On February 13th, 2013 48 people risked arrest at the White House gates to call on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Meteor Hits Russia, Not. Maybe did.
UPDATE: Somebody found a hole in some ice.
This is a meteor streaking across the sky in the vicinity of the Urals:
Numerous additional films of that event and some analysis are on Phil Plait’s blog, here.
Here’s a FAKE video purported to be a crater formed by a fragment of that meteor BUT IT ISN’T:
From Phil Plait’s blog: “Note also lots of hoaxes are turning up, like a video of a flaming crater that’s actually a flaming pit in Turkmenistan that’s been burning for decades (called “The Door to Hell”). Be cautious and be skeptica”
… apparently the shock wave of the meteor passing over head or breaking apart blasted apart doors and windows and such in nearby villages and about 1,000 people were somewhat injured by flying debris.
I’m also told that there is no connection between the nearby asteroid flyby and this event. According to Phil Plait (see link above) the direction of the objects flying across the sky in the videos seems to be different than the direction of the visiting asteroid. That is all provisional, of course, This is a breaking story and it will be a while before we can totally understand the details.
US Drought
From US Drought Monitor:
Peter Gleick vs Heartland Institute
Peter Gleick, my sbling here at scienceblogs.com (see his blog here) is famous for a lot of things, but about one year ago he went up against the Heartland Institute and in a daring effort of investigative (if avocational) journalism, revealed that right wing conservative/libertarian “think” tank’s nefarious plans to interfere with science education in an effort to discredit climate scientists in the eyes of the American public and our students through a series of rather smarmy tactics, including some really obnoxious billboards.
Scott Mandia at “Global Warming: Man or Myth?” has written a one-year-later retrospective of Gleick vs. Heartland. Check it out: Peter Gleick vs Heartland Institute – Scorecard One Year Later. And the Winner Is?
Scott compares the “accomplishments” of the Heartland Institute over the last year with Peter’s activities to produce a rather lopsided score card that resembles what would happen if the local High School football team went up against the Baltimore Ravens.
The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll
Several thousand scientists at a handful of different research centers spent a gazillion hours and a huge pile of money searching for the Higgs Boson. But, nobody really cares that much about the Higgs Boson. The important thing is the Higgs Field. The Higgs Field is this thing that is everywhere, as these spooky quantum fields tend to be, but that has a strange characteristic that makes it different from other fields; at rest the Higgs field has a non zero energy level. This means that its effect on particles is asymmetric. What that means is that when you write a mathematical formula of what happens to each of various different related and quasi similar particles such that the particles “look” the same way as each other in the formula, but then add in the effect of the Higgs field, the particles no longer “looks” the same. The symmetry of the formula is broken. I short, the Higgs field breaks symmetry. The result of this breaking of symmetry is that certain (most but not all) of the fundamental particles that make up matter act differently than a whole bunch of other thingies that make up the universe and you get … stuff. Without the breaking of symmetry caused by the Higgs Field, there really wouldn’t be much stuff, and if there was any stuff, it would be very different than the stuff we have now. The Higgs Particle itself is the product of extremely rare and hard to reproduce in the lab events, and the specific nature of the Higgs Particle, as measured by ginomrous devices that can’t really detect the particle directly but do so indirectly, should “look” a certain way (have certain products at a certain energy level) if the Higgs Field exists and is what we (and by we I mean they) think it is. Continue reading The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll
Happy Valentine’s Day, Everyone. Here’s a card for you:
And, Happy Birthday Amanda!
Reflections on Darwin’s Origin of Species
The The Origin Of Species
Continue reading Reflections on Darwin’s Origin of Species
Climate Change and Civil Disobedience
At 11:30 AM eastern time today, an act of “civil disobedience will take place around at the East Gate of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, just east of the picture-postcard zone.” #NoKXL is the hashtag.
It is time, apparently. This is a time when more of the money that is out there is in the hands of a very small number of people and corporations, and many of these people and corporations are paying to maintain the status quo, and that status quo involves keeping our economy, or society, our species firmly planted on a track leading to the edge of a very tall cliff. Not the fiscal cliff or some other cliff, but the climate cliff. Science, common sense, and basic moral responsibility tell us that we need to change direction and now, even the President of the United States is telling us that. But very little has been done, compared to what could have been done, to slow down and eventually reverse direction towards what is clearly a major disaster, or really, multiple disasters which will compete with each other to see which of many bad scenarios ends up being the worst scenario.
So, people are taking to the streets. This just came out:
Sierra Club, 350.org and Commited Citizens to Engage in Civil Disobedience Today at White House to Stop Tar Sands, Keystone XL pipeline
Wednesday, February 13 at 10:45 AM ET
Fifty American leaders–including Michael Brune (Sierra Club), Bill McKibben (350.org), Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr. (Hip Hop Caucus), civil rights legend Julian Bond, actress Daryl Hannah, Nebraska rancher Randy Thompson and others on the frontlines of climate change–will risk arrest in front of the White House to demonstrate the depth of their support for decisive action against climate change. For the first time in its 120-year history, the Sierra Club will participate in this civil disobedience action to convey the severity and urgency of action on climate.
2012 was the hottest year on record, half the country is in severe drought, and Superstorm Sandy just flooded the greatest city in the world–New York. A global crisis unfolds before our eyes and immediate action is required. President Obama has the executive authority to make a significant and immediate impact on carbon pollution, and he can begin by saying no to Big Oil by rejecting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.Civil disobedience is the response of ordinary people to extraordinary injustices. Americans have righted the wrongs of our society – slavery, child labor, suffrage, segregation, and inequality for gays and immigrant workers – with creative nonviolent resistance. Climate change threatens the health and security of all Americans, and action proportional to the problem is required–now.
Details, Contact Information, Etc. are HERE Here is a letter written by the participants in this action:
We’re here today to show the depth of our resolve that President Obama take immediate, decisive action against climate change—to show that if the president leads, the vast majority of Americans will rally behind him. We’re not here today to protest the president, we are here to encourage and support him. We lived through horrors of Superstorm Sandy, the Midwest drought, wildfires, and the hottest year on record: we know in our bones that the time has come to do more than we have, and all that we can.
The president can’t work miracles by himself. An obstructionist Congress stands in the way of progress and innovation. But President Obama has the executive authority and the mandate from the American people to stand up to the fossil fuel industry, and to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline right now.
And we’re here to show something else—that the movement for a clean energy revolution is a broad and powerful one. In 2011 we were moved by the 1,253 Americans who went jail to protest Keystone in the biggest civil disobedience action in many years in this country. Today we are 50 people at the White House representing millions of Americans in every state, in every community. Today we risk arrest because a global crisis unfolds before our eyes. We have the solutions to this climate crisis. We have a moral obligation to stand stand for immediate, bold action to solve climate disruption. We can do it, and we will.
The Credibility of the Anti-Climate Change Science Industry
So, I posted something at Daily Kos you might find interesting:
As we wrestle with hard science and hard policy and the interaction between the two, the real problem we face are made much harder to solve because of the seemingly incessant drumbeat of science denialism.
Climate change is real and is mainly caused by humans, but climate change science denialism is an industry, a cottage industry, or a hobby for many. Big oil pays for the production of anti climate science rhetoric and activism. Anti climate science activists exhibit bizarre non-scientific behavior that goes beyond denying anthropogenic climate change. It may be hard to tell if the denialist activism in this important area of science and policy is something people are driven to do by vocation, or if they make a living at it.
At the end of his rope: The execution of William Williams
Minnesota has three things you may have heard about: Cold weather, “Minnesota Nice,” and a vigorous training program in Passive Aggressive Behavior (PAB). Unless you know about things, you probably didn’t know any of that.1
The part about the cold weather is neither here nor there with Global Warming causing it to go away. The latter two are interrelated and complex, and can only be understood through a great deal of analysis. And, since we don’t have time to put everyone in the state into Freudian therapy, I’ll just give an example. Continue reading At the end of his rope: The execution of William Williams
Darwinism, Darwinian, Darwinist
Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!
Oh, and Abe Lincoln too.
For Darwin’s birthday, I want to discuss the uses of the terms “Darwinism, Darwinian, and Darwinist.” Many have written about this and many don’t like any of those words, some seem to equally dislike all three. A couple of years back, writing for the New York Times, Carl Safina said,
Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.
By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.”
I don’t fully agree. Darwin proposed, discussed, and integrated into his theories of evolution the idea of inheritance. Yes, Gregor Mendel independently demonstrated an atomistic theory of inheritance and worked out key features of that process, essentially creating the concepts of “gene” and “allele” as we often use them today. Having said that, Mendelian inheritance turns out to be a very incomplete picture and more often than not is inadequate in real use. The difference between what we now know about inheritance and what Darwin needed to develop much of his evolutionary thinking isn’t really all that large. Darwin certainly did address developmental biology, in that he understood that life forms underwent changes within the lifetime that were controlled by the same factors that shaped any feature of those organisms. And so on.
In particular, Safina states that the term “Darwinism” puts too much emphasis on the contributions of one person and one book and one theory. But Darwin wrote more than one book on Evolution, and he proposed more than one theory. Mayr says there were five theories and makes a reasonable argument for that. Darwin even foresaw, though he did not develop, higher level behavioral theories such as kin selection.
Safina goes on to note that “We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism” and otherwise warns against the “ism”-ish nature of a word like “Darwinism” reminding us of Marxism, capitalism, Catholicism, and racism.
Before I go any further, I want to strongly agree with Safina and others who have eschewed the term “Darwinism” but not for most of the reasons stated. Darwin was a key figure in defining evolution, and for the most part, the “evolution” we know of today is Darwin’s evolution plus, not a form of evolution that required the overthrow of Darwin’s ideas. Newton was wrong. We can use the word “Newtonian” to refer to a subset of physics that work like Newton said they worked but only on a very limited scale. Newtonian mechanics does not describe how the universe, or reality, or matter and energy work. Newtonian physics changed from a theory of everything (dynamic and physical) to a mere approximation that is fundamentally flawed. Copernicism, as it were, more so. Darwinism (to use that term for just a moment) is still at the core of modern evolutionary thinking.
The reason to eschew the term “Darwinism” is for that final reason mentioned above: isms are sucky. So I’m fine with that. But evolution as we know of today is a Darwinian thing to a much much greater degree than physics as we know of it today is Newtonian (or for that matter, even Einsteinian!).
So, I’m happy to be a “Darwinist” but I’d prefer to use the term “Evolutionary Biologist.”
There is another term that people have elected to toss out for similar reasons: Darwinain. That is an error, and most biologists who would happily agree with Safina (and me) in avoiding Darwinism use Darwinian all the time. The term Darwinian refers to one part of Darwin’s body of theory: Selection. We say that during neurogenesis, neurons over produce and over connect, and then, over time, undergo culling based on use. Neurons that are used are retained, those that are not go away. It is said to be a Darwinian process, because it is a selection process in which over production is followed by selective retention or survival. There are other examples of Darwinian process that occur in biology, and of course, they happen outside of biology and the term is often used, including but not limited to the nefarious idea of Social Darwinian process.
And now, for your reading and listening pleasure, a few Darwinian blog posts:
A few essays focusing on Darwin’s Voyage on The Beagle
- Bon Voyage HMS Beagle
- The Voyage of the Beagle
- Darwin Crossing The Atlantic
- Charles Darwin and the Rain Forest
- Darwin Gets his Wellies Wet
- South America on Five Dollars a Day
- Bugs (Darwin)
- Darwin South of the Tropics
- Darwin and The Gauchos
- Fossil Quadrupeds
- Rheas and the Birth of Evolutionary Theory
- Elephants and Horses
photo of Darwin by kevinzim
SSA 2013
BBC Gets Climate Change Correction Story Wrong(ish)
I already told you about this. In a BBC/David Attenborough special on Africa, this specific statement was made: That part of the African continent had warmed by 3.5 degrees. This was corrected by Leo Hickman. That datum is invalid. Africa has indeed been affected by climate change, but that specific factoid is incorrect. Now, the BBC is patting itself on the back for correcting the special, but they are doing it wrong.
From the BBC Story:
The presenter then commented on the additional challenges presented by climate change, adding that parts of Africa now face higher temperatures.
However, a BBC statement, said: “There is widespread acknowledgement within the scientific community that the climate of Africa has been changing.
“We accept the detail is disputable and the commentary should have reflected that, therefore the line of commentary has been edited out of Sunday’s repeat and iPlayer version removed.”
They continue to say that climate change is real and affects Africa, and they make reference to an error in the documentary. But the error in the documentary is a) very specific and b) not entirely unrelated to reality, though the datum itself is totally bogus.
Here’s my quote mined version of the BBC statement: “parts of Africa now face higher temperatures…[but] the detail is disputable… [and] has been edited out of Sunday’s repeat and iPlayer version removed”
They should have been more clear about this.
Forward On Climate Blogathon
Today, a new Climate SOS Blogathon starts at the Daily Kos. I’ll be contributing a post tomorrow, which I’ll let you know about. The other contributors include an amazing list of bloggers, scientists, policy experts, and at least one federal level elected official of which I’m aware.
The first blog posted is: Keystone XL pipeline is not in the U.S. National Interest by A. Siegel who blogs at Get Energy Smart. NOW!!!!.
The list of posts will be managed HERE.
CO2 and Ocean Acidification
This graphic is from GRID-Arendal, a Norwegian Foundation collaborating with the UN Environment Programme. It shows CO2 concentrations in the ocean going up over a period of 20 eyars, and the corresponding drop in pH over the same time period.
Ocean acidification is a serious effect of climate change.
There are more climate change related graphics HERE.