I suspect that if we settle space, we’ll see a lot of this sort of thing in some of the environments.
Category Archives: General Science
The Deep Biosphere
Biologists have discovered a whole new world below the surface of the planet.
Geminids
It should be a good year for watching the meteor shower, if you can handle the temperatures.
“Neanderthals And Humans”
Apparently they got it on more than we thought, but Neanderthals were humans (or they wouldn’t have been able to interbreed). In fact, last time I checked, they were also Homo sapiens, but a different subspecies, “neanderthalensis,” rather than Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans).
The Fourth National Climate Assessment
Anthony Watts is having fun with it.
I continue to be amazed at people who continue to attempt to compare landing a probe on another planet to predicting something as complex as the climate and the economy eight decades from now.
[Thursday-morning update]
Bjorn Lomborg: What the media got all wrong about the report.
Pretty much everything.
[Update Friday morning]
“The NCA’s projections are simply not borne out by the data.”
Unexpectedly!
[Bumped]
[Late-morning update]
How the Trump administration blew it on the NCA:
The Administration now has a problem since some Democrats say they will use the report to oppose a number of the Trump Administration’s attempts to weaken a number of the Obama climate regulations that they have proposed, including using the report to persuade courts to reinstate the original Obama Administration regulations. All this was quite foreseeable. So why did the Administration publish the report without reviewing it? Was it because it was not paying attention to what the bureaucracy was doing? This is hard to believe, but appears now to be the case. One obvious possibility is that they wanted to avoid the charge that they had “corrupted” the report writing process. But the costs are likely to be high. Another possibility is that Acting Administrator Wheeler did not want to endure questions about possible intervention at his confirmation hearing. But the evidence appears to suggest inattention by the Trump Administration was the major problem.
You don’t say.
Junk Science
It’s everywhere, and the media eats it up.
The Keto Diet
Myths versus facts, from Nina Teicholz:
I think the larger question is why we are seeing such a sudden rash of anti-keto stories. So many of them quote no experts [sic] sources and do not provide citations for their claims. Skeptics with little acquaintance with the diet are quoted exclusively instead. From a journalistic perspective, this lack of balance of viewpoints and the failure to back up claims with evidence falls below basic reporting standards. Offenders on this list include even the Harvard School of Public Health, which recently published more than one unsourced, one-sided article on the keto diet (This is in addition to the Lancet Public Health article cited above, by Harvard researchers, which suggests that a low-carb diet kills you). These stories could reflect lazy reporting or they could very well be scare tactics to steer people away from the keto diet. Why would reporters or scientists at Harvard be doing such a thing? That’s material for another post. Stay tuned.
I’ll look forward to her thesis.
Parkinson’s Disease
Does the appendix play a role?
Interesting.
California Drought Issues
A four-and-a-half-year-old article that puts them into perspective.
It’s always sadly amusing when you see a headline about “hottest|dryest|whateverist X in recorded history” when we haven’t been keeping records very long, and people rely on their own living memory to judge current events, when a few decades is meaningless in the geological context of climate.
Love Of Coffee
It may be genetic. Well, if it is, it’s not a gene I carry. Coffee is terrible.