Science Addiction

Obama Gets a Thank You from NASA – [NYTimes.com]

It’s not every day that the head of a federal agency in a Republican administration during an election year writes a glowing thank-you note to the Democratic candidate for president. But Michael D. Griffin, the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote a letter to Senator Barack Obama on Oct. 2 stating that that he was “deeply grateful to you, personally” for his work in getting Congress to approve a critically important measure for the space program.

Maybe I just don’t understand the Sky Trust proposed by Peter Barnes, but it sounds like a recipe for disaster. Here is the gist of the idea:

Under the Sky Trust plan, all companies that bring burnable carbon into the economy would be required to buy permits for the carbon content of their fuels. Each year the number of permits would be reduced.

Revenue generated from the sale of permits would be placed in a trust, managed by independent trustees. Earnings from the trust would be returned to U.S. residents as dividends and used for public investments that accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.

I’m not sure giving Americans financial gain for pollution is the solution; I understand that taxing pollution is already being floated as an idea, but giving the average citizen a bigger check when pollution levels rise can’t possibly make him appreciate the seriousness of the situation.

Of course, the idea of Sky Trust is a bit more nuanced, especially with the caps on total permits given to polluters which are reduced every year. The issue, however, is that if people get used to getting a $500 check every New Year’s day and all of a sudden that starts drying up, won’t the people be demanding a little more pollution?

I may be underestimating the general populace and I may be misunderstanding Sky Trust- let me know, I’d love to see it work.

For the second year in a row, the ice stalagmite of immense importance to Hindus- the Shivalinga of Amarnath- has melted completely at the beginning of the pilgrimage season.

Scientists say the melting is due to increased temperatures due to climate change and to the heat generated by increasing numbers of pilgrims flocking to the site, located at an altitude of 3,800 metres.

Last year, elements in the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board had replaced it with a crude fake but did not get away with it. Sepia Mutiny has great before and after photographs from last year. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading a lot lately about food- eating seasonal, local, healthy and so forth. These goals are inter-linked. I checked if the place where we get our vegetables bought from local farms, turns out they do when they can (in the summer). A little more Googling lead me to Sustainable Table which is a phenomenal site about all the goals I listed above. Here’s a list of what’s in season in which month in for many states in the United States.

The solar system has lost a planet today, as the International Astronomical Union decided to demote pluto to Dwarf planet status. So now “My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine” just doesn’t make any sense.

Although astronomers applauded after the vote, Jocelyn Bell Burnell—a specialist in neutron stars from Northern Ireland who oversaw the proceedings—urged those who might be “quite disappointed” to look on the bright side.

“It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called ‘planet’ under which the dwarf planets exist,” she said, drawing laughter by waving a stuffed Pluto of Walt Disney fame beneath a real umbrella.

Well, at least they have a sense of humor about it.

Scientific American has an interesting article by Michael Shermer on how he has been flipped from being a skeptic- that is, not entirely trusting the environmentalist’s take on global warming- to becoming a believer based on overwhelming and undisputable facts.

Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. My attention was piqued on February 8 when 86 leading evangelical Christians—the last cohort I expected to get on the environmental bandwagon—issued the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for “national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions” in carbon emissions.

Then I attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Monterey, Calif., where former vice president Al Gore delivered the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard, based on the recent documentary film about his work in this area, An Inconvenient Truth. The striking before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world shocked me out of my doubting stance.

I saw An Inconvenient Truth last weekend and it is a fantastic film. It is a powerful film and has the urgency that this tragedy demands.

If you do doubt that global warming is real, then let me put it to you this way: even if it was not true, would you rather not be prepared for the chance that it is? Are you so convinced that it is not true, that you would bet the future of the planet on it?

On a related note, TreeHugger has a great piece on the four stages of global warming denial- from theory not fact to what about the bottom-line. Well put together.

This is one of the great videos in the history of Internet viral videos- the fountains of Bellagio recreated using Diet Coke and Mentos mints (required Quicktime).

This is fascinating

A mountain near the Montana-Wyoming border once moved 62 miles in a half-hour in a catastrophic scenario that could be repeated elsewhere, scientists say. Rock at the summit of Heart Mountain is 250 million years older than at its base. That suggests the top and the bottom have not always been together. The presumed migration to its present home has puzzled scientists for years. They have known the mountain moved, but no one has explained how it happened or how long it took.

Some cool things to check out regarding the total solar eclipse on the 29th of March.

• Some interesting information from Scientific American:

  Such a total eclipse is relatively rare—the next one for observers in the U.S. will not happen until August 21, 2017—because the moon must cross our planet’s orbital plane exactly when it, Earth and the sun are aligned, and its nighttime side faces us.

• And then a lot of stuff from NASA- pictures, information, videos, audio.
• And finally, some spectacular photographs of this (and past) solar eclipse at Flickr.

Some links via Accidental Blogger.