Environment
clock | December 22, 2009If a publisher offered me a contract to write a book under a title that would be something like "Unscientific America", how would I go about it?
I would definitely be SUCH a scientist! But, being such a scientist does not mean indulging in Sesquipedalian Obscurantism. Being such a scientist means being dilligent, thorough and systematic in one's reasearch. And then being excited about presenting the findings, while being honest about the degree of confidence one can have in each piece of information.
I was not offered a book contract, and I do not have the resources and nine or twelve months…
gregladen | December 21, 2009Every now and then I get out my old Blog Epic on Global Warming and dust it off. I'm thinking it is time to do it again. This is a seven part series of Global Warming that covers much of the basics. Enjoy. Or get mad at me. Whatever.
About two years ago, a sea change occurred in the way that climate change news is reported, much to the annoyance of the Right Wing. It is an axiom that in reporting science, there are two (not one, not three or four, just two) sides to every issue, and one side is the plank nailed to the Democratic Party Platform, and the other side is the plank nailed to…
illconsidered | December 21, 2009 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I ho8pe you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Information overload is pattern recognition December 20, 2009 Chuckles, Copenhagen, COP15 Dailies, Copenhagen Accord, COP15 Rhetoric, COP15 Demos, COP15 REDD 550 ppm Leak, +2C Impact, AGU, Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Open Access, Sunspots, CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols, Paleoclimate, Satellites…
sastyk | December 16, 2009Note: Tonight is the sixth night of Chanukah, the night we remember Judith hacking off Holofernes' head by eating cheese (yes, there is a reasoning behind that strange statement), and I really had planned to write a post about that. But it is also Isaiah's sixth birthday and deep in the grading nightmare for the husband and the night before we get up at 4am to butcher the turkeys (and if anyone is looking for a free-range, heritage turkey for the holidays in the greater Albany/Schenectady area, email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com) and I'm just not feeling innovative. So here's an old piece…
jjacquet | December 15, 2009Will Big Business Save the Earth? This was the title of the New York Times Op-Ed last week by Jared Diamond (UCLA professor and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse). I thought we could go through his piece -- piece by piece.
1) He begins:
There is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know -- because I used to share that view. But today I have more nuanced feelings.
More nuanced feelings? The New York TImes must not edit for arrogance. Many big…
hrynyshyn | December 15, 2009The good news is Andrew Revkin will continue to post at his Dot Earth blog for the foreseeable future. The bad news is he will be doing so not as a staff reporter for the New York Times, which has allowed him the rare honor of specializing in something as specialized as climate change, for many years. Instead, it will be as Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University's Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies.
As a "mainstream" journalist, Andy operated under the constraints, baggage and inertia of a system that was ill-suited to cover a subject that fused science…
terrasig | December 14, 2009Last week in Stockholm (and Oslo), the 2009 Nobel Prize winners were gloriously hosted while giving their lectures and receiving their medals and diplomas. In Chemistry this year, the Nobel was shared by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz, and Ada E Yonath for their studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, a remarkable nucleoprotein complex that catalyzes the rapid, coordinated formation of peptide bonds as instructed by messenger RNA. My post on the day of the announcement in October was designed to counter the inevitable (and now realized) criticisms that the prize was…
illconsidered | December 14, 2009 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 December 13, 2009 Chuckles, COP15, COP15 Dailies, COP15 Tools, COP15 Alternate Forums, COP15 The Editorial, COP15 Demonstrators GermanWatch, Mediterranean Flood, CRU, Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, In the Balance Melting Arctic, Arctic Mode Switch, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Pledges, Baseline…
illconsidered | December 11, 2009I have had these tabs open in Firefox for quite a while now hoping to have the time to comment on them in a bit of detail but time is not on my side (sorry Mic).
So I would just like to list them briefly and recommend them for your review.
From Balloon Juice:
Especially early in this story's life cycle, when you could hardly expect an average reporter to make much sense of the science, a sheaf of personality stories (e.g.) complained about the defensive attitude among climate researchers. Again, you have to wonder what people expect. Taken collectively the "science" of warming denial has…
hrynyshyn | December 10, 2009Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science. In an op-ed published in today's Washington Post, he excoriates Sarah Palin for her illterate essay, published earlier this week, on the topic of climate change.
While former Alaska governor Sarah Palin wrote in her Dec. 9 op-ed that she did not deny the "reality of some changes in climate," she distorted the clear scientific evidence that Earth's climate is changing, largely as a result of human behaviors. She also badly confused the concepts of…
drorzel | December 9, 2009
Physics Buzz: When chemistry dunces bake
"Shirley Corriher, a former research biochemist at Vanderbilt University, got her start in the kitchen burning scrambled eggs beyond all recognition. Later, when she ruined recipes while taking a cooking class, she impressed her teacher by being able to explain scientifically what had gone wrong. Red cabbage gone purple? Add vinegar to restore the acidity. Asparagus gone an unappetizing olive green? Overcooking broke the veggie's cell walls. Soon her teacher and chefs and bakers all over the southeastern US were calling her with their questions;…
sastyk | December 8, 2009Last year I was invited to speak at a Green Energy Event in the West. Most such events make their actual money from their vendor halls, and this one had as one of its focal events the premier of the new Ford Hybrid, which was just being released. Thus, there were many Ford executives at the event. I arrived early to the drinks-and-food-for-the-speakers-and-vendors bit the night before the event formally began, since I had been told it would take longer for me to walk there than it did, and the only other person present from the event was a Ford executive. We got to talking - he was a…
drorzel | December 7, 2009
Sunday Conversation: The case for Pluto | SciGuy | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
The controversy just never ends...
(tags: science astronomy planets media blogs)
Chromoscope
How the Milky Way looks at a variety of different wavelengths.
(tags: astronomy space science pictures physics galaxies)
Less Wrong: Parapsychology: the control group for science
"There's no particular reason to think parapsychologists are doing anything other than what scientists would do; their experiments are similar to those of scientists, they use statistics in similar ways, and there's no reason to think they…
illconsidered | December 7, 2009 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I ho8pe you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News December 6, 2009 Chuckle, Copenhagen, CPRS, SCAR, Ocean CO2, 4 Degrees, Naughties, CRU Inquiry, Other Hacks, CRU Hack Bottom Line, Tim Garrett, Lancet, Copenhagen Diagnosis Melting Arctic, Polar Bear, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, GHG Pledges, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Aerosols,…
clock | December 1, 2009
The Deadline has passed!
There are a total of over 700 submissions for OpenLab 2009. Thank you all for submitting your and other people's blog posts. I at least opened every one of them, and already read many of them and the overall quality looks very high.
SciCurious is ready (here is her post), judges are ready, and the judging process is about to begin.
And while you are waiting for results, you can read all the submitted entries right here!
And once you are done reading them all, you can go back to the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions and read them as well.
And keep checking in every now…
clock | November 30, 2009
Deadline is December 1st at midnight EST!
That is roughly 37 hours to go.
The submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date are under the fold. On December 2nd, I'll put them all above the fold for all to see all the submissions. And then SciCurious and a large gang of judges will start sorting them all out and judging them until only 50 essays, one poem and one cartoon remain.
Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays). Realize that nobody knows your archives as well as you…
illconsidered | November 30, 2009 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I ho8pe you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another Week of Global Warming News Information overload is pattern recognition November 29, 2009 Chuckle, Copenhagen, CHOGM, G77, Save-the-Jungle, Copenhagen Diagnosis, CS Statement, CSIRO, Health & CC Bottom Line, Patents, Broken Promises, Garrett, Solar, CRU Hack Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, EAIS Losing Mass Food Crisis, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes,…
clock | November 29, 2009
Reminder: Deadline is December 1st at midnight EST!
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date (under the fold). You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
Make sure that the submitted posts are possible (and relatively easy) to convert into print. Posts that rely too much on video, audio, color photographs, copyrighted images, or multitudes of links just won't do.
10 days of science: Astronomical…
pronald | November 29, 2009
One of the pleasures of reading Stewart Brand's new book, "Whole Earth Discipline", is that when it comes to managing the Earth's ecosystem, he is unconstrained by conventional wisdom.
In a break with many old-school environmentalists, Brand argues that the established Green agenda is outdated, too negative, too tradition bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided to address the scale of environmental problems that we face today.
Who better to challenge the rigidity of the long-respected environmental movement than the distinguished writer, lecturer and author of the classic Whole…
clock | November 28, 2009
Reminder: Deadline is December 1st at midnight EST!
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date (under the fold). You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
Make sure that the submitted posts are possible (and relatively easy) to convert into print. Posts that rely too much on video, audio, color photographs, copyrighted images, or multitudes of links just won't do.
10 days of science: Astronomical…