Wednesday, May 30th, 2012
, - Southern Methodist University
Stephan: Here is the latest research on the historical precedence for extreme weather events such as the Megafires consuming the Southwest. Once again it warns us about what is coming with climate change, and why these changes are human mediated.
Today’s mega forest fires of the southwestern U.S. are truly unusual and exceptional in the long-term record, suggests a new study that examined hundreds of years of ancient tree ring and fire data from two distinct climate periods.
Researchers constructed and analyzed a statistical model that encompassed 1,500 years of climate and fire patterns to test, in part, whether today’s dry, hot climate alone is causing the megafires that routinely destroy millions of acres of forest, according to study co-author and fire anthropologist Christopher I. Roos, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
The researchers found that even when ancient climates varied from each other - one hotter and drier and the other cooler and wetter - the frequencies of year-to-year weather patterns that drive fire activity were similar.
The findings suggest that today’s megafires, at least in the southwestern U.S., are atypical, according to Roos and co-author Thomas W. Swetnam, the University of Arizona. Furthermore, the findings implicate as the cause not only modern climate change, but also human activity over the last century, the researchers said.
‘The U.S. would not be experiencing massive large-canopy-killing crown fires today if human activities had not begun to suppress the low-severity surface fires that were so common more than […]
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Wednesday, May 30th, 2012
Stephan: Finally psychology is moving past sophomores, and a whole new world is emerging.
According to Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, most undergraduates are WEIRD. Those who teach them might well agree. But Dr Henrich did not intend the term as an insult when he popularised it in a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2010. Instead, he was proposing an acronym: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic.
One reason these things matter is that undergraduates are also psychology’s laboratory rats. Incentivised by rewards, in the form of money or course credits, they will do the human equivalents of running mazes and pressing the levers in Skinner boxes until the cows come home.
Which is both a blessing and a problem. It is a blessing because it provides psychologists with an endless supply of willing subjects. And it is a problem because those subjects are WEIRD, and thus not representative of humanity as a whole. Indeed, as Dr Henrich found from his analysis of leading psychology journals, a random American undergraduate is about 4,000 times more likely than an average human being to be the subject of such a study. Drawing general conclusions about the behaviour of Homo sapiens from the results of these studies is risky.
This state […]
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Wednesday, May 30th, 2012
TIM MAURER and DAVID WEINSTEIN, - Foreign Policy
Stephan: Increasingly I think one needs to assume every email you send, every phone conversation you have, every tweet you make is monitored and recorded somewhere.
Welcome to the new frontier of cyber-espionage, and remember this name: ‘Flame’ — a mysterious new cyber spy tool that hit the headlines on Monday, May 28. Its code is 20 times larger than Stuxnet, the mysterious computer worm that temporarily crippled Iran’s Siemens nuclear centrifuges, and it ‘might be the most sophisticated cyber weapon yet unleashed’ according to Kaspersky Lab, a Russian-based cybersecurity firm. Kaspersky published the findings of its analysis on Monday in addition to the Iranian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and Budapest University. Most of the infected systems are located in the Middle East, with Iran, Israel, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, and Hungary topping the list. Flame stands out in the various ways through which it ‘exfiltrates’ data, including surreptitiously recorded audio data captured by internal microphones. However, unlike Stuxnet, Flame was designed to spy — not destroy.
The variety of spy tools that Flame employs is astonishing. According to Kaspersky, ‘of course, other malware exists which can record audio, but key here is Flame’s completeness — the ability to steal data in so many different ways.’ It also takes snapshots of instant messages and records a user’s keystrokes. Flame is remotely controlled through a command and […]
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Stephan: While the U.S. whose government is a vassal to old energy is building new nuclear plants, and trying to push through the horrendous shale oil pipeline, a project fraught with dangers, countries like Germany are moving into the post-nuclear, post-petroleum world as fast as they can. Here are the latest results. Germans pay more now, although not an unreasonable amount but this will drop with scale up, and they will not pay the undeclared costs of endless nuclear storage, old energy pollution costs, or the health costs associated with old energy.
German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours of Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank has said.
Germany’s government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022. They will be replaced by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass.
Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50% of the nation’s midday electricity needs.
‘Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity,’ Allnoch told Reuters. ‘Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over.’
The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world’s leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.
Government-mandated support for renewables has helped Germany became a world […]
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, - Phys.org/Yale University
Stephan: Increasingly it is becoming clearer that our social problems arise from cultural values issues which simply trump scientific information.
More information: The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks, Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1547
Are members of the public divided about climate change because they don’t understand the science behind it? If Americans knew more basic science and were more proficient in technical reasoning, would public consensus match scientific consensus?
A study published today online in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that the answer to both questions is no. Indeed, as members of the public become more science literate and numerate, the study found, individuals belonging to opposing cultural groups become even more divided on the risks that climate change poses.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study was conducted by researchers associated with the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School and involved a nationally representative sample of 1500 U.S. adults.
‘The aim of the study was to test two hypotheses,’ said Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School and a member of the study team. ‘The first attributes political controversy over climate change to the public’s limited ability to comprehend science, and the second, to opposing sets of cultural values. The findings supported the second hypothesis and not the first,’ he said.
‘Cultural cognition’ is the term used to describe the process by which individuals’ […]
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