It is impossible today to get a ‘treaty’ ratified that would cause America to obey CO2 limits set by any outside body, for a number of reasons.  So Democrats in Congress have been trying to make CO2 the purview of the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), which gives it sweeping authority to regulate and penalize businesses.

Republicans, more skeptical than not on a CO2 basis for global warming, want that authority removed completely and have been trying to get the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011 passed, which keeps the EPA from being able to unilaterally regulate American industry.     So Democrats held a hearing to try and slow it down.

read more

As you may or may not know, I am a member of the Council of Canadians.
http://www.canadians.org/index.html

The council is a privately funded “social watchdog” (if I may be blunt.)  At the above site you will find all you could want to know about the council.

On march 8th I received an email from the council, it is summed up by the following quotation.
I felt it worthy of sharing.

read more

You’ve seen it everywhere by now - Earth’s sixth mass extinction: Is it almost here? and other articles discussing an article in Nature (471, 51–57 doi:10.1038/nature09678) claiming the end of the world is nigh.  

Hey, I like to live in important times.  So do most people.  And something so important it has only happened 5 times in 540 million years, well that is really special.    But is it real? 

read more

Some people accept that the world’s climate systems are changing, but try to argue that humans are too puny to be any part of the cause.

The reason for putting forward such an argument in the face of a wealth of historical and scientific data seems to be a matter of political agenda: if humans are too puny to cause climate change then they must surely be too puny to put matters right.  It follows that ‘right thinking people’ should oppose any attempt to ‘do something’ about climate change – especially at the taxpayers expense.

read more

Arctic Ice March 2011

In April 2010 a late upward blip in Arctic sea ice extent led some bloggers to write about ‘recovery’.  The blip was anomalous, hence there is no reason to expect a repetition this year.  On the contrary, it is likely that ice extent will not increase by any significant amount before the 2011 melt season gets fully under way – if it is not under way already.

read more

Arctic Ice 2011 – Sail, Steam and Satellites

The NSIDC will shortly be publishing its report for March 2011.  I expect the report to conclude that Arctic sea ice extent for February 2011 was the ‘lowest in the satellite record’.  That would mean the ‘lowest ever recorded in human history’, since we have abundant data on historic ice extent.

There is a false argument doing the rounds of the blogs: words to the effect that we have no accurate knowledge of ice extent before the age of satellites.  This is, of course, nonsense on stilts in clown boots with a squirting flower – the latter being filled with complete and utter bilge with an admixture of absolute hogwash.

read more

Although I am not the biggest proponent of cars, I have to admit that the facts don’t match their poor environmental image. Combustion of all transportation fuels accounts for only 14% to 26% of greenhouse gases. This includes contributions from trains, planes, buses, automobiles and other vehicles. Cement companies convert calcium carbonate to calcium oxide, releasing carbon dioxide in the process, but they escape public scrutiny.

read more

It’s not often you can boil down complicated abstract ideas of science or culture into simple concepts everyone can understand.  Gems like “for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction” don’t come along every day.   But every time someone asks me what science is like I simply say “You’ve seen The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.  It’s like that” and they nod knowingly.

What?  You haven’t seen it?   Read on my friends.   In a few key phrases you will know everything you need to know.  Science wisdom, as distilled by quotes from one of the greatest science films of all time (and it’s fun for Halloween too) – The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It’s also PG and totally safe for older children, unless your kid is prone to irrational fear of Skeletorama-motion plastic props and utters sentences like …

(more…)

If you were a young-ish science student in the mid-1980s there are two movies that remain in your collection to this day; Back To The Future and, of course, Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension.

‘Buckaroo Banzai’ was completely inplausible – even I can’t be a rock star, neurosurgeon and world class physicist. Well, maybe I can, but you can’t and even I don’t have my own video game and comic book like he does.

So for actual science discussions, Back To The Future remains the default movie of the period. Like Yahoo Serious in “Young Einstein”, Marty ends up doing some science (in Marty’s case by accident) but also invents rock and roll. Rock and roll shows up a lot in science movies. This is because music is math and math was created to give scientists something to do while sleeping. (more…)

It’s political primary season and you know what that means, right? Right, it’s time to rent movies and think about something else.

But you wouldn’t be here if you could watch just any movies, you’d be a Huffington Post reader or Glenn Beck listener or whatever it is those people do that gets so much more attention than actual quality writing, like this site. You have more sense than that so you like movies with scientists; and especially scientists who could be hottie supermodels, mostly because they don’t know anything about science.

In compiling a list like this, I am torn and maybe you will be also. Great science movies and attractive women don’t always go together. Number of hot women in Pi for example? Well, okay, Lauren Fox, but she wasn’t a scientist.

You get my point. We have to make a choice in a lot of cases; great women or great science. Sometimes we get both but that’s rare. Actually, female scientists, great or not, in movies apparently aren’t all that common. Eva Flicker of the University of Vienna wrote in Between Brains and Breasts—Women Scientists in Fiction Film: On the Marginalization and Sexualization of Scientific Competence that only 18% of movies containing scientists had the female kind. That means there must have been almost no female scientists in the early days of film because it is easy to find modern films with female scientists – a lot more than the 25% of the science work force in the real world. Scientists are in and female scientists even more so. If you’re going to have a female scientist you might as well make her a hot one.

(more…)