While I was wrapping: Christmas science

December 25, 2009

Ohh, here’s fun:  Photographing fractals using Christmas ornaments, at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories:

Fractals photographed in three Christmas tree ornaments, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

"Construct complex fractals out of light using a few shiny Christmas tree ornaments. Who says the holidays aren't exciting?"

All you need is a camera and some imagination — oh, and some Christmas ornaments. In this case, four silver ornaments ($5 at Target, the guy says), a piece of Scotch tape, and the colored lights.  The photo above comes from four ornaments, stacked.  Go see how he does it (lots of photos), and check out his Flickr stream.

While your kids ponder the pretty lights and stars on the Christmas tree, why not add a little science in?  According to Carlos Hotta, at  Brazillion Thoughts, “The Universe in a Christmas Tree”:

How about looking at the Christmas tree through the light of this knowledge? Here is some food for thought:

  • We know more planets beyond the solar system than there are Christmas balls on your tree. The current count is at 358 exoplanets, and growing;
  • If the planet was [shrunk] to the size of a Christmas ball, it would be the smoothest ball of the tree. The Mount Everest (8 km) or the Marianas Trenchr (11km) are small imperfections relative to the planet’s 12,000 km diameter. It’s an imperfection of less than 0,01%;
  • “Earth is not spherical, it’s an oblate spheroid”, some Grinch may say. Indeed, our planet wider in the equator, but even this deviation from a perfect sphere is of less than 0,04%;
  • If an 8 centimeters Christmas ball represented Earth and the nearest ball represented the nearest known exoplanet – Epsilon Eridani b, 10.5 light-years away – then the distance between them should be around 630,000 km. Almost twice the actual distance from Earth to the Moon. Epsilon Eridani b is quite far from here
  • Now, if the star at the top of the tree represented our Sun, 1,392,000 km in diameter, and the star at the top of your neighbor’s tree – say, 50 meters away – represented the nerest star system, Alpha Centauri at 4 light-years of distance; then the size of our Sun-star to be on the same scale it would have to be 0,74 micrometers large. From 1,4 million kilometers to more than 100 times smaller than the width of a hair, that’s how small the star should be for it to be in the same scale as the distance between it and the neighbor’s Christmas star.

There’s more — plus the original at 100 Nexos (in Portuguese).

Leave a Comment » | Astronomy, Education, Holidays, Manipulables (i.e., Manipulables (i.e. Toys), Physics, Science, Space exploration | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Great news for biology teachers: Neil Shubin released illustrations from Inner Fish for your classroom use

December 25, 2009

Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish reads well, and it reveals evolution as easy to understand from a morphological view of life as revealed by fossils and modern animals.

Cover of Your Inner Fish, by Neil Shubin

Shubin released the illustrations from the book for teachers to use — a rather rare and great contribution to evolution.

Here’s where you can download the slides, at the Tiktaalik roseae website: Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion Year History of the Human Body – Teaching Tools.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Pharyngula, “Teaching Your Inner Fish.“

2 Comments | Biology, Classroom technology, Education, Evolution, Images, Science, Teaching, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Santa’s ride updated – GE’s high-tech sleigh

December 24, 2009

GE labs suggest some improvements to the Santa Claus Sleigh.  A good way to introduce research, I think.

GE's improvements to Santa's Sleight, 2009

Click here for GE's interactive feature

Among improvements:

Companies hitching a star to Santa’s sleigh is nothing new.  It may be difficult to separate out the Coca-Cola from the Santa myth at this late date, and who remembers that “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” originally came from a project for departed department store Montgomery Ward.  GE at least shows good humor.

Here at Bathtub Manor we switched to LEDs on the Christmas tree this year.  The blue lights are a bit intense (more yellow and red in the mix, please, string assemblers).  Travel home, shopping, recipe-finding, and most other parts of our family’s Christmas preparations are laced with cell phones, computers, internet and digital photography, and microprocessors performing music — not to mention the yearly infusions of new technology under the tree.

We live in fascinating times.

Check out the update of Santa’s headgear, too.

Santa's old sleigh, as last configured - HowStuffWorks.com

Bye-bye tradition? Santa's old sleigh, as last configured - HowStuffWorks.com

Tell your friends about Santa’s high-tech ride:

Add to FacebookAdd to NewsvineAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Furl

1 Comment | History, Holidays, Invention, Science, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Chet Raymo on Rachel Carson

December 20, 2009

Sad fact:  More people read and believe as a matter of faith the sour, misanthropic and pro-obfuscation sites about Rachel Carson than read either Silent Spring or Linda Lear’s excellent biography of the woman.

Chet Raymo is reading Lear’s book, and has comments.  Fans of science writing will recognize Raymo’s name.

More:

Leave a Comment » | Biography, Books, Literature, Rachel Carson, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Investigative report: Climate science e-mails ugly, science is correct; “skeptics'” response even uglier

December 14, 2009

Associate Press put a team of five reporters on the e-mails purloined from the Hadley climate science group in England.  AP sought advice on interpreting the messages from other scientists involved in ethical science issues.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only group that has gone through the entire mass to see what is really shown — more than a million words, the AP story estimated.

Veteran climate issue reporter Seth Borenstein wrote up the story:  Scientists in the heat of research and interpretation, on deadline with government policy makers, often attacked unfairly — one received death threats for his work on climate change.  Under those conditions, one might understand that the scientists were defensive and rude, in private, about their critics.  One of the critics harassed scientists with repeated FOI requests, then didn’t use the data.  In one case, a critic published a paper based on bad data — what the critics accused the scientists of doing.

But in the end, there was no pattern of data fixing.   Independent reviews today confirm that independently-generated studies confirm the warming the scientists wrote about.

Of course, that doesn’t stop the hecklers of the scientists from complaining, either about the science or the way it’s reported.  Rather than deal with the material AP reported, for example, warming blogger Anthony Watts attacked the reporter who wrote the story, complaining that he is “too close” to the story, since he seems to have been covering the story long enough that his e-mail appears in the purloined e-mails.

‘You can’t report the news because you know too much,’ is Watts’s complaint.

In the e-mail cited, Seth Borenstein wrote to some of the world’s best scientists in the field and asked their opinions about a paper making some contrary claims.

To Watts, seeking information from the experts is beyond the pale.  He calls it an ethical infraction.

Watts is unbound by such ethical rules, however, and so can make up stuff like this with abandon.  Watts’ charge is hooey, foul play, and stupid.  In the headline to his post, Watts wrote, “AP’s Seth Borenstein is just too damn cozy with the people he covers – time for AP to do something about it.”

That’s right, AP — it’s time Borenstein got a promotion for doing the legwork, honestly, that critics of the science have refused to do.  Borenstein’s reporting is important.  The story goes beyond mere repeating of press releases, beyond the mere “he-said/he-said” norm.  Borenstein, in unemotional, clear and cool terms, indicted the critics of warming, by factually reporting the events.  Give that man and his team a Pulitzer Prize.

Why shouldn’t reporters go to the experts?  Why shouldn’t they ask the opinions of all sides in a science debate?

Think about it for a moment:  Watts’s complaint is that Borenstein sought fairness in reporting on Watts’s side’s claim.  Because Borenstein refused to show the bias Watts wants, Watts went after Borenstein.

Could there be a more clear and dramatic illustration of why the scientists’ ire is raised by such silly criticism?

Watts quotes at length from the Associated Press Statement of News Values and Principles, slyly implying by doing so that Borenstein violated the rules somewhere.  Not so.

Watts worries about “getting too cozy with sources.”  Read his blog.  Watts prefers to be the source — but he also reports on the debate.

Watts would do well to read that AP ethical statement again, and take it to heart.

His charges are groundless, scurrilous in the light of the AP team’s going to great lengths to be fair to all sides.  Watts and other critics bank on people being shocked that scientists get angry.   Watts and his colleagues have campaigned across the web, on television and in print, to have these scientists tarred and feathered, and their science dismissed — though there is not handful of feathers to weigh against the mountains of evidence the scientists accumulated and published over the past 50 years.

Do not take my word for it.  Read the AP story.  Read Watts’s rant.  Read the e-mails, if you wish (you can find them from my opinionated take on the flap).  Check with the scientists you know and trust on their views of the science done and reported.

I won a couple of minor investigative journalism awards in college.  I have been a member of the Society of Professional Journalists off and on since 1974 (not much since I quit doing that stuff full time).  I have worked with some of the best investigative journalists and Congressional investigators in my duties with the Senate.  I’ve been a member of the FOIA committees in Utah and Maryland.  I’ve lobbied in three states for freedom of information.  I know a little bit about investigative reporting and fairness.  And yes, IAAL.

Borenstein’s piece is solid and good.  In light of the firestorm Watts hopes to bring down on it, Borenstein’s article is a shining example of high ethics in journalism.  It deserves your reading.

If the critics had data denying warming, or denying human causation of warming, why are they hiding it so well?  If they have the data to prove the scientists are in error, why not publish it, instead of sniping at a wire service reporter who merely tells the story?

Critics don’t have the data to contest the hard work of the scientists.  They don’t have the data to make a case against either warming or human causation.  And now we all know.

Post Script:  Um, and , you know, it’s not like Borenstein hasn’t done some stuff over the years to make it look like he’s been on Watts’s side:  Stoat, Mooney’s Intersection, Island of Doubt.  Watts’ fit may put a gloss on Borenstein’s work that wasn’t there to begin with.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/14/tech/main5977430.shtml

Help others investigate the facts:

Add to FacebookAdd to NewsvineAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Furl

14 Comments | Accuracy, air pollution, Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Environmental protection, Ethics, Global warming, Green Politics, History, Political Smear, Politics, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Slight fluctuations from 1998’s record heat doesn’t mean warming is done

December 14, 2009

Sometimes you find rational discussion and good information in the newspaper.

This story moved on the McClatchy wire last August (I just recently came across it):

Drop in world temperatures fuels global warming debate

By Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Has Earth’s fever broken?

Official government measurements show that the world’s temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.

That’s given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary.

Proposals to combat global warming are “crazy” and will “destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family’s annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year,” the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. “High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health,” the ads asserted.

Many scientists agree, however, that hotter times are ahead. A decade of level or slightly lower temperatures is only a temporary dip to be expected as a result of natural, short-term variations in the enormously complex climate system, they say.

McClatchy’s story would be accurate today, even after the records show that the last decade is the hottest ever — such a long shelf-life shows good research and writing by McClatchy’s reporters.  McClatchy’s story doesn’t contradict this press release last week from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO):

2000–2009, THE WARMEST DECADE

Geneva, 8 December 2009 (WMO) – The year 2009 is likely to rank in the top 10 warmest on record since the beginning of instrumental climate records in 1850, according to data sources compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global combined sea surface and land surface air temperature for 2009 (January–October) is currently estimated at 0.44°C ± 0.11°C (0.79°F ± 0.20°F) above the 1961–1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.2°F. The current nominal ranking of 2009, which does not account for uncertainties in the annual averages, places it as the fifth-warmest year. The decade of the 2000s (2000–2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990–1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980–1989). More complete data for the remainder of the year 2009 will be analysed at the beginning of 2010 to update the current assessment.

This year above-normal temperatures were recorded in most parts of the continents. Only North America (United States and Canada) experienced conditions that were cooler than average. Given the current figures, large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are likely to have the warmest year on record.

If only all reporting were so accurate.

1 Comment | Academic freedom, Climate change, climate_change, Global warming, Journalism, Newspapers, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Getting a great education that the tests can’t measure

December 11, 2009

As I sit with officials from the Texas Education Agency and the Dallas ISD discussing what goes on in our classrooms, I often reflect that the drive to testing frequently pushes education out of the classroom.

One of my favorite education blogs, the Living Classroom, comes out of a the West Seattle Community School where, many days — perhaps most days — education goes on in wonderful ways.  No test could ever capture the progress made.

Latest example:  This boy made this squid.  He had fun doing it.  He learned a lot.  Look at the excitement.

(Somebody get P. Z. Myers’ attention:  P. Z.!  Look at this squid!)

Asher and his amazing squid, The Living Classroom, West Seattle Community School

Asher and his amazing squid, The Living Classroom, West Seattle Community School

It’s pretty colorful, even for a squid, but I’ll wager the kid now knows more about squids than most Texas ninth grade biology students.  Of course, sewing squids is not among the list of Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.  What Asher now knows . . . such learning would have to be smuggled into a Texas classroom.

When education is outlawed, only outlaws will have education.

2 Comments | Biology, Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education success, Natural history, Science, Zoology | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

If only hysteric, misplaced paranoia could reduce greenhouse gases . . .

December 10, 2009

“I got this idea for a movie!”

“Not another vampire who sucks the sap of only endangered species plants, please, Bob.”

“No, really, you gotta hear this!  Heck, it might even be real.”

“Whaddya mean by that, Bob?”

“I mean this whole Copenhagen thing!  World leaders getting together in secret to plot the destruction of world industry!”

“Copenhagen’s meetings are wide open, Bob.  It’s on the news everywhere.  And did you ever notice that most of the world leaders there are capitalists, and that they owe their election to other capitalists, frequently of the oil-drilling and coal-mining sort?”

“That’s what they want you to think!”

“Well, I think that way whether they want me to or not, Bob.  Money, you know?  I love it.  I follow it.  There’s no money in controlling climate change.  If there were, I’d be Copenhagen right now.”

“You’re missing the point!  These guys are meeting to take the money away from guys like you.”

“Pierre, here at the restaurant, does a pretty good job of taking money from guys like me, in return for a good arugula salad and a chunk of rare roast beef.”

“That’s not what I mean!”

“I think you’ve got another crazy idea that won’t make a good movie.  I’ll let you talk through the arugula, Bob.  When the roast beef comes, I don’t want stupid plots that won’t sell on the table — so it better be good, or we’ll change the topic.”

“Okay, here goes:  Mad climate scientists create a scare about global warming, and everybody gives them their money, and they the rest of the movie is about the chase to catch them before they get to a secret beach in the Maldives or Marshall Islands where they’ll hide forever in their secret lair.”

“I’m not impressed yet, Bob.  Why would anyone think a climate scientist would be so power hungry?

“They meet in Al Gore’s mansion.  Al Gore’s the power-hungry villain!”

“Al Gore?  He lost an election to George F. Bush, for cryin’ out loud.  Nobody would believe that.”

“You mean W — ‘George W. Bush.'”

“Have you seen what the stock market’s been like lately, Bob?  No, of course not.  You don’t own stocks in regular companies — gun makers and gold dealers only — but after what happened to my portfolio, I mean F.  He’s George F. Bush to me.”

“C’mon, it’s ripped from the headlines!”

“It’s about as exciting as the crossword puzzle, Bob.  That’s not a movie — it’s a new sleep drug.  I couldn’t sell it to a religious group trying to make a movie about Charles Darwin, even if we dressed Gore up as Darwin.  Even they’d see through the plot, Bob.”

“Archie!  It’s a great movie!  Think of the special effects!”

“Think of the NoDoz concession.  Theatres don’t have ’em.  Climate scientists taking over the world is like the Joffrey Ballet as the perps on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.  It’d be like getting toe-shoed to death.”

Oh, c’mon, Arch.  I got half the screenplay already done!”

“Well you need more research.”

“What?”

“Maldives.  Marshall Islands.  They’re the poster islands for climate change.  They’re the first nations to go as the sea rises.  All the geeks will know that, and so they’ll laugh at your movie.  Geeks laughing at you isn’t good box office.”

“We can do it like Superman!  You know a Fortress of Solitude somewhere in the ice.”

“No ice would kinda make that plot device not work, wouldn’t it, Bob?”

“Oh, c’mon.  No one really thinks the ice is disappearing!”

“Bob — remember our agreement?”

“What?”

“Beef’s here.  Shuttup.”

“Huh?  Oh, yeah.  Oh.  Yeah.”

“Okay, Archie.  How about this:  There really are gods, and hysteria makes them happy.”

“Hysteria.  Yeah.  There’s value in that.”

“No, I mean it.  Hysteria makes the gods happy, and so then they do good things for people.”

“Like what?”

“Well . . . like . . . like cleaning up global warming.  Yeah, that’s it!  Blind hysteria makes global warming go away!”

“Nobody’ll believe that, either, Bob.  If that worked, global warming would have been gone ten years ago.  Shuttup and eat your beef.”

1 Comment | Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Environmental protection, Green Politics, History, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The Curse of “Not Evil, Just Wrong” — still evil and wrong

December 10, 2009

At the first post on this material, the thread got a little long — not loading well in some browsers, I hear.

So the comments are closed there, and open here.

In fashion we wish were different but seems all too typical, so-called skeptics of global warming defend their position with invective and insult.  But they are vigorous about it.  What do you think?  What information can you contribute?

Here’s the post that set off the denialists, anti-science types and DDT sniffers, and a tiny few genuinely concerned but under-informed citizens:

AP caption: Former Vice President Al Gore, left, listens to speakers during a meeting at the Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Buckingham, Va., Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. Gore visited the area that is the proposed site for a compressor station for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Should be obviously silly for anyone to argue former divinity student Al Gore is evil, as this film implies despite the demurrer. It should also be obviously that it’s evil to call Gore wrong on these issues; but that doesn’t stop brown Earther critics of scientists and Al Gore.

I warned you about it earlier. Crank science sites across the internet feature news of another cheap hit on Rachel Carson and science in movie form.

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” is slated for release on October 18. This is the film that tried to intrude on the Rachel Carson film earlier this year, but managed to to get booked only at an elementary school in Seattle, Washington — Rachel Carson Elementary, a green school where the kids showed more sense than the film makers by voting to name the school after the famous scientist-author.

The film is both evil and wrong.

Errors just in the trailer:

  1. Claims that Al Gore said sea levels will rise catastrophically, “in the very near future.” Not in his movie, not in his writings or speeches. Not true. That’s a simple misstatement of what Gore said, and Gore had the science right.
  2. ” . . . [I]t wouldn’t be a bad thing for this Earth to warm up. In fact, ice is the enemy of life.” “Bad” in this case is a value judgment — global warming isn’t bad if you’re a weed, a zebra mussel, one of the malaria parasites, a pine bark beetle, any other tropical disease, or a sadist. But significant warming as climatologists, physicists and others project, would be disastrous to agriculture, major cities in many parts of the world, sea coasts, and most people who don’t live in the Taklamakan or Sahara, and much of the life in the ocean. Annual weather cycles within long-established ranges, is required for life much as we know it. “No ice” is also an enemy of life.
  3. “They want to raise our taxes.” No, that’s pure, uncomposted bovine excrement.
  4. “They want to close our factories.” That’s more effluent from the anus of male bovines.
  5. The trailer notes the usual claim made by Gore opponents that industry cannot exist if it is clean, that industry requires that we poison the planet. Were that true, we’d have a need to halt industry now, lest we become like the yeast in the beer vat, or the champagne bottle, manufacturing alcohol until the alcohol kills the yeast. Our experience with Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, the Clean Air Acts and the Clean Water Act is that cleaning the environment produces economic growth, not the other way around. A city choked in pollution dies. Los Angeles didn’t suffer when the air got cleaner. Pittsburgh’s clean air became a way to attract new industries to the city, before the steel industry there collapsed. Cleaning Lake Erie didn’t hurt industry. The claim made by the film is fatuous, alarmist, and morally corrupt.

    When the human health, human welfare, and environmental effects which could be expressed in dollar terms were added up for the entire 20-year period, the total benefits of Clean Air Act programs were estimated to range from about $6 trillion to about $50 trillion, with a mean estimate of about $22 trillion. These estimated benefits represent the estimated value Americans place on avoiding the dire air quality conditions and dramatic increases in illness and premature death which would have prevailed without the 1970 and 1977 Clean Air Act and its associated state and local programs. By comparison, the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits.

  6. “Some of the environmental activists have not come to accept that the human is also part of the environment.” Fatuous claim. Environmentalists note that humans uniquely possess the ability to change climate on a global scale, intentionally, for the good or bad; environmentalists choose to advocate for actions that reduce diseases like malaria, cholera and asthma. We don’t have to sacrifice a million people a year to malaria, in order to be industrial and productive. We don’t have to kill 700,000 kids with malaria every year just to keep cars.
  7. “They want to go back to the Dark Ages and the Black Plague.” No, that would be the film makers. Environmentalists advocate reducing filth and ignorance both. Ignorance and lack of ability to read, coupled with religious fanaticism, caused the strife known as “the Dark Ages.” It’s not environmentalists who advocate an end to cheap public schools.
  8. The trailer shows a kid playing in the surf on a beach. Of course, without the Clean Water Act and other attempts to keep the oceans clean, such play would be impossible. That we can play again on American beaches is a tribute to the environmental movement, and reason enough to grant credence to claims of smart people like Al Gore and the scientists whose work he promotes.
  9. “I cannot believe that Al Gore has great regard for people, real people.” So, this is a film promoting the views of crabby, misanthropic anal orifices who don’t know Al Gore at all? Shame on them. And, why should anyone want to see such a film? If I want to see senseless acts of stupidity, I can rent a film by Quentin Tarantino and get some art with the stupidity. [Update, November 23, 2009: This may be one of the most egregiously false charges of the film. Gore, you recall, is the guy who put his political career and presidential ambitions on hold indefinitely when his son was seriously injured in an auto-pedestrian accident; Gore was willing to sacrifice all his political capital in order to get his son healed. My first dealings directly with Gore came on the Organ Transplant bill. Gore didn’t need a transplant, didn’t have need for one in his family, and had absolutely nothing to gain from advocacy for the life-saving procedure. It was opposed by the chairman of his committee, by a majority of members of his own party in both Houses of Congress, by many in the medical establishment, by many in the pharmaceutical industry, and by President Reagan, who didn’t drop his threat to veto the bill until he signed it, as I recall. Gore is a man of deep, human-centered principles. Saying “I can’t believe Al Gore has great regard for real people” only demonstrates the vast ignorance and perhaps crippling animus of the speaker.]

That’s a whopper about every 15 seconds in the trailer — the film itself may make heads spin if it comes close to that pace of error.

Where have we seen this before? Producers of the film claim as “contributors” some of the people they try to lampoon — people like Ed Begley, Jr., and NASA’s James E. Hansen, people who don’t agree in any way with the hysterical claims of the film, and people who, I wager, would be surprised to be listed as “contributors.”

It’s easy to suppose these producers used the same ambush-the-scientist technique used earlier by the producers of the anti-science, anti-Darwin film “Expelled!“

Here, see the hysteria, error and alarmism for yourself:

Ann McElhinney is one of the film’s producers. Her past work includes other films against protecting environment and films for mining companies. She appears to be affiliated with junk science purveyors at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an astro-turf organization in Washington, D.C., for whom she flacked earlier this year (video from Desmogblog):

Remember, too, that this film is already known to have gross inaccuracies about Rachel Carson and DDT, stuff that high school kids could get right easily.

Anyone have details on McElhinney and her colleague, Phelim McAlee?

More:

Related posts, at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

133 Comments | Accuracy, Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Environmental protection, Freedom of Information, Global warming, Green Politics, History, Junk science, Natural resources, Political Smear, Politics, Rachel Carson, Science, Uncomposted Organic Fertilizer, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Cool stuff: Richard Wiseman’s Top 10 Science Party Tricks for Christmas

December 9, 2009

I especially like pouring the carbon dioxide to put out the candles:

Wiseman’s blog is worth visiting from time to time — especially if you’re a teacher.

Leave a Comment » | Education, Lesson plans, Science | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

What if Al Gore were wrong about global warming? That would be great news.

December 6, 2009

It’s a point that the denialists just don’t get.  If Gore were wrong, if warming isn’t occurring, or if the warming were found to be part of a deeper cycle and all we need to do is hang on for another five or six years until the cycle shifts, that would be great news.

No one would complain about a study that actually showed that.

But no study shows that.  And the e-mails that somebody purloined from an English research center, if the worst allegations about scientists were true, can’t affect warming.  In fact, as I understand it, the chart that was “doctored” got its new, non-tree-ring data from actual thermometer readings — which, of course, show warming.

Worse, the chart’s predictions for following years turn out to be low!  Warming is outpacing some of the pessimists’ predictions.

Johann Hari, a columnist with the internet-fueled London Independent, discusses how good the news would be, in a missive at Huffington Post.

Every day, I pine for the global warming deniers to be proved right. I loved the old world – of flying to beaches wherever we want, growing to the skies, and burning whatever source of energy came our way. I hate the world to come that I’ve seen in my reporting from continent after continent – of falling Arctic ice shelves, of countries being swallowed by the sea, of vicious wars for the water and land that remains. When I read the works of global warming deniers like Nigel Lawson or Ian Plimer, I feel a sense of calm washing over me. The nightmare is gone; nothing has to change; the world can stay as it was.

But then I go back to the facts. However much I want them to be different, they sit there, hard and immovable. Nobody disputes that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, like a blanket holding in the Sun’s rays. Nobody disputes that we are increasing the amount of those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And nobody disputes that the world has become considerably hotter over the past century. (If you disagree with any of these statements, you’d fail a geography GCSE).

Alas, there is no significant or credible evidence that warming is not occurring, nor that we humans are not playing a huge role.

So, in Copenhagen where the world’s leaders and other policy makers are meeting this week to discuss the situation, there will be no champagne to toast an end to global warming.

That would be good news.  It’s not the news we get.

Also see:

1 Comment | air pollution, Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Disasters, Environmental protection, Green Politics, Politics, Public health, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Nathan Wolfe’s jungle search for viruses | Video on TED.com (Why it’s important to beat H1N1, now)

November 29, 2009

Here’s Nathan Wolfe explaining how viruses work, quickly and at a high enough level to be entertaining, and explaining why we need to worry about H1N1.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Nathan Wolfe’s jungle search for viru…“, posted with vodpod

Wolfe also explained a lot at the TED Blog:

Take us back a step or two: How did swine flu enter into the human population?

Swine flu has been known since at least the early part of the 20th century, since the 1930s. It was originally a virus of bird origin — all influenza viruses were originally bird viruses — and it probably spread to humans before it was in pigs.

Now, we still haven’t received definitive information on the underlying genetics of this particular virus. But initial reports suggest that it may be what’s known as a “mosaic virus,” which includes components of swine influenzas, bird influenzas and human influenzas. A cosmopolitan virus like that wouldn’t be unprecedented. (Editor’s Note: see Joe DeRisi’s 2006 TEDTalk for more on state-of-the-art virus detection.)

But in any case, this is a virus that appears to come from pigs, and pigs in close proximity spread the flu in much the same way that humans do — coughing, sneezing, and so on. The virus probably initially entered into human populations through people who work with livestock.

Is swine flu here to stay?

Whether this particular virus will sustain itself and become a permanent part of the human landscape is unclear, but that’s certainly what we’re watching for. As it is, the virus may just disappear because of the weather; summers aren’t good for flu viruses.

So this heat wave is working in our favor?

It might be. The virus has had a good start, from the flu perspective, considering that this is really the end of the season. But the unseasonably hot weather may bode poorly for this virus’ potential to establish itself definitively and cause a pandemic. Had this happened in September or October, it would be much more concerning.

Having said that, it’s not impossible that a virus like this might “go into hiding” — in the southern hemisphere or the tropics — and might come to light again next year. So there will be a lot of discussion about expanding the fall flu vaccine to try to control it next cycle.

Is it really possible for us to prevent future outbreaks like this?

Yes, I believe it is. We spend tons of money trying to predict complex phenomena like tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes. There’s no reason to believe that a pandemic is harder to predict than a tsunami. And we’d be foolish not to include forecasting and prevention as part of our overall portfolio to fight these pandemics.

More resources:

Help this post go viral:

Add to FacebookAdd to NewsvineAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Furl

Leave a Comment » | Disease, Health care, History, medicine, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Time to start making huge stone heads

November 29, 2009

Well, maybe not yet.

But consider Jared Diamond’s 1997 essay in Discover:

In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?

Among the most riveting mysteries of human history are those posed by vanished civilizations. Everyone who has seen the abandoned buildings of the Khmer, the Maya, or the Anasazi is immediately moved to ask the same question: Why did the societies that erected those structures disappear?

Diamond’s essay appears in different, and longer form (as I recall) as a chapter in his book Collapse.  That book is all about why civilizations collapse.

A lot of it boils down to wasting of resources.  Easter Island had not always been the grass-only rock with just a couple of thousand people clinging to a desperate existence, as Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen found it on Easter Sunday, 1722 (April 5).  When the ancestors of the tiny population found the island, it had forests, and probably animals, and rich enough resources to support a larger population.

Until they deforested it, hunted to near extinction every animal that couldn’t escape, and caused the collapse of their own civilization.

Is this an analogy for what humans are doing to the planet now with pollution, especially atmospheric-warming air pollution?

Diamond concluded his essay:

I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn’t simply disappear one day-it vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the latest in a long line of loggers to cry, “Jobs over trees!” The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes, this year we cleared those woods over there, but trees are starting to grow back again on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Their children could no more have comprehended their parents’ tales than my eight-year-old sons today can comprehend my wife’s and my tales of what Los Angeles was like 30 years ago.

Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.

By now the meaning of Easter Island for us should be chillingly obvious. Easter Island is Earth writ small. Today, again, a rising population confronts shrinking resources. We too have no emigration valve, because all human societies are linked by international transport, and we can no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean. If we continue to follow our present course, we shall have exhausted the world’s major fisheries, tropical rain forests, fossil fuels, and much of our soil by the time my sons reach my current age.

Resources:

Jared Diamond in a 2003 appearance at TED:

3 Comments | Anthropology, Archaeology, Conservation, Cost of Green, Environmental protection, Global warming, Green Politics, History, History Methods and Tools, Natural resources, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Starlings of climate change denial do about-face on data-corruption and fraud

November 29, 2009

Funny.  Zumwalt never complained when the data-corruption and fraud were all on the denialists’ side.

I am reminded that, as of the end of November 2009, there are incredibly few science papers (see CCPO’s note) — meaning papers based on research, published in peer-review journals — which make any case contrary to global warming occurring, nor even against the link that much of current warming is caused by human activities.

Under softball rules, the game would have been called against denialists long ago.  Now they want to claim victory on a disqualification, when they violated that rule with gusto through the entire game so far?

1 Comment | Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Environmental protection, Green Politics, Political Smear, Politics, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Yeah, it’s ironic (hacked e-mails and global warming)

November 26, 2009

James’s Empty Blog:

It is hard to miss the irony in people eagerly poring through illegally-obtained private email, looking for ethical breaches by the writers! I’m sure we can all imagine the outrage if one of the emails revealed that a scientist had hacked into one of the sceptics’ computers and was reading all their correspondence. So a bit of perspective is called for here.

James Is A Scientist (IANAS), and he has much good stuff to say (read some of the other posts about the hacked e-mails while you’re there) — but you gotta wonder about a blog that follows such a post with this:

Prawns, Jules Berry

Prawns not in their native habitat. Probably Tastimus deliciousus

Tip of the old scrub brush to Stoat.

1 Comment | Accuracy, Climate change, climate_change, Ethics, Food history, Global warming, How do we know what we know, Research, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »