There is now an online petition to save the Australian Lungfish. Take a moment and put your name on it!
Also, it’s not just the lungfish—as Monika Dieker reminded me, there’s also the Mary River Turtle at risk.
Lots of sources are telling me about Pat Robertson’s sudden acceptance of the fact of global warming. I’m sorry, but it’s no cause for rejoicing. He accepts it for the wrong reasons.
This week the heat index, the perceived temperature based on both air temperatures and humidity, reached 115 Fahrenheit in some regions of the U.S. East Coast. The 76-year-old Robertson told viewers that was “the most convincing evidence I’ve seen on global warming in a long time.”
If there’s one broad, overall message I wish everyone would get from this blog and from my teaching, it’s that science isn’t about getting the right answers—it’s about how you arrive at your answers, by verifiable, testable, repeatable methods and logic and good evidence. Deciding that global warming occurs because you’re having a hot, sticky, uncomfortable summer: bad and unscientific. Deciding that global warming occurs because the climate research community has evaluated multiple lines of evidence and documented an anomalous pattern: smart.
I’m sorry, Jake, but while getting the religious right on the side of conservation is a good thing, doing so on the say-so of an incompetent authority like Pat Robertson who uses an anecdote about the weather to justify it is a bad thing. What are we going to do if Colorado has a blizzard in January, and James Dobson uses that to argue that an Ice Age is on the way? Or if Jerry Falwell has a bout of incontinence, so he prophesies great floods?
There is now a web page dedicated to the Neoceratodus cause. If you haven’t yet fired off a letter to oppose the destruction of the lungfish’s habitat, there’s a sample letter there to help you get started. It’s not too late to make your voice heard!
Yikes—it’s like some kind of horror movie: Inhofe meets Robertson.
Look, Pat, I don’t have to tell you about reading the Scriptures, but one of mine that I’ve always enjoyed is Romans 1, 22 and 23. You quit worshipping God and start worshipping the creation — the creeping things, the four-legged beasts, the birds and all that. That’s their god. That’s what they worship.
I’m not a big fan of the Bible, and every time I do dig into it, I find myself disgusted—and this is no exception. I had to look up Romans.
Peter Doran published a paper several years ago showing that parts of Antarctica were actually cooling, rather than warming—that there were local variations in temperature trends. This is not surprising. It’s also not surprising that he was quote-mined like mad by the global warming denialists. He has now written a calm, solid rejection of the misuse of his data in the NY Times.
Our results have been misused as “evidence” against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel “State of Fear” and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” Search my name on the Web, and you will find pages of links to everything from climate discussion groups to Senate policy committee documents—all citing my 2002 study as reason to doubt that the earth is warming. One recent Web column even put words in my mouth. I have never said that “the unexpected colder climate in Antarctica may possibly be signaling a lessening of the current global warming cycle.” I have never thought such a thing either.
Our study did find that 58 percent of Antarctica cooled from 1966 to 2000. But during that period, the rest of the continent was warming. And climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals—thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals—all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet. An inconvenient truth?
This is great stuff, but anyone want to take any bets on whether the anti-scientific global warming crackpots will now extract that penultimate sentence and use it to urge easing the ban on fluorocarbon release?
I have no idea what the cephalopods flying over the city have to do with the ecological message in the small print, but heck, it’s a cool picture anyway.
Maybe it has something to do with octopuses swimming over flooded cities, but they look airborn to me.
The story of the Australian lungfish has made this week’s issue of Nature. Remember, it’s not too late to keep the pressure on.
Even reading Peggy Noonan through an Attaturk filter is dangerous. I read this little scrap and felt neurons popping throughout my cortex.
During the past week’s heat wave–it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday–I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world’s greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not?
Jebus. Now not only do scientists have to figure out all that complicated data stuff, they have to be able to explain it to one of the stupidest people on earth? That’s an excessive demand.
I’ve had about 8 requests for further information on saving the Australian lungfish. That’s a good start, and thanks to everyone who wrote in, but it’s not enough. Look at that beautiful finny beast to the right; do you want them all to die? And seriously, look at those fins: aren’t they spectacular? Don’t you want to know how they develop and how they evolved?
The Australian government is planning to dam the last rivers on which these spectacular vertebrates live, and that will be it for them. We’ll be left with nothing but bones and tissue samples and few relics in aquaria.
Those sure are beautiful, informative bones…but we can learn so much more from the living animal.
So let’s make one more big effort to let the Australian government know that there is international opposition to their cavalier destruction of an important and unique habitat. Losing these special creatures is a loss of scientific information and a loss of an unusual element of the Australian ecosystem.
If you’ve got a moment, write a polite and considerate letter to one or all of the following members of the Australian government. Let them know that they are planning to do irreparable damage to their environment, and the world is watching them.
It doesn’t have to be a long letter, it would be sufficient to write a brief note that says the the world values these remarkable, unique animals, and that you think more effort must be made in cooperation with the scientific community to find alternatives. Remember, though: politeness and sincerity are paramount. Don’t give them an excuse to dismiss the email as the work of cranks.
That Stephen Hawking guy is saying that we need to get colonies out there in space to preserve the human race. I’m a space opera fan, I think space exploration is a worthy endeavor, but I have to admit that watching Chris Clarke whomp on Hawking is very entertaining, and I agree. Hawking has it all wrong.
