environment
clock | January 29, 2007I love seafood, but I eat it quite rarely. About a third of my old Department did fisheries and aquaculture science so I've seen many seminars and Thesis defenses on the topic and am quite aware of the problems with the world's fisheries stocks.
I also prefer freshwater fish - I grew up on the Danube and my Mom fixes the best Fish Soup in the history of the Universe.
But, if you like seafood and you want to eat shrimp occasionally, yet you want to act in an environmentally responsible way, you need to know quite a lot about ecology, about behavior and natural history of shrimp, about the…
sarahdasher | January 29, 2007If you were king for a day (or President for a century), could you slow the course of climate change? This Flash game from the BBC challenges you to create a carbon-neutral future, while still maintaining your coffers--and your presidency.
With international carbon-reduction treaties to contend with, and policy suggestions like, "Privatize Electricity", it takes more than a curbside recycling program to succeed in this game:
Clearly, my own leadership leaves plenty to be desired.
Hat-tip, Josh Rosenau, coturnix.
ksharpe | January 28, 2007
The New York Times reports on a Cambridge University study which argues that the manufacture and purchase of new clothing -- particularly given today's rapid-cycling fashion trends, and the throwaway clothes culture they've enabled -- drives significant carbon emissions.
Consumers' penchant for new clothes, in other words, is becoming an environmental threat.
Hand-me-down clothing, the article notes, has become less of a wardrobe staple now that dirt-cheap, on-trend garments are widely available through retailers like Target and Old Navy. "Fast clothes" are the order of the day.
The Times…
sarahdasher | January 26, 2007
Watch as births, deaths, and CO2 emissions mount worldwide, in real time, at BreathingEarth.
sarahdasher | January 25, 2007Over at Retrospectacle, there was some discussion about whether the richest countries were the most polluting countries. This little tool from Google has an answer, and so much more.
The US is represented by the large yellow circle in the (predictably) upper-right corner. Most European countries are in the upper right corner, too, although the logarithmic scale is a little misleading: for the most part, European countries emit about half as much CO2 per capita as the US.
In fact, the Middle Eastern oil trifecta--Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates--is the only region that…
j7uy5 | January 25, 2007Remember
rel="tag">geothermal energy? It was a
popular topic back in the 1960's, particularly among those who were
stridently opposed to the massive investments in nuclear power.
Somehow, though, it was never pursued very aggressively.
Now, there is a massive report published by
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology"
rel="tag">MIT, at the behest of the US Dept. of
Energy. It is a big report, a 14MB PDF download:
href="http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf">The
Future of Geothermal Energy. It is mentioned…
clock | January 25, 2007If you think you can easily come up with a workable set of policies to stop and reverse global warming, think again. Or try playing this (very addictive) BBC game that will help you figure it out:
The science behind Climate Challenge:
A game where you are president of the European Nations. You must tackle climate change and stay popular enough with the voters to remain in office.
(Via)
clock | January 24, 2007Every farm that converts from conventional to organic farming is the equivalent to taking 117 cars off the road
sarahdasher | January 22, 2007
It used to be just a blurb on the outside of the Ben & Jerry's container: CONTAINS NO rBGH. But over the last decade, consumer advocates have succeeded in making "hormone-free milk" a part of America's shopping vocabulary. Now Starbucks has joined the fray: under pressure from consumers, Starbucks announced last week that it would begin using exclusively hormone-free milk at its 5500 company-owned locations.
Starbucks's decision is consistent with a wave of growing public concern about the safety of rBGH. Despite that hormone-free milk commands a price of $1.50 per gallon more than…
mikethemadbiologist | January 19, 2007A few weeks ago, climatologist and Weather Channel blogger Heidi Cullen suggested that:
I'd like to take that suggestion a step further. If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming...
Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy.…
sarahdasher | January 19, 2007
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Bush is expected to call for increased focus on biofuels, to mitigate U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Meanwhile, in Bush's home state, Interstate I-10 through Houston is being expanded to 18 lanes.
"Texas has always been pretty far over on the side of exploiting natural resources and not worrying about the consequences," Richard Murray, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said. Pervasive drive-thru lanes and residential parking garages conspire to keep automobiles an inextricable part of Houston's culture. Image.…
sarahdasher | January 17, 2007Just ask the French: plants don't actually need soil.
This was botanist Patrick Blanc's conceit when he began growing Vertical Gardens on the indoor and outdoor walls of some of Paris' most design-forward museums and ateliers.
Unlike, for example, the temples of Angkor Wat (left), Blanc's gardens don't damage the buildings on which they grow. Instead of taking root in the walls, Blanc's gardens use a layer of thick felt as a substrate for plant growth, and are separated from structural walls by PVC, which also acts as a vapor barrier. The gardens and are watered from above by drip…
ksharpe | January 17, 2007Few would dispute that the internet is a communication medium of awesome (in the old sense of the word) proportions. Many would recognize the internet's tendency to function as a massive echo chamber. Interesting stories are picked up and relayed from point to point, and blog to blog, at breakneck speeds, often with bloggers relying on other blogs as their primary sources.
Sometimes a little bit is lost in the frenzy of the internet news cycle. For example, the old journalistic impulse to trace information back to its point of origin, and to verify facts for oneself.
In the January 17…
scientificactivist | January 17, 2007Some of the more insidious factors enabling the constant and dangerous advance of global warming are a lack of public awareness or acceptance and the feeling that it's not a problem relevant to my everyday life. One potentially effective way of tackling these particular issues, then, could be through art: specifically through large in-your-face, impossible-to-ignore, publicly-visible art projects designed to bring the issue to the forefront of the mind of the incidental viewer.
This is precisely the aim of the debut project of the Precipice Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to…
pharyngula | January 15, 2007This one snuck up on me: a new carnival dedicated to ecology and the environment, called Oekologie. The first edition is up at the Infinite Sphere—this was a niche that needed filling!
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2007So those who oppose global warming are using the same strategy as the creationists: teach the 'controversy.'
This week in Federal Way schools, it got a lot more inconvenient to show one of the top-grossing documentaries in U.S. history, the global-warming alert "An Inconvenient Truth."
After a parent who supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education complained about the film, the Federal Way School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film. The movie consists largely of a computer presentation by former Vice President Al Gore recounting…
pharyngula | January 13, 2007The heathen at IIDB are talking about squid—it's infectious, I tell you, and the godless seem especially susceptible—and in particular about this interesting paper on squid fisheries. Squid are on the rise, and are impressively numerous.
We can get an idea of the abundance of squid in the world's ocean by considering the consumption of cephalopods (mainly squid) from just one cephalopod predator the sperm whale. Sperm whales alone are estimated to consume in excess of 100 million tonnes of cephalopods a year. This is equivalent to the total world fishery catch and probably exceeds half the…
sarahdasher | January 11, 2007
Power Washing 188 Suffolk Street, East Village, New York, NY. Captured by Trevor Little.
(Source).
Hat-tip, Seth.
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007
Moonlit Beach.
Orphaned Image. Please contact me for proper creditation.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, dear readers, that I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the images and the creatures and places in them. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
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tags: moonlight, beach, nature, geology
sarahdasher | January 8, 2007There's a new Clive Owen movie out called Children of Men. It's based on the book by P.D. James, and although the two have little else in common, they do share the same basic premise: humankind suddenly becomes infertile and is faced with its own slow, inevitable extinction.
According to United Nations forecasts, humans will face a declining birth rate over the next few decades: after all, if fertility levels were to remain unchanged at today's levels, world population would rise to 244 billion by 2150 and 134 trillion by 2300. Clearly, current levels of high fertility cannot continue…