Environment
oracknows | June 12, 2007The Autism Omnibus is now officially under way, having begun with the first test case, that of Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Omnibus proceeding is the culmination of the legal cases brought to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program by nearly 5,000 families who "feel" that their children's autism was in fact caused by vaccines. Most, but not all, of the plaintiffs blame the mercury in the thimerosal in childhood vaccines, despite there being no good evidence to support such a link, so much so that both David Kirby, whose book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and…
grrlscientist | June 11, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
King penguin stretches on the Falkland Islands.
Image: BBC News [larger]
Birds in Science
If you've looked the articulated 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx fossils, you probably have noticed that they all have a weirdly similar pose; their heads are thrown over their backs, mouths open and tail curved upwards. Scientists have been puzzled for years by what caused this distinctive pose, but now two paleontologists propose an explanation: this characteristic posture was the result of agonized death throes triggered…
jjacquet | June 11, 2007This weekend, the New York Times Magazine focused on the income gap, which included Lauren Greenfield's latest documentary pieces on Kids and Money. They're nothing magical--just a straightforward look at L.A.'s teenagers, who represent the demographic with the largest spending power in the U.S.
Last night, I also watched the film "Bobby"--with a remarkable cast and less than remarkable storyline. The film succeeded only in moments that used clips from Robert F. Kennedy's real speeches. In one, RFK was in rural coal-mining town where he spoke about the economic hardships and the hungry…
petnoyer | June 7, 2007 I like to look at the bright side. Tell me 90% of sharks are gone from the ocean, and my mind will spin the problem like a puzzle until there's light at the end of the tunnel. If 90% of sharks are gone, then 10% of sharks are still swimming, right?
Take away 90% of the cats in my neighborhood and I guarantee the feline population (n = 100) will bounce back in two years, even with a low mean kitty litter (r1 =5) and high mortality (r2 =0.4). Why worry about ocean life? They live in 2/3 of the world. We live in just a little bit. Mako sharks have 12-14 pups. Whale sharks have hundreds. If we…
stoat | June 6, 2007The dirt, in this case, is that he was once fairly sensible. In particular, he edited two books published by D Reidel:Global effects of environmental pollution, 1970, which was the proceedings of a Symposium, organised by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Dallas, Texas, December, 1968. ISBN 90-2777-0151-2 if you're interested; shelf-mark 334.2.c.95.254 south front 3, if you're in the UL. And The Changing Global Environment, 1975 (£55, paperback! Whew, the hardcover has a RRP of £100, but amazon offers it for £101 and is proud of the fact. Odd). ISBN…
tlambert | June 5, 2007While the New York Times has some great reporting on science (eg Carl Zimmer and Andrew Revkin it also has some poor quality reporting (eg William Broad and Tina Rosenberg. John Tierney's latest column fits into the second category, with the usual ill-supported claims that Carson killed many many people.
Tierney quotes from a review of Silent Spring by Ira Baldwin:
[Baldwin] complained that "Silent Spring" was not a scientific balancing of costs and benefits but rather a "prosecuting attorney's impassioned plea for action."
But it is Tierney's column that lacks balance and is a prosecuting…
oracknows | June 5, 2007One of the common refrains you'll hear from alties about "conventional" medicine is that it's a business, that it's all about money. Never mind that, for instance, it's not uncommon for primary care doctors like family practice and pediatricians to net well under $100,000 a year and that many physicians are struggling to maintain their practices, squeezed between lower reimbursements and higher office expenses. Don't get me wrong; I'm not claiming that most doctors aren't making a comfortable living. Most are. Some even do quite well, particularly procedure-intensive specialties, although the…
scientificactivist | June 4, 2007A piece of global warming denialism was published today in the conservative Financial Post. Normally it wouldn't be that noteworthy, except that it was oddly included in Sigma Xi's daily "Science in the News" digest. The article attacks the idea that there is a scientific consensus (embodied by the IPCC) regarding global warming. In a sense, the author is correct. The science regarding global warming is ongoing, and there are myriad subtleties to work out. Of course, this is not what the author is referring to. Although the scientific community as a whole agrees that the earth is…
sb admin | June 4, 2007By David Michaels
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
-Barry Commoner
Tomorrow in New York City Barry Commonerâs friends are gathering to celebrate his 90th birthday. In 2007, Barryâs statement on ecology seems obvious if not trite, but that was not the case in 1966, when his landmark book Science and Survival was first published, or even in 1971, with the publication of his best-seller The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology.
Barryâs work has had a huge impact on several generations of scientists. Ten years ago, on the occasion of Barryâs…
oracknows | June 4, 2007It was a nondescript room, a board room much like board rooms found in corporate offices across the length and breadth of the U.S., or even around the world. There was the tasteful built-in wood bookshelves loaded with books and journals, for instance. Given the nature of this company, the journals included titles such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Pharmacology, and other scientific titles, and the textbooks included Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, among other weighty tomes. Lining the walls were pictures of men in either suits or lab coats, the…
stoat | June 2, 2007It is important that the 2007 G8 Summit is addressing the linked issues of energy security and climate change. These are defining issues of our time, and bring together the themes of growth and responsibility in a way that highlights our duties to future generations.
In 2005, the Academies issued a statement emphasising that climate change was occurring and could be attributed mostly to human activities, and calling for efforts to tackle both the causes of climate change and the inevitable consequences of past and unavoidable future emissions. Since then the IPCC has published the Working…
hrynyshyn | May 31, 2007The incredible words that spilled from my radio this morning were spoken by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. Asked on NPR's Morning Edition to respond to an attack on his agency's competence the previous day by Gregg Easterbrook, who wrote Wired magazine's "How NASA Screwed up," Griffin said some pretty strange things. Among the most bizarre was his response to host Steve Inskeep's question: "Do you think climate change is a problem?" Believe it or not this is what he said:
I have no doubt that ... a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem…
bcohen | May 31, 2007
NASCAR wreck* or parable for the future?
Just thinking out loud here, but you've got at least three problems with car racing as related to environmental health: gas usage in the races themselves, the use of leaded gasoline, and the hundreds of thousands of cars that drive to the races.
Doing a full calculation of the environmental cost of NASCAR (number of cars per race, number of miles per race, number of miles per practice run, number of races per week, number per season, number of fans driving to the races, number of beer cans thrown out the window) is beyond me.
So, just as a…
catdynamics | May 31, 2007NASA admin Mike Griffin noted that deciding the current climate is the best is a rather arrogant position.
Ok, there is a point there. But, we're making a choice whether we like it or not, so what should we choose?.
Not choosing is also a choice, and one no less arrogant.
The preindustrial mean atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was about 275 ppm, plus or minus maybe 5%, with rare intermittent spikes which drew down rapidly, probably due to volcanic injections followed by oceanic and biospheric re-equilibrium.
The current concentration just went over 375 ppm and is trending inexorably…
drorzel | May 31, 2007Steinn points to that rarest of rarities, a Gregg Easterbrook column on scientific matters (in Wired no less!) that isn't completely idiotic. In this case, he takes on the misplaced priorities of NASA.
Of course, this being Easterbrook, it can't be entirely right, and I think he's too harsh in assigning all the blame to NASA itself. For example, he writes:
NASA's to-do list neglects the two things that are actually of tangible value to the taxpayers who foot its bills -- research relevant to environmental policymaking and asteroid-strike protection. NASA has recently been canceling or…
drorzel | May 30, 2007Why the Sky Is Blue, by Götz Hoeppe is subtitled "Discovering the Color of Life," so I was a little puzzled when Princeton University Press asked me if I wanted a review copy. But, hey, free books!
This is ultimately a physics book, but it's really in the category that I think of as "Smart People Books," those books that take an exhaustive look at some phenomenon from a wide range of different perspectives. In this case, it's a survey of several thousand years of thought about the blue color of the sky.
This is an extremely comprehensive look, and I'd be surprised if there's any historical…
denialism | May 27, 2007Today would be her 100th, and it presents us an opportunity to do two things. First, we salute a major influence in the birth of environmentalism in the United States and the world. Second, we want to use the opportunity to defend Carson from the specious attacks on her by the purveyors of the DDT ban myth.
Here's the story. Carson wrote a seminal book on the environment called "Silent Spring" about the damage agricultural use of DDT was having on wildlife - especially birds. As a result DDT was widely banned for agricultural use. But beyond the harm to wildlife, the other reason to ban…
tlambert | May 27, 2007
Today is the 100th anniversary of Rachel Carson's birth. Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the 20th century:
Silent Spring, serialized in the New Yorker in June 1962, gored corporate oxen all over the country. Even before publication, Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical woman" unqualified to write such a book. A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid - indeed, the whole chemical industry - duly supported by the Agriculture…
cmooney | May 25, 2007What are the appropriate roles of the defense and intelligence establishments in understanding and responding to global warming? In a recent op-ed, my colleague Mark Drapeau and I reviewed a study by the CNA Corp. that highlighted the natural security threats posed by unchecked climate change. The CNA report observed (rightly, in our view) that the predicted impacts of climate change - among them, critical shortages of food and water in some regions - could act as "threat multipliers" in some of the least developed, but strategically important parts of the world. In light of this, we argued…
cortex | May 24, 2007We are surprisingly bad at it:
Although last year was quieter than anticipated and the storms of 2005 caused the Weather Service to raise its prediction, the number of tropical storms predicted in May was within the expected range in 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2004.
The forecast was low in 2001 and 2003.
Got that? Since 1999, the Weather Service was relatively accurate only half the time (1999, 2000, 2002, 2004). It was inaccurate in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006. Maybe we should 1) rethink the models or 2) not put too much stock in these meteorological predictions.
This study may help explain why our…