environment
jdupuis | October 8, 2016
What About the Planet?
Partisan polarization on climate change is worse than ever
Three things Ottawa should do to fight climate change
It’s Happening Now: Climate Change Is Killing Off the Yellow Cedar
‘Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’
Could Ontario's climate strategy trigger an industrial exodus?
Why Obama’s top scientist just called keeping fossil fuels in the ground ‘unrealistic’
On Climate Change, Pence and Trump Are a Perfect Match
As climate change worsens wildfires, smokejumpers fight blazes from the sky
Why Trudeau’s Commitment to Harper’s Old Emissions…
esiegel | October 5, 2016“She didn’t even know what she’d do when she got back to New Orleans, but inside she felt a yearning to shove her hands in the dirt, to cling to the ground there, forever.” -Sarah Rae
Hurricanes are among the most destructive natural disasters to occur on Earth, with extensive flooding, property damage and loss of life commonly accompanying them. But they’re also inevitable consequences -- at least on our world -- of two simple factors: warm ocean waters and winds.
The formation of a hurricane relies on warm, humid air, winds, and pressure changes. Image credit: NASA's SciJinks, via http://…
esiegel | October 1, 2016"There will be peace when the people of the world, want it so badly, that their governments will have no choice but to give it to them. I just wish you could all see the Earth the way that I see it. Because when you really look at it, it's just one world." -Superman
So, you want to shoot Earth’s garbage into the Sun, do you? From a physics point-of-view, this is difficult, but possible. First, you have to overcome the pull of Earth’s gravity, and escape into space. Next, you have to take into account the fact that Earth orbits the Sun at 30 km/s, and to fall into the Sun, you need to take…
esiegel | September 21, 2016“All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.” -Sylvia Plath
Even on the darkest night skies from the most pristine locations on Earth, the night sky is never truly dark. Not even if you look away from the plane of the galaxy, on a moonless night, between the stars and away from any human-made or nature-made sources of illumination. Unlike the views that a telescope like Hubble can get from space, nothing on Earth is ever devoid of photons that have their origin in starlight.
The full UV-visible-IR composite of the XDF; the greatest image ever released of the distant Universe. Every…
gregladen | August 30, 2016A lot of higher education institutions are old, and back in the day, things were different. Not only were most schools simultaneously on top of and on the bottom of great snow covered hills, but they were often surrounded by nearly medieval settlement, or at least, pre-industrial ones, that lacked things like central heat, electricity, and so on, even after these things became common and normal.
I remember the legacy of this reality at my Alma Mater, a small university in Cambridge, Mass. Most of the campus had its own heating system, which was built at a time when centrally distributed…
jdupuis | August 21, 2016
Are We Feeling Collective Grief Over Climate Change?
Astrophysicist wins Twitter burn of the year with her reply to climate change skeptic
The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here
Dazzling blue lakes are forming in Antarctica — and they’ve got scientists worried
The Galileo gambit and other stories: the three main tactics of climate denial
Greenland Melt Could Expose Hazardous Cold War Waste
Time for the hard work on meaningful climate policy
Effective climate change regulation: Let’s transform Canadian cars
Suncor and province discuss “stranding” some oilsands…
esiegel | August 11, 2016“Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?” -Neil Gaiman
Enjoying the Perseid meteor shower this year, as perhaps you do every August? As you look up, the great cosmic show might have a lot more to offer than mere streaks of light, due to cometary debris brightly burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. This year, Jupiter has slightly disturbed the debris stream, resulting in an increase in the number of meteors-per-hour, as the stream passes quite centrally through Earth’s location.
The orbital path of Comet Swift-Tuttle, which passes…
esiegel | June 29, 2016“I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.” –Jimi Hendrix
The second lightest and second most abundant element in the Universe, helium, is incredibly rare on Earth. Practically none of the helium that Earth was formed with still exists, since was too easy for it to escape from our tenuously held atmosphere, unlike the gas giant worlds. But deep underground, in the heavy-element-rich interiors of the Earth, new helium is continuously produced.
Scientists studying the ash from a recent eruption of Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in…
gregladen | June 27, 2016Governments, and the people, should be filing law suits against the energy industry for causing the imminent collapse of civilization as we know it. But instead, the opposite is happening.
From Reuters:
TransCanada formally seeks NAFTA damages in Keystone XL rejection
TransCanada Corp is formally requesting arbitration over U.S. President Barack Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, seeking $15 billion in damages, the company said in legal papers dated Friday.
...
The Keystone XL was designed to link existing pipeline networks in Canada and the United States to bring crude from…
esiegel | June 24, 2016“Those who know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the conception that the earth remains at rest in the middle of the heavens as its center, would, I reflected, regard it as an insane pronouncement if I made the opposite assertion that the earth moves.” –Nicolaus Copernicus
There are certain words that simply get people’s hackles raised, shutting off the part of their brain that normally responds to reason and instead results in an emotional response taking over. For some, that word is “theory,” one of the words with the biggest gap between its colloquial and scientific uses…
jdupuis | June 22, 2016One of the key faults of the Harper Conservatives' science policy was their emphasis on applied research to the detriment of basic, curiosity driven research. Obviously there needs to be a balance between any government's approach to those two kinds of research, neither polar opposite is appropriate. But the Conservatives were way out of wack with their policy, significantly favouring commercially-driven, industrial-partnership-focused, applied research. The signature policy in that vein was their transformation of the National Research Council into a Concierge to Industry.
Thankfully the…
gregladen | June 21, 2016This is bad news and good news, but mostly good news. No matter what you think of nuclear energy (and I'm one of those people who give it a stern look and remain suspicious), it does tend to produce electricity with the addition of much less fossil carbon into the atmosphere than, say, burning coal. So, we probably don't want to see a wholesale reduction in the use of nuclear energy too quickly, and we may even want to see some new plants built.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant is the only working nuke plant in California, and it is famously located in an earthquake-rich locality. The plant…
esiegel | June 2, 2016“There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.” –David Attenborough
If the Earth didn't have any global warming at all, our planet's mean temperature would be 255 K, or about -1º Fahrenheit: the mean temperature of the Antarctic continent. As it stands instead, our planet is much warmer than that, owing to the warming, insulating effects of the atmosphere, which is largely transparent to (incoming) visible light, but traps a fair amount of the (outgoing) infrared radiation.
Natural color image of Venus from Mariner 10…
esiegel | May 31, 2016"We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life." -James Hansen
Thanks to our position in space, the energy output of the Sun, and the right atmospheric conditions on Earth, we have temperatures conducive to liquid water on our planet. Over the past 4.5 billion years, that's led to the flourishing and evolving of life, with our present existence marking something unlike anything else our planet's ever seen.
The very cold, polar regions of the Earth have a mean temperature far below the rest of the…
jdupuis | May 6, 2016The town of Fort McMurray, Alberta and it's surrounding region are experiencing a horrific wildfire. Tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate.
The absolute most important thing in the short and medium term is to take care of the people of Fort McMurray. Yes, Fort McMurray is the hub of tar sands development in Canada. Yes, the tar sands and other fossil fuel development projects contribute to climate change. Yes, the tar sands in particular have been identified as a carbon source that needs to be left in the ground. But those aren't short and medium term considerations. Those…
jdupuis | April 28, 2016
The math the planet relies on isn’t adding up right now
Reframing The Economics Debate Could Lead To More Action To Fight Climate Change
Abandon hype in climate models
The Future Role of Economics in the IPCC
Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study
The Unsexy Climate Solution That's a Total No-Brainer
The solution to (nearly) everything: working less
Only One Canadian University Has Divested. Here's How Alumni Can Help Change That
Exxon Using Tobacco’s Failed Free Speech Defense for Decades of Deception on Climate Change
“There is no doubt”: Exxon Knew CO2…
esiegel | April 22, 2016"We are not learning to view ourselves as an advanced, evolving civilization. That is what we really must learn to do, in due course, if we were to survive. All of that will take place, in due course, and we will be able to explore solar system. We will be able to go beyond it, provided we get our act together and learn to live as a civilization." -Edgar Mitchell
There are a great many world with opportunities for life, both in our Solar System and beyond, and we’ve only just begun to discover them. Perhaps Enceladus, Europa or Titan harbor some form of life right now, and perhaps Mars or…
jdupuis | April 16, 2016Or at least a certain corner of Canadian politics. For some definitions of "blow up."
For those not followong Canadian politics, our more-or-less socialist party, The New Democratic Party, recently held a policy convention where they also held a leadership review vote. The current leader, Tom Mulcair, lost the vote and as a result the NDP will be spending the next two years or so looking for a new leader.
What's significant from our point of view here is why he lost the vote. While the results of the last Federal election certainly played a role, the more proximate cause was a battle of…
pharyngula | March 28, 2016The Roaming Ecologist has a few words about lawns.
Lawns – those myopically obsessive (and evil) urban, suburban, and increasingly rural monoculture eyesores that displace native ecosystems at a rate between 5,000 and 385,000 acres per day* in favor of sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments bloated with a tremendous European influence that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage. And there’s the unbearable ubiquitousness of mowing associated with such a useless cultural…
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2016Weird argument in the World Wildlife Fund's magazine for why Swedes shouldn't avoid buying palm oil.
"Sweden has such a small population that it doesn't matter to the environment whether we buy environmentally destructive palm oil or not. The big markets are in other parts of the world. But if we buy environmentally certified palm oil, then we get to have a voice in the discussion about palm oil production."
How would a small group of people buying certified oil have any impact on the market for uncertified oil? Makes no sense. I don't want those producers to cultivate any oil palms…