ecocide, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production…
gregladen | October 13, 2011The latest update on the crisis in Fukushima. The hot spots are everywhere. Be careful where you step!
But first, we'd like to introduce the handy-dandy Fukushima Post and Ana's Feed search engine. This search engine will return results from this series of posts we've done. This is a good place to start if you are researching anything about fukushima:
Loading
Later, we may produce a search engine that includes everything we've pointed to as well. That, of course, is roughly the same as searching the entire internet. We've not yet decided if we should pursue that strategy or something…
illconsidered | October 10, 2011 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
skip to bottom Another week in the Ecological Crisis Sipping from the Internet Firehose...October 9, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Pakistan, EU & Tar Sands, Planet 3.0 Grumbine, Drought, Maathai, Subsidies, Ecocide, BS Detector, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food: Crisis, Prices, Riots, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, IP Issues…
kcollins | October 7, 2011by Joe Schwarcz PhD, Author, Expo Performer and AT&T sponsored Nifty Fifty program speaker
They say you can't take it with you. Actually that isn't quite true. Your earthly possessions stay behind, but there is something that you do take with you. Your body! And decisions have to be made about what is to become of it. Burial and cremation are the traditional choices, but now there is another option on the horizon. A "green" option. You can be resomated. In technical terms, your remains can be subjected to "alkaline hydrolysis." In somewhat less elegant language, you can be…
hrynyshyn | October 7, 2011It's hard to argue against funding scientific research. But let me try.
This past week 18 experts assembled as the Task Force on Climate Remediation Research released the product of its collective wisdom. A creation of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which the New York Times' Cornelia Dean describes as "a research organization based in Washington founded by four senators — Democrats and Republicans — to offer policy advice to the government," the task force concluded that the U.S. should be spending unspecified sums on research into what is colloquially known as climate hacking. Most everyone…
sa smith | October 6, 2011I dont know why so many people bag on Pittsburgh.
Maybe people who grew up In The Big City dont like it, but to a country bumpkin like me, it is a magical city full of hot boys and glitter. *shrug*
Its also home to some of the best virology work in the country. Example:
Raw Sewage Harbors Diverse Viral Populations
One major point I want to get across to the general public through this blog is "Viruses are not always 'bad guys'."
Yes, of course, some viruses make us sick. And those are the ones we notice, obviously.
Long-time readers of ERV know that we can domesticate these 'bad guys'. We…
tfk | October 5, 2011Modeled Behavior tells A Tale of Two Recessions, noting a rather shocking statistic:
as of the last few years the auto fleet in the United States has begun to shrink. That is, we are scrapping cars at a faster rate than we are producing them.
Unless something changes in the next 18 months, our scrappage rate will begin to exceed new cars sales by the millions of units per year. In a country that is still growing in population and still adding drivers every year its hard to explain why the optimal path is suddenly for the vehicle fleet to shrink.
What economist Karl Smith means is that it's…
gregladen | October 5, 2011As a result of our last posting on Fukushima, we had a discussion initiated by commenter Daedelus2u about radioactive istopes of Cesium becoming concentrated in fish. I thought I'd take this opportunity to expand on that discussion a little. This relates to the possibility that radioactive elements spilled or spewed from a nuclear reactor site (as per normal or following a meltdown and China Syndrome, as in the case of Fukushima) can become part of our diet especially in fish, and how much concentration of radioactive isotopes we might expect.
Ana's feed is loaded with startling and…
illconsidered | October 3, 2011 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
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...October 2, 2011 Chuckles, Horn of Africa, Overshoot, Maathai, Jet Stream, IMECHE GDP, Subsidies, Ecocide, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Temperatures, Feedbacks,…
hrynyshyn | September 30, 2011This story has been around a while, but I haven't been blogging much lately so I am only getting around to it now.
"..the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones."
So says a new paper. Troubling findings. Something's not quite right, and am hoping to nail it down. "The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change," by Harvard's Dan Kahan et al. tested a sufficiently large sample size of…
sastyk | September 28, 2011There are ten children in my house, but six of them are phantoms. No, we haven't gotten a foster placement or heard anything new since the two weeks in August when we were asked to take two separate groups of five kids each. Both of those placements fell through, and there has been nothing since, which is sort of the problem.
I have little patience with being expectant, whether pregnant or waiting for a foster placement, and the six (this is a totally arbitrary number that I'm using only because it represents the number of van seats, and thus the maximum placement we could take) "ghost…
gregladen | September 28, 2011One of the interesting items we have this week is a study by Greenpeace in which various organisms from the sea near Fukushima were sampled for radioactive isotopes. Let's take a closer look.
The data in the table provided (see the first item in Ana's feed for the link) show the amount of radiation (radioactive decay) by isotope type per kilogram of plant or animal tissue from various samples. On the higher end is a fish with 357 bq/kg of radiation and some seaweed with 190 bk/kg.
What does this mean? Hard to say. I can tell you this: A normal human has about 4,000 or more bq (in total…
illconsidered | September 26, 2011 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
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsSeptember 25, 2011 Chuckles, Equinox, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Pakistan Missing Heat, Easter Island, Atlasgate, Monnett, Subsidies, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Beasties, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Land Grabs, IP Issues, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs…
oracknows | September 23, 2011I've been following the anti-vaccine movement for nearly a decade now, first as a regular on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative and then, beginning almost seven years ago, blogging away. Along the way, somehow I stumbled into the role of countering the pseudoscience, misinformation, and nonsense promoted by the anti-vaccine movement. It's dangerous misinformation, too. For instance, in the U.K., misinformation claiming that the MMR vaccine somehow contributes to autism, a lie based on the work of Andrew Wakefield, has led the MMR uptake rate there to plummet. As a result measles,…
sastyk | September 20, 2011Aaron Newton and I are starting out our first-ever Advanced Adapting-in-Place class, for people who have taken our previous course or who have been on the adaptation journey for a while. If you'd like to join us there are still spots available and world enough and time to join, so please email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com. In the meantime, the first step in sorting out what you need to do to get ready for a shifting future is to have some sense of what that future looks like - or the range of possible ways the future could look.
There are a lot of possible ways to imagine the future.…
drorzel | September 19, 2011I got a new comment on an old post asking an interesting question about thermodynamics:
I have a question that bears somewhat on this issue of keeping cars parked in the sun, cooler. You all know those accordion folded/aluminized shades you can put up inside the windshield and back window.
Seems to me putting them INSIDE is the wrong approach. They should be on the OUTside of the window acting as real shades and reflecting away the sun before it gets into the inside of the car.
This involves some of the same physics involved in the ever-popular issue of climate change, so it's worth talking…
illconsidered | September 19, 2011 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
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomSeptember 18, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Pakistan, BGS Monnett, WikiLeaks, Subsidies, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food Prices, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Ozone,…