gregladen | August 16, 2013Patrick J. Kiger at National Geographic News has an excellent summary of the current situation at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The plant continues to leak radioactive material into the sea, though at a rate much lower than the massive release that happened at the time of the accident. Strontium-90 (Half-life 28.79 years) has increased in proportion over various Cesium isotopes. This is a concern because while Cesium has the potential to enter the food supply in fish that pick it up, Strontium enters the food supply in a different way. In theory Cesium enters tissues and leaves…
gregladen | August 15, 2013And a little taste of what the beginning of the end of civilization might look like. Maggie wrote this book and here she is on TV:
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I was in South Africa for this. No problem with the lights there.
gregladen | August 15, 2013Every northern summer Arctic Sea ice melts away and reforms for winter, but how much melts away seems to be increasing on average, at a rate that surprises climate scientists.
But there are some who see variation from year to year, and there is variation, in a rather unrealistic way. Here is a graph comparing how climate science denialists view arctic sea ice over time, compare to how "climate realists" (i.e., smart people who can read graphs and such) see it:
Go HERE to see the source and learn more about what is behind this graph.
gregladen | August 14, 2013You know about the Hobbit. Not The Hobbit (TM) but the hominid from Flores, Indonesia. Mike Morwood was a key investigator in that research (though he did lots of other research as well).
He was born ...
... in Auckland, New Zealand, studied archaeology at the University of Auckland and gained his PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra. From a position in the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement – the public service body with responsibility at that time for Aboriginal cultural heritage – he joined the University of New England (UNE), in Armidale, New…
gregladen | August 14, 2013There are at present two systems in the Atlantic that have a good chance of producing tropical storms and possibly, eventually, hurricanes. One is east of the Yucatan, the other is very near the coast of West Africa.
Here's the report from the National Weather Service. I've used a rough routine to convert case so it is not screaming at you (the NWS has not yet implemented the rumored policy of not using ALL CAPS FOR EVERYTHING.
1. The broad area of low pressure in the northwestern caribbean sea is moving toward the west-northwest at 10 to 15 mph. Cloudiness and showers associated with…
gregladen | August 14, 2013Or, at least, I'm surprised that this earlier implemented solution has not been mentioned in all the discussion about NSA spying.
Richard Stallman invented an approach to obviating the NSA's attempts to spy on email. He included it in emacs, the world's greatest text editor. Here how it works, from the manual. The "M" is the "alt" key (for all practical purposes) and "M-x followed by a word implements the command attached to that word.
32.6 Mail Amusements
M-x spook adds a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that…
gregladen | August 12, 2013Whitey Bulger has finally been convicted of a small percentage of all the bad things he is said to have done. The Boston Globe has the details.
James J. “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster who rampaged through the city’s underworld for decades before slipping away from authorities and eluding a worldwide manhunt for more than 16 years, was convicted today in federal court of charges that will likely keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
Don't count on that. Whitey has slipped from the clutches of justice several times before. He'll probably make a break for it between…
gregladen | August 11, 2013I do not have an unquestioned respect for Edwared Snowden or those other guys who swore an oath of secrecy in service of their government and then stole piles of secrets and gave them away. I'm also not especially impressed with the uncritical crush so many people have on them for doing what they did. We've discussed this before in relation to State Department cables. While so many others seemed to assume that all State Department cables were evil secrets that must see the light of day, I was thinking of a number of probable State Department cables that I have reason to believe might exist…
gregladen | August 7, 2013Update: Never mind, Never mind! Scientific American Blogs has taken down Dr. Stollznow's post. So, I guess everything is OK now! False Alarm, everyone go home. Nothing to see here.
Say you are a woman in the Skeptics or Secular movement, professional, possibly working for one of the big organizations. If you are sexually harassed (or worse), the way you get your voice heard is, apparently, to blog your heart out, or use an anonymous tumbler.
That is wrong. Organizations such as JREF and CFI should have been places that were safe, and that would facilitate and amplify your voice as…
gregladen | August 6, 2013Every year the federal government wastes tens of millions of dollars a year, possibly hundreds, supporting old versions of the Internet Explorer browser (below version 9).
Web development teams typically use 30%-40% of their time (or more) adapting sites to display properly in these browsers.
There is no good reason for the US to waste time and money supporting this old, flawed technology. Alternatives such as Firefox or Chrome, which render pages properly, are available at no cost and are easy to install. Citizens with older computers can be redirected to use these.
By publicly stopping…
gregladen | August 6, 2013Large ponderous entities like the IPCC or government agencies like NOAA take forever to make basic statements about climate change, for a variety of reasons. They are going to have to speed up their process or risk losing some relevance. Among the coming problems we anticipate with global warming will be events that have huge, widespread effects and that happen in time scales of weeks or months, or a season, and having a nice governmental report about it two years later isn't going to do anybody any good. So let's see to that problem, please (looking sternly at IPCC and NOAA).
But that's…
gregladen | August 6, 2013Remember those puddles at the North Pole that at first everyone said were not important, then when someone realized that they were only puddles so a new meme formed and everyone said they are not important? They're important. From the abstract of a new study, just out:
The surface albedo of the Arctic sea-ice zone is a crucial component in the energy budget of the Arctic region. The treatment of sea-ice albedo has been identified as an important source of variability in the future sea-ice mass loss forecasts in coupled climate models. ... Here we present an analysis of observed changes in…
gregladen | August 5, 2013Originally posted on Mar 18, 2012
Communications expert George Marshall offers six strategies for talking to people who don't accept that climate change is happening Drawing on his workshops in climate communications and the latest social research he proposes a respectful approach that responds to their interests and values. He says that you should keep away from an argument about the science and concentrate on the personal journey that led you to accept the problem. Try it and you'll find it works.
More here.
gregladen | August 4, 2013From Nick Breeeze, "This video contains excerpts from interviews with Dr James Hansen. Here he gives his view on how we can get emissions from burning fossil fuels under control."
gregladen | August 3, 2013Follow Climate Crocks for regular updates on the Dark Snow project. Meanwhile, have a look at this TED talk.
gregladen | August 3, 2013I think there is a belief that pipelines are safer than trucks,trains, or boats for shipping liquid hydrocarbon fuels. That may actually be true. I don't know what would happen if we stopped all the pipelines and switched to vehicles. But the idea that pipelines are safe is absurd and it is time people started to realize this.
The Center for Biological Diversity has posted an interesting analysis by Richard Stover, which we can see in the form of a video.
This time-lapse video shows pipeline incidents from 1986 to 2013, relying on publicly available data from the federal Pipeline and…
gregladen | August 3, 2013This is early in the year for Atlantic hurricanes, though we are already up to "D" in named storms. The current mane floating around in the Atlantic is "Dorian" which the National Weather Service is shortly going to rename "Dorian The Zombie." Dorian was a named tropical storm several days ago, disappeared into a system not worth of a name, then re-organized a bit so they are using the name again, and is expected to spit lightly on Florida and then wander off to the Hurricane Graveyard in the mid Atlantic.
From NOAA: The average cumulative number of Atlantic storm systems per year.
In…
gregladen | August 1, 2013Emily S Cassidy, Paul C West, James S Gerber and Jonathan A Foley, from the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment, have produced a very important study for IOP Science Environmental Research Letters. (This is OpenAccess so you can access it openly!) You know Emily as one of the participants in our CONvergence panel on food last July. The research Emily and her colleagues do is some of the most important work being done right now, because it is about the food supply.
The bottom line is this: When we look at our food supply, we find that a large amount of what is grown in…
gregladen | August 1, 2013As I suggested might happen, the town of Gilberton, Pennsylvania suddenly realized that having an over the top crazy gun nut as chief of police use town weapons to make his own YouTube video threatening a large percentage of the citizens of the United States was not a good idea. When Kessler finally goes over the top and opens fire on a bunch of people he disagrees with, the town probably does not want to be involved as his employer or as the entity that owns the weapons (though as I understand it, Kessler bought the weapons with his own money and gave them to the police force, probably as a…
gregladen | August 1, 2013This is a sea change, possibly one of the most important political changes to happen in US history. I've mentioned it before, we'll talk about it more, but for now, just watch this. Also, Michael Mann is interviewed:
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