environment
pharyngula | January 4, 2011Morphological variation is important, it's interesting…and it's also common. It's one of my major scientific interests — I'm actually beginning a new research project this spring with a student and I doing some pilot experiments to evaluate variation in wild populations here in western Minnesota, so I'm even putting my research time where my mouth is in this case. There has been some wonderful prior work in this area: I'll just mention a paper by Shubin, Wake, and Crawford from 1995 that examined limb skeletal morphology in a population of newts, and found notable variation in the wrist…
jtoney | January 3, 2011
Lionfish
Photo source.
With New Year's resolutions on our minds, consider something out of the ordinary: not a diet to lose weight, but a diet to help the planet. Become an invasivore. Let me explain.
A recent article in The New York Times describes the invasivore diet this way:
There's a new shift in the politics of food, not quite a movement yet, more of an eco-culinary frisson. But it may have staying power; the signs and portents are there. Vegans, freegans, locavores -- meet the invasivores.
Think of invasivores as targeted ominvores, focused on eating species that invade specific…
jdupuis | January 2, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of David Suzuki: An Autobiography, is from October 3, 2006.
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We live in a time when the military, industry, and medicine are all applying scientific insights, with profound social, economic, and political…
esiegel | January 1, 2011"They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?" -Jeanette Winterson
Here in Portland, it's just cold for now. But much of the world has been blanketed in those familiar white flakes, and recently. Snow is one of those simple things that nature just does, but it's still as wonderful for most of us as it was when we were little kids.
Image credit: Fillies Wo/UNEP/Still Pictures.
Rather than liquid freezing, snow comes from water vapor -- the gaseous form of…
jtoney | January 1, 2011Protecting and sustaining our environment is a core value that seems to be common sense. It never occurred to me that this value might somehow conflict with religion - after all, isn't being a good steward of the earth a goal of numerous faiths? Apparently not.
As reported in The New York Times, there is a strong push back by Christian evangelists against environmentalism. I find this mind boggling.
This movement refers to itself as "Resisting the Green Dragon" {is such a moniker supposed to conjure images of fire breathing dragons in a prehistoric era?} and refers to enviornmentalism as…
aardvarchaeology | December 27, 2010
The Swedish Skeptics' annual awards for 2010 were just announced.
Ãsa Vilbäck, MD, receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"... who has described diseases and treatments in an unbiased and informative manner on her TV show Dr. Ãsa on Swedish state television. By upholding a good popular science standard on her show, Ãsa Vilbäck has emphasised clearly the importance of evidence-based medicine. She has also warned viewers of dangerous alternative medical methods."
Enlightener Vilbäck receives a cash prize of SEK 25 000 ($3700, â¬2800).
The Stockholm Initiative lobby group receives the…
pharyngula | December 14, 2010This is really well done: Darryl Cunningham explains global warming with simple, clear illustrations and explanations. I want to steal it all, put it in a pdf, and print out a few hundred copies to hand out to the deniers.
pharyngula | December 9, 2010So you filled up another bucket in the endless thread…I really should get that leak fixed someday. Meanwhile, here's a little something from the Institute on the Environment at the UM.
(Current totals: 11,487 entries with 1,207,883 comments.)
mikethemadbiologist | November 17, 2010Or something. By way of Howie Klein, we discover that Blue America PAC, which supports candidates, who among other things, are not global warming denialists, is faced with a nuisance lawsuit. This attack is led by 'Let Freedom Ring, Inc.', a conservative faith-tank. And who funds Let Freedom Ring? Well (italics mine):
'Let Freedom Ring, Inc.' is a Conservative think-tank that was set up in 2004 in the USA thanks to a $1 million donation from Dr John Templeton, Jr., President of the John Templeton Foundation. The organization seeks to promote the neo-conservative agenda led by President…
pharyngula | November 11, 2010A few days ago, sent you off to vote on a debate on genetically-modified crops, a debate that has continued onwards.
We didn't quite pharyngulate this poll; it has gone back and forth, and now the anti-GMO forces have a pretty good lead. One reason that we didn't pound it into the ground is that there was some dissension here, even — I think a fair number of the people who read about it here went off to vote for the antis. And then, also, I've learned that the anti-GMO gang organized their own opposition (which is perfectly fair!), which I suspect voted with much more unity than the gang from…
esiegel | November 10, 2010"Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life." -Hal Lewis
The most valuable natural resources we have at our disposal during our brief lives are the following.
That's right, the Earth and the Sun. And if we want life on Earth to continue as we know it, we have to avoid destroying our own natural environment. The big questions are whether we're actually damaging it to the point of devastating destruction, and if so, what we need to do to fix it.
One of the things we've measured reasonably well -- at, for instance, weather stations all…
gregladen | November 9, 2010As global warming progresses, habitats change in their suitability for various life forms. It may be that moose will not be able to live in Minnesota in the future; Of the two resident moose populations, the one that lives in the area more affected by global warming has pretty much died out probably due indirectly to the effects of increased temperature. There are regions of the rockies where entire forests are dead because of temperature changes. And so on.
Imagine a large flat landscape. As one moves north vs. south, average annual temperature changes, as does the number of days of…
esiegel | November 2, 2010"Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise." -Ayn Rand
We're all aware that one of the ways that human life on Earth could end, conceivably, is the same way that the dinosaurs went down.
And asteroid tracking and deflection technology is fast becoming one of the hot issues of the day. It appears so often in the news that you'd think we are at a high risk, any day, of being hit by a catastrophic asteroid.
But -- and my opinion here definitely runs against the mainstream -- I think this hysteria is…
sastyk | October 31, 2010I admit, maybe because of that intellectual slowdown that the cold weather and dark days call, but I'm confused about which one of these is the real Onion Headline - that thing about the Brookings Institute guy or a BBC headline that reads "World Bank Leads Economic Push on Nature Protection." Really? Seriously? The World Bank? Are we sure this isn't April Fools, not Halloween?
But no, it is serious. Or at least trying to be:
The World Bank has launched a global partnership aimed at helping countries include the costs of destroying nature into their national accounts.
Ten nations will…
esiegel | October 29, 2010"People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend." -Jim Morrison
Yes, Jim Morrison, some people are quite strange, too.
People Are StrangeBut that's not what I'm talking about. You see, one of the "doomsday" scenarios people are talking about over at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- in addition to black holes -- are out-of-control strangelets.
Let's talk about what these things are, what people are afraid of, and whether there really is anything worth fearing.…
mikethemadbiologist | October 26, 2010A problem in genome-wide association studies ("GWAS") is the"missing heritability" issue--identified genetic variation can only account for a small fraction of the estimated genetic contribution to variation in that trait. Razib has a good roundup of several explanations (and I added some speculation about nearly-neutral mutations).
GWAS also have problems accurately characterizing the trait. For example, not all heart diseases (note the plural) are alike, so we have to be certain that we accurately assess the trait of interest. But what is very rarely discussed is the environmental…
sastyk | October 21, 2010Robyn's Adapting In Place Blog has a really great sermon she gave about teaching kids about the environment. I really like her points both about multiple environmentalisms, and also about the way kids react to empty nonsense like "101 ways you can save the planet." The whole thing is well worth a read! Robyn is one of the most intelligent and passionate advocates of good education of all kinds I know, and this is her stuff at its best!
I also discovered that I was under a double whammy with kids when teaching conventional environmentalism. First, as I already said, kids can smell a lie, so…
mikethemadbiologist | October 16, 2010While most of the commentary, including mine, about the collapse of Big Shitpile (aka the housing crisis) has focused on the financial and economic effects, building more housing than we needed--and couldn't afford--also had environmental effects. Take, for instance, Prince William County, VA:
Stewart and other Prince William officials hope a new developer will soon be found to construct Harbor Station, the nearly 2,000-acre parcel near Dumfries with the glittering golf course.
McLean developer Robert C. Kettler and partners had planned on building 4,000 houses, a town center with luxury…
pharyngula | October 14, 2010Ross Douthat proposes an explanation for why Republicans are so wacky on climate change. He points out that there's a strong strain of climate change denial in the American public, one that's also present in other countries.
What's interesting, though, is that if you look at public opinion on climate change, the U.S. isn't actually that much of an outlier among the wealthier Western nations. In a 2007-2008 Gallup survey on global views of climate change, for instance, just 49 percent of American told pollsters that human beings are responsible for global warming. But the same figure for…