Environment
nisbetmc | March 11, 2010Daniel Sarewitz, professor of science policy at Arizona State University, has an important op-ed at Slate today explaining why if we continue to frame the climate change debate in terms of science, we may never achieve meaningful policy action. Drawing on the conclusions of much of the scholarship in the area of science studies, Sarewitz writes:
When people hold strongly conflicting values, interests, and beliefs, there is not much that science can do to compel action. Indeed, more research and more facts often make a conflict worse by providing support to competing sides in the debate, and…
nisbetmc | March 9, 2010
American Today, the weekly newspaper for American University, ran this feature on last week's AU Forum and public radio broadcast of "The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in an Unsustainable World." My graduate assistant Brandee Reed has also produced a transcript of the panel which I have pasted below the fold.
I was joined on the panel by AU journalism professor Jane Hall who served as moderator, and fellow panelists Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post and Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones magazine. The transcript is not quite professional quality, but it does provide…
grrlscientist | March 8, 2010tags: education, public outreach, BirdNote Radio Program, Bird Note, birding, Bird Watching, birds, nature, environment, conservation, NPR, National Public Radio, Seattle Audubon Society, mp3
Are you trapped on a crowded subway or in a traffic jam of honking, stinking cars? If so, you might be interested to know that you can transport yourself to a different world, a cool green space where you can feel the earth breathe in time to the music of birds. Your personal vehicle is BirdNote, a 2-minute radio program about birds and nature.
"We want to help people connect to the natural world and…
illconsidered | March 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 Sipping from the internet firehose... March 7, 2010 Chuckle, Copenhagen, Yvo de Boer, COP-16, UN-CFG, Anthony's Question, Precautionary Principle, Greenhouse Effect Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, World Bank, AAAS, IPCC Review, Interpreting Polls, Pushback, CRU Inquiry Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, Food…
sastyk | March 4, 2010Note: This is another lightly revised version a piece I wrote some years ago at the oldest incarnation of this blog. It answers a question I get a lot - if people have been saying that the oil is going to run out for years, and if 30 years ago people thought we were going to have an ice age, why should I believe you that peak oil and climate change are real problems.
A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don't necessarily agree on this…
pronald | March 3, 2010John Broder writes today in the New York Times that the uproar over the unauthorized release of hundreds of emails and recent revelations about a mistake in the IPCC report threatens to undermine decades of work and has badly damaged public trust in the scientific enterprise.
Broder's interviews with scientists reveal two thoughtful but seemingly opposing viewpoints:
'Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious scientific body in the United States, said that there was a danger that the distrust of climate science could mushroom into doubts about…
clock | March 3, 2010Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Mark MacAllister, Coordinator of On-Line Learning Projects at the North Carolina Zoological Society to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming…
nisbetmc | March 2, 2010
Americans under the age of 35 have grown up during an era of ever more certain climate science, increasing news attention, alarming entertainment portrayals, and growing environmental activism, yet on a number of key indicators, this demographic group remains less engaged on the issue than older Americans.
A survey report released today challenges conventional wisdom that younger Americans as a group are more concerned and active on the issue of climate change than their older counterparts. The analysis of nationally representative data collected in January of this year is timed for release…
illconsidered | March 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 Disruption News February 21, 2010 Chuckles, Copenhagen, Nusa Dua, Blue Carbon, COP-16, China's Emissions, Bonn, WMO Meeting, iPhone App Bottom Line, Hamilton, McKibben, Gates, IPCC Review, CRU Inquiry Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Mertz Glacier Tongue Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures,…
pharyngula | February 23, 2010People who don't understand modern evolutionary theory shouldn't be writing books criticizing evolutionary theory. That sounds like rather pedestrian and obvious advice, but it's astonishing how often it's ignored — the entire creationist book publishing industry demands a steady supply of completely clueless authors who think their revulsion at the implications of Darwinian processes is sufficient to compensate for their ignorance. And now Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a philosopher and a cognitive scientist, step up to the plate with their contribution to this genre of…
illconsidered | February 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 Disruption News Information overload is pattern recognition February 21, 2010 Chuckles, de Boer Resignation, Copenhagen, UN-CFG, AAAS, Greenhouse Effect, Snow, Branson, Gates, iPhone App Bottom Line, Dunning-Kruger, IPCC, RealClimate on IPCC, FOI as a Weapon, Mann, CRU, Denialist Campaign Melting Arctic, Permafrost Line, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis,…
pharyngula | February 22, 2010I'm getting a flood of email from Israel. As one correspondent explains, Israel maintains three kinds of state-supported schools: one kind for the ultra-orthodox, because the state has always fostered freakishly fanatical ignorance among the lunatic subset, and these schools teach no science at all; a fully secular system, particularly in higher education, because Jews have also had a strong scholarly tradition, and Israel depends on material strategies for its survival, and these schools teach science very well; and a general intermediate kind of school where religion may be taught but…
illconsidered | February 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 Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... February 14, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, Copenhagen Accord, UN CFG, COP16+, Rasmussen , Bolivia, IPCC van Ommen & Morgan, Dorale et al., US Snow, Bottom Line, Cosmic Rayz, Grumbine FOI as a Weapon, Swiftgating, CRU Inquiry, Myers, Greenhouse Effect, Solomon Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica…
oracknows | February 11, 2010
"Would you like to touch my monkey? Touch him! Love him!"
J. B. Handley wants to touch see Andrew Wakefield's monkeys.
How do I know this? Well, there's just the little matter of his entitling his most recent excretion of flaming stupidity Show me the monkeys! and repeating "Show me the monkeys!" eleven times in the course of his post. My guess is that J.B. was trying to get a vibe going, perhaps like a preacher giving a sermon with cadences leading up to repeating the same phrase over and over again, with the intended effect of getting the audence to repeat the phrase when he says it, with…
sastyk | February 11, 2010Once upon a time, before I descended into parenthood and dull stability, I was out with a group of friends who had, let's just say, been drinking quite a bit. One of the young men in this group proposed to two others that they do something that was, to put it bluntly, totally moronic and likely to get them into enormous trouble. One of the gentlemen to whom this had been proposed thought for a moment, and then observed that this was likely to bring down the authorities upon them. The third gentleman responded to this with, "Yeah, but it would be awesome!" After a brief moment's…
revere | February 11, 2010I admit there are some medical articles I just read the press release for. They are almost always articles in journals I don't have easy access to and don't read regularly, but when I run across a press release I find interesting enough to read and maybe post about, it often isn't so compelling I'm going to go out and read the article. It's just mildly interesting and for my purposes the details aren't as important as the main ideas. If you guessed that I'm going to do that now, you'd be right. It's about an article in The Journal of Trauma Injury, Infection, and Critical Care from…
clock | February 9, 2010As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Visual Search for Human Gaze Direction by a Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes):
Humans detect faces with direct gazes among those with averted gazes more efficiently than they detect faces with averted gazes among those with direct gazes. We examined whether…
illconsidered | February 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 Years February 7, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, Copenhagen Accord, Scorecard, COP16 & Beyond, DSDS, G77 & BASIC, Mann FOI as a Weapon, Greenpeace UK, CRU Slugfest Bottom Line, RETECH 2010, Grumbine, WEF, Cold Snap, Solomon Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, Food…
nisbetmc | February 6, 2010
On Thursday, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, I served as one of the panelists at the event "The Public Divide over Climate Change: Science, Skeptics and the Media." The two hour session drew roughly 100 attendees, was organized and moderated by Belfer Center fellow Cristine Russell, and featured Andrew Revkin of the New York Times' Dot Earth blog and Thomas Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Kennedy School.
Audio of the panel is available at the Kennedy School web site and the event was covered in detail by the Columbia Journalism Review and the…
eklemetti | February 4, 2010
A 2010 mud flow from Lok-Batan, a mud volcano in Azerbijian.
So, first there was all the Yellowstone talk. Then the unsubstantiated reports of a volcanic eruption in a decidedly unvolcanic part of Pakistan (what part isn't), then submarine volcanism off Japan. Now, we have a nrews report about an eruption in Azerbijian. Luckily, although the headline implies a magmatic event, the text of the article shows that this is, in fact, a mud volcano. The mud volcano is called Lok-batan (or Lokbata) and has erupted quite a few times over the last 150 years, as recently as 2005. Azerbijian has quite a…