gregladen | February 25, 2013From the National Center for Science Education:
Arizona's Senate Bill 1213 died on February 22, 2013, when the deadline for Senate bills to be heard in their Senate committees passed. A typical instance of the "academic freedom" strategy for undermining the integrity of science education, SB 1213 specifically targeted "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming[,] and human cloning" as supposedly controversial. Unusually, however, a sponsor of the bill, Judy Burges (R-District 22), told the Arizona Star (February 5, 2013) that climate science was her primary concern,…
gregladen | February 25, 2013River blindness, also called Onchocerciasis, is the result of the infection of several different eye tissues by the nematode Onchocerca volvulus. The bacterium Wolbachia pipientis lives symbiotically in the gut of the nematode, and escapes the small roundworm to cause an inflammatory response in human tissues, which results in damage to the tissue. These infections can occur in a number of different human tissues causing a variety of effects, but when the eye tissues are involved, the result can be river blindness. It is endemic and widespread in several areas of Africa, as well as more…
gregladen | February 25, 2013I recently posted a simple Internet meme suggesting that if we subsidized solar energy like we subsidized fossil fuels that this could be good. I posted that on Google Plus an it engendered way over 300 comments, many of which attempted to explain, often rather impolitely, that solar energy was inefficient or in some other way bad. I'm pretty sure most of those comments come to us courtesy of the bought and paid for climate change denialist campaign, funded by Big Oil to the tune of many tens of millions of dollars to date. Most of the commenters were saying similar things, most of which…
gregladen | February 24, 2013Is there a problem with John Abraham’s argument about Obama’s Legacy?
John Abraham wrote a piece in the Guardian titled Keystone XL decision will define Barack Obama’s legacy on climate change: Does the president have courage to say ‘no’ to a project that will lock us into decades of dependency on this dirty energy? in which he states:
Alberta has 1.8 [trillion] barrels of oil contained within the tar sands. Extracting and burning all of that tar will cause a global temperature increase of about 0.4 degrees C (0.7 degrees F). That is about half of the warming that humans have already caused…
gregladen | February 23, 2013I was distressed to find many people who are essentially pro-environment and who generally understand climate change science being less than terribly shocked about the prospect of the Keystone XL pipeline being built. Then I began to realize that many people don't realize the order of magnitude of the problem. I'm writing a blog post about this which I'll post Sunday or Monday, but in the mean time I want to provide a list of handy dandy reliable and helpful sources of information about the pipeline and related issues.
Keystone XL decision will define Barack Obama's legacy on climate…
gregladen | February 23, 2013American currency uses the phrase "In God We Trust" which is a clear violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. This is to the First Amendment roughly like saying "No Guns Allowed" everywhere would be to the Second Amendment, but if we did that to the Second Amendment people would be up in arms (as it were). But since it is merely the First Amendment nobody cares.
Anyway, that is what our money says now, but in the past, it did not say that. The "In God We Trust" was added during the Red Scare, when American started putting screenplay writers in jail and neighbors turned in…
gregladen | February 21, 2013"Thank you to the nearly 50,000 who demonstrated on Presidents Day Weekend at the Washington Monument, the thousands at 20+ solidarity rallies across the country, and the more than one million online activists who stood up and spoke out to tell President Obama that right now its time to move Forward on Climate."
gregladen | February 21, 2013This is not new, but I just found out about it from Paul Douglas's blog. Back in 2011, an F3 tornado touched down and went straight for over 60 km. The beast (that's the technical for a big-scary-tornaod) was almost a kilometer wide. It left an impressive scar, which you can see in this photograph:
More recently, when so called "Nemo the Storm" swept across the same region, the scar became plainly visible, as shown in this image:
The first image is from here, the second is from here.
gregladen | February 20, 2013This is being discussed here, thought I'd show you this:
Use of the terms "Global Warming" vs. "Climate Change" in books
gregladen | February 20, 2013You hear, again again, that climate and weather are not the same thing. This has led to assertions such as "you can't attribute a single weather event to climate change." But climate and weather are not distinctly different. Climatologists and meteorologists have made statements like this because people do confuse and conflate current conditions and weather forecasts on one hand with climate systems and climate change observations and modeling on the other. Saying "climate and weather are not the same thing" is a convenient segue into a discussion of how certain conclusions may be invalid…
gregladen | February 19, 2013I just put up a post in 10,000 Birds reporting on a recent study of duck stamp sales and duck hunting. There have been changes in recent years in the patterns of both waterfowl hunting and the purchase and use of federal duck stamps. Waterfowl hunters are required to have a duck stamp, and about 90% of the funds raised through the sale of these artistic quasi-philatic devices are used to secure wildlife preservation areas. For decades, duck population numbers and duck stamp sales were closely correlated, but recently this correlation has broken down. Read the post to find out the details and…
gregladen | February 18, 2013On February 17th, some 40,000 people showed up at an event in Washington DC in order to draw attention to the most pressing issue of our time: Climate Change. Another group of people also attended that rally. They represented the Climate Science Denialists, which in the US overlaps considerably with the Tea Party. They wore yellow jackets and called themselves "The Light Brigade." This follows the tradition of the Tea Party, who in their early days used the nickname "Teabaggers" for themselves, a term which refers to a particular sexual act, or so I'm told. I was reminded of this because…
gregladen | February 17, 2013I checked out the book Ubuntu Made Easy: A Project-Based Introduction to Linux by Rickford Grant and Phil Bull (No Starch Press). With any book like this, the trick is matching it to the correct user. If you are the kind of person inclined to install the latest version of Ubuntu on your computer, you probably have already done enough with Linux to not need this book. If you are the kind of person who believes the trash talk about how bad Linux is, or who is frightened of the idea of stepping away from Windows or your Mac for any reason, run away now. This book is not for you. But, if you…
gregladen | February 17, 2013On February 13th, 2013 48 people risked arrest at the White House gates to call on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
TAR SANDS ACTION
gregladen | February 15, 2013UPDATE: Somebody found a hole in some ice.
This is a meteor streaking across the sky in the vicinity of the Urals:
Numerous additional films of that event and some analysis are on Phil Plait's blog, here.
Here's a FAKE video purported to be a crater formed by a fragment of that meteor BUT IT ISN'T:
From Phil Plait's blog: "Note also lots of hoaxes are turning up, like a video of a flaming crater that's actually a flaming pit in Turkmenistan that's been burning for decades (called "The Door to Hell"). Be cautious and be skeptica"
... apparently the shock wave of the meteor passing over…
gregladen | February 14, 2013Peter Gleick, my sbling here at scienceblogs.com (see his blog here) is famous for a lot of things, but about one year ago he went up against the Heartland Institute and in a daring effort of investigative (if avocational) journalism, revealed that right wing conservative/libertarian "think" tank's nefarious plans to interfere with science education in an effort to discredit climate scientists in the eyes of the American public and our students through a series of rather smarmy tactics, including some really obnoxious billboards.
Scott Mandia at "Global Warming: Man or Myth?" has written a…
gregladen | February 14, 2013Several thousand scientists at a handful of different research centers spent a gazillion hours and a huge pile of money searching for the Higgs Boson. But, nobody really cares that much about the Higgs Boson. The important thing is the Higgs Field. The Higgs Field is this thing that is everywhere, as these spooky quantum fields tend to be, but that has a strange characteristic that makes it different from other fields; at rest the Higgs field has a non zero energy level. This means that its effect on particles is asymmetric. What that means is that when you write a mathematical formula of…
