Thursday, January 27th, 2011
SAM DILLON, - The New York Times
Stephan: It is very hard to have a successful educational system when about 30 per cent of the population is openly anti-intellectual, and contemptuous of science.
On the most recent nationwide science test, about a third of fourth graders and a fifth of high school seniors scored at or above the proficiency level, according to results released Tuesday.
Only one or two students out of every 100 displayed the level of mastery that the federal panel governing the tests defines as advanced, the government said.
‘I was rather dismayed at the relatively lackluster performance at the top of the achievement levels,
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
ELLIS SIMON, - City College of New York
Stephan: You know I like to deal with good data, it is so much more helpful than ideology or willful ignorance. This is a report on the state of the nursery of sea rise, Greenland Island. I have said this many times, let me say it again. I have been studying climate change since 1991, that's 20 years. In all that time the basic premise has never really been in question. The Denier movement arguments dance around the edges, and seem unable or unwilling to distinguish weather from climate. The movement has been politically devastating, but is completely irrelevant to climate processes, except to retard our ability to respond to what is happening. What has changed dramatically in two decades is the collapse of the time line, as databases became more and more refined. Changes originally seen as taking 500 years, became 200 years, became 50 years, and seem to be shrinking again. The planet is changing very quickly.
New research shows that 2010 set new records for the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, expected to be a major contributor to projected sea level rises in coming decades.
‘This past melt season was exceptional, with melting in some areas stretching up to 50 days longer than average,’ said Dr. Marco Tedesco, director of the Cryospheric Processes Laboratory at The City College of New York (CCNY – CUNY), who is leading a project studying variables that affect ice sheet melting.
‘Melting in 2010 started exceptionally early at the end of April and ended quite late in mid- September.’
The study, with different aspects sponsored by World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the National Science Foundation and NASA, examined surface temperature anomalies over the Greenland ice sheet surface, as well as estimates of surface melting from satellite data, ground observations and models.
In an article published today in ‘Environmental Research Letters,’ Professor Tedesco and co-authors note that in 2010, summer temperatures up to 3C above the average were combined with reduced snowfall.
The capital of Greenland, Nuuk, had the warmest spring and summer since records began in 1873.
Bare ice was exposed earlier than the average and longer than previous years, contributing to the extreme record.
‘Bare ice is […]
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
WILLIAM RAILLANT-CLARK, - University of Montreal
Stephan: Further evidence concerning pharmaceutical pollution of waterways; a trend that is known to be dangerous, even though poorly understood. It also struck me as extraordinary that 25 per cent of the population of Montreal take anti-depressant medication. That is a truly amazing statistic.
Around one in four Montrealers take some kind of anti-depressant, and according to new research, the drugs are passing into the waterways and affecting fish. The findings are internationally significant as the city’s sewage treatment system is similar to that in use in other major cities, and moreover, it is reputed to be the third largest treatment system in the world. Lead by Dr. Sébastien Sauvé at the University of Montreal’s Department of Chemistry and André Lajeunesse, a PhD candidate, the research team found that the drugs accumulate in fish tissues and are affecting the fish’s brain activity.
The Saint Lawrence is a major international waterway that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, and it surrounds the island of Montreal. Sauvé has been looking at the chemical pollution of the water system for years. ‘Montreal has a very basic sewage system – the city basically only removes solids, there’s no disinfecting of the water,’ he explained. ‘In any case, the chemical structure of anti-depressants makes them extremely difficult to remove from sewage, even with the most sophisticated systems available.’
‘We know that antidepressants have negative side effects on human beings,’ Sauvé said, ‘but we don’t know how exactly how these […]
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
GREGORY KARP, - Sun-Sentinal (South Florida)
Stephan: This sort of fast-food non-food is why we have such a poor national diet.
Where’s the beef?’ Wendy’s restaurants once famously asked through its advertising, a swipe at its competitors’ burgers.
The same question is now being asked by a California woman regarding Taco Bell’s beef products, which she claims contain very little meat. So little, in fact, that she’s brought a false-advertising lawsuit against the huge fast-food chain.
The class-action suit, which does not ask for money, objects to Taco Bell calling its products ‘seasoned ground beef or seasoned beef, when in fact a substantial amount of the filling contains substances other than beef.’
It says Taco Bell’s ground beef is made of such components as water, isolated oat product, wheat oats, soy lecithin, maltodextrin, anti-dusting agent, autolyzed yeast extract, modified corn starch and sodium phosphate, as well as some beef and seasonings.
Just 35 percent of the taco filling was a solid, and just 15 percent overall was protein, said attorney W. Daniel ‘Dee’ Miles III of the Montgomery, Ala., law firm Beasley Allen, which filed the suit.
‘Taco Bell’s definition of ‘seasoned beef’ does not conform to consumers’ reasonable expectation or ordinary meaning of seasoned beef, which is beef and seasonings,’ the suit says. Beef is the ‘flesh of cattle,’ according to the U.S. Department of […]
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
JULIA PONGRATZ, - Carnegie Institution
Stephan: I take this report to very positive because it makes clear that reforestration wherever possible is highly desirable. We will know whether we are on course by looking at the percentage of land with forest cover. This, not ideology, should guide our land use programs.
War, plague no match for deforestation in driving CO2 buildup
Stanford, CA- Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes had an impact on the global carbon cycle as big as today’s annual demand for gasoline. The Black Death, on the other hand, came and went too quickly for it to cause much of a blip in the global carbon budget. Dwarfing both of these events, however, has been the historical trend towards increasing deforestation, which over centuries has released vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as crop and pasture lands expanded to feed growing human populations. Even Genghis Kahn couldn’t stop it for long.
‘It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,’ says Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, lead author of a new study on the impact of historical events on global climate published in the January 20, 2011, online issue of The Holocene. ‘Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.’
Clearing forests releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when the trees and […]
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