environment
j7uy5 | November 10, 2007People who advocate alternative energy (i.e. not oil or
natural gas)
often fail to appreciate the true cost of developing the necessary
technology. Courtesy of
href="http://cryptogon.com/?p=1597">Cryptogon, I
now present a chart that
illustrates these true costs, in proper perspective.
As you can see, development of alternative fuels costs
almost nothing, compared to fighting a war against even a third-rate
opponent.
Imagine what a real war would cost.
And you want to vote for a pro-war candidate? Please explain.
sciencewoman | November 8, 2007Here are the quick and dirty results of my green workplaces survey from a few weeks back. I had originally hoped to do a geographical analysis of the results, but the limitations of SurveyMonkey's free features effectively precluded that this time around. Still the results are illuminating and I'm looking forward to your help in designing the next phase of the "research."
First up, some demographic information. There were 104 survey respondents, 78% of whom were from the United States. Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada, and Australia/New Zealand/Pacific Islands were also represented. Within the…
j7uy5 | November 7, 2007I found this at John Fleck's
href="http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/?p=2310">Inkstain,
but others
are writing about it, too. Some think it is a hoax
perpetrated to promote anthropogenic global warming
denialism; others think it is an attempt to discredit
the denialists.
I was all excited at the prospect that humans
aren’t causing global warming after all, that it’s
really
href="http://www.geoclimaticstudies.info/benthic_bacteria.htm">benthic
bacteria. Then Roger Pielke Jr., suspicious bastard that he
is, had to go and
href="http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/…
j7uy5 | November 6, 2007This cartoon is by
href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett,
the editorial cartoonist for the Christian
Science Monitor.
I guess that is one way to get re-elected. Tell
people what they want to hear.
mikethemadbiologist | November 4, 2007A while ago, I stumbled across this amazing article about a car mechanic, who never even graduated high school, and who has developed a diesel engine that is cleaner (biodiesel based), more fuel efficient, and more powerful than the standard engine produced by car companies (italics mine):
This is the sort of work that's making Goodwin famous in the world of underground car modders. He is a virtuoso of fuel economy. He takes the hugest American cars on the road and rejiggers them to get up to quadruple their normal mileage and burn low-emission renewable fuels grown on U.S. soil--all while…
j7uy5 | November 3, 2007...11 miles from Denver, in a wildlife refuge, forcing the
cancellation of
a number of public events.
This refers to a placed called the
href="http://www.fws.gov/rockymountainarsenal/">Rocky
Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, near Commerce
City, Colorado. Their website now states, simply:
Wildlife
Refuge Temporarily Closed
Public visitation to the Refuge has been temporarily suspended due to a
specific remediation project. All tours and programs have been
cancelled until further notice. Visitor safety is our number one
priority and we appreciate your patience during…
voltagegate | November 2, 2007In Part I we looked at the eastern hemlock's northwestern progression after the last ice age,
and the frequency of the hemlock along a slope-oriented moisture gradient:
The distribution pictured above is almost exactly the case in the Laurel Hill old growth stand. The hemlocks are dense at the moist valley bottom, surrounding and shading Laurel Hill Creek and At the different levels of the gradient, not only does the abundance of trees differ, but the composition of the ecosystem. There is a "no-man's land" of sorts between each level that ecologists called ecotones.
Ecotones are imaginary…
j7uy5 | October 29, 2007I don't think I am being unduly harsh in saying that this
was an
incredibly stupid thing to do:
U.S. Forest Service investigators were on
campus last
week to question Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members about an Oct.
11 incident at the Lower Gallinas Campground in which a tree was cut
down and burned along with plastic chairs and several other items,
according to an NMSU police report.
A road was also blocked and a large amount of trash was left at the
campground.
Forest service officers pulled several documents with the SAE
letterhead from the fire. The report states an…
voltagegate | October 29, 2007About 16,000 years ago, glaciation from the last ice age finally began to retreat after millennia of occupation. As the glaciers melted and filled scrapes in the landscape with fresh water, the animals and plants followed, once only able to live in the temperate climes of southern North America.
The eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadenis) was one of these pioneers, albeit a slow, steady one. Spreading north at about 100 - 400 meters per year (incidentally about the same rate of large ungulates like elk), the hemlocks wouldn't reach the extent of their expansion, around the glacier-crafted Great…
voltagegate | October 29, 2007This seems to be a more sensible theory regarding leaf color change in autumn:
By taking careful stock and laboratory analyses of the autumn foliage of sweetgum and red maple trees along transects from floodplains to ridge-tops in a nature preserve in Charlotte, N.C., former University of North Carolina at Charlotte graduate student Emily M. Habinck found that in places where the soil was relatively low in nitrogen and other essential elements, trees produced more red pigments known as anthocyanins.
Habinck's discovery supports a 2003 hypothesis put forward to explain why trees bother to make…
mikethemadbiologist | October 28, 2007A while ago, I wrote about the MBTA's test program of playing crappy commercial radio over the PA system at Boston subway stops. Because what Boston really needs is government-sponsored noise pollution. After many complaints, the MBTA has decided to shelve the program, for now anyway:
...disparate T riders are united in joy and a degree of quiet. The two-week-old experiment in bringing disc jockeys and music to MBTA platforms, "T Radio," has been shelved, at least for now.
"There is a God," said Tom Augello, a multimedia editor from Cambridge.
Augello is still bitter from a trip to South…
j7uy5 | October 27, 2007Today I watched the C-Span broadcast (
href="rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/energy/energy102307_warming.rm">link
to Real Player file,
80 minutes) of Dr. Gerberding's testimony to the Senate Committee on
Environment and Public Works. The topic: The potential
effects of
climate change on public health.
After seeing it, I have to agree that she was able to make many good
points, and the Senate is more informed as a result. That
fact
does not excuse the White House censorship of her written report;
rather, it simply means that their anemic efforts at censorship were
relatively ineffective…
mikethemadbiologist | October 26, 2007I know: who could possibly think that the Bush administration would censor a report on the effects of global warming? From the Washington Post:
Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.
Specific scientific references to potential health risks were removed after Julie L. Gerberding submitted a draft of her prepared remarks to the White House Office of Management and…
j7uy5 | October 26, 2007The Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, and amended in 1977
and 1990.
It has been mildly controversial, but most people supported
it then and support it now.
A retrospective
economic analysis done in the early 1990's indicated that the
cost of implementation from 1970 to 1990 had been about $523 billion in
1990 dollars. What did we get for that money? The
same study indicated that the economic benefit had been somewhere
between $5.6 to $49.4 trillion,
with a mean (among various scenarios) of $22.2 trillion.
Allowing for various uncertainties, it was estimated that the
benefit/cost ratio…
sciencewoman | October 25, 2007Here at Mystery U, there are little signs in the labs that encourage us to conserve electricity, whereas when I worked in a lab in California, signs urged us to conserve water, and in the Northwest, I was encouraged to save trees by using fewer paper towels. These observations have gotten me wondering about regional and employer differences in conservation messages.
What I'm wondering is how easy is it for people to live out their environmental principles when they are at work and school? And do the messages we hear vary by where we are in the country or the world? (Is it soda or is it pop…
grrlscientist | October 25, 2007tags: oceans, marine reserves, fish, streaming video
This video explores how the establishment of marine reserves can save our oceans from overexploitation from overfishing and other damages. Narrated by Mariella Frostrup. [12:53]
grrlscientist | October 24, 2007tags: wildfire, California, aviculture, evacuation
Southern California state wildfires (red dots) as seen from a satellite. The smoke plumes are being blown out over the Pacific Ocean. The National Interagency Fire Center reports that 12 large, uncontained fires have burned over 335,000 acres in Southern California and these fires have continued to spread due to fierce, dry Santa Ana winds.
The first image was captured by NASA's Terra satellite at 2:25 p.m. EST on October 23, 2007. The second image was acquired by NASA's Aqua satellite at 5:40 p.m. EST, just over three hours later.
Image…
j7uy5 | October 23, 2007
A couple of days ago, I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/10/lets_improve_the_quality_of_th.php">wrote
about the government reforms proposed by
href="http://www.centerforinquiry.net/advocacy/protecting_scientific_integrity_2/">The
Center for Inquiry. Specifically,
Enact legislation to specifically permit
government scientists to communicate freely with the media and the
public.
Re-establish the Office of Technology Assessment
Reform the Data Quality Act
Now, Think Progress has a post in which
they detail how the
Administration
href="http://thinkprogress.org/…
voltagegate | October 22, 2007The coal industry has always been a big provider in Western Maryland. Right across the street from my apartment complex is a winding road up the mountain to several active blast sites. There are still old mine tunnels under the campus.
Acid mine drainage is a huge problem up here. Many of the streams are nearly decimated, so clogged with iron and sulfur that only the most hardy of algae can survive.
Last year, my ecology class surveyed about eight miles of George's Creek, from the Hoffman drainage tunnel (also called a blow, where water flows through excavated mine areas due to changes in…
