Environment
sb admin | March 30, 2007U.S. environmental regulations were on several bloggersâ minds this week. Frank OâDonnell at Blog for Clean Air explains that EPAâs new rule on particle soot is terrible, while Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority warns that Bush administration is about to release a set of administrative rules changes that would completely eviscerate the Endangered Species Act. At least The Olive Ridley Crawl has some good news: the National Marine Fisheries Service is proposing stronger regulations to reduce sea turtle bycatch.
Infectious diseases were a hot topic, too. Tara C. Smith at Aetiology…
bcohen | March 29, 2007Grist has been posting many excellent links, discussions, and interviews about Mountaintop Coal Removal in the Appalachians. It's been a while since we added to our MTR posts (one, two, three, four), so allow me to do so now.
photo source: Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
First is an article in Blue Ridge Country by Peter Slavin.
Slavin reports on the anti-MTR movement over the past year, with successes in Tennessee, large protests in West Virginia, with sit-ins, congressional action, and with new popular press articles ("Features have appeared in 2006 in Orion (January), National…
tqa | March 28, 2007
According to widespread media (and blog) reports, the Bush administration is about to release a set of administrative rules changes that would "gut" the Endangered Species Act. Actually, "gut" really isn't descriptive enough to do justice to what they are getting geared up for. They are getting set to completely eviscerate the act. Basically, their plan is to take the thing, slit it up the middle, dump all the internal organs onto the ground and jump up and down on them. Then they're going to stuff the carcass of the Endangered Species Act with straw, and drag it around with them in a…
grrlscientist | March 22, 2007
A new species of dinosaurs have been discovered in a burrow in Montana
and has been given the scientific name Oryctodromeus cubicularis,
meaning "digging runner of the lair". The adult length is about 2 meters.
The juvenile is in grey.
Fossils from a family of the first known burrowing dinosaurs have been found by scientists in Montana. The fossils are from an adult and two juveniles. The bones are 95 million years old and were unearthed in a chamber at the end of a 2.1 meter long tunnel that was filled with sediment. The researchers say their discovery is the first definitive evidence…
voltagegate | March 22, 2007The other day I made a passing comment about the issue of using celebrity as a face for conservation:
I have a few tough questions for the organizers of the event, mostly about the questionable choice of using celebrity to promote and give a face to conservation. It has worked for promoting purely humanitarian causes in the past, but is this movement different and should it be addressed in a different manner? Furthermore, where are the young Goodalls and Attenboroughs of the world? Surely they would be glad to step up and reach out to people instead of a polarizing, disconnected celebrity.…
scientificactivist | March 21, 2007Last week I mentioned an upcoming hearing by the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to "Examine Allegations of Political Interference with Government Climate Change Science." The hearing happened on Monday (19 March), and it even got a bit of media coverage in the process.
The testimony of the witnesses can be downloaded here. I reported last week that a video would also be available on the site (as this is what I was told by the person who informed me about the hearing), and looking at past hearings, this seems to be the standard policy. Since no video has yet been…
hrynyshyn | March 20, 2007You've got to hand it to John Edwards. He's always trying to do the right thing, or at least appear to be doing the right thing. Last week he announced that his campaign for the White House will be a sustainable one, through the use of the latest fad in environmental circles: carbon offsets. It's a nice idea in theory -- facing the reality that one can't tour the country without producing significant amounts of greehouse gases, he's going to pay someone else to compensate for his emissions. But I've never been too enamored of the idea, and last week one of my favorite science journalists,…
sb admin | March 16, 2007William Broadâs NYT piece on Al Goreâs global warming science has been causing a stir in the blogosphere this week (original article here). Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate write, âIt is rather ironic then that William Broad's latest piece on Al Gore plays just as loose with [the facts] as he accuses Gore of doing;â David Roberts at Gristmill says itâs âthe worst, sloppiest, most dishonest piece of reporting I've ever seen in the NYT.â Tim Lambert at Deltoid faults Broad for failing to check out claims made by climate change skeptics and for misrepresenting scientific reports.…
nisbetmc | March 14, 2007My quick summary reaction to Bill Broad's provocative NY Times article surveying a few scientists and social scientists' opinions on Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth:
1) Just like in politics generally, science-related blogs can strongly shape the news agenda and framing of an issue, and Broad's article is a leading example. Roger Pielke and Kevin Vranes at UColorado's Prometheus site have been doing a great job in adding their expertise and views to the climate change discussion over the past few years. In the process, they have emerged as a valuable source for journalists trying to make…
pharyngula | March 12, 2007The chat with Lynn Margulis is over; thanks to Dr Margulis and all who participated. I've included the transcript below the fold.
[17:08] * Margulis (~pjirc@ZiRC-60364A8F.hsd1.ma.comcast.net) has joined #pharyngula
[17:08] <TimMc> oh, right
[17:08] <TimMc> ah, there we go
[17:08] * Cairnarvon sets mode: +v Margulis
[17:08] * TimMc taps mike "Is this thing on?"
[17:09] <Margulis> Yes
[17:09] <Margulis> So?
[17:09] <TimMc> Well, the gang's all here.
[17:10] <Margulis> hat now in my first chat room disexperience
[17:10] <Margulis> What now?
[17:10] <…
oracknows | March 12, 2007It figures.
After my having written repeated debunkings of various physicians who are creationists (mostly of the "intelligent design" variety), in retrospect I should have seen this one coming. I should have seen that the Discovery Institute, eager to use anyone they can find whom they can represent to the public as having scientific credentials (never mind whether those credentials have anything to do with evolutionary biology) and thus dupe the public into seeing them as having authority when they start laying down ignorant brain farts about how they "doubt Darwinism," would settle on…
pharyngula | March 10, 2007Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, now thinks that high-tech, fetal research is OK — if it leads to a cure for homosexuality.
If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.
Note that this is not your old-school, naive eugenics he is proposing; developing a prenatal test for…
clock | March 1, 2007City Ants Take The Heat:
While Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, has generated greater awareness of global warming, most people remain unaware of the more rapid warming that has occurred within major cities. In fact, large cities can be more than 10 degrees hotter than their surroundings. These metropolitan hot spots, which scientists refer to as urban heat islands, can stress the animals and plants that make their home alongside humans. Until recently, biologists had focused so much on the effects of global climate change, that they had overlooked the effects of urban warming.
More…
hrynyshyn | February 28, 2007Jerry Fallwell. Can anyone compare to his particular brand of idiocy? He more than anyone else is the reason I blog. From the AP
Falwell says global warming is "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus" from evangelism to environmentalism. Falwell told his Baptist congregation in Lynchburg yesterday that "the jury is still out" on whether humans are causing -- or could stop -- global warming.
But he said some "naive Christian leaders" are being "duped" by arguments like those presented in former Vice President Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Falwell says the…
grrlscientist | February 26, 2007
European Robin, Erithacus rubecula, grabbing a mealworm.
Birds in Science
Scrub jays can plan on saving tasty treats for the future and do it in a way that shows they are truly planning ahead, British researchers reported. They set up a careful experiment to allow the birds to cache food in a certain way if they were indeed planning, and found the birds were up to the task. Their study, published in the journal Nature, adds to several others that show animals such as great apes and certain birds can plan ahead in much the same way as people do. "Knowledge of and planning for the future is…
cmcclain | February 25, 2007 Unfortunately, this weekend I came across the complete stupidity of Paul Hollrah and Phillip Brennan.
In their own words...
...the "inconvenient truth" is that Gore's hypothesis of global warming is exactly wrong... upside down...In the January 15 edition of NewsMax, writer Phil Brennan provides an excellent primer on global cooling that almost anyone - with the possible exception of liberals, Democrats, and radical environmentalists - can understand...It is not the impact of industrialization and fossil fuel combustion that is causing the seas and oceans to warm. To the contrary, it is…
tlambert | February 22, 2007The Wall Street Journal editorial board is infamous for their reckless disregard of the evidence for global warming. They've just published an op-ed by Pete Du Pont which manages to get pretty well every single factual claim wrong. As with most of these things, correcting every single false claim would result in a post about five times as long as the original piece, so I will just do some of the more egregious ones.
Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2007Today, I read a story in the latest issue of New Scientist that discussed how human activities are driving evolution of animals in dramatic and often unexpected ways. In effect, we have turned earth into a large uncontrolled evolutionary laboratory.
Biologists are struggling to understand what is happening although there is no shortage of species that are evolving in response to human interference. For example, chinook salmon in the Snake River are growing smaller and smaller, possibly as the result of dam construction. Additionally, the fish are apparently putting off migration out to sea so…
tetrapodzoology | February 21, 2007
A story of cheeks, beaks, feathers, bizarre theropod dinosaurs, and truly, truly amazing fossils....
Yesterday I made a special visit to the University of Portsmouth's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences in order to attend a talk by, and meet, Professor Altangerel Perle, the famous Mongolian palaeontologist and finder of awesome Cretaceous dinosaur fossils. From the 1970s onwards, Perle has personally excavated and described such incredible fossils as the fighting Velociraptor and Protoceratops, the alvarezsaurid Mononykus, the unusual giant dromaeosaurid Achillobator, and the…
bcohen | February 19, 2007More on green campuses and environmental responsibility from higher education. This one's "a high-visibility effort to address global warming by garnering institutional commitments to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions, and to accelerate the research and educational efforts of higher education to equip society to re-stabilize the earth's climate" (from here). (The Chronicle of Higher Ed reported on it as well last week.)
The full "Commitment" paper is here (in pdf), for university and college presidents to sign.
Good P.R.?
Good for the trustees?
Good for the environment?
Opens questions…