Tuesday, August 03, 2010

A taste of the menu

Global warming turns 35: both the term itself and the experience of rising temperatures have lasted a little longer than my lifespan. Predictions made back in the mid-70s were in the right ballpark.

Ben discovers the law of ice cream (well, gelato actually).

Phytoplankton, the base of the ocean's food chain, are in serious decline, according to a new global study in Nature.

Alison points out what has largely been missing from the Australian election campaign.

The Automatic Earth: why deflation matters more than inflation.

Dominic Knight: How to make the election more interesting.

SMH/Crikey: Gillard's cash for clunkers is a lemon costing almost twenty times as much to reduce a tonne of carbon as an ETS. And that is with some generous assumptions. And the claims of money for R&D when looked at carefully also fare poorly. Neither the emperor nor the would-be emperor are wearing any climate clothes.

Gravity, it's only a theory. The hoax unmasked.

John Cook: Ten ways we know the earth is warming and ten reasons we know that the primary driver is human activities enhancing the natural greenhouse effect.

Popular author Anne Rice has "quit being a Christian" (but still follows Christ).

Joe Romm: US EPA gives ruling on ten different petitions submitted by climate change deniers: "These petitions - based as they are on selectively edited, out-of-context data and a manufactured controversy - provide no evidence to undermine our determination."

Wynne Parry asks whether the oceans primed for mass extinction in an article that starts to join the dots between pollution, overfishing, nutrient run-off, dead zones, ocean warming and acidification from carbon dioxide.

8 comments:

David Palmer said...

Byron,

Using Joe Romm as a source of reliable information does you no credit.

Joe Romm is responsible for creating a poisonous, negative atmosphere in the climate debate.

Witness this baseless attack on Clive Crook of The Atlantic

Btw, here is Crook's response.

Matthew Moffitt said...

Alison first made the point here.

byron smith said...

David - There is a difference between having a critical and polemic tone and being unreliable as a source of information.

byron smith said...

Nature: Phytoplankton decline questioned.

byron smith said...

Nature: And also here, which argues for a sampling bias in the original paper's method. I guess this topic has now become "watch this space", since neither critique claimed a replacement figure, simply pointed out problems with the original paper.

byron smith said...

Stephen Leahy: Phytoplankton + decreasing pH + sunlight = dead phytoplankton. Another possible threat from a more acidic ocean.

byron smith said...

Ocean Warming: more records broken off the New England coast.

byron smith said...

More on phytoplankton (taken from a comment by Steve Mann on FB):

Further discussion and a reply to the critiques from the authors of the original piece. Boyce et al. are not the only researchers that have found a decline in phytoplankton. Gregg et al., 2003 also found a reduction in phytoplankton productivity. Admittedly, new studies by Gregg show that declines are not continuing. However, the recent increases have been in coastal areas and no significant change has been observed in the open ocean. This clearly due to the influx of nutrients from agricultural production. This activity has produced "dead zones" in esturarine and deltaic areas along coasts all over the world.