The Great Debate

Promoted like a monster truck rally, the stakes in tonight’s debate are said to be ginormous. Certainly the media would like there to be a story, better yet a horse race. I personally find it drab and unexciting (If they were actual debates with points and fact checking, that would be different). Nevertheless, willpower and time permitting, I will be here liveblogging Mitt Romney’s Festival of Lies: [Read more…]

Half the Great Barrier Reef is gone

Bleached coral at the Keppel Islands on the southern Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia. Image courtesy of Reuters/UK Guardian

Just in case you lucky duckies down under feel left out of the incredible shrinking Arctic ice cap adventure, you have an exquisite shrinking biome to call your own. A new analysis indicates that roughly half the coral in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia has gone the way of the Dodo bird, and it did so in less than 30 years. [Read more…]

A solar shield; what could possibly go wrong?

So let’s say, thanks to the reality challenged wingnut brigades and associated ingorati, climate change hits a tipping point. And now the whole world is looking down the barrel of a clathrate gun. Well, there might still be solutions. Afterall, this isn’t just a political problem, at its heart it’s a thermodynamics problem. Any second year engineering student can swear on a stack of tables six inches thick that thermodynamic problems often have solutions. In this case, the solution would have to be … err … large: [Read more…]