environment
j7uy5 | August 3, 2008There are other, more interesting things to write about. But
someone is WRONG on the Internet, so it must be corrected.
Moreover, we must speculate about the rationale for this
blatant
misstatement. And wonder why it was printed in a prominent
newspaper.
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/31/AR2008073102824.html">Pelosi:
Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill
Friday, August 1, 2008
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the
moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on
the Outer Continental Shelf. She won't even allow it…
grrlscientist | August 3, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
De Roy, Tui, Mark Jones and Julian Fitter. Albatross: Their World, Their Ways. Due out: Sept. 2008. Firefly Books. Hardbound: 240 pages. Price: $49.95 U.S. [Amazon: $32.97]. SUMMARY: A well-illustrated account on…
clock | July 31, 2008Interesting idea:
"Save It" Global Warming message by 10 yr old from 1skycampaign on Vimeo.
[Via - read the post as well]
gregladen | July 31, 2008I noted earlier that hundreds of baby penguins are being washed, dead, onto beaches thousands of miles away from their native lands. Various causes have been suggested, including the idea that the penguins are swimming into unfamiliar and penguin-hostile waters in search of fish, diminished in supply owing to overfishing.
Well, this phenomenon has continued, and sifted northwards.
While penguins commonly wash up as far north as Rio de Janeiro state in July and August - hundreds have done so this year. Bahia is roughly 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) northeast of Rio.
P. Dee Boersma, a…
mikethemadbiologist | July 30, 2008
With all of the stories about bacterial contamination of food, a recent paper describes one possible way to reduce the virulence--the ability to cause disease--of the bacterium Escherichia coli.
Farms are an obvious...input of E. coli--the amount of feces that a single pig produces is staggering, never mind a thousand pigs*. The concern is that E. coli from agricultural settings can either serve as a genetic reservoir of virulence (disease-causing) genes (and antibiotic resistance genes too), or as a source of virulent E. coli strains, such as E. coli O157:H7.
What the authors of paper…
clock | July 30, 2008Science Communicators of North Carolina:
Tuesday, August 19
6:30-8:30 p.m.
Science Cafe: Monster Storms - Hurricanes in North Carolina
Dr. Ryan Boyles, State Climatologist and Director of the State Climate Office at NC State University with Dr. Anantha Aiyyer, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine, Earth, Atmospheric Sciences at NC State.
Tir Na Nog 218 South Blount Street, Raleigh, (919) 833-7795
j7uy5 | July 28, 2008Sustainability is a modern-day buzzword. It is used so much
that it is at risk of suffering from a dilution of meaning.
But is still is an important concept.
In August 2004, President Bush
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040809-9.html">boasted
that home ownership in the USA was at an all-time high (69.2 percent).
It was important for him to point this out, just before the
election. The reason is that he was advocating trickle-down
economics. He needed to show that concentrating wealth in the
hands of a few could lead to improved standards of living for…
skookumchick | July 27, 2008The New York Times reports that the Princeton review is including a "green rating" in their next ranking of colleges in the US. While I think college rankings is pretty much a popularity contest, I think this incorporation of some kind of rating of environmental impact and sustainability is a step in the right direction. And not just because my husband is getting a job at my university (W00T!) to do sustainability work.
I am working on a post about sustainability from our trip to Europe, but in the meantime, reflecting on Purdue's past considerations of the environmental is pretty dismal.…
grrlscientist | July 27, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
Huxley, Robert (editor). The Great Naturalists. 2007. Thames and Hudson. Hardbound: 304 pages. Price: $39.95 U.S. [Amazon: $26.37]. SUMMARY: Covers the naturalists from Classical times to the end of the 19th…
pharyngula | July 25, 2008Most of you haven't seen Sizzle, but there is one global warming denier in the movie who is a wonderfully strange character, Dr Chilingar. He is interestingly idiosyncratic, but the movie didn't really pursue his views very far…but Tim Lambert has. Chilingar is guilty of comparing CO2 over billions of years to human CO2 over centuries and using formulas that assume greenhouse effects don't change to argue that greenhouse gases will have no effect.
<hack> <hack> Excuse me, I had a little cough.
edyong | July 22, 2008A complete ban on fishing can save coral reef communities in more ways than one. A few weeks ago, I blogged about a study which found that the coral trout, a victim of severe overfishing, was bouncing back in the small regions of the Great Barrier Reef where fishing has been totally forbidden. It certainly makes sense that fish will rebound when fishing ceases, but a new study reveals that the bans have had more indirect benefits - they have protected the corals from a predatory starfish.
The crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) is a voracious hunter of corals and a massive problem…
grrlscientist | July 20, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase. If you despair of ever having enough summer reading material, this issue is just for you because you will find that the total page count in these books is 4277 pages!
FEATURED TITLE:
Olsen, Penny. Glimpses of Paradise: The Quest…
clock | July 19, 2008Robert Grumbine has a series of posts with thoughts about climate change and what a non-expert can do to get properly informed:
Climate is a messy business:
Climate certainly is a messy business. One of the things that makes it interesting to those of us who work on it is precisely that. Wherever you look, you find something that affects climate, regardless of whether you look at permafrost, sea ice, forests, farms, rivers, factories, sunspots, volcanoes, dust, glaciers, ...
So certainly we have a complicated science and certainly few people are going to understand enough of it to argue the…
gregladen | July 19, 2008More than 400 baby penguins have been found dead on beaches in Brazil, hundreds of miles from their native habitats. It is not uncommon to find the occasional penguin (dead or not) wahsed by currents far to the north of where they normally live, the number of penguins being found now is unprecedented.
Why is this happening? According to Thiago Muniz, a veterinarian at the Niteroi Zoo, this could be due to overfishing forcing the penguins to forage father asea than normal, where they encounter strong currents.
Details here.
scientificactivist | July 16, 2008When I published my review of Sizzle yesterday, I felt like adding a reluctant-parent-disciplinarian-esque "this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you" qualifier. Although I felt that Randy Olson's heart was in the right place, I just didn't have many positive things to say about his new movie, and I wasn't too excited about the prospect of writing such a negative review. But, since I had been recruited--like so many others--to participate in this science blogosphere-wide experiment before seeing the movie, I went along grudgingly.
Fortunately for me, various events today have helped…
scientificactivist | July 14, 2008Today, science bloggers from across the web (and particularly here at ScienceBlogs) are reviewing Sizzle, a new film by Randy Olson, maker of Flock of Dodos. Sizzle, billed as a "global warming comedy" is part mockumentary and part documentary, and in that sense is difficult to pin down. And, intentionally or not, this confusion emerges as a defining characteristic throughout.
In the movie, Randy Olson plays himself, a filmmaker who sets out to make a movie about global warming featuring climate scientists. There's trouble from the beginning, as the big movie producers won't fund a project…
clock | July 14, 2008Yes, I am one of many SciBlings and other bloggers who got offered to pre-screen Randy Olson's new movie "Sizzle" (check the Front Page of scienceblogs.com for links to all the others). I was reluctant at first, but in the end I gave in and agreed to preview a copy. Why was I reluctant? As a scientist, I need to start my piece with a bunch of neatly organized caveats, so here are the reasons why I thought I would not be a good person to review the movie:
- I am just not a good movie critic. Of the thousands of movies I have seen in my life, I disliked perhaps three. I am terribly…
pharyngula | July 14, 2008That gadfly of the science communication world, Randy Olson, has a new movie out, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, and many bloggers all over the place are putting up their reviews today. I tried something a little different. The other day, I invited a group of people from Morris, Minnesota to watch the movie with me, and then we discussed what we thought of it afterwards…while my daughter, Skatje, video taped the whole thing.
Here's the team: Nancy Carpenter (UMM chemistry), Kristin Kearns (astronomy/physics), Pete Wyckoff (biology), Len Keeler (physics), Kathy Benson (psychology), Athena…