Environment
sastyk | December 17, 2010If you haven't seen this video by Richard Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute, you should. In a lot of ways it is an excellent summary of the history of fossil fuels, entertainingly and creatively done. In some ways, it is extremely valuable as a basic educational piece.
I'm very impressed with the clarity of this video, but it does have an odd gap in it - all of the human history of 300 years of fossil fuels doesn't have a single female person in it - not one. Women are addressed by implication when population is mentioned - but all the little hand-drawn people are men. There is a…
illconsidered | December 13, 2010 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...December 12, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16 Grind, COP16 Deal, COP17, Cablegate, Winter, AGU, Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, WB, IEC, Thermodynamics, CSRRT, Cook, CCPI Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Greenland, Antarctica Food Crisis, Global Crop Diversity Trust Project, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2010Update 13 December: Florian at Astrodictum Simplex has translated the whole entry into German. Thank you, Florian!
Update 21 December: German pop-sci web zine Scinexx reports on the poor status of the impact hypothesis and refers to this blog entry. They also mention a really weird idea of the CIRT's that I hadn't heard about: that the impact event somehow taught certain Celts to make better steel, and that this material eventually allowed the Roman empire to expand!
Back in August, I blogged about this dodgy paper that had been published in Antiquity. Subsequently, German geologists Robert…
illconsidered | December 6, 2010 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 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsDecember 5, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, Kyoto, 4 Degrees+, CableGate, Cable Talk, Pakistan Subsidies, GEE, Weather, The Question, Why, Thermodynamics, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…
drorzel | December 3, 2010
Cocktail Party Physics: books, books, books galore!
"A couple of weeks ago, an editor asked me to name my favorite science book from 2010 for a year-end round-up her magazine was putting together. My incredulous response: "You mean you want me to pick just one?" Because let's face it, 2010 has been a banner year for popular science books. [...]
The steady stream of science books hasn't stopped, either, so I thought I'd highlight just a few of the new offerings (mostly math and physics related) that came out this fall -- just in case you're looking for the perfect gift for the science…
pharyngula | December 2, 2010
Oh, great. I get to be the wet blanket.
There's a lot of news going around right now about this NASA press release and paper in Science — before anyone had read the paper, there was some real crazy-eyed speculation out there. I was even sent some rather loony odds from a bookmaker that looked like this:
WHAT WILL NASA ANNOUNCE?
NASA HAS DISCOVERED A LIFE FORM ON MARS +200 33%
DISCOVERED EVIDENCE OF LIFE ON ONE OF SATURNS MOON +110 47%
ANNOUNCES A NEW MODEL FOR THE EXISTENCE OF LIFE -5000 98%
UNVEILS IMAGES OF A RECOVERED…
krandall | December 1, 2010By Dr. Rosalba Bonaccorsi
Environmental Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs
Rosalba, what first sparked your interest in science?
I've always had big dreams -- even as a young girl. As soon as I started to walk, I took an interest in conducting experiments with whatever was available around such as household plants and various chemical compounds. I'm lucky I didn't end up poisoned or otherwise hurt! I remember dismantling alarm clocks. I was so curious!
As a young girl, I was in poor health and as a result spent a lot of…
illconsidered | November 29, 2010 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 Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not WisdomNovember 28, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16+, WMSoC, Schneider & Hook, CSRRT, Reforestation, GreenPeace, Pakistan Carbon Tariffs, Subsidies, UNCFG, Ecuador, GFI, Psych, Year in Review, Cook, Post CRU, IEC Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food…
jdupuis | November 27, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of A Short History of Nearly Everything, is from September 25, 2006.
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I'm a bit of two minds on this book. Really, I almost consider it two different books that I could review separately. The first, a book I…
gregladen | November 26, 2010I was just glancing through the blog of Katheryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, a book about people who were wrong about stuff, often big stuff (for example, she talks about individuals who spent decades in jail owing to false convictions). Meantime, I'm working on posts related to the falsehoods and "Everything you know is wrong" series. And, as I do this, I'm thinking about a way in which people get things wrong that is often overlooked or, perhaps, not recognized as a specific category of irrational thinking.
This has to do with the idea of a fetish.…
illconsidered | November 22, 2010 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 Information Overload is Pattern RecognitionNovember 21, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16+, GGCS, Kiribati, CSRRT, AGU, Pakistan Carbon Tariffs, IEC, EcoCops, Psych, Winter Weather, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro-corps, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate…
stoat | November 19, 2010I was going to blog about what bunch of ponces the Police were in the video for Wrapped around your finger (great music though; speaking of which Nice legs, Shame about the face applies today. King of Pain is better, but they don't look so stupid).
Anyway, what I decided to talk about today is Sherwood Boehlert's op-ed in the WaPo (as I believe the hip dudes call it). Which I'll quote in near-entirety (truncated a little for brevity and for bits I find not wrong but detracting from the otherwise excellent message):
Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I…
illconsidered | November 15, 2010 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...November 14, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16+, G20, APEC, IEA, Kiribati, Cities, Fighting Back, Montreal Protocol, Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, UNCFG, IP Issues, IEC, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro Corps, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…
heathero | November 10, 2010Rarely do I read papers whose title really sums up exactly what is so cool about the study in a succinct way, free of jargon. I think that "First Investigation of the Microbiology of the Deepest Layer of Ocean Crust" does just that. It isn't trying to be sexy... it just is!
Examining the microbial communities in the so-called "deep subsurface biosphere" is a relatively new field. Until recently people didn't think there was much, or really any, life deep in Earth's crust. As with many scientific assumptions made before scientists had the opportunity to actually study a new environment...…
esiegel | November 10, 2010"Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life." -Hal Lewis
The most valuable natural resources we have at our disposal during our brief lives are the following.
That's right, the Earth and the Sun. And if we want life on Earth to continue as we know it, we have to avoid destroying our own natural environment. The big questions are whether we're actually damaging it to the point of devastating destruction, and if so, what we need to do to fix it.
One of the things we've measured reasonably well -- at, for instance, weather stations all…
illconsidered | November 8, 2010 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 YearsNovember 7, 2010 Chuckles, Pre Cancun, Post Nagoya, Geoengineering Ban, Election Reaction, Pakistan SOS Fund, GFIs, UN CFG, IEC, 2 Degrees, Living Planet Report Melting Arctic, Walrus Food Crisis, IP Issues, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Feedbacks, Aerosols,…
dnayak | November 2, 2010A lot has been said, written, and discussed about the recent Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The spill has been capped but the damage remains. The Gulf of Mexico has now become the feedstock of several battles, fierce and feeble, in the legal, political and scientific realm. What battles you say? It's what on your mind as well - What will happen of the Gulf of Mexico? What do we need to do to save the physical, chemical and biological environment? And the worst of all - Is the damage irreversible?
Sadly, we don't have any answers yet. And let's face it - there is no right answer. What we do…
pronald | November 2, 2010 The Economist is running an online debate and we need your vote.
Vote here.
My opening statement:
The number of people on Earth is expected to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9 billion by 2050 with food demands expected to rise by 70%. How will we feed them? If we continue with current farming practices, vast amounts of wilderness will be lost, millions of birds and billions of insects will die, scarce water will be wasted, greenhouse gas emissions will increase and farm workers will be exposed to harmful chemicals. Clearly, the future of our planet requires that we improve the…
illconsidered | November 1, 2010 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 Information overload is pattern recognitionOctober 31, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16+, Nagoya, Geoengineering, Extinctions, Fisheries, Pakistan GFIs, UNGCF, Kasatochi & Salmon, Cook, Multinational Deniers, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Narwhals, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…
illconsidered | October 25, 2010 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 24, 2010 Chuckles, COP16, Nagoya, Sukhdev, National Green Tribunal, CCVI, Pakistan Bottom Line, IP Rentiers, Economists, Cook, Free Access Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro Corps, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Temperatures, Feedbacks,…