Posts by Tony Judd
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Nice quick summary from The Island of Doubt (on ScienceBlogs.com) of why the author doesn't think that nuclear power is a panacea for climate change:
http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2007/08/what_have_you_got_against_nucl.php -
Ok, weird coincidence of the day:
This morning on the Scientific American editors blog a discussion of the global warming consensus.
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Craig:
I don't know how you feel about the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) as far as being "free of political, academic/institutional or ideological axe-grinding as humanly possible", but it really is the best summary of the data you're likely to find at the moment.
They have available on their website a series of technical reports, a synthesis report, and a summary report for Policymakers.
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Bart:
I know what you are saying - as a working scientist I know that I spend a lot of time working on reports, and I try to make those reports as readable and applicable to the audience as possible. The vast majority of those reports are only ever seen by a client and never see the further light of day however. And often they are pretty specialised and of no interest to the greater public anyway.Many other scientists working in their own fields probably have similar experiences, or if they are working as academics then they publish in academic journals which are usually only ever read by other scientists in the field.
Magazines such as New Scientist or Scientific American etc try to present science to a wider audience, but who reads New Scientist? Probably mostly scientists I would guess.
Science blogs like the ones at ScienceBlogs are a good start at presenting science to the world, but again - who is their readership?
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Che:
If you mean David Hayward at SGES at Auckland Uni, then you ought to talk to his boss Willie Smith.
He can certainly string a sentence or two together himself (legs off a chair and all that). But he's Scottish, so I don't know if his sentences qualify as "coherent" or not.
A very entertaining man though.
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Andrew:
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with doing light research on the internet (god knows I love the Wikipedia), but its no replacement for a solid four years spent researching the entire breadth and depth of a topic to gain a PhD and then devoting your adult life to understanding that topic more fully. Especially in the sciences.
I don't think all opinions on matters of science are created equal and we need to give a little more weight to the opinions of the guys and girls who really really know the minutiae of this stuff than to the punters who google "climate change" and suddenly think they are experts (and I'm not having a shot at you by the way).
Hence I don't really know that controversy is the right word to use in regards to this issue. I think maybe scientists need to do a better job explaining to the general public why they truly do believe that global warming is a) occurring, and b) due to anthropogenic causes.
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Andrew:
This is a common mistake to make. This is the clearest answer I could find on Yahoo answers to clarify this for you:
"The atmosphere is a mixture of different gases, and CO2 is one of the heaviest, but it does not form layers.Up to a height of about 100 km, the atmosphere is called the "homosphere" (Greek homos = same) because it is a fairly uniform mixture - the different gases still occur in almost the same proportions at all heights. The "ozone layer" is from about 15 km to 35 km, but it is a false name because ozone is already a very scarce gas, and the extra proportion of it at these heights is very slight.
Above 100 km, comes the "heterosphere" (Greek heteros = different) where the lighter gases predominate the higher you go.
The greenhouse effect is distributed throughout the homosphere, and depends on its proportion of CO2 and of CH4 (methane)."
Re: carbon dioxide dissolving in seawater: this is of concern also due to the fact that this has the effect of lowering the pH of the ocean, making it (at first) slightly more acidic. The effect of this on the many sea organisms which have calcium carbonate based shells (think shellfish and coral etc) is not known but worrying.The UN report (I assume you mean the 2007 IPCC report on climate change) that you dismiss as "controversial and somewhat biased" was contributed to by 2500 scientists from 130 countries. The controversy is not present among the experts in the scientific community. The people who know what they are talking about. The people who have studied the issue at length, rather than on the internet.
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Yes they wear the butchers apron
No pride in a bloodstained rag 26.01.2007It went up early on the morning of Australia Day. It helped a little with the apprehension I was feeling at the thought of the day to come. But instead the day was much as I expected. Drunk jingoistic munters wrapped in the flag. Every other car flying the fighting kangaroo flag and the token news report about proud immigrants taking the citizenship oath.
I was out in the provinces by then though, so perhaps things were different in the city? -
You had two out of the three surefire Boing Boing flags (Disney: check. Corporate takeover of culture: check. All you needed to work in there was unicorns...). And it worked - you got boing boinged.
Is that the first mention of Public Address on the worlds most read blog?
Hope your server is ready... -
Update from Fitzroy: My tram was pelted with paint cans this morning by a man with crazy eyes. On the way home this afternoon I bumped a gentleman who started singing a song (of his own composition I think) about how he "couldn't take any more of this shit" and then started humming the same tune when he forgot the words. This is just one days worth of crazies. There are a lot of crazy people in Fitzroy.