Environment
gregladen | January 14, 2009The IPCC report is out, "An Inconvenient Truth" has been honored by the academy, a sea change is happening in the way that climate change news is being reported, and you can bet the Right Wing and the Ree-pubs are as we speak working up new Talking Points and Spins to deflate the urgency of the issue. 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 the Ree-pub Party Platform. This is a truth as stable and reliable…
illconsidered | January 12, 2009 Another Week of Climate Disruption News
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) January 11, 2009 Top Stories:Coal Sludge, Tim DeChristopher Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Grumbine, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals, Desertification, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts…
tlambert | January 12, 2009John Quiggin suggests some reasons why the anti-science position on climate change has become an orthodoxy on the Right:
There are many explanations, perhaps so many that the outcome was overdetermined - powerful economic interests such as ExxonMobil, the hubris associated with victories in economic policy and in the Cold War, tribal dislike of environmentalists which translated easily to scientists as a group, and the immunisation to unwelcome evidence associated with the construction of the rightwing intellectual apparatus of thinktanks, talk-radio, Fox News, blogs and so on.
And…
sb admin | January 9, 2009There's a lot of news about food that might spoil your appetite:
Tom Philpott at Gristmill is "having a hard time accepting that Obama has picked an ethanol-loving GMO enthusiast as his USDA chief."Â
Revere at Effect Measure reports that the country is experiencing a salmonella outbreak that's sickened 400 people, but the CDC and FDA haven't publicly identified the source.
Andrew Schneider at Secret Ingredients draws our attention to a study that found vegetables grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure absorbed antibiotics from the animal waste.
Ezra Klein points out that high…
clock | January 9, 2009Ancient Odor-detecting Mechanism In Insects Discovered:
In work to be published in the January 9 issue of Cell, the team reports the discovery of a new family of receptors in the fly nose, a finding that not only fills in a missing piece in the organizational logic of the insect olfactory system but also unearths one of the most ancient mechanisms that organisms have evolved to smell.
Evolution In Action: Our Antibodies Take 'Evolutionary Leaps' To Fight Microbes:
With cold and flu season in full swing, the fact that viruses and bacteria rapidly evolve is apparent with every sneeze, sniffle,…
sb admin | January 7, 2009What do the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, the Migrant Clinicians Network, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, and 65 other organizations have in common? They've all endorsed the "Protecting Workers on the Job Agenda", a collaborative product of the American Public Health Association's Occupational Health and Safety Section and the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. The platform, released just in time for Labor Secretary-Designee Hilda Solis' confirmation hearing on Friday, outlines seven goals for improving our nationâs programs for preventing work-…
clock | January 6, 2009There are 18 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As 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, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the day - so many today! - but you go and look for your own favourites:
Can Playing the Computer Game "Tetris" Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science:
Flashbacks are the hallmark symptom of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD…
sb admin | January 6, 2009by Carole Bass (posted with permission from the On-Line Journalism Project, New Haven (CT) Independent)
Black lung disease used to be nearly as common as dirty fingernails among American coal miners. Roughly a third of them got the fatal illness. Starting in the 1970s, a federal law slashed that rate by 90 percent. But now it's back.
When Anita Wolfe and her co-workers discovered that the rate of black lung has doubled among U.S. coal miners in recent years, she took it personally. The daughter and granddaughter of West Virginia miners, Wolfe watched her father die of black lung disease…
illconsidered | January 5, 2009 Another Week of Climate Disruption News
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) January 4, 2009 Top Stories:Tennessee Coal Sludge, YD Impact Theory, Hansen Letter, Year End Roundups Melting Arctic, Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Contrails, Particulates, Abrupt Climate Change Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks, Glaciers, Sea Levels Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather,…
tlambert | January 2, 2009The Australian has fallen well behind in the race for the 2009 ward for most consistently wrong media outlet. They've published a piece by Mike Steketee that debunks common denialist arguments. He points out the difference between long and short term trends, that the Oregon petition is very light on climatologists and that climate models have got it right:
Neville Nicholls, of Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science, has been studying climate change and climate variability for 35 years and his advice has been drawn on by the IPCC. He says it is basic laboratory…
revere | January 1, 2009One tradition of News Years Day in the US is the college football bowl game. When I was young I always watched the Rose Bowl (my state university was in the Big Ten league), but I have gotten away from it and don't expect to be glued to the TV today. But there will still be something glued to the football field, at least metaphorically: the dirty leavings of "Clean Coal." An American college football field is 120 yards long and 53.34 yards wide. That's 6400 square yards. Last week a retention pond containing coal ash from a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) coal fired power plant let loose 5.4…
edyong | December 30, 2008Phew. Another year almost over and it's been a really good one. This time last year, I was still blogging at Wordpress, and it was only in late February that I beamed aboard the mighty ScienceBlog mothership. It's been a great experience and all in all, I've managed to rack up about 190 posts on new research (excluding reposts and random stuff), over 1,500 comments and over 400,000 page views in a year. Elsewhere, I published a book based on this blog, I wrote about 2% of another book called "Defining Moments in Science", and I wrote three features and several news pieces for New Scientist.…
purepedantry | December 29, 2008People are doing biology in their kitchen now, or in rented labs with cheaper equipment:
In Cambridge, Mass., a group called DIYbio is setting up a community lab where the public could use chemicals and lab equipment, including a used freezer, scored for free off Craigslist, that drops to 80 degrees below zero, the temperature needed to keep many kinds of bacteria alive.
Co-founder Mackenzie Cowell, a 24-year-old who majored in biology in college, said amateurs will probably pursue serious work such as new vaccines and super-efficient biofuels, but they might also try, for example, to use…
illconsidered | December 29, 2008 Another Week of Climate Disruption News
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 Global Warming News Sipping from the internet firehose... December 28, 2008 Top Stories:Tennessee Coal Sludge, USCCSP on ACC, EEStor Patent, Economics, 2008-In-Review Melting Arctic, Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Civilization Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Glaciers, Sea Levels Impacts, Forests, Climate Refugees,…
sheril | December 29, 2008Sure I'm concerned over Bush's last stand against the environment, but this piece from the Environmental News Network is, simply well... you decide:
In a few hundred thousand years, after all weather
effects of 21st century climate change have disappeared from the earth's surface, after our quietly smoldering nuclear waste has been extinguished, two destructive impacts traceable to George Bush's policies will yet remain.
The first is extinctions. Species that have died out, including the subset resulting from Bush's environmental policies, will forever deprive our evolving biosphere of their…
edyong | December 24, 2008 Since the first living things appeared on the planet, the biggest among them have become increasingly bigger. Over 3.6 billion years of evolution, life's maximum size has shot up by 16 orders of magnitude - about 10 quadrillion times - from single cells to the massive sequoias of today (below right). And no matter what people say, size does matter.
The largest of creatures, from the blue whale to the sauropod dinosaurs, are powerful captors of the imagination, but they are big draws for scientists too. Jonathan Payne from Stamford University is one of them, and together with a large team,…
cortex | December 24, 2008Oliver Morton has a lyrical and thoughtful op-ed today in the Times, in which he re-interprets the famous images of Planet earth seen from space:
They came for the Moon, and for the first three orbits it was to the Moon that the astronauts of Apollo 8 devoted their attention. Only on their fourth time round did they lift their eyes to see their home world, rising silently above the Moon's desert plains, blue and white and beautiful. When, later on that Christmas Eve in 1968, they read the opening lines of Genesis on live television, they did it with a sense of the heavens and the Earth, of…
clock | December 24, 2008Dark Chocolate Is More Filling Than Milk Chocolate And Lessens Cravings:
New research at the Faculty of Life Sciences (LIFE) at the University of Copenhagen - shows that dark chocolate is far more filling than milk chocolate, lessening our craving for sweet, salty and fatty foods. In other words, eating dark chocolate may be an efficient way to keep your weight down over the holidays.
A Walk In The Park A Day Keeps Mental Fatigue Away:
If you spend the majority of your time among stores, restaurants and skyscrapers, it may be time to trade in your stilettos for some hiking boots. A new study…
sb admin | December 23, 2008Updated below ( 12/24/2008 )
Here are just some of the reports coming out of Harriman, Tennessee:
"Millions of yards of ashy sludge broke through a dike at the TVA's (Tennessee Valley Authority) Kingston coal-fired plant, covering hundreds of acres, knocking one home off its foundation, and putting environmentalists on edge about toxic chemicals that might be seeping into the ground and flowing downriver. One neighborhing family said the disaster was no surprise because they have watched the 1960's era ash pond's mini-blowouts off-and-on for years."  [The Tennesseean, here]
Jim Bruggers…
hrynyshyn | December 23, 2008If the "Reality" anti-coal advertising campaign represents the best American environmentalists can come up with, Matt Nisbet is right. Communicating the facts about global warming to the masses is simply beyond our ability. Fortunately, there are others who understand how to craft a message that might actually work. As usual, the Brits demonstrate a superior ability on this score. Check out this ad from Europe's Big Ask campaign:
One can quibble about the exaggerated and inconsistent reference to how much the Earth has warmed so far ;;;; the ad's narrator first talks about "almost" a degree…