editorial
laelaps | October 31, 2007Looks like I've got an editorial war on my hands. Yesterday I announced that my refutation of Brad Pironciak's "Social Darwinism" piece was printed in the college newspaper, The Daily Targum, and now I've received an editorial reply from English major Justin Fruhling. I don't have time to respond in full to his comments right now (you can read his piece here), but Fruhling's main complaint is that I didn't take "The Darwin Awards" or falling standardized test scores into account. Entirely missing the main point of my argument (intelligence is not wholly determined by inheritance and we should…
laelaps | October 30, 2007Yesterday I wrote about an absolutely horrible opinion piece that appeared in the Rutgers newspaper The Daily Targum, the author suggesting that those he deemed stupid deserved to die. Although I gave a detailed response on this blog, I wanted to address the Rutgers community as a whole and I shot off an editorial reply to the paper. I didn't hear back from the Targum editors so I wasn't sure whether my piece would run or not (especially since I was critical of the editorial board for not checking Pironciak's piece), but lo and behold, it's been published. There's little in my response that I…
illconsidered | October 30, 2007Oceans are 'soaking up less CO2' is the headline of a recent BBC News article. (Well, it is recent in most senses of the word though not in blogger-land...Rabbet Run discusses it here, Stoat did it here, and Michael Tobis blogged about it here).
So the news is that a some new research indicates that the rate at which atmospheric CO2 is being absorbed into the ocean is falling. The findings are new, the authors are not sure if natural varibility is involved or not, but regardless it is a troubling sign. If it does turn out to be the case it signals the cessation of a free ride nature has…
illconsidered | October 29, 2007Real Climate has a good post on geo-engineering and why it is only fitting as a final act of desperation, not a policy platform. It expresses very well all my own misgivings (it's a terribly dangerous one-chance-to-get-it-right experiment on the entire planet, it commits the human race to centuries of climatic meddling, it will ultimately be more expensive and harder to agree on than simply reducing CO2) so I won't enumerate them here, just go read it all there.
But I will emphasize one of the points Ray Pierrehumbert mentions that is too often overlooked.
As anyone who follows the science…
illconsidered | October 27, 2007If the United States continues to thumb its nose at the rest of the world in the climate change arena, this article from the EU Observer discusses what the appropriate response should be.
The article indicates that the European Union is considering taxing goods that are imported from CO2 polluting countries. In other words, the US would not be allowed the economic benefits it would gain by being a rogue nation and not controling its CO2 emissions.
Of course, there are many devils hiding in the yet to be established details, but this is clearly the right principle and may actually have a…