Hugh Downs explains why biodiversity (and taxonomy and natural history museums) matter. “Taxonomy is only important if you live on this planet.”
Courtesy of Planet Bob (alias the Arizona State University Institute for Species Exploration).
One of my Google alerts is for the Atlas of Creation. Ever since receiving a copy myself, I've been interested to see where else it shows up and what the reactions are. Well, this morning's Google alert not only alerted me to another sighting, it introduced me to Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist, a blog I hadn't encountered before. It's written by Karina, a “[t]wenty-something grad student in ecology with aspirations to be a professor and lead foreign study programs.” She's blogging (more or less) anonymously from Big City, United States. I'll be adding her blog to my Google Reader collection, and I encourage you to pop by her site for a visit. It looks very interesting.
Oh, Karina, if you're reading, click through.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the seminar on scientific blogging that Margaret Rubega and I have been running this fall, and I mentioned welcomed Moss Plants and More to the blogosphere. I didn'r realize at the time that we also had Cells in Culture. I've been meaning to welcome Cells and Culture for a couple of weeks. Sorry it took me so long.
A belated welcome to the blogosphere Sasha and Amy!
A few days ago I mentioned that Georgia's congressional delegation is proposing an amendment to the Endangered Species Act in response to the water crisis in Georgia and the southeast. In today's USA Today I find out that Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia, requested that President Bush suspend environmental laws during the crisis. On Wednesday, the governor of Florida, Bill Crist, sent Bush a letter asking that he reject the request.
The article included this interesting tidbit:
The corps has rejected the governor's claims of impending calamity, saying that even if the region does go without rain for the next six months, there will still be water from the lake to support the needs of both people and industry. Accomplishing that feat, the corps admits, would require that it dip into the reservoir's conservation pool. Hydrology experts caution that such water is often dirtier and in need of greater treatment. (emphasis added)
I'd been hearing that Atlanta had only 90-120 days of water available. Now I hear they have at least a six month supply – by dipping into the “conservation pool”. That makes the crisis sound much less like a crisis and much more like a problem. Especially when I also read a couple of days ago that
The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola's bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow. (source)
The southeast has water problems, but trying to amend the Endangered Species Act won't help. Turning off some faucets will.
According to this morning's New York Times, more than 500,000 people in southern California have left their homes as a result of the wildfires. Here's a map from calfires.com that shows how extensive the fires are.
If you'd like more information, I suggest going directly to the Calfires site.
A little less than a week ago, the entire Georgia congressional delegation introduced a bill intended to relieve pressures on Georgia water supplies associated with a severe drought.
Georgia's entire congressional delegation introduced legislation Tuesday intended to relieve drought conditions in the Atlanta area....
The legislation the Georgia lawmakers introduced would amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 so that federal protection for such species would be lifted in times of severe drought. (source)
NASA estimates of Arctic sea ice cover at the end of each summer (from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; click here for larger version).From the Congressional Record for 17 October 2007, page [Page: S12980]:
Mr. VITTER. Madam President, I rise today to discuss a project I sponsored in the fiscal year 2008 Labor, Health, Human Services and Education appropriations bill. The project, which would develop a plan to promote better science-based education in Ouachita Parish by the Louisiana Family Forum, has raised concerns among some that its intention was to mandate and push creationism within the public schools. That is clearly not and never was the intent of the project, nor would it have been its effect. However, to avoid more hysterics, I would like to move the $100,000 recommended for this project by the subcommittee when the bill goes to conference committee to another Louisiana priority project funded in this bill.Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I appreciate the sentiments by the Senator from Louisiana and accept this proposal to move the funding for this project to other priority projects for the State of Louisiana in the bill when it goes to conference committee.
Mr. SPECTER. Madam President, I concur with my colleague and will agree to move these funds in conference committee.
The “hysterics” Senator Vitter refers to probably refers to the efforts of many organizations to have the earmark removed. Read more about those efforts here.. Be sure to read the PDF of the letter that was sent to Senators. I'd hardly call it hysterical, but I'm delighted it got the earmark removed.
UPDATE: More information is available at the NCSE webiste.
I just received a large envelope in the mail from the Petition Project. The letter exhorts me to sign a petition urging the United States Congress “to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan...and any other similar proposals.” That struck me as odd, since President Bush announced that the U.S. was withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol five or six years ago.
Included in the fat envelope was an article entitled, “Environmental effects of increased carbon dioxide,” which appeared in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Let me say that again: It appeared in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. What do reviewers know for this journal know about atmospheric physics? I trust my doctor to give me advice on blood pressure and diet, but I wouldn't trust him to review a paper on atmospheric physics.
And it gets stranger. The authors are from something called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Again, I think my doctor is great, and when I had Lyme disease a few years ago he referred me to a great specialist who publishes regularly in top medical journals. But I don't think my Lyme disease specialist, smart as he was, would be likely to submit a paper on global warming to any of the journals in which he regularly publishes.
So, I decided to check RealClimate.Org, my go-to source for solid information on climate change. They became aware of the Petition Project about a week ago, and they've set up a wiki that provides more information about the paper (and its earlier versions), the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
neurodiversity has an interesting analysis of the contents of the journal. “Strange bedfellows” is the title of the post, and that sums it up pretty well. Sourcewatch notes that
The OISM is located on a farm about 7 miles from the town of Cave Junction, Oregon (population 1,126)...The main visitors are tourists who come to hike, backpack and fish in the area's many rivers and streams. Cave Junction is the sort of out-of-the-way location you might seek out if you were hoping to survive a nuclear war, but it is not known as a center for scientific and medical research. The OISM would be equally obscure itself, except for the role it played in 1998 in circulating a deceptive “scientists' petition” on global warming in collaboration with Frederick Seitz, a retired former president of the National Academy of Sciences.1
When I looked back at the letter urging me to sign the petition, whose name was at the bottom of it but Frederick Seitz. And the whole packet of material has now found its way to my recycling bin.
1Note: I don't have anything against small, western towns. I'm rather fond of them, actually. After all, I grew up in Burley, Idaho (county seat of Cassia County; population of Cassia County, ca. 20,000).
According to an article in this morning's Times, an enormous new dinosaur, Futalognkosaurus dukei, has just been described in the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Futalognkosaurus appears to have been more than 32-34m long, and nearly 70% of its remains appear to have been found. It's not the biggest dinosaur ever found, but it's among the biggest, and it's also among the most complete. Unfortunately, the Annals of the Brazilian Academy do not appear to be available on-line, so I can't provide a link.
A couple of months ago CTWatch Quarterly1 published a special issue on “The coming revolution in scholarly communication and cyberinfrastructure.” In that issue, Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information writes about “The shape of the scientific article in the developing cyberinfrastructure.” I won't attempt to summarize the whole article, but I do want to comment on a couple of points.
Great challenges lie ahead, but the promise is even greater. As Miranda might have put it:
O, wonder!
How many goodly discoveries are there here!
How beauteous the scientific literature is! O brave new world,
That has such hypotheses in't!
(with apologies to Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1).
1From the CTWatch Quarterly website: “CTWatch Quarterly is an online journal that focuses on cyberinfrastructure related research critical to collaboration and information dissemination within the science community as a whole. Each issue of CTWatch centers on a topic with currency and importance to this community with articles written by experts in their field from both academia and industry.”
2My superficial impression is that this was less true 40 or 50 years ago than it is now.
3In our pollination biology seminar this morning, for example, the supplementary information associated with Brian Barringer's article in the American Journal of Botany provides a table of chromosome numbers, ploidy levels, and outcrossing rate estimates for all of the taxa included in the analysis.
The animation below is hosted on the Arbor Day Foundation website (http://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm). But you can see it here, too. Just use the scrollbar at the bottom of the window to center the map, and you'll see the buttons necessary to run the animation.
If you scroll down while you're in the window, you'll find that you can also follow links on the Arbor Day Foundation's website through the window, but I wouldn't recommend it. If you want to explore their website, point your browser to http://www.arborday.org.
The animation is on the next page.
On October 9th U.S. District Judge Garr King adopted a ruling of Magistrate Judge Janice Stewart that could lead to Endangered Species Act protection for Oregon coast coho salmon, the only one of 27 salmon and steelhead populations in the Pacific Northwest and California that is not listed.
The decision to withhold endangered species protections from the coho was based on Oregon's viability analysis which states that “coho populations are inherently resilient at low abundance.”In rejecting that analysis, the court cited extensive scientific critiques of that theory from government scientists, who said that it was unreliable and failed to pass the “red-face test.” The court ruled that the new theory did not represent the “best available science” as required by law.
Judge Garr King's decision does not automatically reinstate ESA protection for the salmon.1 His order requires that the Threatened status of the coho be reviewed and that a new listing decision be made in 60 days.
Read more details in the story at Environment News Service.
1The coho was originally listed under the ESA in August, 1998, in response to a petition filed in October, 1993. Protections were removed in January, 2006.(timeline from NOAA)
Or so I am told by an internet survey:1
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Literate Good Citizen You read to inform or entertain yourself, but you're not nerdy about it. You've read most major classics (in school) and you have a favorite genre or two. | |
| Dedicated Reader | |
| Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm | |
| Book Snob | |
| Fad Reader | |
| Non-Reader | |
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz | |
(link from Andrew Sullivan).
I haven't read a novel in a long time. I read mostly non-fiction (history, politics, and the like). And I mostly read periodicals, especially The Economist, Foreign Affairs. I know boring, but that's me.
1I rather like the part about not being nerdy. Of course, anyone who knows me, knows that's wrong.
In 1990 my part of Connecticut was on the border between zone 6 and zone 5. Now we're solidly in zone 6 and you have to go to southern Vermont or southern New Hampshire to get into zone 5. In other words, the southern boundary of zone 5 has moved northward about 60 miles in 16 year –almost 4 miles per year.
Climate change is real..
1James Inhofe are you lisitening?
I meant to mention this a long time ago, but as you can see, I haven't made any entries for awhile. Life's been a little crazy.
In a speech to the Carnegie Institution for Science on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik's launch last week, Hillary Clinton noted that she would re-establish the Office of Technology Assessment..
Admittedly, re-establishing the OTA was not what caught the Associated Press reporter's eye. The headline on the article is “Clinton Would Fund Stem Cell Research&rdquo. And the list of science-related things that Clinton said she would do had re-establishing the OTA at the end:
But at least re-establishing the OTA is there. That means it's on the radar screen, if only as a small blip. Now we need to find a way to make that blip grow larger.
Margaret Rubega and I have been leading a graduate seminar on scientific blogging this semester, and I'm pleased to report that our first blogger has just started posting on Moss Plants and More.
Welcome to the blogosphere, Jessica!
It appears that Quebec is taking the lead.
The province of Quebec slapped the country's first carbon tax on energy firms on Monday, as Canadian business leaders urged “environmental taxation” to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.
Not only will the tax encourage reduction of CO2 emissions directly, by reflecting at least a portion of the cost associated with climate change in the price of products, the roughly C$200 million in tax receipts will be used to fund other efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
Separately, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives said on Monday Canada should become “an energy and environmental superpower,” and suggested higher energy prices to help cut emissions.
Thanks to Grist for bringing this to my attention.
I missed the obituary in the New York Times until Luigi (from Agricultural Biodiversity) pointed it out. Alfred H. Peet died Wednesday, August 29th at his home in Ashland, Oregon.
Mr. Peet, often called the “grandfather of specialty coffee,” started his business in Berkeley, Calif., in 1966, with a single retail coffee bean outlet that blossomed into a public company with 150 stores in 10 states.He is credited with mentoring and inspiring a generation of coffee entrepreneurs, including the founders of Starbucks.
“He was the guru of everyone in the gourmet coffee revolution,” said Corby Kummer, author of “The Joy of Coffee” and a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly. “He was the big bang. It all started with him.”
And it wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for Alfred H. Peet. Thank you Mr. Peet.
1This was before they went national and started supplying coffee to Au Bon Pain, among others.
Philosophers like to use counterfactuals as a way to assess principles. Wikipedia provides this example:
If Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have.
In particular, there is a close connection between asserting the truth of a counterfactual proposition and asserting a causal connection between events rather than just a correlation. Claiming that
If atmospheric CO2 had been maintained at average levels of the 1950s, global average temperature would now be about 1.5°C lower.
requires accepting a causal connection between levels of atmospheric CO2 and global average temperature. Those who deny the causal connection, James Inhofe for example, would deny the counterfactual.
Counterfactual history can also be entertaining, as Saturday Night Live reminds us.
(This is an old clip, but I only discovered it today. Sheril at The Intersection pointed the way.)
