Environment
gregladen | September 15, 2011It has been Just over six months since a magnitude 9 earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In the hours following that incident, nuclear power protagonists filled the blogosphere, the news outlets, and other media with assurances that little could go wrong, that the reactors would be managed, that the disaster would demonstrate, once things had settled down, that nuclear power was, indeed, safe.
One of the first things Ana and I noticed, and we were not alone, is that some of the same stories ... in some cases the same exact wording ... was…
cevans | September 13, 2011A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O'Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the "Overview Effect," a phrase coined by the writer Frank White to describe the profound insight -- characterized by a sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet -- experienced by astronauts gazing down at the Earth from space.
Frank White is the author of The Overview Effect: Space…
illconsidered | September 12, 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 Overloadis Pattern RecognitionSeptember 11, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Pakistan, Wigley, Keystone XL WikiLeaks, Dessler, Spencer, Monnett, Ecocide, How To?, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…
jrosenhouse | September 9, 2011Jerry Coyne weighs in with a few thoughts about the various attempts, considered in my last post, to preserve the notion of original sin in the light of modern science. It turns out he's even less impressed by those attempts than I am. Go have a look!
Since Wednesday's post was already quite long, I didn't get around to mentioning one additional attempt to promote an evolutionary understanding of original sin. It comes from theologian John Haught. In his book God After Darwin he writes:
What, then, might original sin mean? Superficially, it means a systematic turning away from God by…
gregladen | September 8, 2011Today all we have for you is Ana's feed, and only the first half. We have both been very busy with distracting things like work and other writing projects and so on. There are interesting things going on at Fukushima and in the Nuclear Power industry in general, as you'll see soon. In the mean time, here's what has been happening:
Fight Over Mining Near Grand Canyon, Other Riders Will Return After Recess -NYT, August 9
-Several lawmakers involved in the congressional debate over uranium mining around the Grand Canyon expect the war of words to reignite as soon as the House returns from…
illconsidered | September 5, 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 Sipping from the Internet Firehose...September 4, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Keystone XL Action, The Conversation, Wagner Monnett, Kirby et al., WikiLeaks, Bottom Line, Free Science, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane/CO2, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food…
lborkowski | September 1, 2011Pictures of Hurricane Irene's destruction are circulating and making many of us realize we're lucky to still have our homes and power lines intact. There's also one Irene-related problem that's invisible to the naked eye: raw sewage in waterways. Here's the Washington Post's Darryl Fears on local contamination:
DC Water officials estimate that 200 million gallons of rain mixed with raw sewage overwhelmed pumping stations and poured into waterways around the city during the downpour from Hurricane Irene.
The sewer overflow contributed to a flood of wastewater into rivers and streams over the…
egrossman | August 30, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
On Sunday August 21, a cleaning process designed to make tomatoes safe for customers eating marinara sauce, pizza topping, and canned tomatoes resulted in a release of chlorine dioxide gas that sent 43 workers at the Pacific Coast Producers plant in Woodland, California to area hospitals. According to Pacific Coast Producers vice president Mona Shulman, a malfunction of sanitizing equipment caused an "overdosing" of chlorine dioxide, causing the chemical to off-gas to the atmosphere. Chlorine dioxide gas was also drawn into a building through the ventilation system. "The…
oracknows | August 29, 2011I detest the term "integrative medicine," which is what promoters of "alternative medicine" pivoted to call "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) when they decided that they needed to lose the word "alternative" altogether. After all, no longer were CAM practitioners content to have their favorite quackery be "complementary" to real medicine because "complementary" implied a subsidiary position and they wanted to be co-equals with physicians and science- and evidence-based medicine. The term "integrative medicine" (IM) served their purpose perfectly, and "integrative medicine"…
illconsidered | August 29, 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 Global Warming News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsAugust 28, 2011 Chuckles, Horn of Africa, Hsiang et al., Keystone XL Action, Kirby et al. Monnett, East Coast Nukes, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Subsidies, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Riots, GMOs, Food…
dr. dolittle | August 25, 2011
Image Source: www.animalsandearthquakes.com
The recent earthquake on the East Coast has me thinking about animals. Specifically, animals that can reportedly predict earthquakes...a feat humans have yet to reliably accomplish.
According to the US Geological Survey, animals may be able to sense the fast traveling P waves which arrive seconds prior to the S wave of an earthquake. Although many studies suggest that observing animals in the hopes of being able to predict earthquakes is not a viable option since animals respond to many environmental cues. So how do you know when the strange…
illconsidered | August 22, 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 Global Warming News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomAugust 21, 2011 Autobahn Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Keystone XL Protest Monnett, Chen et al., Shell Leak, Conoco Leak, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Walrus, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Food Prices, Food Riot, Food vs Fuel…
tfk | August 17, 2011In his book Fed Up, Rick Perry came out solidly in the climate denial camp, repeating long-discredited claims of that the underlying science is fraudulent. ThinkProgress quotes him writing:
For example, they have seen the headlines in the past year about doctored data related to global warming. They know we have been experiencing a cooling trend, that the complexities of the global atmosphere have often eluded the most sophisticated scientists, and that draconian policies with dire economic effects based on so-called science may not stand the test of time. Quite frankly, when science gets…
illconsidered | August 15, 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 Overloadis Pattern RecognitionAugust 14, 2011 Autobahn Chuckles, Horn of Africa, Monnett, NEON, Nigeria, North Sea, arXiv, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Kay et al., Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, IP Issues, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs,…
gregladen | August 12, 2011Things at Fukushima are about as interesting as they've ever been. We want to talk about specific problems at the reactor site, with radioactive material, cooling systems, etc. but first a few words about things happening more broadly, beginning with the largest and work towards the smallest scale. Everything we discuss here is based on the material provided in "Ana's Feed" below. There, you will find detailed notes from media and other sources since our last posting, and links. (See here for all of our postings on Fukushima.)
Globally, it is interesting and disconcerting that Japan…
gregladen | August 10, 2011The Honshu tsunami of March 11th (the one that caused the Fukushima disaster) caused the otherwise stable Sulzberger Ice Shelf to calve giant hunks of ice. Climate scientists call this "teleconnection." I call it a big whopping bunch of whack knocking off a gigunda chunka stuff. Either way, this is important and interesting.
Scientists figured this out by modeling the movement of the tsunami's energy across the Pacific and correlating this with the calving event observed from s satellite. That sounds easier than it was: By the time a tsunami wave travels a few tens of thousands of…
illconsidered | August 8, 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 Global Warming News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...August 7, 2011 Autobahn Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Monnett, Shell & Nigeria A Good Question, Cook, Post CRU Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk Melting Arctic, Funder et al., Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes,…
illconsidered | August 1, 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 YearsJuly 31, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, DeChristopher, Monnett, BTI, Black Subsidies, Cook, Post CRU Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, POPs & Toxics, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Corps, Food Banks, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production…
cevans | July 31, 2011In the mid-1970s, the U.S. State Department prohibited the internal use of the term "space colony," due to the global bad reputation of colonialism. Instead, the government opted for "space settlement." Of course, as Stewart Brand pointed out at the time, the last thing you do in space is settle. Quite the opposite! Making the decision to explore space -- and live there -- is just about the most unsettled act a human can commit.
There have always been two camps on this issue. First, the unsettled, like Brand: the science-fiction aficionados, capitalists, rocketry geeks, macrocosmic thinkers,…
gregladen | July 30, 2011Falsehood!!!
Sometimes people say this because it seems reasonable to them ... what, with life originating so long ago and so much geological mushing-around happening since then. But sometimes people say this, and sound quite innocent saying it, because they want to throw the average person off track and make them think that Evolutionary Biology has this big gap -- at the beginning -- in which any-old kind of story can fit, including a supernatural or religious story, or even just a spiritual Jungian story, or anything but a story about molecules interacting.
So, the purpose of this blog…