This is something that will cause a few heart palpitations at UMM — we’ve begun this big push towards being a green university, exploring alternative energy and conservation, and we are very proud of our campus wind turbine, with plans to build more. This story of a wind turbine that lost a rotor and exploded in a storm is a wee bit unsettling.

However, I’ve never seen our turbine blades move that fast, even in the high winds we sometimes get around here, so I suspect we must be working with a newer and I hope better design here, unlike the ten-year old turbine in the video.

Oh, and our turbine is off campus, and if it did blow like this one, at worst it might kill a few cows.

(via Page 3.14)

At least somebody tried to meet the green gingerbread house challenge—Janet and the sprogs built one, although they cheated a little bit.

Everyone else has until 31 December to send in entries!

The first part of this video bugged me — it sounded like Pascal’s Wager for global warming warriors — but hang in there. He admits that treating the alternatives as equal in probability is bogus, and what you need to do is rational risk assessment, and it makes a lot more sense.

My university is making a big push for the environment, with an environmental studies curriculum being added, an ongoing effort for energy independence with wind and biomass power, and conservation in the construction of a new green dorm, so this holiday project for everyone is particularly appropriate: apply sustainable building design practices to a gingerbread house. Get to work, you’ve got until 31 December to submit photos.

I’m thinking we need to take all that sugar and convert it to alcohol…

Well, the Japanese whaling fleet has left port to go slaughter some whales. This is bad policy for several reasons.

• Killing endangered animals is always a bad idea, and the Japanese don’t even do it humanely. This is bloody slaughter for the sake of bloody slaughter, and it’s going to harm large species that are easily tipped over the brink into extinction.

• It’s basically done as a subsidy for the whalers. This is not really a profitable business. I get irritated by the local farmers who are raising corn for ethanol, an exercise in inefficiency and waste that gets them government money…but getting money for killing large rare animals is more vividly worse.

• The biggest reason I despise Japanese whaling is a bit selfish and narrow, I have to confess. It’s because of this:

  Japan kills more than 1000 whales a year in the Antarctic and also the Pacific Ocean using a loophole in an international moratorium that allows catching whales for research.

  That is such a lie. It demeans science. Japan is not throwing money into their whaling fleet as a research tool; I know what marine biological research looks like, and it rarely involves harpoons, flensing knives, and a cannery. Give university marine mammalogists the money to equip boats to pursue whales, and they won’t look like this:

  

  Note the big “RESEARCH” stenciled across the hull. It’s a lie. It ought to say “BUTCHERY”. The research done by whalers is miniscule, and could be better done without the associated killing.

After urging you all to do something to save the Tasmanian devil, I discover now that Tara wrote about DFTD last month. I guess I have to work harder to keep up with all these science bloggers.

Kentucky, you’re on notice.

The chairman of the joint Agricultural and Natural Resources Committee is holding hearings to promote ignorance and denialism. This is appalling.

Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, a longtime ally of the coal industry, said he purposefully did not invite anyone who believes in global warming to testify.

“You can only hear that the sky is falling so many times,” said Gooch, whose post makes him the House Democrats’ chief environmental strategist. “We hear it every day from the news media, from the colleges, from Hollywood.”

Neither of Gooch’s invited panelists was a scientist.

What he is saying is idiotic enough, but look at the letter after his name: “D”. Isn’t it nice that we now have bipartisan inanity? How do these mouth-breathing ninnyhammers get elected into positions of power, anyway?

If you’ve been wondering what to do in the aftermath of Cyclone Sidr, the people to watch Chris and Sheril and influential blogger Greg Laden. Some specific information is available here and here, but I’m sure more will be coming up.