Last week, while most of us here in the states were busy spending time with family and friends, the ongoing scandal of “Climategate” took a couple of new turns. Climategate is the popular term referring to the release by a computer hacker of a large body of private emails written by climate researchers. As people have combed through the emails they’ve found a number of questionable statements regarding the data the researchers have been citing […]
So okay, the headline is a little alarmist. I should probably say “Rising C02 levels” rather than “global warming” and “rising in spite of any efforts to stop them” instead of “no turning back”. But that will hardly make people read about this new study. Tim Garret, a physicist specializing in Atmospheric research, has created a new model predicting the amount of C02 that civilization produces. He models it on some specific and mostly obvious […]
Back when I was in High School and the works of Eric Von Daniken were still new and popular, I was fascinated by the mysterious works of the Nazca people in Peru. Von Daniken claimed that the giant figures that the Nazca people carved into the plateaus of Peru were meant to be seen by alien spaceships. (A bit of a reach perhaps, but if you know Von Daniken’s work, exactly what you’d expect.) But […]
News of a study linking death rates caused by the weather to the mean income of a neighborhood was just published here in Arizona: “[The] link between money and the ability to cope with extreme weather emerged clearly in the research. Among the startling revelations: For every $10,000 an area’s income rises, the average outside temperature drops one-half degree Fahrenheit. ‘It’s an environmental-justice issue,’ said Darren Ruddell, a geographer who led the study. ‘The people […]
Neat! New details about a claim I remember being made at the beginning of this decade: “Chinese and Arabic astronomers left historical documentation of a supernova that occurred in our own galaxy in the year 1006 (SN 1006), and another one 48 years later (SN 1054). Some of the writings about SN 1006 say there was a visual explosion half the size of the moon, and it shone so brightly that objects on the ground […]
I just posted an article over at the Episcopal Cafe pointing to this wonderful lecture by the Abbot of Worth. It’s the inagural Noah Lecture (a british charity) and deals primarily with finding a theological basis for sustainable living. The good Abbot finds his foundation in a call for all of us to return to the cardinal virtues – especially and more importantly – the prime virtue of Temperance. From his lecture: “So how does […]
Ugh and Ugh. A article that points out that the Peak Oil situation combined with the observed undergoing climate change may be creating a much more immediately dire situation together than on their own. Maybe not so quickly in the developed world as in the developing, but according to the article it’s a matter of time. (Says your writer who lives in the US’s 5th largest city, in the middle of huge desert.) “You. Will. […]
Sorry to be so quiet here over the past week. I’ve been in North Carolina meeting with representatives of the Moravian Church’s Northern and Southern Provinces to finish up the crafting of a Full Communion agreement between our church and theirs. I’ll post something about that effort in a bit. In the meantime, here’s an article from the New York Times that reports on a growing recognition that energy shortages are going to continue to […]
Which is it? An article today reports on research that the Antarctic iceshelf is expected to disappear relatively soon: “Last summer sea ice in the North shrank to a record low, a change many attribute to global warming. But while solar radiation and amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are similar at the poles, to date the regions have responded differently, with little change in the South, explained oceanographer James Overland of the National […]
The news that a sizable number of scientists had signed a document that questioned the commonly accepted wisdom that human activities contribute to the observed effects of global climate change was announced with some glee by people opposed to that view. Apparently a number of the scientists who’s names appeared on the letter are reporting that they were not contacted in advance, and that they do not agree with the letter to which their signatures […]
Entangled States 