It begins with a garden or two. Once you have gardens, you have a resource that has the two most important characteristics anything can have with respect to human society. First, you can eat it. Second, your enemies can destroy it. If you have just a few gardens and get your food somewhere else, no big deal. But back in the old days, and by "old days" I mean any time during the last several thousand years everywhere and anywhere that is not urbanized and has gardens, most people relied on their gardens. These gardens were maintained by families or small villages or occasionally larger…

There is an 80% chance that a disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico will become a tropical cyclone, a named storm, over the next couple of days. If that happens it will be called Bill. Possible Bill is not well defined and is poorly organized. The disturbance is currently near the Yucatan, and will move northwestward over the next couple of days where it may pick up enough energy and be left sufficiently alone to crank up. The most likely coastal area to be affected are along Texas and parts of Louisiana. Even if the disturbance does not turn into a named storm, that region will likely…

As planned, I interviewed Sheril this morning on MN Atheist Talk Radio about the Science Debate Dot Org project. Mike Haubrich was host. I think it was a great interview, please give it a listen. The interview is available here. I also interviewed Sheril about this important topic on paper here.

We hear this all the time. Pig physiology is like people physiology. Pigs and humans have the same immune system, same digestive system, get the same diseases. Pigs are smart like people are smart. Pigs are smarter than dogs. And so on. Ask a faunal expert in archaeology or a human paleoanatomist: Pig teeth are notoriously like human teeth, when fragmented. Chances are most of these alleged similarities are overstated, or are simply because we are all mammals. Some are because we happen to have similar diets (see below). None of these similarities occur because of a shared common…

There is a poorly secured railroad crossing in Saint Paul Park (south of Saint Paul, Minnesota) where a small industrial road crosses a BNSF track. The crossing has warning lights but no barriers. Yesterday (June 7, 2015) a semi crossing the tracks was hit by a Bakken oil train coming down the BNSF line. The Bakken oil trains on this BNSF line has been an increasing matter of concern. As Bakken oil trains derail and in some cases catch fire en route from the Dakotas to the east coast, folks who see these trains run by their homes, through their small towns, and across their travel routes…

The Problem with terminology There is some confusion about the way we talk about global warming. Most of this confusion arises during the communication of science to the public or to policy makers. Part of this confusion rests within the science itself; There is no meaningful confusion about the nature of global warming or how it is observed, but there are some terminological glitches of the kind that arise in science all the time, and that rarely matter to the science itself. The most commonly used indicator of global warming is a graph that is meant to show the effects of global warming…

There is no such thing as a "pause" or "hiatus" in global warming. There is, however, variation as the earth's surface temperature steadily rises as the result of the human release of greenhouse gas pollution. Every now and then that variation results in a period of several years when the rise in global temperature is relatively slow, and a recent such period has been termed a "hiatus" or "pause." But that signifier mainly comes from those who deny the reality of global warming, and is often used by them as an argument that global warming is somehow not real. It is real, and they are wrong…

Android Lollipop is the new Android OS, and it is a good one. If you want to get a new Android phone, you will probably be happier choosing a one with Lollipop already installed. This is not to say that phones with the older Android OS, KitKat, won't or can't be upgraded to Lollipop. Nor do I suggest they will be. It is a bit of a mystery. At some point, I assume, some older models will not be upgraded. One might assume that if you get a new model phone that still runs KitKat that you'll be upgraded eventually, but that is not 100% certain. We are looking into a new phone, we use Verizon…

Joe and Mary built a house. They built it on an old flood plain of a small river, though there'd not been a flood in years. This was a 500-year flood plain. Not a very floody flood plain at all. The local zoning code required that for a new house at their location the bottom of the basement needed to be above a certain elevation, with fill brought in around the house to raise the surrounding landscape. But Joe's uncle was on the zoning board, and it wasn't that hard to get a variance. This saved them thousands of dollars, and they built the house without the raised foundation or the fill.…

In 2008, I was visiting the Nobel Conference held annually at Gustavus Adolphus college in Minnestoa. The conference was on Human Evolution. The college provided space in a large room for people to have their lunch, and while I was having lunch on the first day, I noticed a table off to the side staffed by a serious looking man with a clipboard. The front of his table was adorned with a large “Science Debate 08” banner. Seemed interesting. So I wandered over and had a chat. It turns out the man was Shawn Otto, one of the co-founders of Science Debate. Shawn, a Minnesota resident, is the…

Blanca is the second named tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific. I'm pretty sure Blanca was originally a disturbance with a low probability of becoming a named storm, but I may have missed something. Blanca is intensifying rapidly and will reach hurricane status shortly if it has not already, and will likely develop to become a major hurricane. The storm is heading towards the Baja, but may weaken before it hits anything big. Meanwhile, the first named storm of the season, Andres, is still a hurricane. Over the next few days, Andres will make a sharp turn almost in place and weaken.…

Recently, a paper published in a Chinese journal of science by Monckton, Soon and Legates attracted a small amount of attention by claiming that climate science models "run hot" and therefore overrepresent the level of global warming caused by human greenhouse gas pollution. The way they approached the problem of climate change was odd. The Earth's climate system is incredibly complex, and climate models used by mainstream climate scientists address this complexity and therefore are also complex. Monckton et al chose to address this complexity by developing a model they characterize as "…

Bernie Sanders' famous essay is below. I will reserve comment but I'd like your opinion on it. I will say that the press is handling this rather badly, at least at present, taking quotes with zero context, not addressing the meaning of the essay as a whole. Sanders says it was poorly written. Is it? Man and Woman by Bernie Sanders Mid-February, 1972 A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused. A woman enjoys intercourse with her man – as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously. The man and woman get dressed up on…

Did you ever wonder? And if you did wonder, did you Google it? And if you did google it, did you get the results shown above? And if you did, did you click "feedback" and do something like the following? No? Do so now, please. This is important. Why? Because we have been hearing rumors lately that Google intends to change the way it produces searches to bias the search results in the direction of more reliable sites. But the number one search result for a key question that a lot of people ask about evolution is a bogus creationist site. I've never, for one moment, gone along with the idea…

The Earth is warming because of what humans have been doing to the atmosphere. Global Warming has a lot of effects many of which we've discussed here, but the most obvious one is, well, it gets warmer. At present, India is experiencing record breaking heat and people are dying. It is very difficult to say how many people die from the heat in any region. We can use a standard approach used by epidemiologists to estimate this number. This involves simply looking at mortality rates as they change over time to try to detect a signal, an increase, associated with the variable in question. If…

The surface ice in the Arctic has been melting to historic low levels every year for the last several years. The graph above shows the first ten years in the National Snow & Ice Data Center records, meant to indicate what Arctic Sea Ice "normally" does as it melts off during the northern warm months. The thick black line is the average over 1981-2010, and grey shaded area shows two standard deviations above and below that line. The blue line tracking along the lower end of the 2SD shaded area is the ice extent this year. During the period when sea ice is at its maximum, this year's ice…

See below for update. You may not have even noticed it, but hurricane season has officially started in the Eastern Pacific. That is because the official date of the start of season is May 15th, though the actual hurricanes rarely get the memo and start whenever they want, but usually after that date. Last year's Eastern Pacific season was much ore active than usual. The average numbers for named storms, hurricanes, and major (above Cat III) hurricanes for this basin are 15.4, 7.6, and 3.2. Last year's season was predicted to be pretty much average, but it turned out to be exceptional, with…

I've written about The Recompense here, and that writeup includes interviews with the creative team putting the film together. This is just a quick note to remind you that The Recompense has a kick starter project with one week left. So, now, you have to go there and kick in a few bucks! The graphic above is the budget breakdown for the film, indicating what has already been invested and what the Kickstarter campaign will fund. Here is a note from the film's team: With just over one week left in our campaign, we wanted to show you how your contributions, if our project is successfully…

Human released greenhouse gas pollution changes the climatic system through a variety of mechanisms. Trade winds and jet streams change their patterns of movement, and the distribution of moisture in the air changes, with precipitation either lacking more than usual or being more abundant than usual. The patterns of movement of major air masses and the increased bifurcation of air masses into more wet than usual and more dry than usual can result in long periods where region experiences excess precipitation or a lack of precipitation. When the latter happens, there can be a drought.…

A large portion of the glacial mass in Antarctic, previously thought to be relatively stable, is now understood to be destablizing. This is new research just out in Science. The abstract is pretty clear: Growing evidence has demonstrated the importance of ice shelf buttressing on the inland grounded ice, especially if it is resting on bedrock below sea level. Much of the Southern Antarctic Peninsula satisfies this condition and also possesses a bed slope that deepens inland. Such ice sheet geometry is potentially unstable. We use satellite altimetry and gravity observations to show that a…