Published by Brunsell on 26 Sep 2009
Unscientific America
This is a really well researched and written book. It is also incredibly depressing. Here is an interview with the author.
Archive for September, 2009
Published by Brunsell on 26 Sep 2009
Web Highlights (weekly)
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Kirk Cameron monkeys with Darwin | Salon Life
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On that rich-with-gravitas promotional clip, Cameron begins by declaring, “Our kids can no longer pray in public,” a provocative and completely inaccurate assertion, as anyone familiar with the term “public” knows. He then narrows in for the killer point: “A recent study revealed that in the top 50 universities in our country, in the fields of psychology and biology, 61 percent of the professors described themselves as atheist or agnostic.” True, though he fails to point out that the same study found only 23.4 percent of college professors overall declare themselves atheist or agnostic. College: still pretty damn godly!
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Of course, plenty of people, from Darwin himself to Pope Benedict, have been able to reconcile religious beliefs with a respect for the profound elegance of science.
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“Hitler’s undeniable connection with [evolution]” and “the absence of any species-to-species transitional forms actually found in the fossil record.” (Apparently Cameron is not on the American Geological Institute’s mailing list.)
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what 19-year-old wouldn’t clamor for a 19th-century tract amended by someone whose argument for the evidence of God is the existence of the banana?
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But what’s not funny is what happens when “the opposing — and correct — view” gets into the hands of “our future doctors and lawyers and politicians.” That’s when they realize they’re holding a sneaky defilement of one of the most important books ever written. Nowhere on the front of the “beautiful, full color cover edition” are the words “extremist Christian version.” Because maybe if those targeted 50,000 students knew they were getting their free book from a ministry that advises its practitioners on how to “shut up” a Jew or explain to a homosexual that he’s damned, they might not be so keen on it. They might feel duped and angry at accepting something from a group that proclaims free speech but doesn’t have the courage to put its true intentions right there on the cover.
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Texas Textbook Hearings | TPMMuckraker
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history textbook hearing by the State Board of Education down in Austin, Texas.
Those are the standards on which — it can’t be repeated enough — publishers base their nationwide textbooks, and the ones that currently contain a clause requiring knowledge of Newt Gingrich.
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conservatism is not just a movement, it’s an industry. In the intersection of science and US policy, there is no better funded industry than climate change denial. It is bankrolled by the most profitable multinational corporations in world history. And to hear the far right talk about it at the recent Values Voters Summit, Jesus must be a major shareholder.
GLOBAL WARMING HYSTERIA: THE NEW FACE OF THE “PRO-DEATH” AGENDA
Dr. Calvin Beisner, National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
• Why did the President’s science advisor support coerced abortions to protect the planet?
• Why are top abortion funders underwriting efforts to co-opt evangelicals on global warming?
• If “people are the problem,” what’s the final solution?
Cap and trade is about more than saving the planet. It’s the biggest tax hike in American history. It threatens to concentrate massive amounts of power into the hands of central government and international bureaucrats. And its ascendancy marks the rise of a new, more subtle challenge to the culture of life.
Ultimately, climate change hysteria rests on an unbiblical view of God, mankind, and the environment. Come and hear how the Cornwall Alliance is pushing back–producing ground-breaking studies on Biblical environmentalism, educating pastors and churches across the country, and activating thousands of Christians to rally against the hype through the WeGetIt.org Campaign. Learn why policies to fight alleged man-made global warming will instead cause hundreds of millions of premature deaths throughout this century, and how human liberty, responsibility, and flourishing are the key to a healthier environment.
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The Values Voters organizers are either unaware, or simply don’t care, that many conservatives, including George Bush, have now stated they accept that climate change is occurring and that some of it might be due to human activity. It’s textbook right-wing denial, married with a heaping helping of hypocrisy to frame climate change as part of a ‘pro-death agenda’ that will cause ‘hundreds of millions of premature deaths’ while implying that it’s the climate scientists who are blinded with hysteria.
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The Climate’s Warm Future Is Now in the Arctic: Scientific American
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When the summer sea ice goes, the Arctic will lose the ivory gull, Pacific walrus, ringed seal, hooded seal, narwhal and polar bear—all animals that rely on the ice for foraging, reproduction or as refuge from predators. And the sea ice is going, faster and faster: In the past 30 years, minimum sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean has declined by 45,000 square kilometers annually*—an area twice the size of New Jersey is lost each year.
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Rapid change is coming even for animals once thought to be relatively immune, such as caribou. Whereas the nonmigratory population of the animals on the Norwegian Svalbard Islands is burgeoning thanks to more winter snowmelt exposing a greater abundance of plant life for foraging, caribou in other parts of the Arctic are suffering. In spring, plants are blooming earlier in the year thanks to warmer early spring temperatures, but caribou are still calving at the same time, meaning calves are born after most of the food is available, and therefore fewer of them survive.
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SkyandTelescope.com - News from Sky & Telescope - Stellar Mystery Solved, Einstein Safe
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For more than 30 years, Villanova University astronomer Ed Guinan has been plagued, puzzled, and perplexed by DI Herculis. On the surface, this binary star seems pretty much like any other binary star, with two stars going ’round and ’round each other in a predictable, orderly fashion. But there remained a nagging problem that as much as Guinan wanted, he couldn’t just sweep under the rug: DI Her was not behaving in accordance with Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
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Researchers discover first rocky planet outside our solar system
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“This is science at its thrilling and amazing best,” says Didier Queloz, leader of the team that made the observations.
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Because the calculated density is so similar to Earth’s, the researchers believe that the planet’s composition is comparably rocky.
Conditions on CoRoT-7b are much more extreme, though. Because it’s so close to its host star, researchers believe temperatures there could not support life.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Published by Brunsell on 19 Sep 2009
Web Highlights (weekly)
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The Newspaper Clipping Image Generator - Create your own fun newspaper - fodey.com
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The Newspaper Clipping Generator
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The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest for any August on record, and the warmest on record averaged for any June-August (Northern Hemisphere summer/Southern
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New Media, New School Year . . . and a New Resource | Edutopia
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We want to help you make the most of the latest technologies and innovative ways to use them as we settle into the 2009-10 school year, so we’ve put together a brand new free resource (PDF) for you: Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media.
Full of succinct and practical ways to prepare our students for 21st century success, this guide will help you deliver the relevant and meaningful education that all students deserve.
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Dr. Gardner warns that a failure to encourage a sense of altruism amongst Americans could signal the end of the US as a moral leader for the world.
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Living in Dialogue: An Urban Teacher Tells us Why She Must Leave
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There need to be fewer bodies in the classroom at one time. Math and English classes have reduced class sizes (at the most 20) because our country and state have deemed them more important subjects than history or science.
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“I admit I’m being heretical,” said Richard M. Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the university. “But it’s not that we’re producing too few math and science teachers. It’s that we’re losing too many.”
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Mr. Ingersoll and his research partner, David Perda, calculate that colleges and universities are producing 2½ times more math and science teachers than schools require to replace those who are retiring.
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Yikes. The solutions sound familiar. Improving working conditions, mentoring and supporting new teachers, offering better pay, managing student discipline.
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Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’ - Telegraph
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Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’
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Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian
perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as “a
racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”.
His “half-baked theory” directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led
to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”,
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That’s what we’re up against. In 2009. It’s amazing,” he said.
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“Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make
the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn’t saying ‘kill all
religion’, he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people.” -
Early reviews have raved about the film. The Hollywood Reporter said: “It
would be a great shame if those with religious convictions spurned the film
out of hand as they will find it even-handed and wise.”
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Published by Brunsell on 14 Sep 2009
Evidence-Based Explanations.
Here is a lecture on the importance of helping students build evidence-based explanations in science.
Here are the presentation slides:
Science Inquiry
View more presentations from brunsell.
Here is the Science Inquiry Map:
Science Inquiry Map -
Here is a link to a Cane Toad case study that you can use with your students.
Published by Brunsell on 12 Sep 2009
Web Highlights (weekly)
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Major Blunder in Science Reporting will Fuel Creationist Claims : Greg Laden’s Blog
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Life Science Teachers: Take special note!
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It turns out that a study of these different depositional environments, in the paper by Swart, indicates that the two data sources behave differently and the non-ocean bottom deposits cannot be used as they previously were. As a result of this, our understanding of the history of the Earth’s carbon cycle has gone all topsy-turvy and now needs to be re-examined.
Science marches on. This assertion by Swart will be tested, challenged, and if he is wrong, tossed out or modified. At the same time, people will be working on reassessing the pre 150 mya record. There is a lot of work to do an if it is really true that the pre 150 mya record is borked, this means that we will soon be exposed to a new and different (presumably) understanding of early life on earth! Cool!
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Obviously, this writer gets it totally wrong. But more importantly, if you look at this text, it is clear that this is the writing of someone steeped in the creationist literature. This tells me that we are seeing the beginning of a disinformation campaign regarding this research. There are several clues in here that link this paragraph to the Creationist Conspiracy. For example, the mention of NSF funding in the first paragraph, followed by the phrase “carbon dating can ony be trusted up to 150 mya” is a clue.
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Again, most of the early evidence for the origin of life is based on fossil material dated in a way that has nothing to do with this. The overall pattern of life and the carbon cycle prior to 150 million years ago may be reassessed in relation to this research, but not the existence of life during this period.
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YouTube - Experiments & Bias in science
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Science is often seen as only an experimental endeavor, yet both observational and experimental science provide insight. Also, most think scientists strive to be unbiased, but this is simply not p..
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Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The galaxies are observed in the optical (shown in orange and white). Most of the normal mass in the clusters (pink) is associated with gas heated in their collision. Dark matter is not visible, but is inferred (blue) from gravitational lensing effects
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Where Did All the Flowers Come From? - NYTimes.com
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Darwin could see for himself how successful flowering plants had become. They make up the majority of living plant species, and they dominate many of the world’s ecosystems, from rain forests to grasslands. They also dominate our farms. Out of flowers come most of the calories humans consume, in the form of foods like corn, rice and wheat. Flowers are also impressive in their sheer diversity of forms and colors, from lush, full-bodied roses to spiderlike orchids to calla lilies shaped like urns.
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It is now clear, for example, that the closest living relatives to flowers are flowerless species that produce seeds, a group that includes pine trees and gingkos. Unfortunately, the plants are all closely related to one another, and none is more closely related to flowers than any of the others.
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In the past few years scientists have pushed back the fossil record of flowers to about 136 million years ago.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Published by Brunsell on 09 Sep 2009
The importance of STEM education.
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education has gotten a lot of attention in the press over the past few years. Quite simply, having a well educated and innovative STEM workforce is critical to the economic security and prosperity of the United States. More importantly, a solid STEM education provides all of our children with a strong foundation to “keep the door open” on many opportunities throughout their lives.
I was recently speaking with a CEO of a company that prioritizes hiring of scientists, mathematicians and economists because they are good problem solvers. They are creative, yet able to analyze data and trends. He told me that hiring those types of people is a very competitive process - he may only have a few candidates that are also being recruited by other companies. On the other hand, he adds, when we hire someone with a business background, we might have 50-100 (or more) applicants for a single position.
Payscale, Inc. released a report that ranked undergraduate college degrees by median starting salary and mid-career salary (w/o graduate degree). Seven of the top 10 majors were in engineering. The other three (economics, physics and computer science) all require a significant “STEM” background. In fact, every career in the top 20 (marketing comes in at 21) requires substantial science, technology, engineering and/or mathematics coursework.
Methodology Annual pay for Bachelors graduates without higher degrees. Typical starting graduates have 2 years of experience; mid-career have 15 years. See full methodology for more. |
40% of the top 20 majors are engineering majors (50% if you include computer science and construction management/engineering). I am in the process of sifting through survey data that I collected from about 380 ninth grade students regarding their perceptions of engineering as a profession. The one finding that quickly jumped out was that the average 9th grade student could identify just over one type of engineer. How are our students supposed to be prepared for STEM fields if they don’t even know that they exist!
Oh yeah, and why is it abnormal for high schools to actually have engineering courses (except Massachusetts -standards)? Engineering isn’t an “emerging” profession - it has been around long enough for schools (and policymakers) to have noticed.
If you are interested in putting more engineering into your teaching, check out:
Published by Brunsell on 08 Sep 2009
Web Highlights 09/09/2009
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Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The galaxies are observed in the optical (shown in orange and white). Most of the normal mass in the clusters (pink) is associated with gas heated in their collision. Dark matter is not visible, but is inferred (blue) from gravitational lensing effects
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Where Did All the Flowers Come From? - NYTimes.com
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Darwin could see for himself how successful flowering plants had become. They make up the majority of living plant species, and they dominate many of the world’s ecosystems, from rain forests to grasslands. They also dominate our farms. Out of flowers come most of the calories humans consume, in the form of foods like corn, rice and wheat. Flowers are also impressive in their sheer diversity of forms and colors, from lush, full-bodied roses to spiderlike orchids to calla lilies shaped like urns.
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It is now clear, for example, that the closest living relatives to flowers are flowerless species that produce seeds, a group that includes pine trees and gingkos. Unfortunately, the plants are all closely related to one another, and none is more closely related to flowers than any of the others.
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In the past few years scientists have pushed back the fossil record of flowers to about 136 million years ago.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Published by Brunsell on 05 Sep 2009
Web Highlights 09/06/2009
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In a recent interview, the author asserted that the scientific elan that has been the cornerstone of America’s preeminence in the world is today being seriously eroded. In addition to the general perception that “science” is “hard” and “boring” Ms. Angier touched on the fact that in some circles, an interest in science is being actively sabotaged. Spurred on by a religious agenda, a perception is being fostered that science is a danger to be avoided and if necessary opposed.
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Many people begin with a theory, alright a belief, about how the world really works and they then reject any evidence that doesn’t support that belief.
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The solution proffered by Natalie Angier is to rekindle a grass roots interest in all things scientific. In her book she lays out the basics of science and many of the current theories and uses them to explain astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology and physics with all the skill of the creative writer. It’s packed with alarming facts which really do deserve our attention. It is also full of passion, an emotion often sadly lacking in the field. Her primary goal is to instill a love and understanding of what science is all about and debunk some myths in the process.
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Why Science & You - an introduction
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He may have become a successful farmer but I supect that the life of early man, to quote Thomas Hobbes, was “nasty, brutish and short”. Before things could improve, he had to invent Science. It didn’t really happen that way of course because he didn’t actually “invent” science, he stumbled onto it. It was the sky above his head that first got him to ponder the kind of questions that still lead us to discoveries today.
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Climate change is perhaps the most extreme example of what the American ecologist Garrett Hardin called a tragedy of the commons. Hardin considered the example of herders raising cattle on a shared field. It was in each herder’s narrow interest to keep adding more cows, since each enjoyed all the benefits of an extra cow, while the effects of the extra cow on the pasture were shared by all. And so the herders moved ineluctably towards disaster.
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The 10:10 campaign, which is launched today in partnership with the Guardian, is designed both to answer the call for immediate action, and to offer individuals and organisations a meaningful way of taking it. It is the brainchild of Franny Armstrong, the irrepressible film-maker behind The Age of Stupid, a powerful docudrama about our failure to tackle climate change. The idea is compellingly simple: by signing up, individuals and organisations from multinational companies to schools and hospitals commit to doing their best to cut their emissions by 10% by the end of 2010, precisely the sort of deep, quick cut the scientists say is needed.
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John Vidal on the effects of climate change in east Africa | Environment | The Guardian
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They are not alone. Droughts have affected millions in a vast area stretching across Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Chad, and into Burkina Faso and Mali, and tens of thousands of nomadic herders have had to give up their animals. “[This recent drought] was the worst thing that had ever happened to us,” said Alima, 24. “The whole land is drying up. We had nothing, not even drinking water. All our cattle died and we became hopeless. It had never happened before. So we have decided to live in one place, to change our lives and to educate our children.”
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“The scarcity of water is becoming a nightmare. Rivers are drying up, and the way temperatures are changing we are likely to get into more problems,” said Professor Richard Odingo, the Kenyan vice-chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“We passed emergency levels months ago,” said Yves Horent, a European commission humanitarian officer in Nairobi. “Some families have had no crops in nearly seven years. People are trying to adapt but the nomads know they are in trouble.”
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“In the past we used to have regular 10-year climatic cycles which were always followed by a major drought. In the 1970s we started having droughts every seven years; in the 1980s they came about every five years and in the 1990s we were getting droughts and dry spells almost every two or three years. Since 2000 we have had three major droughts and several dry spells. Now they are coming almost every year, right across the country,” said Mpoke.
He reeled off the signs of climate change he and others have observed, all of which are confirmed by the Kenyan meteorological office and local governments. “The frequency of heatwaves is increasing. Temperatures are generally more extreme, water is evaporating faster, and the wells are drying. Larger areas are being affected by droughts, and flooding is now more serious.
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Mpoke said he did not understand how people in rich countries failed to understand the scale or urgency of the problem emerging in places such as Kenya. “Climate change is here. It’s a reality. It’s not in the imagination or a vision of the future. [And] climate change adds to the existing problems. It makes everything more complex. It’s here now and we have to change.”
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Antibodies found that prevent HIV from causing severe AIDS — latimes.com
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After nearly two decades of futile searching for a vaccine against the AIDS virus, researchers are reporting the tantalizing discovery of antibodies that can prevent the virus from multiplying in the body and producing severe disease.
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To find the neutralizing antibodies, researchers collected blood samples from more than 1,800 people in Thailand, Australia and Africa who had been infected with HIV for at least three years without the infection proceeding to severe disease. Such individuals are most likely to produce antibodies that interfere with the replication of the virus.
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Researchers still have a long way to go to produce a vaccine, however.
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Attack on global warming, health care, common sense: the hypocrisy of Fox News
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Something insidious and ugly is happening in America and it is being fueled by a network that has
become the platform for more misinformation on health care, global warming, and political issues, than all the other networks put together—Fox News. -
In May, 2009, Laura Ingraham hosted a segment of Bill O’Reilly’s show. Ingraham used a cropped interview from Gore’s April 24th congressional testimony, to accuse him of making money from his climate and energy activities. However, the fact that Al Gore donates all the money he makes from his environmental foundations to non-profit interests was conveniently cut out of the video.
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To express pride in the mass distribution of ignorance and undermining societal response to global warming, is a badge of honor that conservative talking heads, like Limbaugh, wear proudly.
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The real tragedy in all of this war on science and common sense by Fox’s liberal-hating political posse is that people, who are normally rational in all other regards, are so hungry to denigrate the opposition that they succumb to the conservative-hyping ideology…without the common sense to check other sources or challenging a single word.
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Study Links Humans to Reversal of 2,000-Year Arctic Cooling Trend - washingtonpost.com
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Human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have helped reverse a 2,000-year trend of cooling in the Arctic, prompting warmer average temperatures in the past decade that now rank higher than at any time since 1 B.C.,
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It’s basically saying the greenhouse gas emissions are overwhelming the system,” said David Schneider, a visiting scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the Science article’s co-authors.
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Until now, the most comprehensive paleo-climate analysis of the Arctic covered just the past 400 years. The new analysis reaches back further in time by incorporating data from six new lake sediment cores. Unlike glaciers or tree ring samples, Arctic lakes are more widely distributed throughout the region, so they can provide a more comprehensive look at the area’s past. Researchers were able to analyze everything from annual glacier melt to how much algae grew in an ice-free season, Kaufman said.
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Fred Singer, a prominent climate-change skeptic who heads the Science and Environmental Policy Project, questioned the Science study, saying it does not properly reflect other researchers’ findings about the Medieval Warm Period. That period, between A.D. 800 and 1300, had “higher temperatures than even the past 30 years,” he said.
But documentation of the Medieval Warm Period is primarily about Europe, and natural records indicate average Arctic temperatures during that time were not as high. There was a brief period in the early 5th century in which temperatures in the Artic came close to being as high as those in the most recent summers.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Published by Brunsell on 04 Sep 2009
Web Highlights 09/05/2009
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Education Week: Top-Notch Teachers Found to Affect Peers
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For their study, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Bruegmann focused on mathematics and reading test-score data for students in 3rd through 5th grades, most of whom would have had the same teacher for all of their core academic subjects. They measured teacher quality in two ways: by tracking “observable” characteristics, such as whether teachers were experienced or certified, and by calculating how effective teachers were at raising the test scores of their students. The latter, a “value-added” calculation, was figured using data from teachers’ previous students.
‘Big Enough’ Effects
Either way, the researchers found, student achievement rises across a grade when a high-quality teacher comes on board. The effects were twice as strong, though, for the value-added calculations. They show that, for the average educator teaching in a grade with three other teachers, replacing one peer with a more effective one has a spillover effect of .86 percent of a standard deviation on students’ test scores.
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“It’s not that new teachers are showing up before and no one is helping them do anything,” he said. But another problem, he added, may also be that highly structured mentoring programs—ones that might, for example, require mentors to spend a specified amount of time with all new teachers—might be taking away valuable time that more-skilled beginners might be able to use doing more productive activities, such as planning lessons.
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READING AND WRITING IN THE 21ST CENTURY
When Reading Becomes Work
How Textbooks Ruin Reading
Thomas Newkirk
Winter 2008Newkirk Image
Illustration: Jordin Isip
The euphoria surrounding last summer’s release of the final Harry Potter book — the long lines, the slumber parties in bookstores — obscures a disturbing trend in reading habits. Independent reading actually declines precipitously in the middle school and high school years — and book reading among boys simply drops off a cliff.Let’s do the numbers. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation survey, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8–18 Year Olds, 40 percent of 8–10 year-olds did some self-chosen book reading on the previous day; this figure dropped to 27 percent for 11-14 year-olds, and 26 percent for 15–18 year-olds. The average time spent reading during a day dropped from 27 minutes per day in late elementary school to 21 minutes in middle school. The same trend was found in the Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Report: 44 percent of 5–8 year-olds classified themselves as high-frequency readers, while only 16 percent of high school students made that classification. Moreover, the independent reading that middle and high school students do tends more toward magazines and newspapers than towards books (particularly for boys). My own college freshmen are often hard-pressed to name one book they read on their own and enjoyed.
[Textbooks] are great vehicles for generating corporate profits, but poor ones for creating readers. They fail young readers on four dimensions of reading — authorship, form, venue, and duration.
This trend has obvious consequences for reading development. The more a student reads, the more likely he or she will be a proficient reader (for a thorough review on this question, see Cullinan, 2000). It is plausible — indeed, common sense — to believe that students who read extensively will develop the fluency, word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension skills, and confidence needed for proficient reading in high school and-
ndependent reading actually declines precipitously in the middle school and high school years — and book reading among boys simply drops off a cliff.
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My own college freshmen are often hard-pressed to name one book they read on their own and enjoyed.
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The Great Beyond: Geoengineering report baffles reporters
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Now I want to be fair, the Royal Society report is actually very well written and it contains a lot of good information about the geoengineering proposals out there. But it’s a nuanced take on a complex issue. So it’s not surprising that you saw a range of headlines.
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Jonah Goldberg’s classic know-nothing, non-denial climate denial « The Way Things Break
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Jonah Goldberg has a new op-ed in the LA Times on climate science, and it’s about as confused and asinine as you might expect. First Jonah wants to astound us with his grasp of paleoclimate science:
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“What does the Maunder minimum have to do with anthropogenic warming?” you might ask, given that a mere 7 years of 2003-level CO2 emissions alone would make up for the lost radiative forcing. Jonah seems to believe that Revelations of Great Importance about sunspots may throw a monkey wrench in the whole anthropogenic warming scam:
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The Clark et al. paper The Last Glacial Maximum helps pin down the timing of various forcings during the deglaciation ending the LGM (i.e. the lag vs. lead issue), identifying insolation as the initial driver. However, the paper confirms the significant amplifying effect of GHGs without which the magnitude of warming would not have been possible, and supports other evidence which shows that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will not decay linearly but rather abruptly- not exactly a paper I’d want to cite in challenging the consensus on the need to mitigate.
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What’s priceless about this little argument from ignorance is that the sun is most certainly not, in Jonah’s words, “the only thing that prevents the planet from being a lifeless ball of ice.” There’s a little something called the bloody greenhouse effect that warms the Earth by an additional ~33°C, keeping it from being a “lifeless ball of ice” whereas the sole influence of the sun does not.
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Jonah probably has, like Roger Pielke Jr., confused the IPCC projection of the forced component of climate over time with specific temperature predictions. However, the ensemble averaged projection isn’t even monotonic itself, and the individual modeling runs certainly are not:
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This is not, and will never be, about science for them. It’s about running out the clock on a perceived threat to economic interests.
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India Envisions Robotic Mars Voyage : ScienceInsider
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The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced this week that it has the technical capability to undertake a crewless mission to Mars and has begun asking scientists to suggest experiments.
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Holdren Gets Warm Embrace From Letterman on Climate Policies : ScienceInsider
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After Letterman asked whether global warming means his son may never see snow, Holdren shot back, “It depends on his latitude.” But when Letterman called coal the “culprit” and said he doubted there was such a thing as “clean coal,” Holdren chose his words carefully. “There is no such thing as clean coal,” he began, “but there is cleaner coal.” Asked whether he could leaven the continuing stream of bad news about the worsening impact of global warming on the planet, Holdren mentioned the U.S. economy’s increasingly efficient use of energy and talked about opportunities for people “to make a lot of money” on new energy technologies.
- Do it to get rich, not because it is good for the planet. Isn’t it said that this is what has to be said in order for people to buy in to it? - post by brunsell
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Warmest Arctic temperatures for 2,000 years, says new study - CNN.com
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The study presents new evidence that the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions overpowering natural climate patterns.
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Even though the orbital cycle that produced the cooling continued, it was overwhelmed in the 20th century by human-induced warming. The result was summer temperatures in the Arctic by the year 2000 that were about 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than would have been expected from the continued cyclical cooling alone.
“If it hadn’t been for the increase in human-produced greenhouse gases, summer temperatures in the Arctic should have cooled gradually over the last century,” said Bette Otto-Bliesner, an NCAR scientist who participated in the study.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Published by Brunsell on 04 Sep 2009
Science Inquiry: Evidence, Explanations, and Cane Toads
Science makes the assumption that the natural world can be understood by using evidence from the natural world. Scientists create explanations for natural phenomena by interpreting evidence. The stronger the supporting evidence, the better the explanation!
According to the U.S. National Research Council, the following five features are at the core of teaching through science inquiry:
- Learners are engaged by scientifically oriented questions.
- Learners give priority to evidence, which allows them to develop and evaluate explanations that address scientifically oriented questions.
- Learners formulate explanations from evidence to address scientifically oriented questions.
- Learners evaluate their explanations in light of alternative explanations, particularly those reflecting scientific understanding.
- Learners communicate and justify their proposed explanations.
At the core of this, is the creation of evidence-based explanations. These explanations should go beyond a simple conclusion that reports data. Students need to be given frequent opportunities to create evidence-based explanations and evaluate explanations to determine if they are supported by evidence.
The following mini case study is an example of how you can focus students on creating evidence-based explanations. The case study is Inspired by the Student Self-Test for Chapter 1 of Oxford Big Ideas Science (ISBN 978 0 19 556715 1, Oxford University Press Australia).
Explanations, Evidence, and Cane Toads
An average cane toad can grow to the size of a softball. Adults have poison glands located behind their eyes and tadpoles are highly poisonous to most animals. Females will lay thousands of eggs. Cane toads have a huge appetite and, unlike most toads, will eat both living and dead matter. Cane toads can recognize their food by smell, but most often identifies prey through motion. Cane toads’ main diets consists of insects, but they also eat small rodents, amphibians, reptiles, small birds, plants, dog food, and household trash.
The cane toad gets its name because it was commonly used to eliminate pests in sugar cane fields. Although it is originally from Central America and northern parts of South America, the toad was used in the 1800’s and early 1900’s throughout the Carribean and Australia as a way to control beetles and other pests ravaging farmers’ fields. Since the skin of adult toads are poisonous to many predators in these areas, they are now considered invasive species.
A Sydney University professor and his student, studying captive cane toads, noticed that they exhibited cannibalistic tendencies. They observed adults wiggling their toes when around young toads. When the young toads hopped towards them, the adults would eat the youth! Based on these observations, the scientists developed a laboratory investigation. Adult and young toads were separated by clear glass so they could not eat each other (ethical investigation). They observed that the young toads only approached adult toads that wiggled the middle toe on their hind feet.
Task: There is a lot of information (data) in these three paragraphs. Scientists go beyond simply reporting observations by creating evidence-based explanations for what they are seeing.
- Summarize the important data from the text.
- Write an explanation that explains they scientists’ observations. Make sure you support your explanation with evidence from your data in #1. Go beyond a simple reporting!