science

Time-Lapse History of Human Global CO2 Emissions From the posted description at YouTube: Animated time-lapse video of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in map form, spanning the 18th century until this current first decade of the 21st century. Shows the start in England and radiating to Europe, US and then Asia.The video makes it easy to visualize the geographical distribution and trends in post industrial revolution anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions over 255 years.Whether you are worried about the consequences of carbon pollution or a sceptic of global warming, you should take a look, since this data is based on recorded use of fossil fuels, gas flaring and cement production, but not land-use changes. The majority of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are represented in this video by Robert W. Corkery using data from ORNL on a Nasa Blue Marble background image. Music copyright Robert W. Corkery 2007.
Post Date:12/14/2009 21:30:00
capitalclimate.blogspot.com

Friedman to Copenhagen: Get Real Thomas Friedman, author of Hot, Flat, and Crowded (just released in a paperback edition), stopped at CNBC for an extended interview this morning on his way to the Copenhagen climate conference. His basic message was that economic revival is strongly dependent on green technology. He pointed out that one out of three wind turbine systems worldwide is now made and exported by Denmark. "If you don't believe in hot," he said, "Just focus on flat and crowded." Video below: Meanwhile, economic assistance to developing countries and the size of emission cuts by rich countries continued to be the main points of contention at the conference: Jeroen Van De Veer, former CEO of Shell, discussed the role of business in the development of climate policy: Jean-Pascal Tricoire, CEO of Schneider Electric, also expressed his views on the subject:
Post Date:12/14/2009 14:30:00
capitalclimate.blogspot.com

Climate Chief Q & A Thomas Karl, Director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, held an online Q & A session on Friday. His concluding comments: What I hope we all got out of this is that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented pace, that there is ample evidence for that, and that human activity is largely to blame. It is now up to the United Nations Framework Convention, 15th Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen, to help us solve this problem. Full text is at the silicon-based WaPo.
Post Date:12/14/2009 14:01:00
capitalclimate.blogspot.com

More Earth-like planets discovered around Sun-like stars Five Earth-like planets (and maybe two additional ones) orbiting Sun-like stars have been discovered (and announced in and around December 14, 2009) by an international team of astronomers lead by...
Post Date:12/14/2009 10:16:00
www.itwire.com

a winter?s basket of green news Is the dark side winning? Copenhagen Climate Conference Negotiations Suspended – bbc We’re lazy and conflicted…American’s Attitudes Toward Environment Aren’t Reflected in Actions – cs monitor Change is a comin’…Toyota to Sell Plug-In Hybrids to Consumers in 2 Years – reuters For all you cat obsessed individuals…Cat Uses Human Loo – ananova Who’s going to fight for the arctic [...]
Post Date:12/14/2009 08:54:33
www.alternativeconsumer.com

Still On That Low-Carb Diet I have never been a fan of the low-carb diet craze – Atkins, South Beach, or whatever version you prefer. To me this was always a triumph of marketing over science. It is also an excellent example of how public opinion can be largely swayed by a few proponents and a compliant media, while the science goes off unnoticed in a different direction. Dieting is also one of those issues that is more emotional than one might at first think. I have had the experience on more than one occasion of giving someone, in a very dry and calm fashion, my assessment of the evidence about low-carb diets, only to be met with righteous anger as if I had just trampled on a core tenet of their faith.
Post Date:12/14/2009 06:21:06
skepticblog.org

Third Hand Smoke: The Newest Fear Napoleon Bonaparte once remarked that “In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.”
Post Date:12/13/2009 12:18:08
politicalvindication.com

the difficult divorce between time and space Overturning the theory of general relativity takes a lot of work as most popular science buffs know. So what’s a better way to draw in eyeballs than questioning whether Einstein’s work has finally been overturned? It’s kind of like the New Scientist cover which asked whether Darwin was wrong about the tree of life but with fewer negative consequences. That’s exactly what Scientific American did in their December issue when covering the theoretical work of UC Berkley’s Petr Ho?ava. Finessing the complex quantum mechanical equations with a split between time and space, the physicist has been able to recreate the mathematical workings of general relativity at low energy states and even generate the hypothetical graviton particle. Well, on paper at least… Of course there’s a snag here. Ho?ava’s numbers only work when planetary orbits and shapes of planets and stars are assumed to be absolutely perfect. General relativity should describe how
Post Date:12/13/2009 12:09:09
worldofweirdthings.com

Science Art: Chinchilla, Webster?s New International Dictionary, 1911 Behold a crepuscular rodent. In this case, I suppose, a fractional crepuscular rodent. (That means they like going out at dusk and dawn… creatures of what photographers call “the magic hour.”) I suppose most people know Chinchillidae for their fur. Like guinea pigs, they were originally used by humans in South America, only for coats rather than barbecues. They never really caught on as pets, though there are some fans out there. Wikipedia also tells me those big ears have made them useful for scientists, who study the auditory system using chinchillas as models. What? Image from Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1911, G & C Miriam Co. Springfield, MA, found here.
Post Date:12/12/2009 23:25:00
guildofscientifictroubadours.com

The Hockey Stick
Post Date:12/12/2009 17:13:02
michaelscomments.wordpress.com

The Sounds of Science: Lubchenco gives a demonstration of the science of ocean acidification This video is from House testimony early this month by from Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States? leading climate office.
Post Date:12/12/2009 15:14:27
climateprogress.org

An ?Adobe? of Creativity Which is tougher, being creative or making being creative possible? The question is a bit unorthodox, but if you feel that facilitating creativity is as much a challenge as being creative itself, you would agree that Adobe has done a wonderful job at it. If you are someone in the digital creativity business, Adobe is probably a way of life for you. If you are an adherent fan of the digital world, you probably have run into Adobe at almost every turn. Right from the music album art in an I-pod, to the e-version of the i-pod manual (hope it has one), there?s a high probability that adobe software had a role to play in them. Be it a web report or a product manual or any other digital document meant for wide circulation, PDF is the format of choice for distributing them in. One of the main features responsible for the success of the format is the fact that the document can be read on various operating systems and still retain the presentation format. Portability and interoperability are
Post Date:12/12/2009 12:09:53
theviewspaper.net

Akbar and Jeff's Climate Modeling Hut Know how to run a spreadsheet? Want to learn how Mann, the CRU, et. al. did it? Iowahawk doffs his jester's cap, picks up his keyboard and displays his mad day-job skilz, to show us how to make a hockey stick chart on our own. And for the advanced students, some 'exercises for the reader' to show how shaky that conclusion may be. If you care at all about the AGW debate, this is the post to read this weekend. Even if you just read it as a gloss on the jargon, it's well worth the 15 minutes to do so.
Post Date:12/12/2009 10:27:26
due-diligence.typepad.com

Decisionmaking Without Certainty Greg Craven has what seems impossible -- a promising way to change the way we talk about climate change. Watch and pass it along:Craven expands on these ideas with DJ Grothe in a recent Point of Inquiry podcast.
Post Date:12/11/2009 22:19:00
danceswithanxiety.blogspot.com

Gifts from the sixth dimension   ScientificsOnline.com   A clear 3-inch cube contains a Calabi-Yau manifold, the 3-D cross-section of a 6-D space. String theorists say we may live in a 10-dimensional universe, with six of those dimensions rolled up so tightly that we can never see them. So how can you possibly visualize six-dimensional space? This year's top gift for science geeks can help. The 2009 geek-gift competition resulted in a repeat (geek-peat?) of last year's outcome: Andrew Meeusen of Mesa, Ariz., received the most votes once again, this time for suggesting the Calabi-Yau manifold crystal. Bathsheba Grossman creates the crystals from glass and offers them on her Web site for $72. They're also available for $89.95 from Edmund Scientific. So... what the heck is a Calabi-Yau manifold?...(read more)
Post Date:12/11/2009 17:07:00
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

Steampunk! It's like a birthday gift that arrived a few centuries too late. The English mathematicianCharles Babbage, who was born the day after Christmas in 1791, dreamed of calculating logarithms using a vast machine. Or daydreamed, at least; he wrote in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher:...I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society, at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the room, and seeing me half asleep, called out, Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?" to which I replied "I am thinking that all these tables" (pointing to the logarithms) "might be calculated by machinery." Babbage won government support to work on a "difference" engine that could handle calculations that were valuable to navigators; nautical tables at the time were riddled with errors and could lead a ship into disaster. But after one seventh of the machine was built, and 17,000 poun
Post Date:12/11/2009 15:22:00
physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com

Lots of Ink: From New Mex. when dinos were new ? a prospect of the king tyrant lizard, a vestige of The journal Science this week has on its cover the magnified image of bacteria infecting a rice plant, and the editorial is about the international fraternity of science, its political importance for the common welfare,
Post Date:12/11/2009 11:33:46
ksjtracker.mit.edu

How To Get Your Website Ready for The Christmas Sales
Post Date:12/10/2009 17:11:00
www.affiliaterugu.com

Mind the gap ? distant climates and immediate budgets A
Post Date:12/10/2009 05:25:29
bravenewclimate.com

Eyes and ears on Copenhagen http://www.flickr.com/photos/energyclimatechange/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0A giant globe inside Copenhagen's Bella Conference Center—perhaps to remind delegates to the United Nationals Climate Change Conference of the weight of their grave responsibility.Here's the one piece of science news you can't avoid hearing: over the next two weeks in Copenhagen, Denmark, United Nations delegates from 192 countries will mastermind a global plan to stop climate change in its tracks. Or, if you're a pessimist, international delegates will squabble and point fingers, eventually failing to instigate any sort of meaningful action. Or, if you're a climate change contrarian (denier might be the less-polite word), they're using pseudoscience to monger fear as part of the global liberal conspiracy to murder capitalism and usher in Big Brother and totalitarianism.Besides being hailed as a turning point in climate change policy, Copenhagen is historically important just in terms of how it's being covered. Th
Post Date:12/07/2009 15:56:00
physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com