Scott Pruitt Is a Climate Change Denier… and in Other News, Water is Wet

In perhaps the most Captain Obvious moment on the first week of March, we learn that Scott Pruitt, current head of the Environmental Protection Agency, denies climate change…

From the New York Times…

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Thursday that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement at odds with the established scientific consensus on climate change.

Asked his views on the role of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas produced by burning fossil fuels, in increasing global warming, Mr. Pruitt said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

“But we don’t know that yet,” he added. “We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

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Agent Orange Wants to Slash NOAA Funding by 17%

From the Washington Post…

The Trump administration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post.

The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs, including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas.

NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, which would be hit by an overall 18 percent budget reduction from its current funding level.

The Office of Management and Budget also asked the Commerce Department to provide information about how much it would cost to lay off employees, while saying those employees who do remain with the department should get a 1.9 percent pay increase in January 2018. It requested estimates for terminating leases and government “property disposal.”

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Self Care: Astronomy Picture(/News) of the Week – NASA Finds a New Solar System with 3 Habitable Planets

Okay okay… potentially habitable planets… the title was already long enough…

(Thanks to Rob Grigjanis for alerting me to this…)

Allowing for the fact that NASA is known for its sensationalism (routinely mocked, actually, by some astronomy podcasts I listen to, like Awesome Astronomy), this is actually really intriguing. From Vox…

TRAPPIST-1 System... planets e, f, and g are the potentially habitable planets

TRAPPIST-1 System… planets e, f, and g are the potentially habitable planets

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Self Care – What Was the First Life on Earth?

This is a really cool article, written by Stephanie Pappas for LiveScience…

The earliest evidence for life on Earth arises among the oldest rocks still preserved on the planet.

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, but the oldest rocks still in existence date back to just 4 billion years ago. Not long after that rock record begins, tantalizing evidence of life emerges: A set of filament-like fossils from Australia, reported in the journal Astrobiology in 2013, may be the remains of a microbial mat that might have been extracting energy from sunlight some 3.5 billion years ago. Another contender for world’s oldest life is a set of rocks in Greenland that may hold the fossils of 3.7-billion-year-old colonies of cyanobacteria, which form layered structures called stromatolites.

Some scientists have claimed to see evidence of life in 3.8-billion-year-old rocks from Akilia Island, Greenland. The researchers first reported in 1996 in the journal Nature that isotopes (forms of an element with different numbers of neutrons) in those rocks might indicate ancient metabolic activity by some mystery microbe. Those findings have been hotly debated ever since — as, in fact, have all claims of early life.

Still, the fact that suggestive evidence of life arises right as the rock record begins raises a question, said University of California, Los Angeles, geochemist Elizabeth Bell in a SETI Talk in February 2016: Is the timing a coincidence, or were there earlier forms of life whose remnants disappeared with the planet’s most ancient rocks?

Head on over and read the whole thing! It’s fascinating…

Self Care – The Tardigrade

Tardigrades might be the single most adorable micro organisms in existence.

I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to have one as a pet. I mean… okay… I’m probably surrounded by a ridiculously large number of them. And growing one to the size of, say, a guinea pig could potentially have some pretty horrible results, so…

I still wonder, though… so much that, um… I went and got the next best thing…

But before I tell you what, here’s a bit of a confession…

This one is lighter than my last confession, I promise…

[Read more…]

Self Care – Astronomy Picture of the Week: The Heart and Soul Nebula

Yeah yeah… I know Valentine’s Day was yesterday… but Astronomy Picture of the Week is on Wednesdays, so get over it.

This is an infrared mosaic known as “Heart and Soul“… two nebulae captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. As usual, click on the image for the .tif download…

Heart (right) and Soul (left) Nebulae

Heart (right) and Soul (left) Nebulae

I would say “Happy Valentine’s Day from the Universe!” but… you know… day late, and all…