sheril | August 7, 2007One of my very best friends doesn't believe in global warming. Wait, what?! Believe? When did this become a faith based debate? I'm getting ahead of myself though, allow me to rewind a bit...
I'm back in Maine. Land of blueberries, lobster, moose, and yes, the majestic sea cucumber. Though I'll always be 'from away', the people and experiences of my graduate years have provided the foundation that makes traveling north feel like coming home. It's been a wonderful opportunity to catch up with old friends eager to hear stories of what I've seen and done and so on. After listening to my…
cmooney | August 7, 2007 We are going to hear a lot on this subject as August 29--the day two years ago that Hurricane Katrina made its final landfall, as a Category 3 storm, near the Mississippi/Louisiana border--approaches.
I plan to blog continuously about the upcoming anniversary from now until the actual date. To that end--and to set the tone--I'd like to start off by quoting the powerful opening paragraph of Michael Grunwald's recent Time magazine cover story about the continuing vulnerability of New Orleans and the many pathetic failures of the Corps of Engineers (and their congressional supervisors). The…
cmooney | August 7, 2007Just a coupla updates: I'll be speaking about Storm World at a Cafe Scientifique in Arlington, Virginia, tonight. This Cafe is put on by the National Science Foundation, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Meanwhile, I'll also be appearing today on a great radio show--This Week in Science. I'll be on at around 12 ET. Check out the website for audio; there's also a podcast.
After this I'll be doing plenty more radio interviews, but I'll be giving the speaking a rest for about a month. The book tour was quite grueling, largely because the airlines have (in my view) grown so undependable that…
cmooney | August 6, 2007I've seen all kinda attacks on the theory of human-induced global warming. But it wasn't until I did my first storm tracking post over at The Daily Green that one commenter referred me to this paper, purporting to argue that the greenhouse effect itself--which has been well established in science for over 100 years--is fictitious and in fact contradicts thermodynamics:
The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a…
cmooney | August 6, 2007I have lotsa blog posts today. Only, they're not on this site.
First, I wrote a long essay at Huffington Post about the Yearly Kos science panel, which I thought was just extraordinary. It was definitely worth dropping a dime to travel to Chicago for. Click here to read my take. And here's a great picture of the panel itself from Lindsay Beyerstein:
Meanwhile, the website The Daily Green has asked me to blog regularly about hurricanes--in other words, to track the weather, which has become a great hobby of mine. My first post over there, entitled "2007 Hurricane Season: Don't Get Too…
cmooney | August 6, 2007 There are a lot of big articles you (and I) should be reading this week.
The latest Time puts the continuing failure to protect New Orleans on the cover: "The Threatening Storm: How years of misguided policies and bureaucratic bungling left New Orleans defenseless against Katrina--and why it may happen again," by Michael Grunwald. Read it here.
The latest Newsweek goes with the story of industry funding and global warming denial (a story that many of us have been telling for years): "The Truth About Denial," by Sharon Begley. Read it here.
Finally, USA Today's great science writer Dan…
sheril | August 3, 2007Imagine a place where community is the central theme. A town where people may not all have advanced degrees, but collectively work toward sustainable living. I'm not talking about the stereotyped hippiedom of the 70's, but action through practical informed decisions. Streets where bikes seem to outnumber cars, community gardens are lush and shared, and citizens figure out ways to limit wasting power and resources.
I arrived in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (JP) on my favorite day of the month here: First Thursday. It's part of Boston, though not your typical 'yuppie' branded college…
sheril | August 2, 2007Admittedly, I have a little too much fun teasing Chris about being sexiest geek, but hey, he's the only official one I know. I'm a geek too of course (sans title and glory), who gets seriously excited about anything and everything space. That's SPACE mind you.. astrobiology, supernovas, galaxies, wormholes, and Sagan. Not to be confused with being a Trekkie/Battlestar Galactica geek. [Note: THAT is a link worth clicking]. You see, I want to be an astronaut whereas those folks dream of cylons. Two whole different subsets of geekdom altogether.
Now that I've cleared that up, I'd like to…
cmooney | August 2, 2007My latest Seed column, entitled "Extremophile Journalism," is now online. It's based on my experience at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne, Australia last April, where I learned much about the plight of science reporters in developing countries and emerging economies. Here's an excerpt:
...in many cases science journalists from the developing world face a series of hurdles that I, comfortably ensconced in Washington, D.C., simply never encounter. For some of these writers, basic research resources like cheap and reliable telephone service, libraries, and even…
cmooney | August 1, 2007I offered my little sister, Kate, an internship this summer because I knew she was a talented writer and thought I could teach her a thing or two. So she's been helping me out with stuff.
Little did I know that she would suddenly punch the journalistic hyperdrive button and not only become a blogger--her first post is here at a cool New Orleans blog called "At the Parade"--but have plenty of fun at her big brother's expense....all while writing in a hilarious tone worthy of PZ Myers.
An excerpt:
After spending June in the pine trees and mountains of Flagstaff, Arizona, where my mom relocated…
sheril | August 1, 2007M.C. Hammer sparked the parachute pants phenomenon and Jennifer Aniston sent young women everywhere rushing to get The Rachel. Justified or not, there's something to the power of pop culture. Global Cool is an initiative that uses media celebrities to encourage us to reduce our own CO2 emissions and collectively combat global warming.
Music, cinema and entertainment have long been global unifiers. Global Cool will utilise the powers of our high profile friends to help us deliver, in an uplifting and positive manner, the information that is right now so utterly crucial.
Do you think these…
cmooney | August 1, 2007
Tomorrow I fly to Chicago, where I'll be speaking--for the second year in a row--on the Yearly Kos science panel. This time, my fellow speakers will be ScienceBlogs' Ed Brayton and Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance. Scienceblogs' own Tara Smith will be chairing the panel.
Tara is also heading up the Science Bloggers Caucus the previous day, which unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to attend due to travel conflicts ;<.
At the YKos panel I will be talking about how, as the author of The Republican War on Science, I decided to write next about the murky hurricane-global warming battle…
cmooney | July 31, 2007Man. Japan is getting it bad lately. Just weeks after Supertyphoon Man Yi, another powerful storm is barreling in. Here's the latest satellite image of Typhoon Usagi, just pronounced a Cat 4 with 115 knot sustained winds by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, with an expected intensification to supertyphoon status in the next 24 hours:
And here is the storm's expected track, pointing straight towards Japan's southern island of Kyushu:
Watch out...
cmooney | July 31, 2007
In my previous post, I went into some detail about the intense argument between Greg Holland and Peter Webster on the one hand (PDF), and Chris Landsea on the other (PDF), over whether the total number of Atlantic storms is increasing. And I concluded, somewhat unsatisfyingly, that there may be limits placed upon the extent to which we can determine who's right and wrong in this debate. After all, we will never know for certain how many storms were missed in previous eras.
However, that doesn't mean that we can't draw any conclusions about the current debate--it's just that they may not be…
sheril | July 31, 2007Last night at 8:00, I saw The Simpsons. Rewind four hours and I was sitting at my desk writing about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Turns out they are very much related. Sort of.
A little Marine Bio 101:
Dead zones are areas of the ocean devoid of fish, shrimp, and marine life. They're basically just what they sound like. Every year, the Gulf of Mexico has this pesky habit of turning into a dead zone when runoff from fertilizers and animal waste in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River Basins is introduced leading to a state called hypoxia (oxygen depleted water). Excess…
cmooney | July 31, 2007The National Hurricane Center just named our third Atlantic storm, Chantal, off the eastern seaboard. Chantal is heading across the Atlantic along with the westerlies, possibly destined to become a quite powerful extratropical storm as it travels towards Iceland and Europe. It is not a threat to the USA.
Anyways: Meet Chantal, currently on a rough latitude parallel with New Jersey:
But before paying too much attention to Chantal, we could have more to worry about from a tropical wave that the National Hurricane Center is currently calling 99L, located northeast of South America and traveling…
sheril | July 30, 2007Are carbon sequestration initiatives providing incentives that decrease land productivity and limit the habitat of endangered species?
We spend a lot of time here discussing wind and water, but I'd like to turn your attention to another force of nature.. FIRE! When I was in South Africa earlier this month, it struck me that carbon sequestration initiatives may actually be creating some unexpected arguably perverse externalities that are potentially troublesome. Maybe. I admit I'm no expert, but hear me out..
In many parts of the world, fires are set regularly to simulate the natural…
cmooney | July 30, 2007 It may seem a strange question to be asking in a season that, so far, hasn't yet seen an Atlantic hurricane. But while the weather in any given year can be tricky and unpredictable, there's no doubt that we're currently in an active period for Atlantic storms in general--and now, a new paper (PDF) from Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Peter Webster of Georgia Tech explicitly ties this period of heightened activity to global warming by asserting that the total number of Atlantic storms has increased markedly over the past century, in correlation with rising sea…
cmooney | July 29, 2007It's a long ways out, to be sure. A lot could change and most certainly will. Nevertheless, this storm, which has just formed, is currently forecast to be a Category 3 at landfall and to strike Japan.
For more information check out the Joint Typhoon Warning Center and Tropical Storm Risk. The official tracking agency is the Japan Meteorological Agency. I'll provide updates as warranted....
cmooney | July 28, 2007Read it here. The review is by the New Orleans Times Picayune's Pulitzer winning writer John McQuaid, who is the coauthor of a really great book that helped me a lot with my own research, Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms. Here's an excerpt from McQuaid's review:
Storm World is at its most cogent on the author's favorite issue: science in the noisy public square. Many hurricane scientists reacted with dismay when their subtle arguments were distorted by press accounts or used to score partisan points in the political storm that erupted after…