Lisa and I had dinner with Gregory Benford and his wife when I visited U.C. Irvine a couple of weekends ago, and he raised an interesting point. So far, radio searches for extraterrestrial life have only seen puzzling brief signals – not long transmissions. But what if this is precisely what we should expect? […] [more]
Gina Rinehart has produced a poor-hard-done-by video, which screams hypocrisy, hypobolic, guilt by association and “poising the well” arguments as much as stupidity. It is mind-boggling that she can whine about the tax placed on profiteering on common goods, but then to state that “without mining and mining related industries, this country has no hope of repaying … Continue reading » [more]
Taylor Wilson, is known as the boy who played with fusion, because at the age of 14 became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction. [more]
The much reported paper by John Cook et al finds a very strong consensus about human caused climate change in the scientific literature: Of those abstracts expressing a position on the cause of global warming, 97% (implicitly or explicitly) endorsed human causation of this warming. Over at Lucia’s, Brandon Shollenberger found a way to search […] [more]
Ian Dunlop, is an energy expert, director of "Australia 21," member of the Club of Rome, and more. On climate change, he is an extremely effective speaker who doesn't do any pill sugaring; as you can see in the video above. The slides he presents are also avaliable on-line. From this set of slides, here is the conclusion: The climate & energy challenge is far greater & more urgent than is acknowledged officially “Official” solutions, and current processes, are not working and will not deliver the required transformation either to the extent, or in the time, required. Market forces will not deliver without fundamental regulatory change. If we are serious about avoiding catastrophic outcomes, emergency “war-footing” action is essential “It is no use saying ‘we are doing our best’, we have to do what is required.” Winston Churchill … [more]
By Lorna Howarth17 May 2013 (The Ecologist) – The UK government has come under fire this week from both NGOs and scientists for rejecting an EU proposal to classify tar sands under the European Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) as ‘highly polluting’ – despite the fact research has shown that oil produced from the Canadian tar sands emits 3-4 times more greenhouse gases than does conventional oil. It follows the week’s visit of high profile Canadian Ministers Joe Oliver and Peter Kent who flew to London as part of a pan-European mission to promote the Canadian tar sands industry and lobby against the FQD. Kent, who is the Canadian Environment Minister, is on record as saying “Climate change is a very real and present danger and we need to address it.” Extracting oil from the Canadian tar sands – the biggest industrial project on earth – is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and indeed, is the… [more]
By Peter Hannam, Carbon economy editor17 May 2013 (Sydney Morning Herald) – It's the social media equivalent of hitting the jackpot: having your study tweeted by US President Barack Obama. Australian researcher John Cook, an expert in climate change communication, was inundated with requests for interviews by US media outlets after Obama took to Twitter to endorse his project's final report. “It was pretty cool news,” said Mr Cook, a fellow at the University of Queensland's Global Change Institute and founder of the website skepticalscience.com. “It was out of our expectations.” A survey of scientific papers by a team led by Mr Cook and published by Fairfax Media this week found more than 97 per cent of researchers endorsed the view that humans are to blame for global warming. The peer-reviewed outcome flies in the face of public perception in countries such as the US or Australia that scientists are divided on the issue. "One of the hig… [more]
In the past year, we’ve seen images of extreme pollution events across China, far in excess of anything that would be tolerated in developed countries. What’s been largely uncovered by mainstream media in the west, are the protests and demonstrations, sometimes violent, that have been breaking out against new coal power stations, oil and gas […] [more]
By Christopher Joyce14 May 2013 (NPR) – By the end of the century, the birthplace of America may be underwater. The first successful English colony in America was at Jamestown, Va., a swampy island in the Chesapeake Bay. The colony endured for almost a century, and remnants of the place still exist. You can go there and see the ruins. You can walk where Capt. John Smith and Pocahontas walked. But Jamestown is now threatened by rising sea levels that scientists say could submerge the island by century's end. You wouldn't know that by looking. In springtime, Jamestown is a carpet of bright new grass. There's oak and loblolly pine, and the James River lies on every horizon. There's a museum and a visitor center and a restored 17th century church. It's also an archaeological site, one that comes with costumed "interpreters." Beneath a towering stone monument, a young woman in a woolen smock and peasant blouse greets a gaggle of tourists. […] Climate scientists… [more]
By Shaoni Bhattacharya 15 May 2013 (New Scientist) – With its habitats shrinking and food supplies dwindling, the fate of the polar bear looks grim in the face of climate change. Now comes news that the iconic Arctic mammal may face another potentially devastating threat: it may be particularly vulnerable to new pathogens moving northwards as a result of warming. Diana Weber, who works at both the New College of Florida, Sarasota, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, led a team that sequenced DNA from 98 polar bears in Canada. They looked specifically for genes coding the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) – a molecule found on the surface of cells that acts as a crucial component of the immune systems of most vertebrates. The MHC molecules register the presence of pathogens by binding to them. This alerts the body's immune cells to recognise the foreign invaders and mobilise. Because the MHC molecule's binding site is coded for by hig… [more]
It's the time of year for tracking ice. I have kept current plots and tables of Jaxa daily reports. This year, there will also be daily updated movies of high resolution Arctic SST, both last 50 days and full year.But I wanted to update the plotting me... [more]
Lots going on in the blogosphere, little of which I'll really take up in favor of mentioning that I'll be visiting Charlotte, NC next week. Any of you in the area are welcome to drop me a note and maybe show me the area some. If there's a S... [more]
The Consensus Project was a long, ambitious effort by many volunteers, lasting 12 months from beginning to submission of our paper to peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters. The project involved citizen science from start to finish - from... [more]
Cook et al., searched the ISI web of science between 1991 and 2011 for articles which were returned following a keyword search on "global warming" and "global climate change". A team of reviewers then categorized the ABSTRACTS. Back in 2008... [more]
A friend tipped me off to this one. Focused on five major areas — climate, economy, human rights, land and species, and air and water — Oil Sands Reality Check offers the facts about how these key indicators of health on the planet are affected by the tar sands. Knowing full well that “facts” can often […] [more]
Put this on in the background and let it creep up on you. Elizabeth Shepherd performs Live-to-Air with Michael Occipinti’s Shine On: The Universe of John Lennon Toronto, June 1, 2012 CBC Radio UPDATE: by popular demand, the original below. Filed under: Crock of the Week [more]
NYTimes: In Germany, alone among the 27 members of the European Union, unemployment rates for both older and younger workers are now lower than they were when the United States slipped into a recession at the end of 2007. In the rest of the euro zone, the unemployment rate for workers ages 25 to 74 […] [more]
The summer before last, I invited Brendan Fong to Singapore to work with me on my new ‘network theory’ project. He quickly came up with a nice new proof of a result about mathematical chemistry. We blogged about it, and I added it to my book, but then he became a grad student at […] [more]
Image (click to enlarge): U.S. daily high temperatures for May 14, 2013, from UnisysWhile Mid Atlantic residents were complaining about the unseasonable cold temperatures on Tuesday, heat records were being crushed in the Northern Plains and upper Midw... [more]
A couple weeks ago, former U.S. Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) published an op-ed in the Deseret News, in which he went on about how climate science isn’t “settled,” and that we shouldn’t “panic,” but instead do things that “make sense” to combat climate change. They just published my reply. Filed under: Climate Change [more]
I normally don’t do this sort of thing, but because a topic came up on another site — ClimateProgress — that I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately, I wanted to quote a comment I left and a response to it by someone else, and see where it leads us. The CP post, Climate Sensitivity Stunner: . . . → Read More: Is climate change a choice between education and surrender? [more]
While the „denialosphere” is desperately trying to develop just-another-misunderstanding of climate science (search for “global warming stopped” meme), there is another *real* issue. Specifically, the last time planet Earth enjoyed carbon concentration at around 400 ppm for a longer time period, average summer temperatures in the Arctic region were significantly higher. According to the latest and most comprehensive paleoclimatic analysis, which brought us high resolution temporal data back to the Pliocene (Brigham-Grette et al., 2013, Science), summer temperatures in NE Arctic region were ~8 °C higher compared with present-day climatology. There are tree recent paleoclimatic temperature reconstructions from the Arctic region. Two of them are presented in the following graph: The graph shows temperature anomalies (relative to 1960-1990 climatology) during the summer in the Arctic region with a 10-year resolution in the last… [more]
I got wound up by this whilst reading news on my phone while sitting in a boring meeting. So I’ll vent here. The usual scheme of things that we see so often is that bad things happen (the Assad regime in Syria); it goes on and on and people wring their hands, or ignore it,… [more]
I get an astonishing amount of comment-spam, nominally about dresses – wedding dresses, prom dresses, square dresses and how to fold them, and so on. None of it ever appears so I don’t know why they bother, but simply deleting it all from my email queue is becoming ever more tedious. So I’ve changed one… [more]
A new survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers by our citizen science team at Skeptical Science has found a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are re... [more]
A change in temperature Arctic waters growing alarmingly acidic 'Best estimate' for impact of melting ice on sea level rise Canada sells out science Climate change 'will make hundreds of millions homeless' Fewer Rain Forests mean less energy Obama ad... [more]
The following is a new argument under my Anti-Fluoridation Arguments page above. Firstly, key points from the NIH website page on fluoridation facts; Fluoride in water helps to prevent and can even reverse tooth decay. More than 60 percent of the U.S. population has access to fluoridated water through public water supply systems. The optimal level of … Continue reading » [more]
We’re on a roll with the final fund raising push. If you still haven’t jumped in, you can do so by going to darksnowproject.org, , checking out our IndieGoGo site, or texting darksnow to 50555. Yesterday we got a nice push in this piece from the Weather Channel. Dark Snow is making inroads, and we can […] [more]