The Best Stuff You May Have Missed Last Week: A Coldplay-obsessed, Bieber-bodyguard-befriending, Vin Diesel-quoting, jet-setting American businessman is one of the only people that North Korea follows on Twitter. But why, asked Mother Jones? Vulture popped a quiz to see if you can tell the difference between Jay-Z lyrics and Great Gatsby prose. Zocalo Public Square recalled how support from a single big-city daily newspaper was once enough to send a gawky no-name with too-large feet on his way to the American presidency. The Atlantic revised history: President Kennedy’s ... Read More
Put Down the iPad, Lace Up the Hiking Boots
December 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Have you been staring cow-eyed at a computer all morning? Fiddling with your iPhone in line at Starbucks? Checking Twitter and ESPN every four minutes on your tablet? Good. Here’s a little quiz. What one word ties these three ideas together: water + tobacco + stove? How about widow + bite + monkey? Or, envy + golf + beans? Psychologists call such wordplay the “remote associates test,” or RAT, and use it to study creativity and intuition. The idea is that it requires a nimble, open mind to find the connection between seemingly unrelated ideas—in this case pipe, spider, and ... Read More
The Fuzzy Face of Climate Change
December 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
On January 24, 2004, in the frigid moonscape of an Arctic winter, wildlife biologist Steven Amstrup rode in a helicopter flying low over the ice. Using an infrared heat detector, he hoped to find polar bears in their dens. When the gun recorded a hit, Amstrup circled around for a closer look. What confronted him was something he had never seen in 34 years of research. The mouth of the den was open, and a smear of bright-red blood stretched away for more than 200 feet. At the end of a long drag trail in the ice lay the still-warm body of a female polar bear. The air temperature was 20 degrees ... Read More
The Other “Cliff”
December 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
As Christmas approaches, the mercury here in Washington, D.C., has been flirting with 70 all month. On the day we decorated our Douglas fir, I went for a run in shorts, no shirt. The trees are skeletal, but songbirds still linger in the branches. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised—after all, November was the 333rd consecutive month of above-average global temperatures. Halfway across the world, in Doha, Qatar, the latest international climate conference, COP18, just wrapped up. Representatives from some 190 countries spent a fortnight trying to lay the groundwork for a post-Kyoto world; ... Read More
Could Climate Change be the Epitome of Partisanship?
October 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
It’s the issue that dare not speak its name – climate change. As the New York Times, NPR, the Associated Press and a host of pundits, including our Tom Jacobs, have noticed, talk of global warming has been banished from the hustings in this year’s U.S. presidential campaign. While both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney embrace talk about energy – whether from fossil fuels or renewable sources – with various amounts of gusto, the focus is always economic, not environmental. Despite his muted voice this year, in years past Obama has been an ardent believer in anthropogenic climate ... Read More
Smokin’ Election Campaign Quote of the Week
October 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
No doubt assuming Americans are more concerned about high gasoline prices than long-term threats to the environment, neither of the major-party presidential campaigns--nor, for that matter, the reporters covering them--have paid much attention to climate change. A few of our thoughtful commentators are starting to take note, including Eugene Robinson in today's Washington Post. But the most succinct and pithy quote on the subject was offered on MSNBC by articulate and erudite Chris Hayes. His metaphor: "Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about ... Read More
Could the Smart Grid Finally Do Some Good for Consumers?
September 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Americans shop for viciously for bargains, whether it’s getting plane tickets from discount web sites or driving across town to save 30 cents on a tank of gas. But when it comes to electricity, we’ve been simply writing checks for the bills we receive at the end of the month. Few of us know how much we pay for a kilowatt hour, or how many kilowatt hours we use—or what a kilowatt hour actually is. Since the 1920s, Americans have paid flat regulated prices per hour for electricity. But de-regulated wholesale electricity prices now gyrate extravagantly from nearly zero at night to as ... Read More
Fox News Misleads Viewers on Climate Change
September 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Is the climate changing, and are humans responsible for this troubling phenomenon? There’s virtually no debate in the scientific world that the answer to both questions is yes, but public opinion is confused and conflicted. There are various reasons for this. It’s difficult to wrap our minds around issues involving gradual, big-picture change, and we’re disinclined to believe anything that would necessitate curbing our cherished lifestyles. But there’s also another explanation: simple misinformation, which continues to spread not only via emails and neighbor-to-neighbor chatter, ... Read More
Small Steps Toward Scientific Gender Equity
September 24, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Tom Jacobs last week cited current research showing that job applications attributed to female scientists were received less favorably by other scientists than those of applications they believed came from a man. The effect was true for both men and women. Right now I'm at the Third International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World, and a factoid that arose in the first day's opening remarks offers some small hope for greater gender equality (at least in science). Looking over the participants and presenters of all three of these ocean-acidification gatherings—the first in Paris in ... Read More
Wind Turbines: Saving the Planet but Butchering Bats
September 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
At a recent evening “batwalk” at the University of California’s Sedgwick Reserve conducted by vertebrate biologist Paul W. Collins, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, I learned that a lot of bats are dying from turbines used to produce renewable energy. I emphasize this was my own discovery because a quick Google search reveals the problem is well-known to bat fanciers; there’s even a 9-year-old Bats and Wind Energy Cooperative. That birds and windmills don’t always mix is something I knew, thanks in part to active inbox lobbying from ... Read More
