Cyclone Sidr … have you heard about it?

Try checking the major American news sites: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the New York Times, you can even try the BBC. There’s a major news story missing.

You’ll have to read Chris Mooney’s blog to find it. There’s a potential Category 5 cyclone, Cyclone Sidr, on its way to smash Bangladesh.

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It’s going to hit sometime tomorrow. While Sonny Perdue prays for a little rain, maybe we should be urging our news networks to pay attention to the important news, our government should be getting ready for emergency assistance, and we should all be preparing to loosen those checkbooks and possibly offer what aid we can.

Green UMM

One of the goals of my university is to go green: we’re working on wind and biomass power, we support local foods, we’re making a major initiative to add environmental studies to our curriculum, and we’re about to build a green dorm on campus. One interesting tack the green dormies are taking is to keep the public informed with a Green Dorm blog. So far, it’s awfully dry reading and its not really taking advantage of the medium well — each post is little more than a link to a pdf document from the planning process — but they are open to comment, at least.

Maybe they should consult someone who knows better ways of putting information on the web, though.

Larry Craig’s real crime

I wrote of my fondness for salmon the other day, and now I learn of a strange and rather satisfying coincidence: Larry Craig was an enemy of the salmon.

The surprising fall of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, removes a longtime obstacle to efforts by Democrats and environmentalists to promote salmon recovery on Northwest rivers.

Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from endangered salmon to public land grazing.

I don’t think he should have resigned over stupid sexual behavior, but that he was one of those rats who fought to destroy the environment…that ought to be a hanging offense. It’s not an entirely happy story, though. I find myself a bit peeved that in this country you can lose your job for waving your hand under a toilet stall divider, but accepting money from industry to allow them to poison the land and circumvent reasonable ecological restrictions…pish. That’s nothin’.

Oreskes smacks down Shulte

This sounds so familiar. A few years ago, a historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, reviewed the literature on climate change and concluded that there is a unanimous consensus in the published work that anthropogenic carbon is a major contributor to global warming. Now a denialist has re-analyzed those papers and is saying that Oreskes was wrong : almost half of the papers are “neutral”, neither supporting nor refuting anthropogenic change, while 6% do reject the idea.

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Don’t look to Bjørn Lomborg, thou sluggard

Salon has a refreshingly hostile interview with Bjørn Lomborg, and they also have a strongly negative review of his new book, Cool It. This makes me very happy; I’m not a fan of the “contrarian” label for this guy — he’s just another unqualified denialist, as far as I can see. I hope one of our blogs that discuss climate, like Deltoid or Island of Doubt or the Intersection, picks up on it and adds to the pile-on.

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Ominous Dean

I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t been following the story of Hurricane Dean at all — it’s far away, and I’ve been busy traveling and trying to get my classes organized — but Chris Mooney has. In a short summary on his blog and a longer article on the Daily Green, he explains why I’m a bad person for failing to note the significance of this storm. It’s been a horrific decade for hurricanes.

Storm World

Back when I was a youngling, I read a very exciting series of science-fiction novels called The Deathworld Trilogy, by Harry Harrison. The premise was that there was this horrifically fierce planet in the galaxy, with gravity twice Earth-normal, constantly erupting volcanoes, and savage, ravenous beasts that were out to destroy anything that moves. The humans who settled there became heavily muscled with lightning-fast reflexes and a militaristic society that provided some of the best soldiers in the universe. Now that is the setting for old-school science-fiction.

The genre isn’t dead! I picked up a copy of a book called Storm World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I figured it would be another tale of heroic humans conquering impossible odds in a dangerous setting, this time on a planet rife with ferocious storms. The story provides the storms, alright, but, boy, was I disappointed otherwise: it was the most unbelievable science-fiction novel I’ve ever read.

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An index to climate change denialist’s claims

Long time readers will know how fond I am of the Index to Creationist Claims, a long list of common creationist arguments linked to short, pithy rebuttals with references. Now the gang at Gristmill have done the same thing for climate change, with a How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic page containing a list of common global warming denialists claims linked to blog entries that address the criticism. This should be handy!

One weird thing, though, is that since the answers are blog entries, people can actually comment on them…and of course, the denialists are out in force. It’s useful to see that the accusations aren’t straw men at all, because there are people actively arguing them right there.

Compact Fluorescent Lights are gonna kill you … NOT.

Steve Milloy, junk science peddler and loser, has a new crusade: he is opposed to compact fluorescent light bulbs.

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn’t include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

Sound crazy?

Yes, Steve, it does sound crazy. It doesn’t help that it’s coming from you, either. Can we get more details on Brandy Bridges’ story?

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