environment
clock | June 25, 2007For information, check my older posts here and here. The most recent e-mail is copied+pasted under the fold.
Forgive me if you've already received this email. This is a very important moment as our Senators decide whether or not they will stand with the People of Colorado and the U.S. House of Representatives.
PCEOC / Not 1 More Acre! / Grassland Trust
Action Alert - Continue calls
June 25, 2007
Please continue calling and activate your email lists, blogs and phone trees today to encourage people to PHONE Senators Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard TODAY AND EVERY DAY THIS WEEK .
The Senators…
mikethemadbiologist | June 25, 2007
Abandoned fourth century AD settlement. Photo by L. Laüt.
In the June 2007 issue of Ecology, Dambrine et al. have a fascinating article demonstrating that abandoned Roman settlements still affect the local abundance of plant communities. From the abstract (italics mine):
Combined archaeological and ecological investigations in a large ancient oak forest in Central France have revealed a dense network of ancient human settlements dating from the Roman period. We demonstrate a strong correlation between present-day forest plant diversity patterns and the location of Roman farm buildings.…
clock | June 22, 2007Remember when we discussed the mammal vs. bird survival at Chernobyl the other day? Well, I learned today that someone is about to go and study the humans there as well. I am not exactly sure what kind of reserch it will be, but it will have something to do with the mutations in genomes of the surrounding population.
Sarah Wallace, a senior at Duke University, will be part of the team. And you will be able to follow her adventures and her science on her blog: Notes from Ukraine (MT will not render Cyrillics well so I translated the name of the country)
voltagegate | June 22, 2007But not in the way you might think.
Bay Area CEOs think global warming is a threat to local business, according to a survey from the Bay Area Council.
The survey, released Thursday, said 77 percent of Bay Area chief executives who responded think that environmental warming is a serious threat to the local economy and to the region's quality of life. Just 6 percent of CEOs in the study said it wasn't at all a serious problem.
The council polled 510 Bay Area CEOs and top executives for the study. Those who responded overwhelmingly supported legislation to require cuts in pollution that could…
sarahdasher | June 21, 2007Biosphere 2, that famous research boondoggle, has entered a new stage in its lifecycle: condo and ranchette proliferation.
In the early nineties, Biosphere made headlines when eight 'bionauts' were sealed into the air-tight terrarium as part of a two-year experiment in self-sufficiency. The experiment was intended to determine whether and how humans could survive in constructed closed systems--potentially as a means of colonizing hostile environments, like space.
In practice, Biosphere had flaws that fatally wounded its research credibility. The terrarium continually lost atmospheric…
voltagegate | June 20, 2007Found this on ECOLOG this morning:
Dear Colleagues:
We are writing to invite your participation in a survey of wildlife
responses to climate change in the Rocky Mountains. Results of this
important project will help frame policy decision making, media reports to
the public, and the direction of future science and management programs.
Climate change is no longer a matter of "what if" or "when." The
scientific community agrees: a growing body of evidence indicates that
human activities are causing unprecedented disruptions to the global
climate system. Furthermore, it is clear that these…
voltagegate | June 16, 2007From the ESA blog:
All of this research is needed. But where is the balance? It is the ecologists who know about primary productivity, about the effects of harvests on biodiversity, and about designing sustainable systems. We know about fluxes of greenhouse gasses. We study the effects of biomass removal on biodiversity. In summary, it is the ecologists who should be the leaders in this debate. The Ecological Society of America and other representatives of the community of ecologists should demand that our science receive proportional attention. Otherwise, we will merely end up…
sarahdasher | June 16, 2007Aaaah, wilderness.
Fresh air, the smell of pines, the sounds of songbirds chirping...quelling the urge to throw an elbow in Central Park on a sunny Sunday morning.
Intuition tells us that time spent outside is good for our mental health, and myriad studies affirm it. Schools that incorporate a nature-based curriculum have higher test scores and fewer discipline problems. Children with ADD are mellower and more focused after outside play. Seeing nature or being outside lowers stress levels, calms heart rates, and diminishes road rage. In the presence of natural light, workers are happier and…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate change, ornithology, birds, avian biodiversity, habitat destruction
White-crested hornbill, Tropicranus albocristatus, also confined to African rainforests, may see more than half of its geographic range lost by 2100.
Image: Walter Jetz, UCSD. [larger]
Thanks to the combined effects of global warming and habitat destruction, bird populations will experience significant declines and extinctions over the next century, according to a study conducted by ecologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University. This…
clock | June 14, 2007An interesting paper came out last week in PLoS-Biology: Projected Impacts of Climate and Land-Use Change on the Global Diversity of Birds by Walter Jetz, David S. Wilcove and Andrew P. Dobson. You can view some bloggers' responses on The DC Birding Blog, Field Of View and Living the Scientific Life and media coverage here, here and here.
The authors of the paper collected information about all known ranges of land birds and made a mathematical model for predicting how those ranges will be affected by global warming on one hand and the land-use on the other by years 2050 and 2100. They use…
sarahdasher | June 13, 2007Summer is nearly here, and beef is in the air: or at least in the mainstream media. A cursory search of Google news earlier this week turned up eighteen different stories about beef posted within a twenty-four hour period, among them: South Korea Opens to US Beef Imports, Pampered Beef Cattle Generate a Niche Profit, United Food Group Recalls More Beef, and my favorite, Roast Beef Helps Restore £9m Church.
Why is beef on everybody's brain?
Although beef production has levelled off in the U.S., global demand for beef continues to rise. According to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture…
grrlscientist | June 13, 2007tags: environment, humor, streaming video
This wierdly humorous piece by an Australian comedy team, Clarke and Dawe, is something akin to a Monty Python sketch. It is funny despite the subject matter. [2:01]
clock | June 11, 2007Skeptical Alchemist has the whole story.
Sign the petition to prevent the drilling.
clock | June 8, 2007Ruchira Paul alerted me to this article about a scientific fight between Robert J. Baker of Texas Tech University (who I never heard of) who alleges that the evacuation of humans from the area allowed animals to come in and multiply with no apparent bad consequences from radiation, and Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina (who I have met and read and greatly respect) who finds whopping numbers of bad mutations in the region and very low fertility rates. The first argues that the populations are growing, while the latter suggests that the area is a sink for animals who come in…
clock | June 7, 2007So, it is fitting that Carnival of the Blue kicks off today. The first edition (already huge!) is up on Blogfish. Lots of great posts!
clock | June 7, 2007A paper in press in Current Biology (press release here) looks at mitochondrial DNA of mammoths and advances a primarily environmental cause for the mammoth extinction. Razib explains why such a black-and-white dichotomy is unhealthy.
Looking at a different hypothesis, also environmental, for the mammoth extinction (comet impact), Archy places the black-and-white dichotomy in the historical context and tries to figure out why the environmental hypotheses are so popular nowadays, while extinction at the hands of human hunters is not a popular idea any more.
voltagegate | June 6, 2007This is just what our blue crab populations need:
Chinese mitten crabs, first reported in the Chesapeake Bay, are more widespread than initially thought. Four crabs have now been caught in Delaware Bay during the last week of May 2007, and may occur in other waters of the U.S. east coast.
In total, seven adult male mitten crabs have been documented from the two bays since 2005. Prior to this, the potentially invasive species had never been recorded from coastal waters of the eastern United States.
The mitten crab is native to eastern Asia and has already invaded Europe and the western United…
j7uy5 | June 6, 2007
"You can't handle the truth!" ranted Jack Nicholson in
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Few_Good_Men#Trivia">A
Few Good Men. I never saw the movie, but
I saw the commercials.
Several months ago, Seed
Magazine (a darn good publication) published an
article entitled
href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/free_dscovr.php">Free
DSCOVR!. The article informs us that a fully
functional, paid-for satellite is sitting in storage, not used.
At
a time when the Earth's climate is at the top of practically every
nation's agenda, it might seem perplexing that there's a $100…
scientificactivist | June 4, 2007A piece of global warming denialism was published today in the conservative Financial Post. Normally it wouldn't be that noteworthy, except that it was oddly included in Sigma Xi's daily "Science in the News" digest. The article attacks the idea that there is a scientific consensus (embodied by the IPCC) regarding global warming. In a sense, the author is correct. The science regarding global warming is ongoing, and there are myriad subtleties to work out. Of course, this is not what the author is referring to. Although the scientific community as a whole agrees that the earth is…
scientificactivist | June 3, 2007Last Thursday, President George Bush unveiled a new climate change initiative, and this was further elaborated upon in a press conference by Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality (all of this, interestingly enough, as NASA Administrator Michael Griffin bizarrely proclaims that global warming isn't really a big deal after all). Although the Bush plan was given quite a bit of attention in the media, it's not a major departure from administration policy, as it continues to flout the tried and true international process led by the UN and does not insist on mandatory…