Environment
oracknows | July 14, 2007The last couple of days have been a bit surreal, haven't they?
After all, how often does this box of blinking lights get into a blog altercation with a Libertarian comic over global warming? Actually, it was a commentary on bad reasoning, but global warming happened to be the topic. In the aftermath of my referring you, my readers, to comic Tim Slagle's blog piece "rebutting" me and to another piece by him in which he used some--shall we say?--creative chemistry and thermodynamics to support a political argument, I'm not sure if I should feel guilty or not. This guilt exists mainly because I…
sb admin | July 13, 2007Bloggers have been focusing much of their attention on the federal government this week. The testimony of former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona about White House pressure to remain silent on stem cell research, sex education, and other topics spurred lots of reactions: Revere at Effect Measure and Cervantes at Stayinâ Alive criticized Carmona for failing to speak out during his four-year tenure, while Roy M Poses MD at Health Care Renewal, Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas, and Grrl Scientist at Living the Scientific Life direct their comments to at the Bush administration trend…
denialism | July 13, 2007Does Tim Slagle strike anyone else as being a crank?
I feel like we should lend Orac a hand. He's had to deal with the anti-global warming denialism from this guy all on his own. Let's do a take down of this wise man's approach to global warming science.
Let's start with this genius article " Every Breath You Take"
We have the exaggeration of GW alarmism:
Despite the anticlimactic leaks that have been circulated for the past month or so, I'd like to wager a guess: The Earth is going to warm, the oceans are going to rise, and humanity will be destroyed as plague famine and pestilence…
clock | July 11, 2007
This is the third in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. This post is interesting due to its analysis of history and sociology of the discipline, as well as a look at the changing nature of science. You can check out the rest of Clock Tutorials here.
It appears that every scientific discipline has its own defining moment, an event that is touted later as the moment of "birth" of the field. This can be a publication of a paper (think of Watson and Crick) or a book ("Origin of Species" anyone?). In the case of Chronobiology, it was the 1960…
sheril | July 8, 2007
Map of South Africa from Safarinow.com.
It's before 6:00 am in the field with temperatures around -9C. Winter in South Africa. A thick sheet of frost covers the countryside. Our small caravan includes an ecologist, botanist, naturalist, biologist, herpetologist, theologian, and four of Stuart's current and former students. And me of course. Collectively we come from Ireland, Greece, South Africa, Great Britain and the US of A. It's a spectacular mix for good conversation and the opportunity to compare conservation practices in different parts of the world.
After a week at the '07 Society…
bcohen | July 3, 2007This post was written by Wyatt Galusky.*
If you love the earth too, buy, buy, buy.
So, I suppose it had to happen at some point - the Sam's Club model of environmentalism. Buy More (consumables imprinted with the imprimatur of the Earth). Save More (of aforementioned planet). Alex Williams reports in Sunday's New York Times on the burgeoning commoditization of the environmental movement, and the various views people have taken on this process. This on the heels of the two biggest big box stores - Wal-mart and Home Depot - taking the "green" plunge.
As a committed environmentalist, I have…
thusspakezuska | June 27, 2007I recently got a notice from the AWIS - Philadelphia chapter about a film in production here in Philadelphia, called "Future Weather". The filmmakers, independent and mostly women, wrote to AWIS as follows:
We...are dedicated to bringing the stories of real women and girls to the big (and small) screen, one little story, one strong-willed girl at a time. We hope you will join us... I'm sure you are aware of the lack of positive female role models in the media, especially those with any interest, much less commitment, to science. We are hoping to change that.
Future Weather is the story of…
sb admin | June 27, 2007In the Chinese provinces of Henan and Shanxi, police have raided 7,500 brick kilns and rescued hundreds of slave laborers, many of them children. Victims were kidnapped or entrapped with offers of work and then sold into slavery; officials report arresting 250 people for the crimes. Jane Macartney of The Times describes the horrific conditions at the kilns:
The children, some as young as 8, worked in brick kilns for 16 hours a day with meagre food rations. They were guarded by fierce dogs and thugs who beat their prisoners at will. [...]
They lived in squalid conditions with many adult…
sb admin | June 26, 2007By Liz Borkowski
When EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson announced last week that the agency would lower the limit for ground-level ozone pollution, he acknowledged that the current standard of 0.08 parts per million was insufficiently protective of public health. This was an appropriate rationale for changing the limit, since the EPA is required to establish air quality standards exclusively on the basis of health consideration. The proposal of 0.07 â 0.075 ppm isnât as low as the 0.06 â 0.07 ppm that the agencyâs Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee recommended (PDF), but at least itâs…
ianhart | June 25, 2007In an interview with E&ETV last week (subscription required) White House Council on Environmental Quality Chairman Jim Connaughton managed to get through the entire interview without touting the much-used but much-cherry-picked claim that the US has been beating Europe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions
That's not to say that there wasn't some fuzzy math-talk and a bit of revisionist history.
Monica Trauzzi: You mentioned the near-term goals, what steps will the U.S. take to limit emissions in the next 10 to 20 years?
Jim Connaughton: Well, in the next 10 to 20 years we are currently…
oracknows | June 22, 2007In my rigid, Western, scientific way of thinking, things generally have a beginning, a middle, and and end, the arrow of time marching relentlessly onward. However, it occurs to me that this is the very last edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo of its first year. Last June, when I started this, almost on a whim, I had no way of knowing how it would take on such a life of its own. Indeed, I fear that all the woo to which I subject myself on a weekly basis may be having an effect. I'm ceasing to see life as a straight line any more; such rigid thinking no longer suits me.
Instead, like the more…
pharyngula | June 21, 2007Another major paper has a story on Conservapædia. I'm sure Andy is proud of his accomplishment — the truly stupid would be proud of promoting stupidity.
Schlafly, 46, started small, urging his students to post brief -- often one-sentence -- entries on ancient history. He went live with the site in November. In the last six months, it's grown explosively, offering what Schlafly describes as fair, scholarly articles. Many have a distinctly religious-right perspective.
There's some complaining at the end—there's a rival wiki, RationalWiki, that comments on Conservapædia silliness, and some of…
bcohen | June 19, 2007A timely add-on to our recent Science and Society discussion with historian Michael Egan about his book on Barry Commoner, Science, and Environmentalism (Part I, Part II) is an article in today's New York Times about and with Commoner. And it refers to Egan's book. So ha, we didn't make all that up.
A quote:
Q. There's been some second-guessing about using nuclear power instead of fossil fuels. Do you agree?
A. No. This is a good example of shortsighted environmentalism. It superficially makes sense to say, "Here's a way of producing energy without carbon dioxide." But every activity that…
stoat | June 18, 2007Not quite "we're all going to die" again, but close. But this time by James Hansen, and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society.There is an the Indescribably-over-hypeded write up of it. Featuring:
nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change. Those are not the words of eco-warriors but the considered opinion of a group of eminent scientists writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Diversion: the article has a side bar pointing to Earth in peril: Climate change brings early spring in the Arctic which is a prime…
hrynyshyn | June 18, 2007Business Week recently published an odd little essay by Greg Blonder, someone I've not come across before. He posits that painting your roof white will do more to offset anthropogenic climate change than installing photovoltaic panels. Seriously. The science appears to be pretty sound, but it has the whiff of a thought experiment rather than a practical idea.
Here's the essential section:
...imagine a solar photovoltaic panel. Unlike burning coal or oil, the production of photovoltaic electricity does not add to the stock of global warming gases permeating our atmosphere. The panel's surface…
clock | June 16, 2007Fruit Bats Are Not 'Blind As A Bat':
The retinas of most mammals contain two types of photoreceptor cells, the cones for daylight vision and colour vision, and the more sensitive rods for night vision. Nocturnal bats were traditionally believed to possess only rods. Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and at The Field Museum for Natural History in Chicago have discovered that nocturnal fruit bats (flying foxes) possess cones in addition to rods. Hence, fruit bats are also equipped for daylight vision. The researchers conclude that cone photoreceptors…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate change, ornithology, birds, avian biodiversity, habitat destruction
White-crested hornbill, Tropicranus albocristatus, also confined to African rainforests, may see more than half of its geographic range lost by 2100.
Image: Walter Jetz, UCSD. [larger]
Thanks to the combined effects of global warming and habitat destruction, bird populations will experience significant declines and extinctions over the next century, according to a study conducted by ecologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University. This…
clock | June 14, 2007An interesting paper came out last week in PLoS-Biology: Projected Impacts of Climate and Land-Use Change on the Global Diversity of Birds by Walter Jetz, David S. Wilcove and Andrew P. Dobson. You can view some bloggers' responses on The DC Birding Blog, Field Of View and Living the Scientific Life and media coverage here, here and here.
The authors of the paper collected information about all known ranges of land birds and made a mathematical model for predicting how those ranges will be affected by global warming on one hand and the land-use on the other by years 2050 and 2100. They use…
stoat | June 14, 2007Vaclav Klaus says We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough - irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent - for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now. and for good measure goes on to quote the egregious Crichton. He's said it before, of course.
[Thanks (?) to Lubos for pointing this post out]
He goes on As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the…
tlambert | June 12, 2007I think the employment contract at the CEI must include a clause requiring their hacks to write an article accusing Rachel Carson of killing millions of people. So far we've seen John Berlau, Angela Logomasni, Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth, and Iain Murray.
The latest effort is from the CEI's Eli Lehrer (who we last encountered cherry-picking with John Lott). Lehrer seems to have based his piece on stuff from the rest of the CEI crew because their factoids (which were wrong or misleading in the first place) have gotten somewhat garbled, just like in the telephone game.
Lehrer opens with…