climate change
lborkowski | October 27, 2017A few of the recent pieces I recommend reading:
Vox's Sean Illing interviews Nikole Hannah-Jones: “Schools are segregated because white people want them that way"
Roxane Gay in the New York Times: Dear Men: It's You, Too
Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post: ‘Let us do our job’: Anger erupts over EPA’s apparent muzzling of scientists
Rita Schoeny at the Union of Concerned Scientists Blog: I Am a 30-Year Veteran Scientist from US EPA; I Can’t Afford to Be Discouraged
For HuffPost Highline, Lydia Polgreen interviews Sharon McGowan, Walter Shaub, Mike Cox, and Ned Price…
jdupuis | September 26, 2017Deja vu all over again. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
Canadian science under the Harper government from 2006 to 2015 was a horrific era of cuts and closures and muzzling and a whole lot of other attack on science.
One of the most egregious was the threat to close the PEARL arctic research station. (PEARL website) Fortunately, the outcry was so fierce that the Harper government extended PEARL's funding for five years. Well, guess what? The five years is up and PEARL is threatened with closure once more.
Canadian science under the Justin Trudeau Liberals has shown signs…
jdupuis | September 11, 2017The last one of these was in mid-June, so we're picking up all the summer stories of scientific mayhem in the Trump era. The last couple of months have seemed especially apocalyptic, with Nazis marching in the streets and nuclear war suddenly not so distant a possibility. But along with those macro-level issues, Trump and his cronies are still hammering away at climate change denial, environmental protection, research funding and public health issues. As exhausting as it seems -- and this is part of the plan -- amongst all of us opposed to Trump, we need to keep track of a wide range of…
gregladen | September 7, 2017I usually write my annual back to school post earlier than this, but I was distracted by various events. There are three themes here.
1) You are a science teacher and I have some stuff for you.
2) You have a student in a school and you want to support the school's science teacher.
3) You have a student-offspring or elsewise and are looking for a cool back to school gift.
First, for themes 1 and 2, a mixture of traditional back to school blog posts and some items that may be useful and happen to be on sale at the moment so now's your chance.
My For Teachers Page has posts providing some…
gregladen | September 2, 2017First, please take two minutes to watch and listen to this, in order to calibrate:
https://youtu.be/g25G1M4EXrQ
Now, remove all liquid containing vessels from the vicinity, put on your head-desk helmet gear, and watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=GUcsAFnwC7k
Then, behold the fact that Jim Bridenstine, who has demanded that President Obama apologize for believing that global warming is real and important, is being appointed to run NASA.
By the way, global warming did not stop in 2003
No surprise here, planetary warming does not care about the election. Now…
dr. dolittle | August 29, 2017 Image of yellowfin tuna via Wikimedia Commons.
I love fishing. As with every fisherman, I have my fair share of "the one that got away" stories steeped in *mostly* truth. So, you can imagine my interest in reading research that shows fish appear to be shrinking in warming waters.
Warm waters carry less oxygen, which makes it difficult for fish to breath...especially larger fish. Metabolism is also higher in fish living in warm waters. Higher metabolism means the fish need more oxygen. The gills of fish are responsible for extracting oxygen from water and when they reach their maximum…
gregladen | August 28, 2017Harvey the Invisible Rabbit: Did not exist.
This is a picture of some men.
Since they are men, they have some abilities. They can, for example, knock each other over, and they can play with balls. This is what men do, and this is what these men can do.
This is a picture of some professional NFL foodball players.
They are also men. They can also knock each other over, and they can also play with balls. But the NFL football players are much better at knocking each other over, and you wouldn't believe how great they are at playing with balls.
They are NFL enhanced. They are trained,…
jdupuis | August 18, 2017After a bit of an unexpected summer hiatus, I'm back to regular blogging, at least as regular as it's been the last year or two.
Of course, I'm a committed Game of Thrones fan. I read the first book in paperback soon after it was reprinted, some twenty years ago. And I've also been a fan of the HBO series, which though a bit inconsistent and wobbly at times, has been quite worth watching.
And speaking of winter, has anyone else noticed that winter doesn't seem to be coming? Has anyone noticed the person most worried about climate-related issues, Jon Snow, is having trouble being believed? In…
milhayser | July 27, 2017On Class M, James Hrynyshyn shows us how climate change will benefit the economies of some U.S. counties while damaging many others. This mostly has to do with location; coastal areas and southern latitudes are more threatened, with Florida poised to suffer worst of all. James writes, "we're not just talking about polar bears anymore. It's now about jobs, wages, infrastructure, crime." Meanwhile, William M. Connolley reports Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf is 12% smaller due to a giant iceberg splitting off and heading (presumably) toward Miami. Greg Laden says denial of global warming has…
gregladen | June 29, 2017Two items I know you'll want to check out.
The ‘intellectual’ debate Rick Perry says he wants is already over
Last week, Energy Secretary Rick Perry told CNBC he considers his skepticism towards climate data to be a sign of a “wise, intellectually engaged person.” Yesterday, at a press briefing at the White House – it’s apparently supposed to be “Energy Week” – Perry used similar phrasing, calling for “an intellectual conversation” on global warming.
Four myths journalists should watch out for during Trump’s “Energy Week”
The White House has declared this to be "Energy Week" and is pushing…
gregladen | June 27, 2017There is no free lunch, but you can watch a normally unfree documentary for free on the usual streaming networks for a little while.
Click here to get to the NGS site
From Hollywood Reporter:
Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies, says, “Coal affects our lives and planet in important ways, but people often take positions on it without seeing the full picture. So this week, National Geographic is making From the Ashes available for free on a number of platforms. We encourage family and friends to watch the film and join the CrowdRise campaign to support organizations that are…
jdupuis | June 16, 2017Another couple of weeks' worth of stories about how science is faring under the Donald Trump regime. If I'm missing anything important, please let me know either in the comments or at my email jdupuis at yorku dot ca. If you want to use a non-work email for me, it's dupuisj at gmail dot com.
The selections are by no means meant to represent a comprehensive account of everything written about science over the last couple of weeks. I'm aiming for something representative rather than complete or comprehensive. For example, there are probably hundreds of articles written about the Paris Climate…
cmonforton | June 1, 2017The text came in from my husband: "Canada is going to be getting warmer all the time."
That was his way of telling me today's news that President Trump is pulling out of the historic, global climate change agreement. It makes me sad and brings to mind the words of Pope Francis in his encyclical letter "On Care for Our Common Home":
"Reducing greenhouse gases requires honesty, courage and responsibility, above all on the part of those countries which are more powerful and pollute the most."
Leadership "...is manifest when, in difficult times, we uphold high principles and think of the long-…
gregladen | May 13, 2017I'm currently reading Paul Offit's Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong, in preparation for an interview with him that I'll be recording later this week. I'll let you know about the interview, but at this time I can say that I'm very much enjoying the book. The publisher's description:
What happens when ideas presented as science lead us in the wrong direction?
History is filled with brilliant ideas that gave rise to disaster, and this book explores the most fascinating—and significant—missteps: from opium's heyday as the pain reliever of choice to recognition of opioids as a…
pgleick | May 4, 2017The ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency, the selection of his cabinet and senior advisers, and the actions of the GOP-dominated legislative branch have all raised new serious questions and concerns about the role of science, research, and analysis in national law and policy. These concerns have been worsened by elements of the new administration’s proposed budget that severely cut or eliminate core federal science efforts, Congressional hearings and actions that have been perceived to promote ideological viewpoints over scientific findings, presidential executive orders that attempt…
dr. dolittle | April 25, 2017Thank you Dr. Barb Goodman (Director of SD Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network, Fellow of the American Physiological Society, Sanford School of Medicine of the University of South Dakota) who sent me information about thirsty koalas.
Koalas typically hydrate themselves from the leaves of eucalyptus trees. But recently researchers at the University of Sydney have noticed the animals are drinking water as eucalyptus trees have succumbed to wildfires and climate change. Koalas have found a friend in Robert Frend, who is a farmer in New South Wales and creator of "Blinky Drinker", which…
gregladen | March 29, 2017Scientists are now being subjected to unbridled McCarthyism.
Eventually the transcript will be available, but for now you'll have to just trust me on this. Congressman Clay Higgins, Republican on Lamar Smith's alt-Science committee, demanded today to know if climate scientist Michael Mann (author of The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, and By Michael E. Mann - Dire Predictions, Second Edition: Understanding Climate Change">this book…
pgleick | March 27, 2017[An early version of this essay was originally published on my Forbes blog in 2012. It has been edited and updated.]
Geologic time scales are long – far too long for the human mind to easily comprehend. Over millions, and tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of years, the Earth has changed from something unrecognizable to the planet we see on maps, plastic globes, and photos from space. The Atlantic Ocean didn’t exist eons ago and it will literally disappear in the future as the continental plates continue to shift inch by inch. A visitor from outer space millions of years ago would…
gregladen | March 15, 2017Rob Honeycutt is famous for his many contributions, at Skeptical Science, in the comment threats on my blog, and elsewhere, in defense of climate science, where that defense is largely against the deniers of science and damagers of civilization. (He is also the guy who makes these famous messenger bags) He deserves a lot of credit for all the work he has done in this area.
Over the years, Honeycutt has developed a number of dialogs related to most, possibly all, areas of human caused global warming and climate change. Along with these dialogs, he has also developed some very helpful…
gregladen | March 15, 2017Mark Steyn is well known to readers of this blog as the intentionally obnoxious Canadian version of Rush Limbaugh who is being sued by our friend and colleague Michael Mann, author of the recent "The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy," for defamation. Steyn is also the author of a terrible book attacking all the climate scientists. Steyn has gone after a lot of pro-science people, including me, and I heard a rumor that he likes to crush kittens. OK, maybe he doesn't crush kittens, but he is explicitly and…