Environment
illconsidered | August 11, 2008 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) August 10, 2008 Top Stories:UK Warming, Tropical Rainfall, Forest CO2, Melting Arctic, Arctic Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering Journals, Misc. Science,…
sb admin | August 8, 2008The International AIDS Conference took place this week in Mexico City, and bloggers have plenty to say about it:
RH Reality Check provides extensive, in-depth coverage from multiple bloggers.
Marilyn Chase at WSJâs Health blog summarizes some expert attendeesâ thoughts on the future of AIDS research, the role of AIDS in healthcare system planning, reshaping the international AIDS vaccine strategy, and using AIDS drugs to curb HIV transmission.
At Global Health Policy, Ruth Levine explains why PEPFAR needs more evaluation, and Mead Over considers how the global approach to AIDS has changed…
tfk | August 4, 2008Digging for something else, I encounter Kathryn Jean Lopez arguing with an emailer about curriculum. The emailer objects to an earlier comment, where Ms. Lopez allowed that she's "the Discovery Institute's patsy" at NRO, but "I don't want public schools reading Cardinal Shönborn's tract on creation and evolution." In response, K-Lo:
if Baton Rouge wants freshman reading his book as part of some class or activity, that would be ridiculous to consider unconstitutional.
Ridiculous? The book is Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution and a Rational Faith, a work of Catholic theology. In what…
illconsidered | August 4, 2008 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) August 3, 2008 Top Stories:Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Abrupt Climate Change, Paleoclimate, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Tornadoes, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals, Misc.…
cmooney | August 1, 2008I didn't realize I was going to have the cover story of the latest New Scientist with this in-depth article I did about the climate-tornado relationship. Essentially, the bottom line is this--it's even more complicated than the climate-hurricane relationship. And so for all those politicians, environmentalists, and bloggers out there who want to use tornadoes (and especially this extremely active U.S. tornado year) as an excuse to talk about global warming...well, the science provides a slender foundation for them indeed.
You can't read the full New Scientist article online, but let me lay…
illconsidered | July 31, 2008Via the contest notification I posted about here, I just watched a very effective video they say was conceived, written and directed by a 10 year old boy. Watch it below, it is about a minute:
"Save It" Global Warming message by 10 yr old from 1skycampaign on Vimeo.
Not to be critical at all, especially not of a 10 year old who has not contributed to the framing of environmental debates yet, but it does bring up something that has been bugging me for a while. The whole "Save the Planet" meme is a bit misguided and I think presents a weak point for activists in the media circus that…
scientificactivist | July 30, 2008Planetary geology is a fascinating area--particularly when it pertains to the search for extraterrestrial life. I wrote about it once during my brief stint as a student science writer, but it's not an area that I've really covered on my blog. However, a former colleague of mine from Oxford, Bethany Ehlmann, was recently involved with a couple of papers on geological formations left by ancient Martian water, so I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity. Ehlmann is currently a PhD student in the geological sciences at Brown University and part of the CRISM (Compact Reconnaissance…
tlambert | July 29, 2008Undaunted by the dismal failure of its war on science, the Australian presses on, with a piece by Dennis Jensen. Oops, that's not the link, this is the link:
It has been an article of faith for many years that humans are gradually destroying the environment, and are specifically responsible for global warming via man-made carbon emissions. On Monday, The Australian published results of a poll showing 96 per cent of the population believes climate change is wholly or partly caused by humans.
Actually it was 80%. It doesn't inspire confidence when the Australian can't even report their own…
illconsidered | July 28, 2008 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) July 27, 2008 Top Stories: Wetlands, Green New Deal, WCI ETS, Gore, Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Temperatures, Carbon Cycle, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science, Carbon…
j7uy5 | July 28, 2008Sustainability is a modern-day buzzword. It is used so much
that it is at risk of suffering from a dilution of meaning.
But is still is an important concept.
In August 2004, President Bush
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040809-9.html">boasted
that home ownership in the USA was at an all-time high (69.2 percent).
It was important for him to point this out, just before the
election. The reason is that he was advocating trickle-down
economics. He needed to show that concentrating wealth in the
hands of a few could lead to improved standards of living for…
clock | July 25, 2008I keep getting asked: why should I participate in blog carnivals?
The Wikipedia page about blog carnivals is not really accurate (it includes things that are not carnivals), and also suffers from overzealous, obsessive-compulsive, self-important administrators (who have probably never seen a carnival, never submitted a post to one, never hosted one, never started or managed one, ah well...).
I have written a lot about carnivals in the past (see especially this, this, this, this and this) so you should check those out for more "meaty" treatments, though some of the stuff in there is a little…
oracknows | July 25, 2008I'm very puzzled.
Now, I know that my being puzzled isn't particularly unusual. I'm frequently puzzled. I can't figure out how, for example, anyone with the slightest bit of reasoning ability can do anything other than laugh when informed what homeopathy is and how it supposedly "works." I can't figure out why American Idol or Survivor is so amazingly popular.
And I can't figure out why the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center released this warning about cell phones:
PITTSBURGH July 24, 2008, 07:13 am ET · The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to…
clock | July 23, 2008Commercial Bees Spreading Disease To Wild Pollinating Bees:
Bees provide crucial pollination service to numerous crops and up to a third of the human diet comes from plants pollinated by insects. However, pollinating bees are suffering widespread declines in North America and scientists warn that this could have serious implications for agriculture and food supply. While the cause of these declines has largely been a mystery, new research reveals an alarming spread of disease from commercial bees to wild pollinators.
Unique Fossil Discovery Shows Antarctic Was Once Much Warmer:
A new fossil…
worldsfair | July 22, 2008
I recently had a chance to catch the movie WALL-E, and I must say, it's very good. Still, I couldn't quite shake the irony of a show with (I thought) a fairly implicit environmental message that also happens to have logos and pics emblazon on all sorts of wasteful possibly disposable ware (like on toys, presumably various product tie-ins, fast food?, etc).
In fact, there's an interesting bit on this very thought courtesy of an interview with one of the movie's directors (at the Globe and Mail - although note: I actually found this at a salon.com's review).
G&M: This film has a big…
tlambert | July 21, 2008(Via William Connolley). Ofcom, the UK media regulator has ruled that The Great Global Warming Swindle was unfair to the IPCC, David King, and Carl Wunsch and breached a requirement of impartiality about global warming policy. The full report is here. The complaint is a thorough demolition of all the falsehoods in the Swindle, and you can read it here. Also of interest is Dave Rado's story of how he came to put the complaint together -- it all started as a comment over at Stoat. [Insert some blog triumphalism here.]
A few quick comments. To get an idea of how deceitful Channel 4 and Martin…
thescian | July 21, 2008Last Saturday, we went to see WALL-E with our 4 year old niece. It's the story of an ordinary cleaning robot (WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) that, well, keeps cleaning a city on earth long after humans have left earth. Humans left earth because they had turned it into a garbage heap. They have all run away from earth when it got too messy on a spaceship operated by a giant business corporation - the same corporation that ran earth aground. The escapees hope that once earth fixes herself, humans can all come back and re-colonize. Since many generations pass on…
illconsidered | July 21, 2008 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) July 20, 2008 Top Stories:Australian CPR, Gore's Moon Shot, Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, OECD, Earth Hour, Methane, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals…
clock | July 15, 2008Welcome to the Firstest, Biggestest, Inaugural Edition of The Giant's Shoulders, the carnival of History Of Science! The carnival grew out of the Classic Papers Challenge by gg of Skulls in the Stars. That was so much fun, several of us thought this is something that should be done regularly, perhaps every month. So, gg and I got together and got this thing started.
I know some of the future hosts will do this very creatively (and yes, you can volunteer to host, though you will have to wait six months for your turn!), and I envisioned doing this in a form of, perhaps, a vigorous debate at…
cmcclain | July 15, 2008Admittedly, before reading the actual paper I was a little uneasy about the latest paper in PNAS by Goldberg et al. The paper describes a deep-sea basalt formation that would allow for storage of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. The area is the Juan de Fuca plate of the Oregon and Washington Coasts. The authors suggest that the area
provides unique and significant advantages over other potential geological storage options, including (i) vast reservoir capacities sufficient to accommodate centuries-long U.S. production of fossil fuel CO2 at locations within pipeline distances to populated…
cortex | July 15, 2008What you need is a distraction from the drip of bad economic news. (Just remember: the stock market is a random walk that, over the long-term, has an upward slope. Besides, investors who do nothing to their stock portfolio - they don't buy or sell a single stock - outperform the average "active" investor by nearly 10 percent.) So, instead of trying to get your broker on the phone, browse through these exquisite satellite photos, courtesy of NASA:
via kottke