Environment
hrynyshyn | March 11, 2009There's a good reason why of all the consequences of anthropogenic global warming, nothing garners as much attention as sea level rise ;;;; with the possible exception of those darn charismatic polar bears, that is.
It's the same reason Al Gore devoted half a dozen slides in his climate change presentation to animations depicting the flooding that would come with a six- or seven-metre rise. While we can't predict just how much the oceans will rise if the world's glaciers and the Western Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets were to melt, everyone knows, without having to take a course in…
sb admin | March 9, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
I'm sure it will be years before we have cleaned up all the garbage -- literally and figuratively -- from the Bush administration's Environmental "Protection" Agency. The notoriously conservative DC Appeals Court, in a unanimous decision, did its part recently when it declared the Bush EPA's standards for air particulates âcontrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decisionmaking." The language doesn't get much stronger than that. Just a few days before the Supremes refused to hear a challenge to a lower court decision striking down…
illconsidered | March 9, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
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 March 8, 2009 Top Stories:Capitol Coal Protest, Patterns, Green Cars, Recession, Open Access Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Methane, Pseudoscience, The Pipeline, Daylight Saving, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites…
revere | March 9, 2009I'm sure it will be years before we have cleaned up all the garbage -- literally and figuratively -- from the Bush administration's Environmental "Protection" Agency. The notoriously conservative DC Appeals Court, in a unanimous decision, did its part recently when it declared the Bush EPA's standards for air particulates “contrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decisionmaking." The language doesn't get much stronger than that. Just a few days before the Supremes refused to hear a challenge to a lower court decision striking down Bush EPA mercury standards from coal-fired power…
khannula | March 6, 2009Earth is going to be here for the foreseeable future. Will there be geoscientists to help everyone else figure out how to deal with it?
The people who organize the Cutting Edge geoscience teaching workshops have another set of workshops, aimed at helping geoscience departments figure out how to grow and stay vibrant. This is particularly challenging for the geosciences, because we're on both sides of environmental issues. Our majors might end up looking for oil and gas or for ore deposits, or might monitor and clean up pollution. Our departments are also the place where college students learn…
sheril | March 5, 2009In 1992, a small group of 12 and 13 year olds from the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO) raised money to attend the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. This is Severn Suzuki's address to delegates.
Nearly early two decades later, her words are as relevant as ever. Are we doing any better?
illconsidered | March 2, 2009Over 12,000 people are expected at a student climate conference this weekend and today over one thousand will gather today in Washington DC.
The focus of the DC protest is the local coal fired plant that powers capitol buildings heat and air conditioning. The target is symbolic, and congress has preemptively agreed to switch the plant to natural gas.
But the most compelling reason to pay attention to this:
Jim Hansen at NASA, [...] may be arrested today with us all
We can all expect more of this from the attack dogs, of course. (BTW, when I went to that link, the Google Ad prominently…
purepedantry | March 2, 2009One of the impediments to the adoption of a solar alternative to fossil fuels is that solar panels are relatively expensive to make. A big benchmark to making them competitive is to get their cost of production per Watt produced comparable to energy produced by fossil fuels.
A company in Arizona, First Solar, claims to have broken the $1/Watt barrier for producing solar panels using panels made from cadmium telluride (CdTe). I am definitely impressed, particularly because the company aims to read "grid parity" with fossil fuels, meaning that they will be cost-competitive even without…
illconsidered | March 2, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
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... March 1, 2009 Top Stories:PowerShift, OCO, Smith et al., Barker et al., Ocean Circulation, Economy, Blogostorm Melting Arctic, International Polar Year, Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Earth Hour, Monsoons, Aerosols, Grumbine, Brooks Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks,…
sb admin | February 27, 2009Bloggers have lots of thoughts on Obamaâs budget:
Merrill Goozner at GoozNews gives us the big picture
Maggie Mahar at Health Beat explores the challenges of the budgetâs approach to healthcare
Ezra Klein explains how it addresses the question of an individual mandate for health insurance
Sarah Rubenstein at WSJâs Health Blog highlights proposed spending on food safety, the healthcare workforce, cancer, and autism
Emily Douglas at RH Reality Check examines reproductive-health related items
Kate Sheppard at Gristmill gives us a rundown of the environmental provisions
Elsewhere:
Tom…
jstemwedel | February 26, 2009At the New York Times Room for Debate Blog, a bunch of commentators were asked to weigh in with easy-to-make changes Americans might adopt to reduce their environmental impact. One of those commentators, Juliet Schor, recommends eating less meat:
Rosamond Naylor, a researcher at Stanford, estimates that U.S. meat production is especially grain intensive, requiring 10 times the grain required to produce an equivalent amount of calories than grain, Livestock production, which now covers 30 percent of the world's non-ice surface area, is also highly damaging to soil and water resources.…
illconsidered | February 26, 2009Today's DemocracyNow! has a segment with Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other guest discussing worsening outlooks of future warming and increased lobbying efforts from the fossil fuel industry.
We speak to Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about his warning that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising more rapidly than expected in recent years. Field says the current trajectory of climate change is now much worse than the IPCC had…
nisbetmc | February 25, 2009
Last night in his State of the Union address, Obama asked Congress to send him a bill that caps carbon emissions, with the president framing the matter primarily in the context of economic recovery and energy innovation:
"But to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy. So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America. And to support…
illconsidered | February 23, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
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 22, 2009 Top Stories:Day of Mourning, Inferno & Aftermath, Inquiry, WaPo & Will Melting Arctic, Faulty Sensor, Arctic, Antarctica, Grumbine, Tipping Points, Open Access, MTobis, Economy, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Vulcan, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures,…
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2009This myth says a lot about the default views of western thinking, rather like the issue of teleology.
One of the constant and incessant complaints made against Darwin by theists in particular, is that he introduced chance and purposelessness into our worldview. I don't believe in such entities as worldviews, but leave that for now: did he introduce chance, and if so, does it imply a general lack of purpose in the world?
Here are some classic examples of that complaint. From Is Darwin Right? Or, The Origin of Man in 1877, William Denton wrote:
... it has been said that those who advocate…
clock | February 20, 2009
New 'Light' On Fascinating Rhythms Of Circadian Clock:
....Using DNA microarray techniques, Duffield and the other researchers identified an important gene called the "Inhibitor of DNA-binding 2" (Id2) and found that the gene is rhythmically expressed in various tissues including the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
"In the last few years, my laboratory has focused on a family of transcription factor genes expressed in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, liver and heart," Duffield said. "In conjunction with colleagues at Dartmouth Medical School and Norris Cotton Cancer Center, we produced a knockout mouse…
sciencewoman | February 19, 2009Dr. Ashanti Pyrtle is an assistant professor in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. She's a chemical oceanographer who studies the fate, transport and retention of radionuclides in aquatic ecosystems. Her PhD work investigated the marine distribution of radioisotopes from the Chernobyl accident, and she's currently doing work in Puerto Rico, off the Florida coast, and in the Savannah River. She's one of the first female African-American chemical oceanographers, and the first African-American to earn an oceanography Ph.D. from Texas A&M University.
Dr. Pyrtle…
sb admin | February 18, 2009Our regular readers may already be familiar with Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporters who investigate the stories behind chemicals used in consumer products. Their series âChemical Falloutâ includes articles on bisphenol A and flame retardants, and in-depth looks at how EPA and FDA are (or arenât) regulating the many chemicals we encounter on a daily basis.
Rust and Kissinger have just won a George Polk Award, which was established by Long Island University in honor of George W. Polk, a CBS correspondent killed while covering civil war in Greece in 1948.…
grrlscientist | February 18, 2009tags: lichens, symbiosis, nature, image of the day
Lichens.
Image: Biosparite, 2009 [larger view].
Lichens are a symbiotic association between a fungus (the mycobiont) with a photosynthetic partner (the photobiont or phycobiont), usually either a green alga or cyanobacterium. The morphology, physiology and biochemistry of lichens are very different to that of the isolated fungus and alga in culture. Lichens occur in some of the most extreme environments on Earth -- arctic tundra, hot deserts, rain forests, rocky coasts and toxic slag heaps. Lichens are widespread and long-lived; however,…
illconsidered | February 16, 2009I recently wrote about the tragic bushfires in Australia and how it seems to me that it is reasonable to ask if this would have happened without anthropogenic climate changes.
Real Climate has the details on this in their latest post: Bushfires and extreme heat in south-east Australia.
The post is by David Karoly, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He identifies four factors in the fire's ferocity - maximum temperatures, relative humidity, wind speeds and the ongoing drought - and discusses the possible role of climate change in each of them. For three of…