environment
pharyngula | March 21, 2014The climate change denialists are a bit thin-skinned; they've also been exposed as a bit on the wacko side. The journal Frontiers in Psychology is about to retract a paper that found that denialists tend to have a cluster of weird beliefs (NASA faked the moon landings, the CIA was in charge of the assassination of political figures in the US, etc.) because the denialists screamed very loudly.
This outrage first arose in response to a paper, NASA faked the moon landing--Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science (pdf) which analyzed voluntary…
oracknows | March 14, 2014Time to get back to business after yesterday's festivities.
One of the items of Gospel Truth among the "autism biomed" movement, which consists of people who fervently believe that autism is caused by some sort of external "toxin," infection, or vaccines and that subjecting children to various forms of quackery designed either to "detoxify" or reverse whatever physiological derangement believed to be at the root of autism will "recover" these children from autism. Of course, there are a lot of antivaccine believers in the autism biomed movement, and arguably the vast majority of "autism…
esiegel | March 6, 2014“All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.” -Thomas J. Watson
You’ll frequently hear people say, “the science is settled.” Scientifically speaking, can it ever be? (And yes, what follows below is meant to be an inflammatory image.)
Image credit: Ramirez of the Weekly Standard, via http://www.IBDeditorials.com/cartoons.
Let's take a look at five major instances -- gravitation, evolution, the Big Bang, germ theory and…
esiegel | February 23, 2014“It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.” -David Allan Coe
As the population of cities continues to grow, real estate runs out fast. But one innovative solution may be the wave of the future: building down! Have a listen to Turin Brakes as they go through their remarkable song,
Building Wraps Round Me,
while we go through four remarkable, innovative solutions to real-estate shortages being implemented around the globe!
Image credit: Getty Images.
1.) Japan's automated underground bicycle parking. Every…
pharyngula | February 21, 2014After informing us of her environmentalist cred — she drives a hybrid car and has solar panels on her home! — Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of Science magazine, makes a remarkable statement.
I believe it is time to move forward on the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from the tar sands deposits of Alberta, Canada, and from the Williston Basin in Montana and North Dakota to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Environmental cred…blown.
She'd better have a really good argument for why an environmentalist ought to support the Keystone XL pipeline, given that it is a great big leaky…
jhalper | February 3, 2014“Billions of dollars are being spent on weapons of mass destruction. A small fraction of that could go so far to engage more Israeli and Arab scientists in collaborative projects in order to create a critical mass that will bring about peace.” The speaker is Dr. Zafra Lerman, President of the Malta Conferences Foundation, which organizes conferences in nonaligned Malta for Israeli, Palestinian and Middle Eastern scientists. These bi-annual conferences, attended by researchers from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, focus such neutral topics as materials science, as well as common interests like water and…
gregladen | February 2, 2014Peak Oil is a controversial concept. Some people actually think that the production of oil in nature is continuous (which is a tiny bit, but hardly at all, true) so we can keep pumping oil out of the ground and it will just keep being produced by tiny microbes. But aside from that particular, and annoying, made-up controversy, "real" Peak Oil (or should I say Peak Real Oil) is still controversial. Peak Oil is defined as the moment when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction occurs, and thereafter production declines steadily, like on a bell curve. But that is, in my view, the wrong way…
gregladen | February 1, 2014This is mainly about copper mining in a part of Minnesota that has previously seen extensive iron mining. Most mineral rights across Minnesota are owned by the state, which then may lease rights to miners. Recently, 31 nonferrous mineral leases were approved by the Minnesota Executive Council, which consists of Governor Dayton, Secretary of State Ritchie, State Auditor Otto, Attorney General Swanson, and Lt. Governor Prettner-Solon. It was a four to one vote with Otto voting no.
The reason that Rebecca Otto voted no is that she felt the science based policy justifying these leases was not…
jdupuis | January 29, 2014A couple of weeks ago I was approached by Rabble.ca to write a piece for them with some of my thoughts about the current controversy surrounding the government of Canada's closure of several Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries. I have a link compilation here.
I was happy to write up something and it appeared here. Rabble also allows authors to keep all rights to their work so we agreed that after a few days I would be able to repost it here on my blog. Which is what I've done below.
I will reiterate my thanks to Kaitlin McNabb for offering me this opportunity and for her very…
gregladen | January 12, 20144-methylcyclohexane methanol is a chemical used to clean coal before it is burned. As you know a region of southern West Virginia where upwards of 100,000 people live has been affected by a spill of this chemical; the water supply in this area has been made unavailable for human use. A 48,000 gallon storage tank for 4-methylcyclohexane methanol has been leaking the chemical into the Elk River, which is part of the municipal water supply in the area.
Apparently there isn't a lot known about this particular chemical. It's chemical name is scary looking, and resembles the names of other better…
dr. dolittle | January 8, 2014 Frog with an extra foot. Image from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
Image of a frog with a missing leg from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
Since 1995 deformed frogs have been turning up. Call them the canaries in the coal mine for environmental health. Frogs are showing signs of some kind of stress.
So is it a parasite? Pollution? A natural phenomenon? Cannibalism? Fungus? Ultraviolet light? Something in the water?
Video from YouTube
The tap water data referred to in the video in which they placed embryos in tap water collected from different sites in Minnesota…
esiegel | December 28, 2013"I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different." -T. S. Eliot
Time passes, and things grow; that's the way of the world, so it seems. 2013 was no exception, and as Joshua Radin (featuring Patty Griffin) would sing,
You Got Growin Up To Do.
Well, the world grew again this year, in a multitude of ways. Approximately 134 million new human babies were born worldwide, and in back in February, the largest extraterrestrial object in more than a century merged with the Earth. It's been quite a year for new additions.
Image via: http://www.zingzoo.com/2013/02/15/falling-meteor-…
esiegel | November 21, 2013"Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth." -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Oh, it's true alright, something bad did once happen on Mars. And although there isn't any real danger of that happening to Earth, a little conversation I had earlier this week made me think that it's time to tell all of you a story about our red neighbor, and why it is the way it is today.
You see, when we think about Mars, we think about the smallish, red, desolate world that fascinates us today…
pharyngula | November 1, 2013Every time you use a plastic bag at the grocery store or buy another bottle of water you are contributing to the deluge of one-use, throw-away plastic products that pile up in our landfills or float out to sea. One group in Baton Rouge is trying to raise consciousness with Sacred Waste, a performance art piece that illustrates the problem.
This performance art show is a unique blend of art and science – it conveys some of its information in some unusual and compelling ways: the costumes, the set, and all the props are made of discarded plastic – each costume is made of 100-300 plastic bags,…
pharyngula | October 4, 2013The latest celebrity fad is getting pet lorises. They're adorable! They have such big eyes and a funny face! And look, they like to get tickled!
Aww, so cute. I want one. At least, that seems to be the typical response in followers of pop culture. Anna Nekaris, a professor of primate conservation at Oxford Brookes University, has been documenting the loris fad and doing her best to expose the reality of the loris trade.
They created a Wikipedia page on loris conservation, and Nekaris appeared in a powerful BBC documentary, Jungle Gremlins of Java. The film paints a decidedly less cute…
esiegel | September 29, 2013"Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends." -Shel Silverstein
No, there's not really an edge to our world, but if you've ever been to the ocean shores, you might know that feeling I'm talking about. The smell of the salt water, the wind gusting in from the sea, the sandy beaches and rocky outcrops slowly losing ground to the relentless waves; it's one of the most…
esiegel | August 30, 2013"Being told about the effects of climate change is an appeal to our reason and to our desire to bring about change. But to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change, even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas, is a glaring injustice, which also triggers anger and outrage over those who seek to ignore it." -Sigmar Gabriel
With all of the scientific issues subject to politicization in this world, there's arguably none that raises such strong emotions as the issue of global warming and climate change. This is the final installment of a three-part series on how one could…
esiegel | August 29, 2013"We make the world we live in and shape our own environment." -Orison Swett Marden
If you had never heard of global warming before, how would you figure out whether it's real or not? And if it is real, how would you figure out what humanity's role in it is? To answer this, I've decided to do a three-part series on how you'd go about figuring this out, putting aside all politics, economics, opinion and any other non-scientific factors. If you missed part 1, you can check it out here; today we're going to build on that and talk about what determines the temperature of a planet with an…
esiegel | August 28, 2013"There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it." -David Attenborough
It's been a long time since I've written anything on this blog about global warming, climate change, or most Earth-based environmental topics in general. After all, I'm a physicist -- an astrophysicist in particular -- and although I'm well-versed in the physics of the Earth and in science in general, it's not my particular area of expertise.
Image credit: NASA, Johnson Space Center, Apollo 17 crew.
Recently, I've had a number of requests to take a…
jhalper | August 14, 2013Last month we reported on the first people who, around twelve thousand years ago, were lining their loved ones’ graves with flowers. This month, we have a piece on the “extinct” frog that was “resurrected” and then discovered to be a living fossil.
Both of these studies were led by Israeli researchers from other institutions. The Weizmann contributions were what you might call technical: precise radiocarbon dating and x-ray micro-tomography. While the findings, themselves, were publicized in many scientific and popular publications, the technological advances that make these findings possible…