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The politics edition, pre-election special

In the politics edition I made some amazingly prescient comments that now appear somewhat dated. Not quite definitively wrong4 - next week will seal that - but before the election itself it will be fun to write down what I think to see how it stacks up against what happens. Less than two months ago I said What will happen? Labour will do badly, obviously and I don't see anyone disagreeing with that, then. Now we have the Torygraph saying stuff like Labour continue to narrow the gap on the Conservatives, with the General Election's latest polls and odds showing that Theresa May may not…

Uncertainty by David Lindley

One of my colleagues raves about David Lindley's Where Does the Weirdness Go? as a basic introduction to odd quantum effects, but somehow, I've never managed to get around to reading any of his books until now. I recently had a need to know a bit more about the historical development of quantum theory, though, and ran across Lindley's Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science in the library, which promised to contain the information I was after, so I checked it out. As you can guess from the title, the book deals with the early development of quantum…

The Pope On Evolution

It is not just his controversial stance that the Church should dial back its dickishness towards homosexuals that has brought attention to Pope Francis. He has also weighed in on evolution: Pope Francis on Monday (Oct. 27) waded into the controversial debate over the origins of human life, saying the big bang theory did not contradict the role of a divine creator, but even required it. The pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which gathered at the Vatican to discuss “Evolving Concepts of Nature.” “When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the…

Coercive Logic

Here's a logic puzzle for you: Suppose I offer you a million dollars, in return for which you agree to answer a certain yes/no question. You can answer either truthfully or falsely as you desire. That's it. Should you accept that offer? Solution below the fold. Those of you reading this who enjoy logic puzzles are probably familiar with Raymond Smullyan. I was pretty young, eight or nine I think, when I first discovered his writing. Somehow I noticed his book What is the Name of This Book? sitting in a bookstore, and I persuaded my parents to buy it for me. The book opened with some…

Against the gun control that won't work

The shootings in Connecticut are a monstrous act of incomprehensible horror. For all the atrocities visited upon the world in the last hundred years, this is still without doubt among the most appallingly evil acts ever performed by a single person. And he is dead, and beyond the reach of human justice. Normally I'd wait for the story to wane and passions to cool before commenting on the nakedly political aspects of a catastrophe, but this story is so hideous, so devastating, that many people have been viscerally compelled to speak: How can the permissive laws preferred by people like you…

Tenure and Money

With all of the renewed fuss the Discovery Institute is trying to stir up over the Gonzalez tenure thing, this seems like a really good time to talk about the role of money in the tenure process. I'm not going to do this because the money issue is one that the Discovery folks are frantically trying to distract attention from (they are) or because Gonzalez's inability to land external funds means that he'd be a very weak candidate for tenure even if he wasn't involved in ID (it does). I'm going to look at the role of money in the process because it's hugely important, for more reasons than…

Problems with Simon Baron-Cohen's Thesis

I see that Simon Baron-Cohen has a piece in Seed about his theory of autism. I am really skeptical of many of his arguments related to autism, so I thought I would discuss a couple of them. Here is his core argument: So what has all of this got to do with autism? We know that autism runs in families, and that if a child with autism is a twin, the chances of the other twin also having autism is much higher if the twins are identical. This tells us that genes are likely to be an important part of the explanation, and that one should look at the parents of children with autism for clues.…

The Political Mind, Part III (Chapter 2)

Chapter 2 of Lakoff's new book is titled "The Political Unconscious, and it's absolutely terrible. It's also the first chapter likely to really piss off conservatives, or really anyone who might approach the chapter critically. Oh, and it has plenty of gratuitous neuroscience to top it all off. First, let's look at what will inevitably piss conservatives off. Lakoff writes that there are "thoroughgoing progressives" who "hold to American democratic ideals on just about all issues," and that these progressives "are the bedrock of our democracy" (p. 46). Progressives, then, need to "reclaim"…

What McCain and Obama and the Moderators Forgot

I'm sure I am not the only one who was underwhelmed by the series of Presidential debates.  Here is what the candidates and the moderators forgot... 1) Regarding energy problems:  Government should act more swiftly to promote solar and wind installations.  Specifically, they need to do more to promote small, distributed installations.  Because of economy of scale, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power generation does not scale down very well.  Wind and especially solar power can be scaled down reasonably .  This is not merely a question of where the power will come from; it is a question of…

Connections.

Because it strikes me as somehow related to my last post, and because Memorial Day is the Monday after next, I'm recycling a post I wrote last year for WAAGNFNP: On Memorial Day, because I really needed to do something beside grade papers for awhile, I decided to go to the nursery to buy some plants. First, though, because the kids (who had the day off from school) were actually entertaining themselves pretty well, I poured myself another coffee and decided to actually read some of the articles in The Nation issue on climate change. Confronted with the news that jets are evil and carbon…

Sustainability starts with sustainable habits.

Another Earth Day rolls around, and I still have major qualms about the typical American approach to it (which seems to boil down to "Consumer choices will save the world!"). Possibly, viewing ourselves and each other primarily as consumers explains how we have had such a dramatic effect on the environment in the first place. Still, while we try to muster the political will and get ourselves together to respond collectively to the challenges to the Earth we all share, it's undeniable that our individual choices do have impacts. Here in the U.S., some of those impacts can be pretty big. So…

Eek! Keep Those Scary Bra-Burners Away From My Sexy Feminine Self!

Subtitle: It's really cool when feminists can help me advance my personal interests, as long as nobody sees me talking to them, 'cause, you know, they're ugly. Over at Isis's place, Victoria writes that she does not wish to be sexually harassed at scientific conferences, no matter what she is wearing. She does not want to feel responsible for controlling men's poor behavior through her sartorial choices. Zuska is on board with that. Victoria also writes that she wants "to maintain the feeling of being a sexy, feminine woman without sacrificing the science". Zuska is less sure what…

Lumping Dinosaurs: Stygimoloch a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus?

Paleontologist Jack Horner has proposed that the pachycephalosaurs Dracorex (upper left) and Stygimoloch (upper right) are really growth stages in the species Pachycephalosaurus (lower center), as presented in the November 23rd, 2007 issue of Science Pachycephalosaurus was always introduced to me as the ancient equivalent of a Bighorn Sheep (Ovis canadensis), always looking for some excuse to bang their heads together. As I grew older I didn't really buy the head-to-head butting hypothesis, especially since the heads of these dinosaurs were domed and did not provide a wide, flat space to…

Information Addiction

I finally got the internet setup in my new apartment - I won't bore you with my customer service complaints - and I've never been so delighted to waste time on the web. At first, my information vacation was lovely, charming, an experiment in vintage living. It was like traveling back in time to 1994 - I'd wake up, buy an actual newspaper, and leisurely sip my coffee. No blogs, no twitter, no ESPN.com. I'm not going to lie and pretend that, once freed from the yoke of constant email updates, I suddenly found myself reading Tolstoy for hours on end - instead, I mostly watched more mediocre…

Winning antivaccine hearts and minds

I've been writing about the antivaccine movement for a long time. The reasons are many, but they boil down to a handful. First of all, it interests me. It interests me as an example of pseudoscience and quackery, how it spreads, and how antiscience cranks attack science. More importantly, it's dangerous. The antivaccine movement is a threat to public health, which is why it's important to study its origins, the methods its members use to attack vaccines, the misinformation it spreads, and how it spreads that misinformation. As a result, I've been consistently vilified and attacked by…

Anthrax case: reasonable doubt on the science

I've been looking at the documents deposited online by the Department of Justice making their case against Dr.Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist they allege is the lone anthrax attack culprit. My perusal of their case leaves a mixed impression. If their portrayal of his mental condition is at all accurate - and it is difficult to judge on the basis of the highly selected quotes from emails and hearsay evidence of unnamed sources -- then Ivins certainly is a plausible suspect. Selected leaking of information, not all of it verified could also make him a convenient and plausible patsy. I have…

Numbers arent enough

Okay, so there are like 20,000 polar bears left. 4,000 tigers. 1,600 Pandas. Meh, who cares, right? I mean, there are still some. 1,600 plus the ones in zoos. 'Endangered' animals are fine! Yeah... No. Minor problem with decreasing population numbers: Its more than just the numbers. Its genetic diversity within those numbers. If those 1,600 pandas are all we have left, and those 1,600 pandas are genetically similar, they are in big trouble. Easy example? Tasmanian Devils. While there are still 20,000-50,000 Tasmanian Devils left, they are being slaughtered by an infectious tumor. An…

Brain-muscle interface helps paralysed monkeys move

Researchers from the University of Washington have demonstrated that paralysed monkeys can move using a simple neuroprosthesis consisting of an external electrical circuit which connects individual neurons in the motor cortex to muscles in the arm. Similar prostheses have been used to move external devices such as a robotic arm, but they required sophisticated algorithms to decode the brain activity associated with generating movements. The researchers adopted the alternative strategy of creating an artificial connection by which the activity of single cells could directly stimulate the…

PeerJ - the science journal we need and deserve

I spend a lot of time thinking about the scientific method. I don't mean that thing you learned in high school, where you make an observation, form a hypothesis, design an experiment etc etc. That's certainly part of the scientific method, but the linear formula that freshmen are typically forced to memorize sucks the life and interest out of what it is that my colleagues and I do on a daily basis. Source: The fantastic "How Science Works" from UC Berkeley (click image) The process of doing science is messy and complicated, and most of the time it doesn't work. There are false starts, bad…

Get your climate change data here: A big list of climate change data sources & repositories

We have a Steacie Library Hackfest coming up and our there this year is Making a Difference with Data. And what better area to make a difference in than the environment and climate change? I am far from an expert on this topic, so suggestions for additions (and deletions if I've added anything inappropriate) are welcome. In particular, deeper and more complete data sources for Canada would be nice to have. I would also very much like to improve coverage beyond the North American focus with a wider variety of targeted regional and national data sources. This set of lists is not meant to be…

Treating flu in mice with monoclonal antibodies?

I'm not sure what to make of the report that scientists in Boston, California and the CDC in Atlanta have made monoclonal antibodies that protect mice against many different flu subtypes. Monoclonal antibodies are antibodies made by the descendants of a single immune cell (that is a single clone, hence monoclonal). Thus unlike natural antibodies, these are also monospecific, i.e., they are directed against one specific target. Our natural immune system "sees" a protein on the surface of the virus called hemagglutinin (HA), of which there are 16 broad subtypes and many, many variations within…

A scientific ethics of code

I'm a scientist and my research is supported by NIH, i.e., by American taxpayers. More importantly, the science I do is for anyone to use. I claim no proprietary rights. That's what science is all about. We make our computer code publicly available, not just by request, but posted on the internet, and it is usable code: commented and documented. We ask the scientists in our program to do the same with the reagents they develop. Reagents are things like genetic probes or antibodies directed against specific targets mentioned in the articles they publish. There is an list of the reagents on the…

Helping more newborns survive their first 24 hours

One of the Millennium Development Goals -- a set of goals to improve global well-being by 2015 -- is to reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate of children under age five. The good news for MDG progress is that the under-five mortality rate has been cut nearly in half, from 90 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 48 in 2012. The bad news is that 6.6 million young children still die every year, and those deaths are concentrated in the world's poorest regions. Eight-one percent of these deaths occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, many of them in babies' first 24 hours of life. A…

Local Boy Gets Obnoxious

Cool — I've been written up in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's a good story by a journalist, Tom Paulson, who I just met this week, and who seems to know what's up in the area. I've already had a relative call up and say she's glad I'm famous, so it's all just in time for the family reunion tomorrow — everyone will be prepared to take me down a peg and make sure I'm not too cocky. Since I did say a few things about the Discovery Institute, he called them up and got their side of the story. This part is the typical creationist sidestep. Not so, said John West, associate director of the…

Open Access in Belgrade

As you know, I gave two lectures here in Belgrade. The first one, at the University Library on Monday, and the second one at the Oncology Institute of the School of Medicine at the University of Belgrade. As the two audiences were different (mainly librarians/infoscientists at the first, mainly professors/students of medicine at the second) I geared the two talks differently. You can listen to the audio of the entire thing (the second talk) here, see some pictures (from both talks) here and read (in Serbian) a blog post here, written by incredible Ana Ivkovic who organized my entire Belgrade…

Why is Charlotte Allen so mad at atheists?

The LA Times offered me a little space to write a reply to Charlotte Allen in their online edition, so I did. You can read it at the LA Times or below the fold. I'm already getting lots of unhappy email from people, so I must have done it right. Charlotte Allen is very, very angry with us atheists -- that's the only conclusion that can be drawn from her furious broadside in The Times on May 17. She can't stand us; we're unpopular; we're a problem. What, exactly, is the greatest crime of modern atheists? We're boring. I can't actually argue with that. It's true. We're all just ordinary people…

PLoS 500

Yesterday, PLoS-ONE celebrated the publication of the 500th paper (and additional 13). Here are some quick stats: 1,411 submissions 513 published paper 360 member editorial board and growing 19 day average acceptance to publication 600+ post publication comments posted I am assuming that the remaining 898 manuscripts are in various stages of the publication process: rejected, in review, in revision, or in the pipeline to appear on the site any day now. The very first paper was published on December 20, 2006. The 500th paper is this one "Climate Change Cannot Explain the Upsurge of Tick-…

The Archimedes Palimpsest

After centuries of mistreatment, the Archimedes palimpsest is in bad shape. During its thousand-year life, it has been scraped, singed by fire, dribbled with wax, smeared with glue, and ravaged by a deep purple fungus, which in places has eaten through its pages. Without the use of computer technology, the Archimedes palimpsest would be largely illegible. But modern imaging technologies, similar to those that helped experts read portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1996, allow for astonishingly precise views of faded text. Image source: Nova. Has the ancient link between mathematics and…

Occupational Health News Roundup

The Center for Public Integrity's excellent Hard Labor series continues with two more stories about workers killed on the job. In "'They were not thinking of him as a human being,'" Jim Morris writes about Carlos Centeno, who died after suffering from burns to 80% of his body. Centeno had been assigned by a temporary staffing agency to the Raani Corp. plant in Bedford Park, Illinois, and he was scalded by an eruption of of a citric acid solution. According to federal investigators, factory bosses refused to call an ambulance, even as Centeno screamed in pain. More than 90 minutes after being…

Krauss on Dawkins

Physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote Nature's review of The God Delusion. The review itself is mixed: strong praise for parts of the book, exasperated criticism for others. But the following two paragraphs are what caught my eye: Dawkins the preacher is less seductive. And make no mistake: this book is, for the most part, a well-referenced sermon. I just have no idea who the intended parishioners might be. In his preface, Dawkins claims he hopes to reach religious people who might have misgivings, either about the teachings of their faith or about the negative impact of religion in the modern…

The Simplest Argument For Dark Matter

"What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with." -Anonymous If I were brand new to theoretical cosmology, I might be skeptical of a whole bunch of "dark" things that I'd heard of. "Dark matter?" "Dark energy?" Come on; you've got to be kidding me! You're telling me that 95% of the Universe is not made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, like all the matter we know? After all, I look out at the Universe, and this is what I see. Stars, galaxies, gas and dust... normal matter, all of it. Yet all I need to do is start with two very well-supported…

Science Online Advice: Blogging as a Scientist

I ended up feeling that my most valuable contribution to the Science Online meeting (other than boosting the income of the Marriott's bartenders) was providing experienced commentary and advice from a slightly different angle than a lot of the other participants. A bunch of this got tweeted out by other people in the sessions, but the format (both at the conference and on Twitter) necessarily strips a lot of nuance out of what I was trying to say (and not always saying successfully). so I thought I'd revise and expand on my remarks a little bit. In particular, I want to post expanded versions…

Links for 2012-05-09

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Adjuncts on Food Stamps The general idea isn't new, of course, but the numbers are. The story notes a threefold increase just from 2007 to 2010 in the number of people affected. I have to admit that my first response was "there but for the grace of God." Anyone who clings to the myth of the academic meritocracy is invited to explain the speed of the increase in people in this position. Yes, I work hard at my job, but so do plenty of other people; denying the role of luck is just ungracious. That said, though, I wonder if this article - and others…

Ten Years Before the Blog: 2005-2006 (Part I)

Continuing the blog recap series, we come to the "split year" of 2005-2006. The blog was initially launched in late June, so that's when I'm starting the years for purposes of these recaps, but ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006, so this year was half Steelypips and half ScienceBlogs. This post will cover the Steelypips half, June-January; I'll do the ScienceBlogs stuff in a second post, once I figure out the best way to go through those posts (the ScienceBlogs archives aren't set up well for reading straight through). In reading through this, I was amused to discover this pan of Seed's…

The Anti-MOOC Panic

I'm not desperately interested in the "MOOC" on-line course thing, though I can see that I might be in future. I don't have a lot of spare time; for example the 2 hours I had free last night I spent running + recovering, not learning. But others do, and CIP has been talking to "the enemy" - i.e. the tenured professors in minor universities who have the most to lose. John Boy is even more in favour than CIP. However, I don't want to debate their virtues but do want to note CIP's: The flood waters in Colorado seem to have washed away my comments on yet another blog by a historian at a school (…

Endowment Hoarding?

It's been a few days since I linked to Inside Higher Ed, and the Internet itself was threatening to collapse. They're got a provocative article today about university endowments, though, so disaster is averted. The author, Lynne Munson, compares colleges and universities to private foundations, and doesn't like what she sees: A recent survey of 765 colleges and universities found they are spending 4.2 percent of their endowments' value each year. Meanwhile, private foundations -- which are legally required to spend at least 5 percent of their value annually -- average 7 percent spending.…

Laser-Cooled Atoms: Cesium

Element: Cesium (Cs) Atomic Number: 55 Mass: One stable isotope, mass 133 amu. Laser cooling wavelength: 854nm, but see below. Doppler cooling limit: 125 μK. Chemical classification: Yet another alkali metal, column I of the periodic table. This one isn't greyish, though! It's kind of gold color. Still explodes violently in water, though. Other properties of interest: The definition of the second in the SI system of units is in terms of the microwave transition between hyperfine ground states in Cs-- 9,192,631,770 oscillations to one second, to be precise. Has a really large scattering…

What Counts As Successful Outreach?

Part of this past weekend's meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public was to evaluate 100+ proposals for "mini-grants" of up to $10,000 for new outreach activities. It wouldn't be appropriate to go into detail about any of the proposals or what we decided (the PI's of the proposals we decided to fund will be notified soon), but there was one issue that came up again and again that I think is appropriate for the blog, which is what should be considered as a successful effort, particularly in the online world. A large number of the proposals we were considering had "new media" components…

Religious Trivia Contest Results

There's been a lot written in the last day or so about this Pew Foundation Survey on who knows what about religion. Like most such surveys these days, they have a really easy online quiz version that you can take and marvel that anybody missed any of these questions. My first thought was to just tag some of the better reactions for the Links Dump, and leave it at that. The auto-posting feature has been broken for some time, though, and my Internet access will be spotty for the next several days, so it's easier to do a quickie post pointing out the more worthwhile posts on the subject that…

"How Washington is Nixing a Cancer Cure..."

...is the title of a Newsweek article by Jonathan Alter posted online last night that draws more attention to the Medicare restriction on reimbursements for radioimmunotherapeutic (RIT) drugs used to treat lymphomas. Surgical oncologist, Orac, and I have spoken about this issue in the last few days. Alter admits his bias a bit, as he was diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma back in 2004 and received RIT. Moreover, Alter's Newsweek colleague (and SoCal singer-songwriter), Jaime Reno, attributes RIT to his long-term remission. The article opens as follows: What if they found a cure for a…

Dumbing down science (or not)

This is "a new website that brings together images and viewpoints to create insights into science and culture." Sounds like Seed, no? It's what Scienceblogs is/are about. This page, on the dilemma of science in the public -- the "fine line between intellectualism and elitism" -- is really fascinating. The site authors "examine how the message [of science] changes as it moves from the scientific to the popular arena. We also look at the medium, at how technology facilitates engagement with science. Finally, the motive is scrutinised: why popular science is not part of a dumbing down process…

Recoil from Dollo's Law

Time always marches forward, of course, but does evolution? It's certainly easy to impose a march of progress on the course of evolution. That's why the sequence of apes transforming into humans as they march from left to right is so universal. Of course, there are also pictures in which Homo sapiens, having risen up to noble, upright proportions, begins to crouch back down again, until he (never a she, I've noticed) is crouching in front of a computer or a television or facing some other ignoble end. As I wrote in Parasite Rex, this anxiety--an anxiety mostly about ourselves and not about…

A Request For The Hive Mind: Did Darwin Write About Microbes?

Having just written a book all about E. coli, including its evolution, I came to wonder what Darwin thought about microbes. I've searched far and wide. I've looked in biographies, for example, and the awesome site Darwin Online. I have found only one reference--to viruses: A particle of small-pox matter, so minute as to be borne by the wind, must multiply itself many thousandfold in a person thus inoculated; and so with the contagious matter of scarlet fever. It has recently been ascertained that a minute portion of the mucous discharge from an animal affected with rinderpest, if placed in…

Finding information on a topic

Previously, I had a post about finding information in books using things like Google Book Search. This post talks about finding information on a topic, or more specifically, why you should start your search with a research database and more about what research databases are (like the real ones). In a post coming up, I'll give some information on some free to you research databases (the real ones). You should start your search with a research database to be more comprehensive, to cover multiple sources and publishers, to have real searching power/precision, and because of the vocabulary…

Casual Fridays: Why those annoying menus are here to stay

Last week's Casual Fridays study was inspired by my annoyance at a website form which required me to constantly switch between typing in information and selecting it from a menu. I wondered if there was really any significant benefit to requiring the use of menus, when typing (for me, anyways) seemed so much faster. So we developed two versions of the same simple 8-question quiz, one of which required users to alternate between menu-responses and typed responses, and the other which allowed respondents to type in each response. We asked respondents to answer the questions as quickly as…

The Boston Debate

Saturday I reported that AAAS had pulled together an unexpected preliminary presidential science debate at the annual meeting. The event was organized by the Association of American Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and as promised, here's what went down in Boston... Representatives of the major Democratic candidates accepted invitations to participate in a discussion of science in the next administration. Senator McCain's campaign sent their regrets that they could not attend on such short notice, while Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul did…

"Don't Know Much About Hurricanes"--the New Hit Song by Steven D. Levitt

Althought I haven't read it, I've heard great things about the book Freakonomics, co-authored by (and about the work of) University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt. Levitt is supposed to be a true original thinker, and has really shaken up the somewhat traditionalist field of economics. And now, Levitt has moved his popular blog--co written with Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner--to The New York Times online. This week he started off the new show with (among other things) a post on hurricanes and global warming. Alas, Levitt seems unaware of the history of this debate, and so…

A Cunning Disregard For Security

This seems very odd.  The Internet -- including web sites and email -- has been found to have a very serious security flaw.  Civilized places such as Sweden and Puerto Rico are already fixing the problem.  There are plans to improve security for US .gov and .mil sites (government and military , respectively).  Yet, the most important fix for the rest of us, which is under the control of the US government, is being delayed. Given that the Russian military attack on Georgia was href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0813/p01s05-usmi.html">preceded by an Internet attack, it would seem pretty…

Researchers talking to journalists should assume the public might be listening.

In the wake of some recent deaths in Edmonton of teenagers who took Ecstasy, DrugMonkey gets irritated with a doctor who made some proclamation to the press: I'm particularly exercised over an article which quotes Charles Grob, M.D. (UCLA page): Charles Grob believes there is a strong chance that a deadly batch of adulterated pills is making the rounds in and around Edmonton, though health officials and law-enforcement groups have issued no such public warning. Dr. Grob, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, was the first U. S. researcher to conduct human tests of methylenedioxymethamphetamine…

The Australian's War on Science XXV

On Saturday the Australian published a story by John Stapleton offering as evidence against global warming the fact that "the Arctic ice is expanding". Something that happens every winter. Anyway, Stapleton's piece is about biased reporting on global warming. Stapleton is oblivious to the extraordinary bias displayed by the Australian -- he's alleging that it is the ABC and Fairfax who are biased. The sole piece of evidence that Stapleton offers for this is their reporting on the question of whether global warming is reducing the Southern Ocean's ability to soak up carbon dioxide. Last year…