| Steven Chu to greenhouse gases: We will bury you The U.S. Secretary of Energy-- channeling former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev perhaps?--has one thing to say in this week's Science to the greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired power plants: We will bury you. Nobel laureate Steven Chu's department has funneled $3.4 billion in stimulus dollars to research and develop the technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). [More] rss.sciam.com |
Setting Boundaries: 10 Guidelines to Save Earth Editor's note: The original online version of this story was posted on September 23, 2009. The scale of humanity’s impact on the globe is becoming ever more apparent: we have wiped out species at a rate to rival great extinction events of all geologic time as well as contributing to a rapidly acidifying ocean, dwindling ice caps and even sinking river deltas. Now an international group of 29 scientists has taken a preliminary stab at setting some concrete environmental thresholds for the planet. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Fish Fry: How Will a Warming World Impact U.S. Trout Populations? Dear EarthTalk: A fisherman friend of mine told me that trout populations in the interior West of the U.S. are already shrinking due to global warming. Is this true? And what is the long term prognosis for the trout? --Jon Klein, Portsmouth, N.H. [More] rss.sciam.com |
OBSERVATORY; From Shells, an Insight Into Neanderthal Minds Joao Zilhao of University of Bristol leads study on shells discovered in two caves in southeastern Spain; research, which is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that Neanderthals were using shells in decorative and symbolic way at least 10,000 years before modern humans migrated to Europe; shells appear to have been strung and painted; photos query.nytimes.com |
Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues In trying to understand the Judith Curry phenomenon, it is tempting to default to one of two comfortable and familiar story lines.For most of her career, Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics. But over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black­board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points--and by lumping the good with the bad, climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” Curry says. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.” [More] rss.sciam.com |