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Cortisol necessary for circadian rhythm of cell division

A new paper just came out today on PLoS-Biology: Glucocorticoids Play a Key Role in Circadian Cell Cycle Rhythms. The paper is long and complicated, with many control experiments, etc, so I will just give you a very brief summary of the main finding. One of the three major hypotheses for the origin of circadian clocks is the need to shield sensitive cellular processes - including cell division - from the effects of UV radiation by the sun, thus relegating it to night-time only: The cyclic nature of energetic availability and cycles of potentially degrading effects of the sun's ultraviolet…

Shale Hype

Kurt Cobb has a great article at Resource Insights about why I think the best case against fraccing in my area isn't the water, it is the boom and bust cycle - with a predominance of bust. The last thing rural PA or upstate NY need is another short term boom and bust cycle that leaves them with a lot of played out gas heads and environmental consequences. Or worse, just a plain old bust. But, in its early release of the Annual Energy Outlook for 2012, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) cut its estimate of technically recoverable resources of U.S. shale gas from 827 tcf to 482…

Workers Memorial Day in Words and Pictures

Here are a few articles and posts about Workers Memorial Day events. If you've got more, leave a link in the comments. Las Vegas Sun: Safety advocates testified on Capitol Hill, while Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis attended the groundbreaking for a new National Workers Memorial and vowed that "The Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business." (Plus, an article about victims' families here.) McClatchy Newspapers/San Luis Obispo Tribune: Witnesses at the House Education & Labor Committee hearing urged that OSHA penalties be strengthened in order to deter employers from allowing…

Blasting aways mountains, dumping rubble in valley streams

From the President who brought you "Clean Skies (cough)" and "Healthy Forests (not)" comes a slashing of the "Buffer Zone" rule which is supposed to prohibit mining companies from dumping waste rock---created by mountaintop removal to extract coal---within 100 feet of streams.  As we all know from 3rd grade science class, these small streams flow into larger streams, then creeks and rivers.  They are the underpinning of the natural ecosystem---locally and regionally.  Clogging up the headwaters with boulders, rocks and soil, ruins the local ecology and creates havoc downstream.…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Electronic Eggs Used To Help Save Threatened African Bird: This is an important summer for kori bustards at the Smithsonian's National Zoo. Four chicks of this threatened African bird have hatched in June and July. Along with the bumper crop of baby birds is a bumper crop of new information for scientists working to preserve the species, thanks to an electronic egg that transmits real-time incubation data from the nest. Reef Corals: How To Structure A Complex Body Plan: Phenotypic flexibility enables multicellular organisms to adjust morphologies to variable environmental challenges. Such…

Cortisol necessary for circadian rhythm of cell division

A new paper just came out today on PLoS-Biology: Glucocorticoids Play a Key Role in Circadian Cell Cycle Rhythms. The paper is long and complicated, with many control experiments, etc, so I will just give you a very brief summary of the main finding. One of the three major hypotheses for the origin of circadian clocks is the need to shield sensitive cellular processes - including cell division - from the effects of UV radiation by the sun, thus relegating it to night-time only: The cyclic nature of energetic availability and cycles of potentially degrading effects of the sun's ultraviolet…

Holocaust Children, part III (guest post by Mom)

This is the third post in the series. I mentioned before that my Mom taped her story for the Shoah project. You can access the tapes through the RENCI site. Also, regulars here know that my Mom reads this blog and sometimes comments. I assume that she would not object to answering a couple of polite questions from readers. Do the hidden Children Differ from the Others? Saturday, November 10th I liked the lecture of Robert Krell he gave this morning. He told us his "story". He comes from Holland, was hidden from 1942-1945 and after the war he reunited with his parents, who were…

The Y Chromosome Reveals Ancestry

tags: Y chromosome, genetics, Britain, African A study of the human Y chromosome found that seven men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a rare genetic signature found only in people of African origin. Researchers Turi King and Mark Jobling from Leicester University found that the men appear to have shared a common ancestor in the 18th Century, but the African DNA lineage they carry could have reached Britain centuries earlier. This discovery was the result of genetic research that analyzed the relationship between the Y chromosome and surnames. The Y chromosome is normally found only in…

A Field Guide to Household Bugs: It's a Jungle in Here

tags: book review, entomology, insects, household pests, Joshua Abarbanel, Jeff Swimmer I am dismayed to reveal that my apartment is home to uncounted numbers of freeloaders. In fact, every evening, when I turn the lights on, I witness these tiny marauders' mad dash for the cracks in the walls and the space under the refrigerator. I am talking about the East Coast plague: cockroaches. You know; vile, disgusting, nearly ubiquitous bugs. However, I feel much better knowing that everyone's home, regardless of how sterile it is, is occupied by a vast collection of invertebrate roommates. In fact…

In the Bigs Boyz' Wake

This graph shows what two links from Daily Kos and one link from Instapundit in the span of two days can do for your blog traffic. For those of you who don't know, Daily Kos is a high-traffic politically liberal team-written blog, whereas Instapundit is a high-traffic politically conservative single-author blog. This graph depicts traffic to Scientific Life during the previous 30 days, and the numbers along the x-axis denote the dates for the end of February through the middle of March. The green area shows the number of visitors, or "hits", and the purple area shows the total number of…

Letting others speak for me

James Wolcott: Inside, a NY editorial titled 'Nuts!' begins with a little historical lesson explaining the cover line. "It may be the most famous one-word sentence in American military history, and it's time to dust it off after yesterday's pronouncement from Osama bin Laden: 'Nuts!' That's how Brigadier Gen. Anthony McAuliffe responded to the Nazis when asked to surrender the town of Bastogne on December 19, 1944. Outnumbered and surrounded by Panzer tanks, McAuliffe gave his one word response to a courier." Did you see the problem with this Victor Davis Hanson-ing? The United States isn't…

stupid petty rulers of nations

There is much angst now about finanical crises and bank collapses, and whether and which emergency bailouts are appropriate and who gets them. Yet at the root of the whole process are petty little people with fragile egos and incomplete understanding of the basics of their profession, despite having been in power for many years. I am, of course, talking about Iceland. The country is bankrupt, the whole banking system has failed, the currency is untradable and the economy is in free-fall. The only hope of sustaining something of a working economy in the short run is to get a large loan, on…

Mastodon Found in Greece

tags: mastodon fossils, Greece AMNH 9951, skeleton of the American mastodont, Mammut americanum, Newburgh, NY. Image: AMNH (American Museum of Natural History, NYC, NY) [larger] In an astonishing discovery, a three million year old "fossilized zoo" was discovered by Greek geologists yesterday in the northern Milia region near the town of Grevena. This "zoo" contains the fossilized remains of prehistoric rhinos, mastodons, gazelles and carnivorous mammals. The discovery included a pair of tusks from a mastodon (pictured left. Image: Evangelia Tsoukala), an ancient species of elephant that…

Investigators probe integrity of OSHA's safety recognition program

Update below (7/8/2011) Just a few months after the Obama Administration took office, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a scathing report on OSHA's Voluntary Protection Program (VPP). The program is supposed to recognize workplaces with exceptional safety programs, but GAO's investigators identified participant worksites that had multiple fatalities and gross violations of safety standards. The late Senator Kennedy said "GAO's report makes clear that OSHA has strayed too far from its core mission of protecting the safety and health of workers on the job. The agency has spent…

Recent Archaeomags

Current Archaeology #287 (February) has news of a roundhouse foundation that really caught my eye. English Iron Age roundhouses are usually visible simply as a circular ditch or a post circle. This house, at Broadbridge Heath in Sussex, had a foundation ditch shaped like a slightly open number 6: a spiral! I also enjoyed Nadia Durrani's eight-page feature on the historical archaeology of Early Modern London theatres and bear-baiting rings. Chris Catling asks an interesting question regarding the ownership to land and to any ores under that land in the UK: these can and often do belong to…

Global warming comes from within

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: We all live on a thin crust that floats on a huge ball of molten iron, and at its core, the Earth's temperature is over 5000oC! It's pretty far fetched to think a few parts per million of CO2 can have a bigger effect that all that heat! Answer: Although there is nothing wrong with the statement that the Earth is truly very hot at its center (actually as hot as the surface of the sun) the notion that it is a significant source of heat at…

Conflicts of Interest and the Supreme Court

STACLU has a post up accusing Justice Ginsburg of having a conflict of interest for ruling in a case involving the ACLU because she used to work as an attorney for them. Quoting another blogger, they ask the following question: Is it proper that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg - a former attorney for the ACLU - to have actually ruled on a ACLU case before her? Isn't it a standard practice to recuse oneself when there is a conflict of interest - such as in the case of CJ John Roberts in the Haman (sic) case? And then Jay goes on, as usual, to blather on about hypocrisy where none…

If You Have Nothing to Hide, Why Worry?

Like many others around the blogosphere, I'm finding it quite amusing that the Congressional leadership has finally found an exercise of executive law enforcement authority frightening enough to get upset about - unfortunately, it took a raid on a Congressman's office to do it. The FBI raid on Rep. William Jefferson's office last weekend has Congress absolutely apoplectic, despite the fact that A) they had a warrant and B) Jefferson had been videotaped taking bribes from an undercover officer. If that isn't probable cause, I don't know what is. But the Congressional leadership is freaking…

Weekend Diversion: The First Relativistic Video Game!

“There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that's still beyond logic of the observer.” -Toba Beta It might be hard to believe, but science tells us truths about the Universe that we might never have intuited or philosophized about if the Universe itself didn't reveal them to us through investigation. Bap Kennedy alludes to this in one of my favorite songs by him, Mostly Water, and this is certainly true of Einstein's relativity, which details just how the Universe behaves when we move close to the speed of light. This is notoriously difficult to visualize or gain…

How do insects walk on water?

A new study illuminates this shadowy question. First, the video: And now, a press note from the American Chemical Society: Water striders' ability to walk and jump on the surfaces of ponds and lakes has long amazed curious observers — and inspired robot designers who want to mimic the bugs' talent. Now, scientists have measured for the first time key parameters that allow them to walk on water — by studying their leg shadows. The findings, reported in the ACS journal Langmuir, could contribute to designs for water-skimming robots. More than 2,000 years ago, Greek scientist Archimedes…

I just got an email from the Heartland Institute about the "HeartlandGate" documents

I just got this email. I have no way of telling if it is authentic: February 18, 2012 By e-mail to: greg@gregladen.com By Federal Express to: Mr. Greg T. Laden Greg Laden's Blog 44788 265th Lane Aitkin, MN 56431-4807 Re: Stolen and Faked Heartland Documents http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/02/heartlandgate_anti-science_in… Dear Mr. Laden: On or about February 14, 2012, your web site posted a document entitled "Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy" (the "Fake Memo"), which is fabricated and false. On or about the same date, your web site posted certain other…

Ten Years Before the Blog: 2011-2012

In which we reach the end of our decade-long historical recap. ------------ So, at long last, the recap of my decade of blogging has reached the current year. And I do have a file of pre-filtered links from the current year (well, up through early May, when it was put together), which I was going to go through and post in the same manner as previous years. But you know how when some magazine does a list of the "top 40 songs of the last 40 years," or whatever, there are always 6-8 songs from the last couple of years, and you say "No way. It may be a big hit right now, but it's too soon to call…

Children from low-income families at educational disadvantage

Children from low-income families in the US and Britian are disadvantaged in school, according to research just now coming out from the University's Centre for Market and Public Organisation. From a press release: ...According to the study, children from low-income backgrounds are raised in environments that fail to promote their cognitive, social and health development adequately and, as a result, they are more likely to begin school with deficits in their learning ability and social behaviour. The key findings of the research are that: The poorest fifth of children in the UK are equally…

Responses to Newtown

I don't have anything in particular to say in response to the massacre in Newtown, CT. The usual folks are making the usual arguments, of course. Many are suggesting that teachers and principals should be packing heat. Unless you're going to make combat training part of teacher certification, that sounds like a bad idea. Having more guns in schools does not sound like a recipe for increased safety. From the other side, it just seems obvious to me that certain forms of weaponry, automatic weapons and enormous ammunition clips for example, are so inherently dangerous and serve no function…

The Dark Art of Blurbing

Tom Levenson's series about the writing of his Newton and the Counterfeiter continues with a piece on the getting of blurbs for the cover: Newton and the Counterfeiter (Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound) is by far my best-blurbed book, boasting enthusiastic and generous praise from a very diverse crew of luminaries — (David Bodanis, Junot DÃaz, Timothy Ferris, Brian Greene, Walter Isaacson, Sylvia Nasar, and Neal Stephenson). This follows, as I wrote last time, a much sparser field of those who promoted my three previous books. How — and why — did I go for this level of long-…

Links for 2009-11-25

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Teaching Governance "As an administrator, I'm constantly struck by the unacknowledged contradiction among many faculty between "consult us in all things" and "back off and leave us alone." It's not that I don't understand the impulse; depending on local practice, 'service' may or may not count for tenure or promotion. If it doesn't, then the duck-and-cover approach makes short-term sense. Certainly, anybody who has put in time in contentious meetings (hi!) can attest that they can be draining, that you'll sometimes see people at their worst, and that…

"Summa cum loony" - the Duke lacrosse case lives on

Let me say from the outset that I am too close to this issue, in many ways, to be fully objective. However, this issue is likely to be of interest to those in the academic community and especially anyone who followed the now-discredited 2006 Duke lacrosse case. On 15 May Duke graduating senior and guest columnist, Kristin Butler, wrote an editorial in The Duke Chronicle entitled, "Summa cum loony." Her editorial addressed the fellow graduation across town of Solomon Burnette, convicted in 1997 of robbing two Duke students, and Crystal Gail Mangum, the exotic dancer hired by Duke lacrosse…

Latest no-no for climateers: tropical vacations

As if the developing world didn't have a enough to worry about when it comes to joining the industrialized 21st century without following in the developed world's polluting footprints. A new study by British researchers finds that where you fly makes a difference to your impact on the climate. The take-home message is jet flights near the equator do more damage than at high latitudes. "Impact of perturbations to nitrogen oxide emissions from global aviation" by Mark Köhler et al in the Journal of Geophysical Research (Vol. 113, D11305) studied the effects of all that nitrogen oxide spewing…

The most powerful American foreign policy: Education

David Ignatius has a great column about the underestimated power of American education. American-style education is being rapidly exported all over the world, and foreign students are lining up to attend American universities at both a graduate and undergraduate level. In some cases, these students stay. In some cases, they return, bringing the values they learned here to their home countries: America's great universities are in fact becoming global. They are the brand names for excellence -- drawing in the brightest students and faculty and giving them unparalleled opportunities. This is…

Evolution at Work (and creationism nowhere in sight)

You may have heard last month's news about an aggressive form of HIV that had public health officials in New York scared out of their professional gourds. They isolated the virus from a single man, and reported that it was resistant to anti-HIV drugs and drove its victim into full-blown AIDS in a manner of months, rather than the normal period of a few years. Skeptics wondered whether all the hoopla was necessary or useful. The virus might not turn out to be all that unusual, some said; perhaps the man's immune system had some peculiar twist that gave the course of his disease such a…

Post-Holiday Syndrome.

Ahh... some great research from Spain. You know when you get home from vacation you really need another vacation to get ready to go back to work. Well... it's called Post-Holiday Syndrome. Here's the whole mess from Eurekalerts: Millions of people will leave their working places and start their holidays in the next weeks. The daily routine will be part of the past and resting days, pictures at the seashore and summer memories will be back to stay - at least for some weeks. Experts estimate that 35 per cent of Spanish workers between the ages of 25 and 40 will have to face the "post-holiday…

Roundup of notables: The Certainty Epidemic, Dog Head Poetry, et alia

Some great stuff I've come across, lack time to blog on, but would hate for you to miss: In On being certain, neurologist and novelist Robert Burton, who writes a column at Slate Salon, looks at the science of what makes us feel certain about things -- even when we're dead wrong about them. His book on the subject, which I read in advance copy a while back, is fascinating fun reading. The most startling (and disorienting) finding he describes is that, from a neurocognitive point of view, our feeling of certainty about things we're wrong about is pretty much indistinguishable from our…

Who In The World Cares About Gender Equity In Science?

Thanks to Scienceblogs, I have access to Google Analytics for my blog, which means I can obsess over a wealth of information and statistics. It's amazing what Google knows about my blog. Let's hope Google always and only decides to use its power for good... Anyhoo, one of the things I can look at is where you, my fabulous blog readers, are situated. I can look by city, region, country, sub-continent region, and continent. Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd take a peek at what countries y'all are hanging out in. I thought I might get a nice handful of countries - surely Canada,…

The problem with Canada

Since I moved to North Carolina (five years ago next month), it's been depressing to watch the political climate there move ever closer to the one the U.S. managed to pull itself out of in 2008. The latest news, which concerns attempts by the federal government to silence its own climatologists, only reinforces that interpretation. From the Montreal Gazette we learn of an internal review at the Department of the Environment: The document suggests the new communications policy has practically eliminated senior federal scientists from media coverage of climate-change science issues, leaving…

PLoS Medicine tests out spam drug merchants

The headline on Science Daily reads "One-third Of Spam Is 'Health'-related," but the real news comes from the highly readable PLoS Medicine source article, "Will Spam Overwhelm Our Defenses? Evaluating Offerings for Drugs and Natural Health Products." Peter Gernburd and Alejandro R. Jadad analyzed the spam in three different email accounts last November and came up with some startling results. Of the over 4,100 spam messages received, over 1,300 were "health"-related. Most of us, I assume, simply move these messages to our spam folders, and most of it goes there automatically. But Gernburd…

What babies can hear through all that noise

Listen to this short audio clip: Now listen to this one: Notice any difference? I didn't think so. But if you were a 5-month-old infant named Caroline, the difference would be crystal clear. In the second clip, your name would be indistinguishable from background noise, but in the first clip, you'd be able to hear it above the din. Both clips are played against the identical background noise: ten different women reading ten different stories. But in the first clip, the name "Caroline" is 10 dB louder than the backround noise, while in the second clip, it's just 5 dB louder. Being able to…

Earliest land vertebrates had a colourful view

Some 365 million years ago, during the early Devonian period, the Sarcopterygian (or lobe-finned) fish emerged from the sea and gave rise to the first terrestrial tetrapods. During the course of their evolution, the tetrapods became adapted to life on land. One big challenge faced by the earliest tetrapods was how to interpret the rich tapestry of visual information to which their aquatic ancestors were all but oblivious.  One would think that, having evolved from fish, the visual systems of the early tetrapods would have been poorly adapted to life on land. But new research, just…

Original Art of A Lion's Skull, And What's In It

I have immense respect and awe for people with artistic talent. Since I have have absolutely none to speak of, the process of developing a piece of art from sketch to completion (and making it look beautiful) is something that baffles me. Artists who focus on the illustration of specimins, science, and natural history art are particularly awesome and rare. I am lucky enough to consider as friends two talented natural history artists, Glendon Mellow and Carl Buell, who have both designed the beautiful banners which rotate on the masthead above. I have another to add though, reader John Perry…

Chocolate on the Brain: Is Chocolate an Antidepressant?

Anyone who's ever taken a bite of a Reese's Peanut butter Eggs that are only sold during the Easter season knows that chocolate is a mood enhancer, but in case you thought it might just be the wonderful taste, there is actual empirical evidence that chocolate can elevate your mood. Specifically, eating chocolate appears to make individuals suffering from atypical depression and seasonal affective disorder (SAD) feel better. As a result, chocolate and carbohydrate cravings are common in atypical depression and SAD, perhaps as a form of self-medication1. Several hypotheses have been offered to…

125 sq km of ice knocked off Antarctica by Tsunami

The Honshu tsunami of March 11th (the one that caused the Fukushima disaster) caused the otherwise stable Sulzberger Ice Shelf to calve giant hunks of ice. Climate scientists call this "teleconnection." I call it a big whopping bunch of whack knocking off a gigunda chunka stuff. Either way, this is important and interesting. Scientists figured this out by modeling the movement of the tsunami's energy across the Pacific and correlating this with the calving event observed from s satellite. That sounds easier than it was: By the time a tsunami wave travels a few tens of thousands of…

The Great Potato Origins Debate May be Settled

Solanum tuberosum, is an American cultivar related to the tomato and the eggplant (Remarkably, they are all in the same genus, but rarely to all three appear in the same dish). Potatoes, the lovely underground storage organ (USO) without which we would not have French Fries, or dipping chips to eat during the Super Bowl, twice baked potatoes, or Mr. Potato Head and his family, were domesticated by Native Americans in two local centers, one in the high Andes in eastern Venezuela and northern Argentina, and in the lowlands of south-central Chile. During the last half of the 16th century, they…

It must really suck to be one of Ian Plimer's students

Just as I thought, Ian Plimer's questions for Monbiot were a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions. Monbiot writes: Creationists and climate change deniers have this in common: they don't answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science. When these refutations are shown to be nonsense, they do not seek to defend them. They simply switch to another line of attack. They never retract, never apologise, never explain, just raise the volume, keep moving and hope that people won't notice the trail of broken claims in their wake. ... Having put up…

Monckton debunks Monckton

Peter Hadfield dissects Monckton's response to Hadfield's demolition of Monckton's claims about climate science. Hadfield coins the term "Monckton maneuver" to describe Monckton's tactic of changing his position when shown to be wrong and pretending that his position hasn't changed. In other Monckton news, he is still claiming to be a member of the House of Lords, despite what the courts and the House of Lords say. This time he's got a lawyer to argue the case for him. If we assume that Monckton's lawyer is competent, this would be the best case that can be made for Monckton, so it is…

Somebody Please Plant Some Tannat Grapevines!

Scientists discover where the world's healthiest wines are grown If you are a fan of red wine you might be interested in the fact that certain peculiar facts about the stuff are beginning to emerge: 1. Folks who drink a small to moderate amount of red wine daily live longer, or have reduced rates of heart disease. 2. Folks who live in the Mediterranean countries or in France live longer, or have reduced rates of heart disease. 3. Folks who live in the Mediterranean countries or France drink more red wine than in other parts of the world. Whoa! Now wait just a cotton-pickin' minute! I may…

Updated Senate Results

(I think that I'm done updating this post for now, as the results show no indication of changing significantly. I'll have more to say about the election tomorrow.) A Democratic majority in the Senate is all but certain, as Montana and Virginia both appear to have gone to the Democrats. This means that the Democrats were able to live up to the high expectations, successfully gaining control of both the House and the Senate. With 100% of precincts reporting, Democrat Jon Tester has beat out Republican Conrad Burns in the Montana Senatorial race. The count (as of 5:30 pm ET) is 198,302 (49.07…

Mass Arrest in Occupy Oakland

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com I've been following use of social media in freedom of speech throughout the Arab Spring...but something is going on in Oakland, California that deserves some attention. About the live feed: Global Revolution brings you live stream video coverage from independent journalists on the ground at nonviolent protests around the world. The channel officially started on September 17, 2011 with occupation of Liberty Square in downtown Manhattan, NYC and was the first livestream channel to cover occupy wall street protests. Since then…

How Educated is Your State Legislator?

How educated is your state legislator? The answer varies considerably from state to state. While many lawmakers hold a college degree, support of public higher education, it seems, has always been a challenge. Consider this scenario: Sufficient funds have been raised to support initial construction of the academic buildings and the first faculty member has been hired. But the state legislature is reluctant to provide funding to allow completion of the building, causing considerable delays of opening for its first academic year. Ripple effects ensue. The first freshmen class cannot be…

Weekly Twitter summary

Some of you may know that I post many links of interest that don't make it into a full blog post via Twitter. Since I know there are a number of blog readers who haven't yet made the move to Twitter, I'm going to follow in Dan Vorhaus' footsteps by posting a weekly roundup of useful links here on Genetic Future. Here's episode 1, encompassing the first week of 2010: RT @eurogene Don't worry, personal genomics is not dying (despite Peter Aldhous), it's growing, just shedding skin Pardis Sabeti's beautiful work on refining signals of selection in the human genome is out in Science: http://…

Snowstorms and poison

Just before this weekend's stunning snow storm arrived in the Mid-Atlantic, poison control centers started issuing chirps of alarm. I thought of them as chirps -  something like the peeping alarm calls  of  small birds -  because they sounded so faint against the other looming worries - adequate food supplies, airport closures, shut downs in government services. And yet the fact is that more people have already been poisoned as a result of the monster storm than have suffered from starvation. The Washington Post today  reported eight people treated for carbon monoxide poisoning and in…

The Australian’s War on Science 78

Graham Lloyd is back with a story headlined “Climate link to Sandy invalid” (Google the title if you want to read it).  As we've come to expect from The Australian the headline is contradicted by the story, with both scientists quoted agreeing that sea level rise caused by global warming had worsened the flooding from Sandy.  Lloyd writes (all links in quotes added by me): In a statement on the disaster that hit North America on Monday, the federal government-sponsored Climate Commission said "all the evidence suggests that climate change exacerbated the severity of Hurricane Sandy". ……