gregladen | May 21, 2015Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency for the Santa Barbara oil spill. Phyllis Grifman, associate director of the USC Sea Grant Program, is quoted i a a University of Southern California press release as saying, "Nothing worked – they found out about this because people camping nearby or living nearby smelled it. Nothing happened on the part of the infrastructure that could shut it down early." The spill, she notes, sits beteween two areas under protection for endangered marine wildlife. Taj Meshkati, also a USC professor (of engineering) asked, "Why did it take the…
gregladen | May 21, 2015A new paper is just out in The Lancet that examines the mortality risk of high and low ambient temperatures. The basic idea is that if it is either to hot or too cold, mortality may increase, possibly with the weather being a factor to augment the effects of other health problems, or as a direct result. The paper is methodologically reasonably well done but leads to conclusions that I think will be misinterpreted and misused. The paper implies that a shift to a warmer world would have lower mortality effects than a shift to a colder world might. Or, more significantly, that a shift to a…
gregladen | May 21, 2015It is a fiction that the right wing, and the Republican party, and their primary philosophical guru (Rush Limbaugh) and mouthpiece (FOX News) are more American, more security-savvy, and more patriotic than Liberals, Progressives, and Democrats. This fiction is part of a common bully tactic you already know about because you were either bothered by the bullies, or you were a bully, in middle school. The bully takes his nefarious trait and projects it on his victim. And now, we see yet another piece of evidence for this, one among many. FOX News has attacked President Obama for his…
gregladen | May 20, 2015The White House has issued a press release noting that President Obama will address climate change as a national security threat in a speech later today in Connecticut. Here is the press release.
White House Report: The National Security Implications of a Changing Climate
Today, President Obama will travel to New London, Connecticut to deliver the commencement address at the United States Coast Guard Academy. During his speech, the President will speak to the importance of acting on climate change and the risks to national security this global threat poses. The White House also released a…
gregladen | May 19, 2015... because it is Paleo!
Paleo data, models, expectations, observations, about the past and to some extent the future. The Little Ice Age. The Hockey Stick. And, what people get wrong about it all.
Denial101x Making Sense of Climate Science Denial goes paleo (and Medieval) this week. Here is a sample video, Andy Skuce on the Little Ice Age:
Peter Jacobs employs a great analogy of encountering a dangerous bear in the woods to help us understand palaeoclimatology.
Professor Tim Osborn, Professor Michael Mann, Professor Katrin Meissner, Professor Dan Lunt and Professor Isabella Velicogna get…
gregladen | May 19, 2015Just a pointer to my latest post on 10,000 Birds exploring recent research in which scientists created a GMO chicken with the normal bird beak replaced with the terrible face of the ancient thunder lizards! Well, not exactly, but sort of. Click here to read all about it!
gregladen | May 19, 2015Bounty hunter Jahdo Kyn intends to start a new life, but in order to leave his troubled past behind he has to buy himself a new future. He has a plan, but as his plan develops he discovers a dilemma, one that requires him to make choices he is not well-prepared to make. This is what happens when you have the kind of past Jahdo Kyn has made for himself.
The Recompense concept art: Analiese Miller as Aisha Lefu.
The beautiful and deadly Aisha Lefu is part of that past. And she’s not the only individual that will make Jahdo Kyn wish he hadn’t gotten out of bed that one morning, a long time…
gregladen | May 18, 2015A few notes from Week 3 of Denial 101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. These notes are mainly about the science and not the denialism part (unlike my last post, which addressed the central theme of the course, denialism, more.)
The Carbon Cycle
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have gone up by about 40%. Simple explanation: Humans are releasing Carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel. More complex explanation: Humans are affecting the Carbon Cycle in a number of ways, releasing Carbon (burning fossil fuels) as well as affecting natural Carbon sinks.
This became known,…
gregladen | May 15, 2015The title of this post is also the title of a new peer reviewed paper by Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Orskes, James Risbey, Ben Newell and Michael Smithson, published in Global Environmental Change. The article is Open Access, available here. Stephan Lewandosky has a blog post on it, in which he notes,
... we examine the effect of contrarian talking points that arise out of uncertainty on the scientific community itself. We show that although scientists are trained in dealing with uncertainty, there are several psychological and cognitive reasons why scientists may nevertheless be susceptible…
gregladen | May 14, 2015Oil train derailments are becoming more common, mainly because of the very large number of oil trains, often with over 100 tank cars, taking oil out of the Bakken fields and bringing it to coastal refineries or storage facilities.
You are certainly aware of the recent Amtrak derailment in Pennsylvania. From Reuters:
An Amtrak train in Philadelphia was traveling at more than 100 miles per hour, over twice the speed limit, when it entered a curve in the tracks and derailed, killing seven people and injuring more than 200, federal investigators said on Wednesday.
Now, Patrick Kerkstra at…
gregladen | May 14, 2015Note: The original title of this post was "A Global Warming Fingerprint Confirmed: Upper Troposphere Warming" because I was thinking that upper troposphere warming was a fingerprint. John Cook contacted me to let me know that he didn't think it was. The reason it is not is that more than one thing can cause upper tropospheric warming, not just AGW. However, it does turn out to be more complicated than that. Various people claiming that a lack of UT warming was evidence of no warming have now been shown wrong, but even a lack of warming is not, if you will, an anti-AGW fingerprint. In the…
gregladen | May 14, 2015Bjorn Lomborg has written an Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal lamenting the decision of the University of Western Australia (UWA) to nix previously developed plans to accept a $4 million dollar payment from the conservative Australian government, to be matched by university money, to implement a version of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Institute there, to be known as Australia Consensus.
See: Bjorn Lomborg Is Wrong About Bangladesh And Sea Level Rise
See: Bjørn Lomborg WSJ Op Ed Is Stunningly Wrong
See: Are electric cars any good? Lomborg says no, but he’s wrong.
Lomborg’s scholarship in the area of…
gregladen | May 13, 2015Global warming is typically measured at the surface, with data from thermometers all across the land areas and sea surface temperatures combined. That isn't the whole story, of course. Much of the added heat, an effect of human generated greenhouse gas pollution, goes into the upper 2,000 meters or so of the ocean. But we use the surface measurements to track global warming because we have the data for a long period of time, and those data in turn have been linked to longer running but less precise paleo data.
Almost every month for way over a year now has been warm, and April 2015 is no…
gregladen | May 13, 2015Josh Harkinson at Mother Jones recently posted an item called "Scores of Scientists Raise Alarm About the Long-Term Health Effects of Cellphones." I like Josh's work, but there are some problems with this article I want to point out, some of which parallel problems in the more general discussion of cell phone safety.
Before looking at the Mother Jones piece, here's the bottom line: There is no known mechanism by which cell phone use can lead to cancer (usually, brain cancer is of concern). There have been many studies on this and related issues. They vary in quality and in what they look…
gregladen | May 13, 2015As an anthropologist, I find the interface between technology and the larger culture in which it is embedded fascinating. You all know the old story of the family cook who habitually cuts the ends off the roast before slipping it in the oven. One day her child, hoping some day to be the family cook, asks why this is done. It turns out that nobody can remember, and the matter is dropped. But the question comes up again, at a later family dinner, this one attended by great grandma, who was the family cook a generation ago, and of course, she knows the answer.
"Back in the day," she says, "…
gregladen | May 9, 2015I remember joking with my friend Ana about how her name would be attached to the first named storm in the 2015 Atlantic Hurricane season. It turns out Ana is an exceptional individual. Both of them.
Ana Miller as Aisha Lefu in "The Recompense: A Star Wars Fan Film."
Ana, my friend, is an actor and is currently engaged in a project I'll be telling you more about later. But in the meantime, you can visit this page and find out about a new and very interesting Star Wars related crowd-funded production called The Recompense. Give them money.
Meanwhile, back in the Atlantic Ocean, Tropical…
gregladen | May 9, 2015Sometimes science sees something change – there is more of something, or less, or more importantly, there is a change in the rate of some phenomenon or in its pattern of variability. But sometimes science looks out there in the world and observes something that was probably there all along (though there may be changes in the past or future) but it just wasn’t noticed before.
There is a new study that describes and documents such a phenomenon. The thing we are talking about is over 100 kilometers across, several meters thick, moves at about 4.5 km/h, exists just below the surface of the ocean…
gregladen | May 8, 2015Over the last several weeks we've seen the University of Western Australia accept a $4 million dollar Federal grant to develop a "Consensus Centre" in the mold of Bjorn Lomborg's non profit, with Lomborg as a key player. Lomborg has been heavily criticized for his lack of scholarship and seemingly biased policy related to climate change and related issues. There was heavy opposition in the Australian academic community to this project. Under pressure from peers and colleagues, Vice Chancellor Paul Johnson has announced that the project is cancelled. In a message published on the UWA…
gregladen | May 6, 2015It is reported that ten cars exploded or burned when a BNSF oil train derailed near a small town in North Dakota.
Look at the picture above. Huxley's day care is very close to these tracks, close enough that the day care home would be totally within that zone of buring fiery debris.
There are reports here and here.
From the Star Tribune:
Oil train derails, catches fire in central North Dakota, prompting evacuation of small town
An oil train derailed and caught fire early Wednesday in a rural area of central North Dakota, prompting the evacuation of a nearby town where about three dozen…
gregladen | May 6, 2015The Earth's climate is warming. The upper oceans are warming, the sea surface temperatures are elevated, the air in the lower Troposphere, where we live, is warming. This warming is caused almost entirely by the increase in human generated greenhouse gasses and the positive (not positive in a good way) feedbacks caused by that. The effects that increase the global heat imbalance and the effects that decrease it (such as greenhouse gas increase and aerosols -- dust -- from volcanoes, respectively) vary over time in their effect, which causes some variation in the upward march of global…