Environment
hrynyshyn | October 2, 2006The first question is: how bad are things, really? The second: if things are as bad as the authors of two recent books on climate change say they are, are we capable of doing anything about it?
I've just finished The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock and Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning by George Monbiot. Both authors are familiar to British readers. Both care deeply about the natural world, and both are very worried about where things are headed. Each book comes to similar conclusions -- (1) very bad and (2) yes, but only if we're very…
maggie wittlin | September 29, 2006
Fun With YouTube: Zero Gravity Balloon Edition
A balloon pops in Zero G. Everything's more fun in orbit. Well, maybe not everything.
Celebrity Ecological Footprints - how many Earths would we need if we all lived like Tom Cruise?
"Come on, Matt. Matt, have you studied the history of environmentalism? I've studied the history of environmentalism."
Atheism - Tape 4 - Richard Dawkins
Dawkins discusses Darwin's role in how he became an atheist. Shh! Don't tell Kenneth Miller. Do tell PZ.
Taking the Cephalopod to the Bank
Did we mention something about telling PZ?
put soap in microwave
It's alive…
bcohen | September 24, 2006Or, Has anyone heard of The Onion? Of course you haven't. Dave and I are the only ones who know about it. (What an oddly reminiscent introductory trope?) Dave has a mandate that we meet a quota of Onion references. To do my part, and since I've been lagging behind, I offer this reprint from a few years ago. This one's about "the biggest breakthrough in biotechnology since the breakthrough it fixes."
A Texas A&M chemist works on the breakthrough.
The article is pasted, beneath the fold...
May 9, 2001 | Issue 37â¢17
COLLEGE STATION, TX-Agricultural scientists around the world are…
tlambert | September 20, 2006Jeffrey Sachs writes in the Scientific American about the Wall Street Journal's editorial page:
Another summer of record-breaking temperatures brought power failures, heat waves, droughts and tropical storms throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Only one place seemed to remain cool: the air-conditioned offices of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. As New York City wilted beneath them, they sat insouciant and comfortable, hurling editorials of stunning misdirection at their readers, continuing their irresponsible drumbeat that global warming is junk science.
Now I have nothing…
oracknows | September 18, 2006Ensconced at a conference center in North Carolina near Abel's and Bora's home turf since Saturday, I appear to have missed an update on the story of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. As you may recall, he is a 16 year old who fought for the right to pursue "alternative" therapy over evidence-based medicine to treat his relapsed Hodgkin's lymphoma. Last month he and his parents agreed to a compromise with the court in which he would be allowed to pursue his desired form of quackery (known as the Hoxsey therapy) in addition to other therapies in the clinic of a radiation oncologist named Dr. Arnold…
tlambert | September 15, 2006Andrew Bolt welcomes Al Gore to Australia with a column that accuses Gore of being "one of the worst of the fact-fiddling Green evangelicals". Bolt writes:
Well, here are just 10 of my own "minor quibbles" with Gore's film. These are my own "inconvenient truths", and judge from them the credibility of Gore's warnings of the end of all civilisation.
So let's assess Bolt's 10 "inconvenient truths". I'll classify them as either:
wrong, or
not wrong but misleading, Bolt having omitted other facts that undercut his position, or
a valid point about Gore's movie.
To get a passing grade Bolt…
clock | September 15, 2006This post from November 26, 2004 was my fourth (out of five), and longest, analysis of the 2004 election. With Balkans and Creationism sprinkled in. How did it stand the test of time over the past two years?
Oftentimes, an outside observer can see what a native observer cannot. The native is too deeply immersed in one's own culture, takes too much for granted, sees too many things as "normal" ("doesn't everyone do it this way?") that an outsider finds highly idiosyncratic and unusual.
I spent the first 25 years of my life in a nicest country. Life was great. I had everything I wanted, and…
bcohen | September 15, 2006I'm way late to the Ask a Scienceblogger of a few weeks ago. So late that the question has come back around in a new Ask for this week (and this after being trumped by last week's Organic query - and both subjects are of great interest to me and soon I will converge them, plausibly, not as a lark). I fear now that I may have waded into a mini-manifesto below.
The actual article referenced in the Global Warming Ask category is not worth addressing, though it is actually kind of funny (by intent, I suppose). But I am concerned that Global Warming talk is becoming the end-all and be-all of…
cmims | September 14, 2006Stoat
Categories: Planet Earth, Policy & Politics
William Connolley lives in Coton, UK, and works at the British Antarctic Survey as a climate modeller. In a former life he was a mathematician at SEH. He specializes in climate change in general and Antarctica in particular. He describes himself as a long-haired, sandal-wearing, weird non-conformist dedicated to staunchly defending the science on climate change--armed with logic, facts, and reasoned arguments mostly. The stoat (Mustela erminea) is a small mammal also known as the ermine. The fur of its winter coat is associated with…
scientificactivist | September 14, 2006Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future
by Jeff Goodell
Houghton Mifflin: 2006. 352 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
Coal tends to inspire a few common images in our collective minds. Grizzled and hardened miners, working in deep, dark underground tunnels, piece by piece haul out the black feed needed to power the oversized, dirty, rumbling machines spewing out their noxious waste through tall smokestacks. In the process, these beasts power the rise of the world's up and coming superpower, the US.
Dirty. Dangerous. Imprecise. Big.... Old school.
In the Twenty-First Century…
hrynyshyn | September 9, 2006I've only read the few pages that Amazon offers on its website, but I'm convinced Frederick Crews' "Follies of the Wise" is the science book of the year. Jerry Coynes reviews it in The Times Literary Supplement. How can anyone resist, with a precis like this:
Frederick Crews has made a much more thorough study of Freud, distilling and interpreting not only his whole corpus but also the past three decades of Freud scholarship. His conclusion is that Freud was indeed making it up as he went along. In Follies of the Wise, Crews takes on not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of…
ksharpe | September 8, 2006Living the Scientific Life
Categories: Biology, Academia
GrrlScientist is an evolutionary molecular biologist with a BS in microbiology (specializing in virology), and a PhD in zoology (specializing in ornithology and hormone receptors). She blogs about evolution, the environment, birds, dinosaurs, avian influenza, conservation, and literature.
The Loom
Categories: Biology, Medicine
Carl Zimmer is a science writer whose work appears regularly in the New York Times and many magazines. He is also the author of five books on science. (For more details, go to http://www.carlzimmer.com/author.…
cmooney | September 6, 2006[Blogged from Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport!]
Anyone concerned about how this administration has repeatedly distorted, undermined, and in some cases suppressed information about global warming should read this amicus brief (PDF). It was just filed by a distinguished group of climate scientists--including James Hansen and Nobel Laureates Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina--in the upcoming Supreme Court case over whether the EPA should be compelled to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.
I have already observed how Judge A. Raymond Randolph, in his majority opinion in this case…
tfk | September 6, 2006Before we begin, I should point out that the ozone hole and the greenhouse effect are totally different. A lot of people get confused about that, and I'm about to talk about both phenomena, so I'd hate to contribute to that confusion.
In 1980, scientists examining satellite measurements of the atmosphere over Antarctica noticed that a lot of data were missing. Checking through their FORTRAN code, they found that a data integrity check that tossed numbers that were improbably low was removing data from most of the southern polar region. In 1987, the nations of the world agreed to phase out…
tfk | August 27, 2006Ask A ScienceBlogger:
The destruction of the rainforest was a hot-button topic in the early '90s, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages. Are the rainforests still being destroyed wholesale? Are they all gone? Is it still important? Is the coffee I drink making it worse, and is "free trade" and/or "shade grown" coffee any better?
It is still a problem, and I've been remiss in not answering this question.
The simplest guide can be seen in this satellite image of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On the Haitian side, where forests nationwide have declined 5% between…
cmooney | August 25, 2006There's been trouble at NASA lately. A suite of scientists from the agency's National Advisory Council have resigned over the agency's priorities, a dispute which seems to centrally turn on how the president's Moon-Mars plans have taken an emphasis away from purer scientific research. The NAC itself was reorganized just this spring, when it was put under the leadership of one Harrison M. Schmitt, a former Apollo astronaut who's also been a U.S. senator and is trained as a geologist.
But there's more that you ought to know about Harrison M. Schmitt. He is chairman emeritus, and former…
clock | August 24, 2006First reviewed on June 18, 2005:
Guns, Germs and Steel is an excellent book. Collapse is better.
When "Guns, Germs and Steel" first came out, I was fortunate to take part in a graduate seminar that was built around it. Along with reading a chapter each week, we also read a number of additional readings, some of which were technical papers.
Careful reading of "Guns, Germs and Steel" reveals that, contrary to some opinion, it is not a work of "environmental determinism". Much of history is microhistory. There is also quite a lot of history studying how quirks and idiosincrasies of important…
sporte | August 23, 2006We heard quite a bit about rainforest destruction in the 80's and 90's. Even the Grateful Dead joined the efforts to raise awareness and gather support for rain forest preservation. In the past, the Dead stayed away from political activism because (quoting Jerry Garcia):
Power is a scary thing. When you feel that you are close to it, you want to
make sure that it isn't used for misleading. So all this time we've avoided
making any statements about politics, about alignments of any sort.
But the Dead decided deforestation was too big of an issue to ignore and held a press conference at the…
cmooney | August 23, 2006My latest Seed column is up, and it dovetails so nicely with some of the themes I've been trying to enunciate in relation to the paperback release that I'd like to call it to your attention. Entitled "Thank You for Polluting," it's a piece about my battles with Congressman Jim Gibbons of Nevada, and it narrates how my critiques of a contrarian report on mercury pollution put out by Gibbons have actually ended up being picked up by the local media now that Gibbons is running for governor in his state--thereby forcing Gibbons to respond, generating greater controversy, and so forth. Look at how…
clock | August 21, 2006 The review of the second chapter was written on September 06, 2005:
I have commented on Tomasello's Chapter 1 earlier. Second chapter is much longer and somewhat disjointed, but I would like to write some of my own first impressions now (also long and disjointed), before I read what other members of the reading group have written. As usual, I will make the post contrarian and critical, in the good tradition of blog-writing, but that does not mean I dismiss Tomasello's hypothesis altogether or do not look forward to reading the rest of the book. Read reviews by other group members for other…