coral reefs
pgleick | July 16, 2013
The evidence from real-world observations, sophisticated computer models, and research in hundreds of different fields continues to pile up: human-caused climate change is already occurring and will continue to get worse and worse as greenhouse-gas concentrations continue to rise.
Because the climate is connected to every major geophysical, chemical, and biological system on the planet, it should not be surprising that we are learning more and more about the potential implications of these changes for a remarkably wide range of things. And while it is certainly possible – even likely – that…
pgleick | May 10, 2013The planet has passed a disturbing landmark, a marker on a continuing highway to climate disruption. On May 9th, the NOAA and the Mauna Loa observatory reported that atmospheric CO2 levels touched 400 parts per million. Before humans started burning fossil fuels, they were around 280 parts per million.
Mauna Loa measurements of carbon dioxide. From http://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/
The last time atmospheric CO2 was at 400 parts per million was during the ancient Pliocene Era, three to five million years ago, and humans didn’t exist.
Global average temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees C warmer…
ddobbs | December 7, 20091. Maybe it was just the headline ... but the runaway winner was "No pity party, no macho man." Psychologist Dave Grossman on surviving killing. Actually I think it was the remarkable photo, which looks like a painting. Check it out.
2. I'm not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic. The blog post about the article that led to the book.
3. Senator Asks Pentagon To Review Antidepressants
4. Gorgeous thing of the day: Sky's-eye view of the Maldives & other islands
5. The Weird History of Vaccine Adjuvants, even though it was from Oct 1…
ddobbs | November 6, 2009
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
The Maldives, featured in a Wired gallery of islands shot from space. A place crucial to the story I told in Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. It was in this unique archipelago that Alexander Agassiz found the evidence he felt proved beyond doubt that Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was wrong, dead wrong. It's also a singularly beautiful place, and particularly threatened by global warming.
ddobbs | September 7, 2009Bloggingheads.tv just posted a conversation Greg Laden and I had about the second-biggest scientific controversy of Darwin's time, and of Darwin's life: the argument over how coral reefs form. The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically -- for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father.
His story -- and the tumultuous 19th-century struggle to define science and empiricism -- is the…
gregladen | September 6, 2009The Bloggingheads with David Dobbs and Moi is now up at Blogginheads, and embedded here:
I had just posted a review of Dobb's book, Reef Madness, which I enjoyed a great deal, and here we discuss the book in more detail. I left out a lot of detail, especially the exciting multi-part ending, in my review. You'll hear more about what happened to the competing reef theories and to Alexander Agassiz in this hour long bla-bla-blawginghead's interview.
David Dobbs' main web site is here.
Added: Note something funny (as in funny strange) happening at about 23 or 24 minutes.
ddobbs | September 2, 2009
I was pleased to see my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral written up in a couple of venues recently. Over at The Primate Diaries, Eric Michael Johnson, who does on history and philosophy of science, looks at the "terrific argument" that the book follows -- an argument simultaneously about how coral reefs form, how to do science, and (a third layer out), creationism versus empiricism. A nice write-up -- you can't go wrong starting a piece about the creationism-empiricism debate (among other things) with an atomic blast.
The book is also mentioned…
cwilcox | July 9, 2009As a marine biologist by training, I naturally love the ocean and just about everything in it. So it is such a treat for me to be able to just go out and enjoy what I love. Right now, I'm in between my last job as a simple graduate and being a full time graduate student, so I've got a little free time to explore. And, being on an island in the middle of the Pacific which is only something around 38 miles across, exploration naturally tends to include the ocean.
As a blogger, of course, I feel the need to share such excursions with you. So, it's quite happily that I have decided to extend my "…
ddobbs | February 5, 2009
A coral atoll, from Darwin's The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 1842.
For those teeming millions near Hanover, N.H., here's notice that I'll be giving a talk at Dartmouth at 4pm today -- Thu, Feb 5 -- about Darwin's first, favorite, and (to me) most interesting theory, which was his theory about how coral reefs formed.
This is the subject of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, and I'll be posting more about it next week, during the Blog for Darwin festival. But the short version -- and the topic of my talk -- is this:
Darwin's coral…