gregladen | July 29, 2011Sunday's radio show is going to be a very special treat for all of us. Mike Haubrich and I are going to be speaking with Kevin Zelnio and John Abraham about climate change, global warming, and science vs. denialism.
John Abraham is an expert on Heat Transfer and Fluid Mechanics and stirred up a bit of trouble (in a good way) when he responded to a presentation made by AGW Denialist Chrisopher Monckton at one of our local TRC's1, Bethel University. Kevin Zelnio is a former Sbling, a science journalist, and member of the blogging teams at Scientific American Blogs and Deep Sea News. He has…
gregladen | July 29, 2011Relying heavily on the excellent resource known as Dr. Jeff Master's Wunderblog and a few other sources, I've compiled a quick list of a few of the highlights of weather events related to global warming in the news these days, in preparation for this weekend's radio show "The Science of Global Warming: Science V Denialsim" on Atheists Talk #126, with Kevin Zelnio and John Abraham.
Here goes:
In recent months we have experienced the largest fire on record in Arizona, the largest fire in the history of New Mexico, the most extreme precipitation in the US ever, the hottest day in hell aka the…
gregladen | July 29, 2011According to a newly published paper in the journal "Remote Sensing" the Earth's atmosphere releases into space more heat than climate scientists had previously estimated in a way that effectively removes concern about fossil CO2 being released into the atmosphere.
The reason scientists have this wrong, according to the article's authors, Roy Spencer and William Braswell, is that climate scientists use a fundamentally flawed model of atmospheric heat dynamics and radiation of heat from the surface of the climate system into space. The senior author, Spencer, has previously argued that…
gregladen | July 28, 2011I know, I know, PZ Myers at Pharyngula does a Friday Cephalopod thing, and I'm totally ripping him off here and it's not even friday yet, but still ..
(Below the fold. Not work safe if you work, say, in a Japanese resturant.)
Click here if you want to know the science behind this neat trick. Hint: The creature is NOT alive. And there are no strings attached.
Am I a bad person because this makes me hungry?
gregladen | July 28, 2011Have you been keeping up with my posts at Birdingblogs.com?
If Darwin was alive today he would be a bird watcher. But he would do his bird watching differently, using a nice set of binoculars rather than a shotgun. In his autobiography, Darwin reminisces ...
Read more
gregladen | July 28, 2011In the old days this was easy. The power plants were melting down but no one knew what was going on inside them; Water was being poured in and cooking off as steam, and every now and then the way they were getting the water in or the way they were powering the pumps would change, or one of the containment buildings would blow up, or whatever. If you've been reading the last few Fukushima Updates, however, you'll know that things related to the crippled nuclear power plant have gotten more, not less complicated, which at first is counter-intuitive, but on reflection, expected. After all,…
gregladen | July 28, 2011A proposal has been made to remove beloved Archaeopteryx from the bird family tree and push it over to some non-avian dinosaur subtree. This is not the first time that the ancient species has had its position on the tree of bird life threatened, but this time it may be for real. The proposal is reasonable.
I've talked about this issue before, but I'm bringing it up now because there is a new paper, just out. Lets get right down to business and start with the abstract:
Archaeopteryx is widely accepted as being the most basal bird, and accordingly it is regarded as central to understanding…
gregladen | July 28, 2011Atheists are trolls it turns out!!!! Jason has it covered.
Hey look, I won an award!
Some bad news from the Death from the Skies front:
a half dozen meteors all seemed to come from the same spot in the sky, indicating they all had a common origin. ... they probably come from a parent comet with an orbit that's at least 53 years long. Moreover, the orbit of this comet crosses that of the Earth
Read the details here.
As has been said before, Pre-school kids reveal their instincts for science.
Hey look, scientists are funny!
Made you look!
gregladen | July 28, 2011
You have probably heard about the cougar which was just killed in Connecticut but which is thought to have wandered there from the Dakotas. Well, I have a couple of stories to bookend that story. One of them has to do with the lion in this photograph, and the other with something I saw in the woods. This photograph was taken by me not too far from Connecticut and it was shot with a 50 mm lens. The only thing between me and this cat was his breath.
No, the lion was not running around free. It was part of a travelling group of cats. The lion you see here may be familiar to you because…
gregladen | July 28, 2011Speaking of shrews, some new ones just got discovered. Pics and details here. They are said to be cute. I dunno.
gregladen | July 28, 2011
PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth.
Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn's moons share orbits with Trojans.
Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans…
gregladen | July 27, 2011With Julia spending the summer and most of the fall in The Republic of Georgia, I've been thinking about various political and historical aspects of that country, and one of the things that is claimed to be true is that wine was first invented there.
Recently, someone asked me (always ask the archaeologist esoteric stuff like this) where wine was first invented. And, recently, we scored some Concord Grapes, which are native to North America (presumably thanks to some bird a long time ago) as opposed to most grapes, and which provide the roots for most (nearly all?) wine grape stock. And, a…
gregladen | July 27, 2011It has been said that our most distant primate ancestors, the mammal that gave rise to early primates but itself wasn't quite a primate, was most like the Asian tree shrew, which is neither a shrew nor does it live in trees. This is, of course, untrue. When the average American sees a shrew native to the new world scurrying past, he or she usually thinks of it as a form of mouse. Which it isn't. (In fact, there are no "mice" native to the new world, but even if we give our hypothetical observer the concept of "rodent" as in "eeek, a rodent" the shrew is not that either.) If you spend any…
gregladen | July 27, 2011MN 350 is planning an event for September 24th, and would like you to help get it off the ground, or at least, show up!
This September, people all around the world are joining together for Moving Planet--a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis. In Minnesota we'll gather on the State Capitol lawn to send the message: It's time to move beyond fossil fuels.
We'll come on bikes. We'll march with our faith communities. We'll rally with our neighbors. And we'll send a strong message that we stand for climate justice.
Details here.
gregladen | July 27, 2011Two things have been known for some time now: Human brains get bigger as you go north, and the volume of the primate eye and the primate brain are correlated.
This COULD mean, and this may not be true, that as you go north in human populations you'll get larger brains (for thermoregulatory reasons) and you'll therefore get larger eyes (because eyeball and brain size is somehow correlated). But a new paper suggests a different model: Large eyes evolve at high latitudes because there is more dark, and the larger eye demands a larger brain.
Maybe, but I doubt it. the largeness of high latitude…
gregladen | July 26, 2011Somewhere around 1990 I wrote an article for a monthly paper on global warming. My intention was to explain the idea behind it (the greenhouse phenomenon) and to make clear the distinction between depletion of the ozone layer and greenhouse effects (the two were getting confused on a regular basis in those days). The reason I mention this is that there was virtually nothing in that article that would not pertain today, and other than the addition of piles and piles of data, there has been almost no change in the science of greenhouse effects that has occurred since then. And by that, I…
gregladen | July 26, 2011CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's Juno spacecraft is set to launch toward Jupiter aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on Aug. 5. The launch window extends from 11:34 a.m. to 12:33 p.m. EDT (8:34 to 9:33 a.m. PDT), and the launch period extends through Aug. 26.
The spacecraft is expected to arrive at Jupiter in 2016, on a mission to investigate the gas giant's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere. Juno's color camera will provide close-up images of Jupiter, including the first detailed views of the planets' poles.
NASA will host a prelaunch news conference in the News…