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Bastille Day sprog art.

Not that the art has anything to do with Bastille Day, but it seemed like as good an occasion as any to share some more of their work. And, for the record, if art classes somehow lead the Free-Ride offspring to adopt an all-black wardrobe, they are bloody well going to find themselves reading Sartre. In our house, moody black-clad young people are philosophers! From the younger Free-Ride offspring: I'm told this is a water buffalo striding to the water hole by moonlight. My sense, from the drawing, is that a water buffalo could sneak up on you on a dark night. From the elder Free-Ride…

AAP reports from the future

This story from the Australian Associated Press contains the usual scare-mongering from Ian Plimer: AAP November 19, 2009 01:36pm Australia will go broke and become the laughing stock of the world if politicians ignore basic science on climate change, a leading global warming sceptic says. But there is one intriguing detail: Prof Plimer's comments came as he delivered the annual Essington Lewis Memorial Lecture in honour of a former chief executive and chairman of BHP. And that lecture won't be delivered until 6pm today (Nov 19). I think it is awesome that the AAP can report from the future…

Our Sex Columnist Featured by ELLE Magazine

E. Jean Carroll, the infamous advice columnist for ELLE magazine, picked 40 sex columnists from student newspapers across the country, and our own Amanda Baldwin was one of them. Carroll set all 40 columnists up on her website, giving them space to post their columns for the nation to read. To see Amanda's contributions, select her name from the drop down list (one of the first on the list; the site is javascripted, so there's no direct link). I feel like a proud parent. Amanda has gotten so much crap over the past couple years as our sex columnist, from English professors giving her a hard…

Woman grows a "scrotum", loses husband

Chinese Necklace by Inextremiss (Flickr)   From the Annals of the Weird, or more precisely Proceedings in Obstetrics and Gynecology, comes the story of a 21-year-old woman from rural India presenting a benign vulvar tumour resembling a "soft, pedunculated mass, with a wrinkled surface dangling from her left labia majus" about the size of a tennis ball. She had been abandoned by her husband, proving he was insecure about the fact his wife had bigger balls than him.  Happily, after a visit to the doctors, the five year old growth was removed with "excellent cosmetic result", leading to smiles…

mmmmmm.....tasty......Neanderthal mmmm.....

Well it seems that Neanderthals may have had a taste for.. well... other Neanderthals. Neanderthals suffered periods of starvation and may have supplemented their diet through cannibalism, according to a study of remains from northwest Spain. Paleobiologists studied samples from eight 43,000-year-old Neanderthal skeletons excavated from an underground cave in El Sidrón, Spain since 2000. The study sheds light on how Neanderthals lived before the arrival of modern humans in Europe. Researchers found cut marks and evidence that bones had been torn apart, which they say could indicate…

Carry a gun = you get shot more often

In a first-of its-kind study, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. The study estimated that people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun. source From the abstract of the paper: Objectives. We investigated the possible relationship between being shot in an assault and possession of a gun at the time. Methods. We enrolled 677 case participants that had been shot in an assault and 684 population-based…

Mobile Phone Ingenuity in Africa

This post from one of my favorite blogs, AfriGadget, highlights interesting ways that Africans are modifying cell phones for their unique technological needs. It is based on the author's (Erik Hersman) conversation with Jan Chipchase, a design and usability ethnographer for Nokia, who travels around the world to explore how mobile phones are used worldwide and then reports his findings back to Nokia's design team. He explains: While exploring in Africa [Jan] found a booming market of hackers and mobile phone mechanics who are doing all kinds of interesting things such as creating new mobile…

4K Old Temple with Murals in Peru

A mural-decorated temple that may date to 4,000 years old is being reported from the coastal desert region of Northern Peru. Some of the walls of the 27,000-square-foot site - almost half the size of a football field - were painted, and a white and red mural depicts a deer being hunted with a net. Alva said the temple was apparently constructed by an "advanced civilization" because it was built with mud bricks made from sediment found in local rivers, instead of rocks. "This discovery shows an architectural and iconographic tradition different from what has been known until now," said…

Tuesday Morning Science News

Want to study lava? From the NY Times ... Fudge, corn syrup, and whiskey will do. And I love this quote about science conferences: The poster session, which resembled a science fair for professional scientists, was dedicated to innovative lecture demonstrations. New study out in PLoS on the spread of gene variants across the human population - NY Times article. I still have to look at the original article, but I'm sure others at Scienceblogs will comment on it (Evolgen). OK on to local news. Two good OpEds in the Boston Globe on state support for biotech/biomedical/life sciences and the…

Whale Survives 19th Century Hunt

Unbelievably, a 50 ton bowhead whale was discovered with a 19th century bomb lance fragment lodged between its neck and shoulder the bomb lance fragment was patented in 1879, making the whale between 115-130 years old according to researchers. See this amazing story from the American Cetacean Society at MSNBC here. Below is a graphic from that story. I like this quote from John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum: It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place. He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years…

Random moment in Netroots Nation

Governor Mayor Gavin Newsom (I slipped up and made that verbal premonition yesterday) is sitting here in the airport with me. I may chat with him in a moment. This morning, he introduced the capstone speech by Van Jones. Let it be said that Van Jones Rocks, and his Ella Baker Center is just down the street from NCSE's offices, and I can only assume that Eugenie Scott's steely-eyed rationality is all that has protected us from Van Jones's rolling waves of charisma from several blocks away. When the videos are posted, be sure to watch that session, if you see no other. I'll tell you what I…

The right to map

Afarensis points out that Malaysia and the Philippines are making it harder to make accurate maps. The goal there is to block indigenous groups from using GPS and GIS to map their historic lands and defend their lands from developers. A few years back there was a student here at KU who grew up in the Soviet Union. On birding trips, he'd check a map, then ask where features really were. Soviet maps would always put roads and bridges in the wrong place, whether to confuse invading capitalist pigs or internal dissent I couldn't say. What I do know is that governments which prevent their…

Holiday snaps from space: Sakurajima

Sakurajima Volcano in Japan, taken from the ISS on February 17. Image courtesy of Soichi Noguchi. Eruptions reader Tim Stone sent me a link to the TwitPic feed for Soichi Noguchi, the Japanese astronaut currently on board of the International Space Station. The space traveller got a shot of Sakurajima from space, showing a beautiful plume drifting off - and great detail of the towns and roads near the volcano. Soichi has some other great shots (and comments to go with them), including my old haunt Seattle (with a comment about Ichiro), Mt. Aso - another Japanese volcano, and the Patagonian…

Comments of the Week #39: From Genesis to Fate

Kid: "Mortal Kombat, on Sega Genesis, is the best video game ever." Billy Madison: "I disagree, it's a very good game, but I think Donkey Kong is the best game ever." Kid: "Donkey Kong sucks." Billy Madison: "You know something? YOU SUCK!" -Billy Madison, 1995 Every week brings with it something new, but this is the first week since we've started doing a comments roundup here on Starts With A Bang that we've had an entirely new series to talk about, with the end of our Messier Monday and the start of something new! This all includes: Magnetism from afar (for Ask Ethan), Sleeping in the stars…

Diploblasts and triploblasts

Carl Zimmer wrote on evolution in jellyfish, with the fascinating conclusion that they bear greater molecular complexity than was previously thought. He cited a recent challenging review by Seipel and Schmid that discusses the evolution of triploblasty in the metazoa—it made me rethink some of my assumptions about germ layer phylogeny, anyway, so I thought I'd try to summarize it here. The story is clear, but I realized as I started to put it together that jeez, but we developmental biologists use a lot of jargon. If this is going to make any sense to anyone else, I'm going to have to step…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: When two woos go to war

There's a new woo in town. Unfortunately, it's the same as the old woo. I first noticed it around Christmas. Inexplicably, I started getting a greatly increased amount of traffic to an old Your Friday Dose of Woo post of mine. The post to which I'm referring is one that I did a year and a half ago about some fabulously silly woo that claimed to remove toxins through the soles of your feet through a special foot pad, which inspired me to entitle the post These boots were made for detoxifyin'. This product in question was called "Miracle Patches" and, it was claimed, can remove all manner of…

The 'freaky giraffoid Barosaurus' meme

Lately I've become quite fond of those really weird depictions of fossil animals that were utterly, utterly wrong, yet somehow managed to persist in the literature for decades. Last time round, we saw how the meme of the 'demonic Quetzalcoatlus' passed from artist to artist, and had its genesis in a single, speculative illustration. Here's another example of the same sort of thing: during the 1970s, 80s and 90s the diplodocid sauropod Barosaurus was repeatedly depicted as a very, very strange beast... Above is the oldest of these renditions I've been able to find: it comes from the multi-…

Galve: European spinosaurines, cryptic camarasaurs, and tiny heterodontosaurids

Same old story: Naish plans to blog on long-promised subjects, Naish gets distracted by cool new stuff, Naish ends up writing about cool new stuff and delaying long-promised subjects for even longer. Here, inspired by a paper I recently published with University of Bristol's Barbara Sánchez-Hernández and Mike Benton (Sánchez-Hernández et al. 2007), I've made a concerted effort to finish writing about the Mesozoic tetrapods of the Galve region of Teruel Province, NE Spain. In the previous post I covered crocodyliforms and pterosaurs. This time we get to the dinosaurs [adjacent image shows…

The Tet Zoo field guide to ostrich dinosaurs (part II)

So, on to more ornithomimosaurs, aka ostrich dinosaurs (part I here). This time, the ornithomimids: this is the ornithomimosaur clade that includes only the edentulous arctometatarsalian taxa. Yes, I said arctometatarsalian*. However, note that some authors have incorrectly regarded Ornithomimidae as synonymous with Ornithomimosauria... and one author has even included therizinosauroids and alvarezsaurids within Ornithomimosauria. For those who don't keep up to date with the phylogeny of non-avian theropods, character evidence indicates that ornithomimosaurs are stem-group coelurosaurs,…

A New Challenge, A New Job, and A New Chance

"If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance." -Abraham Lincoln It was nearly four years ago that I started blogging back at my old site, branching out from the hardcore research of physical cosmology and the teaching of physics and astronomy, and into what I think of as science communication. Image credit: The cover of Paul Halpern's book. And there have been a number of very curious things I've learned, some of which I expected and some of which caught me by surprise. The least surprising: the entirety of our experience in this world is something…

Strongest NWS Hurricane Ever Recorded: Patricia (UPDATED)

Update, Saturday AM: On Twitter, people are shocked and amazed that Hurricane Patricia turned into a tropical storm. Some had prayed to god and now claim those prayers were answered. There is at least one claim of a death on Twitter, but The Twitter Lies, and this is probably someone's sick idea of a joke. Naturally, what happened is Patricia made landfall as a very compact hurricane in a region with very few people, but as a strong category five hurricane. It had the highest sustained winds, and the lowest pressure ever observed for a hurricane, but again, Patricia was a small hurricane,…

Teddy Roosevelt on human evolution

As explained in Narratives of Human Evolution (and outlined in an early chapter of Bones of Contention), scientific descriptions of human evolution have often been shaped by a belief in progress and our* superiority. Even today, when descriptions are often more objective on the surface, there are subtexts in which fossils are arranged this way or that to reflect certain values and expectations. *[Whose superiority, however, differs depending on who is speaking. This could range from our species, Homo sapiens, to just one "race" of humans (I bet you can guess which).] Today it requires a bit…

Next Generation DNA Sequencing does more than sequence DNA

You might think the coolest thing about the Next Generation DNA Sequencing technologies is that we can use them to sequence long-dead mammoths, entire populations of microbes, or bits of bone from Neanderthals. But you would be wrong. Sure, those are all cool things to do, but Next Generation DNA sequencing (or NGS for short) can give us answers to questions that are far, far more interesting. With NGS, we can look at entire transcriptomes (!!) together with the proteins that make them and the DNA modifications that help regulate them. If we compare a cell to music, a genome sequence…

Pat Michaels Bashes Gore for Cato

How dare Al Gore open his mouth and say things! Here comes the Cato Institute to the rescue, featuring denialist Pat Michaels (Also see Sourcewatch). What were Gore's great gaffes worthy of scorn from the esteemed think tank? First he suggested dramatic increases in sea level if significant ice sheets were to melt. You know, even a one-meter increase, even a three-foot increase in sea level would cause tens of millions of climate refugees. If Greenland were to break up and slip into the sea or West Antarctica, or half of either and half of both, it would be a 20-feet increase, and that would…

Viral eradication and the evolution of smallpox

The control and eventual eradication of the smallpox virus from the wild is one of the most heralded success stories in all of public health. Indeed, smallpox has played a central role in the history of vaccination. Even prior to Edward Jenner's use of the related cowpox virus to protect against smallpox disease, it was known that inoculation with materials from an infectious smallpox pustule or scab (dubbed "variolation") could protect an individual from death due to smallpox, generally resulting instead in a mild form of the illness. Jenner's observation that milkmaids seemed to be…

The new Crato Formation enantiornithine

You blog readers are so fickle. Write several thousand words on a spectacular group of carnivorous mammals that have never previously been the subject of any sort of semi-popular review, and get bugger all attention. Write about 50 words and post two pictures, and - hey - the whole world goes nuts. Anyway, thanks to everyone who had a guess on the 'mystery' fossil. Some of you were pretty close to the mark, but evidently no-one who commented has checked Naish et al. (2007), the bird chapter of Martill et al.'s CUP volume The Crato Fossil Beds of Brazil (previously discussed in this article…

Bidder's organ and the holy quest for synapomorphies

One of the dirty little secrets of biology is that many groups of organisms have never been 'defined' in the phylogenetic sense: a group grows over time as people add new species to it, but they only do this because it 'feels' about right, not because there's any rigorous way of knowing whether those species really belong there or not. Many tetrapod groups - classic examples include Ranidae, Muscicapidae, Colubridae and Scincidae - lack characters that might allow their monophyly to be demonstrated, and modern studies show that various of their constituent members aren't more closely related…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 16 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Human's Cognitive Ability to Assess Facial Cues from Photographs: A Study of Sexual Selection in the Bolivian Amazon: Evolutionary theory suggests that natural selection favors the evolution of cognitive…

Top notch job by OSHA staff to globally harmonize labels and datasheets for chemicals

Earlier this week, Lizzie Grossman reported here at The Pump Handle on revisions to OSHA's Hazard Communication standard which align the agency's 30 year old rule with a globally harmonized system for classifying and labeling chemical hazards. In "Moving from Right-to-Know to Right-to-Understand," we learn how the changes stem from a 2002 United Nations resolution and why they should help U.S. workers better protect themselves from chemical hazards in their workplaces. I spent some time this week reading for myself the 858-page document, and by the time I got to page 20 it was clear that…

January Pieces Of My Mind

Some recent Facebook updates of mine: After four years' living in this house I just stubbed my toe on the bathrooom threshold for the first time -- painfully. Unusually, I was wearing semi-industrial hearing protectors on my way to the john -- because also unusually two people were watching TV at the same time and so the sound was on (I can't write with speech in the background). Now I wonder -- am I unconsciously in the habit of using the acoustics of our rooms to remember where I need to mind my step? To solve the US gun problem, impose a 1900% luxury tax on ammo. Let the people bear arms…

Hubble: Still Unbeatable

"At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed." -Edwin Hubble Given the relative peace of our night skies, combined with the vast distances from our Solar System to the nearest star, we don't often think about the cosmic catastrophes that took place in our past. But these catastrophes are the very things that gave rise to our Solar System in the first place! Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (…

Locked inside your Heart-Shaped Box (Or, for whom the bell a-tolls)

"She eyes me like a pisces when I am weak I've been locked inside your Heart Shaped box for weeks I've been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black" -Nirvana, Heart-Shaped Box By looking at the right combinations of wavelengths of light, one can literally find almost anything in the depths of space. Image credit: Daniel Marquardt, of nebula IC 1805. But back on Earth, we have some surprising natural features that have been captured from above with nothing more than a camera. Image credit: NASA / STS-129 / Space Shuttle Atlantis, retrieved from…

Russian Rivers and Arctic Salinity: Climate Variation Better Understood

The sun heats the earth, but unevenly. The excess heat around the equator moves towards the poles, via a number of different mechanisms, the most noticeable for us humans being via air masses. That's what much of our weather is about. Heat also moves towards the poles, in the ongoing evening-out of energy distribution on the planet's surface, via ocean currents. One of the interesting things that happens with ocean currents is this: Warm water tends to move from equator towards polar regions across the surface, then cools down and drops to the deep sea, where it moves back south again,…

Wilder Pfaff and Zuckerhutl

Next: Mullerhutte to Nurnberger Having got to the Mullerhutte I finally had a chance to climb the Zuckerhutl, which at 3505 m is the high point of the Stubai and something I've wanted to climb for ages. My diary reminds me it was a cold night: the hut is quite high at 3145 m, and I was alone in my dortoir, and used two blankets. There were a few other people in the hut: two Germans, who I'd half-met on the Signalgipfel, and another group of four; not sure where they went. Naturally, being a reserved Englishman, I merely nodded politely at them. Happily, as you saw from the last pix on that…

Will They Never Tire Of the Second Law?

Secondlawapalooza has broken out over at Uncommon Descent, with a series of posts trying one more time to convince the thinking world that either evolution or abiogenesis violates the second law of thermodynamics. They are unmoved by the fact that the violation exists only in their minds. One recent post, by Eric Anderson, is entitled, “Second Thoughts on the Second Law: Extending an Olive Branch.” He outlines what he sees as myths that each side holds about the other, and then imagines that he is laying down a little clear thinking and common sense. I'm afraid, though, that his olive…

Rotifers find answer to parasites by blowing on the wind

When our lives are in danger, some humans go on the run, seeking refuge in other countries far away from the threats of home. Animals too migrate to escape danger but one group - the pond-living bdelloid rotifers - have taken this game of hide-and-seek to an extreme. If they are threatened by parasitic fungi, they completely remove any trace of water in their bodies, drying themselves out to a degree that their parasites can't stand. In this desiccated state, they ride the wind to safety, seeking fresh pastures where they can establish new populations free of any parasites. This…

Whose Brain Is It Anyway? (The Further Hobbit Adventures)

Finally, more brains. On Tuesday I wrote about how the second batch of Homo floresiensis bones had at last seen the scientific light of day. Today the critics who don't think the Hobbit is a new species are making their way into scientific journals as well. They're saying that the Hobbit brain looks an awful lot like a human brain. Last year, as I described here, Dean Falk of Florida State University and her colleagues reported on a scan they had made of the braincase of Homo floresiensis. They compared it to the braincase of normal humans, of a human born with a congenital defect called…

Review of the Self-Ordered Pointing Task

The prefrontal cortex is a major recipient of subcortical dopaminergic projections. Accordingly, almost all of the behavioral tasks that are known to critically depend on the prefrontal cortex are sensitive to dopamine levels. A curious exception is the Self Ordered Pointing task (SOPT), in which subjects must select each of 9 designs by pointing at each one once; after each selection, the locations of the designs are randomized. Therefore, in order to succeed at this task subjects must remember the designs themselves and not the locations to which they pointed. The dorsolateral…

MRA “Science” madness!

If ever I run out of creationist pseudoscience (it will never happen), I can always turn to another source, the Men's Rights movement, especially their radical anti-woman wing. Here's a prime example from RooshV: Research Suggests That A Woman’s Body Incorporates DNA From The Semen Of Her Casual Sex Partners. Would you be surprised if I told you that everything in that title is wrong? Would you be shocked to learn that everything Roosh concludes from misreading that research is also wrong? The above study has two seismic implications. The first is that a woman can absorb enough DNA during…

Basic Concepts: Progress, Primitive and Advanced

This is a repost of a piece I wrote for The Panda's Thumb in April 2004. I add it here to put it in the Basics series. One of the more difficult conceptual problems the layperson has with biology lies in the simple word "primitive". It has many antonyms - "modern", "evolved" and "derived", and like many biological uses of ordinary words, everybody thinks they understand it, and doesn't. It is a word from the Latin, of course, for "first fruits" or "first things of their kind", but in modern use it means "simple" or "undeveloped". And this is not - quite - what it means in biology. It…

Book Review: Evolution: The Story of Life

Whenever I sit down to write an entry for this blog I remind myself that I might not always speak the same language as the people I am trying to reach. A statement that might be technically accurate, such as "Mammuthus primigenius was a Late Pleistocene proboscidean with a Holarctic distribution", will likely cause nonspecialist readers to go cross-eyed and vow never to visit this blog again. Instead I have to remember what it was like when I began to teach myself about paleontology and evolution. What do those words mean? And how can I quickly and accurately define them without sacrificing…

Skin cells from an 82-yr.-old ALS patient reprogrammed to form neurons

A team of researchers from Harvard and Columbia University Medical Center have reprogrammed skin cells from an 82-year-old woman suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to generate first stem cells and then motor neurons. This is a significant advance which could aid in the development of drug treatments and cell replacement therapies for the condition and related neurodegenerative disorders. The study, due to be published in the journal Science, demonstrates that skin cells from a chronically diseased elderly patient can be induced to de-differentiate into stem cells and then re-…

Genetic variation in space & time - Iceland

A neat new paper on Icelandic genetics, then and now, Sequences From First Settlers Reveal Rapid Evolution in Icelandic mtDNA Pool: A major task in human genetics is to understand the nature of the evolutionary processes that have shaped the gene pools of contemporary populations. Ancient DNA studies have great potential to shed light on the evolution of populations because they provide the opportunity to sample from the same population at different points in time. Here, we show that a sample of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region sequences from 68 early medieval Icelandic skeletal…

Icicles of death!

Check out this astonishing bit of film from David Attenborough: I'm pretty sure this is from Harry Potter.

Interior design optical illusion

From one angle, they look like miscellaneous wall markings. From another, they look like this... [Via Crooked Brains]

The genius of stupidity

John Lynch comments on an impending list of Ph.D. scientists who dissent from Darwin. He doesn't care, and neither do I, ho hum. As I've noted in the past (and plenty of others have) these lists are usually stacked with physical scientists, and within the life sciences they are slim on individuals from integrative fields where evolution plays a large role. Rosters of scholars who dissent from Darwin is part of a public relations ploy meant to leverage the fact that most humans don't have a great grasp on the specificity and the specialization which a course of scientific work entails.…

Is Crohn's Disease Caused By a Relative of TB?

One of the reasons to study the human microbiome--the microbes that live on and in us--is that many diseases might have a microbiological component. One of the best examples of this are gastric ulcers, most of which are caused by an infection by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. A recent report by the American Academy of Microbiology argues that Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis, also known as MAP, may, in part, be responsible for Crohn's disease: Because the bacterium Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) causes a Crohn's-like gastrointestinal disease in…

Note to Senate Dems (and Candidates): Stop Insulting Us with Filibuster Scare Tactics

As readers might guess, I get a lot of junk mail from Democrats asking me to save America by giving them money (although some are worth giving to). The newest sales pitch is to raise the specter of Republicans being able to filibuster. For instance, Senate candidate and current congressman Paul Hodes of New Hampshire (who isn't such a bad Dem--he's not a Blue Dog) writes in a flyer, "1 seat is all the Republicans need to seize filibuster power. If they succeed, the change Americans voted for last year could be doomed." While mentioning this to a couple of longtime readers, I noted that the…

Global Warming Casualties: If It's Cute, Will People Finally Care?

There's been a lot of justified hullabaloo recently over the fate of Arctic polar bears. You see, they're drowning in record numbers as their habitat, in an eyeblink, drastically changes from the ice floes they've known for thousands of years to open ocean. The only possible good news taken this terrible situation is that they might be added to the US federal government's endangered species list, which would theoretically obligate the government to enforce reduction of US CO2 emissions to preserve the polar bear habitat. But that's wishful thinking. If worldwide uproar and scientific…

An Inevitable Headline in 2014: "Planet's CO2 level reaches 400 ppm for first time in human existence."

Sometime, about one year from now, the front pages of whatever decent newspapers are left will carry a headline like the one above, announcing that for the first time in human existence (or in nearly a million years, or 3 million years, or 15 million years), the global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide – the principal gas causing climate change – will have passed 400 parts per million. That’s a significant and shocking figure. Unfortunately, it is only a temporary marker on the way to even higher and higher levels. Here (Figure 1 below) are the most recent (March 2013) data from the…