Comments egbooth has made

I gotta tell you, David. I've enjoyed your Friday Music blogging immensely. I think I first heard about Fleet Foxes from you (thanks for that) and now you're bringing up one of my favorite musicians, Avishai Cohen. I first heard about him from a jazz class I took about 6 years ago. The guy has got some serious talent. Thanks for bringing him up to the wider audience.

plant a White House veggie garden

If she claims to be a locavore, why doesn't she start a vegetable garden on the White House lawn? Are the big agri-business interests really blocking such an idea? Jesus...that's depressing.

Put it in the frame of Eleanor Roosevelt. Plant a "victory" garden. We have two wars and an economy in shambles. Is the idea of pinching pennies and producing your own food really that heretical in this country?

Planting a White House garden may sound like a shallow ploy but think about some of the potential benefits. An immediate benefit would be to source some local DC food pantries but the more significant benefits would be to put the issue of food and farming into the national conversation. Imagine all of the people that would be inspired to create their own garden. Perhaps it could be a turning point for creating a healthy child raised on nutritious food. Or the moment when someone really "gets" the natural world and is inspired to learn more. You never know what kind of impact it could create.

Check out www.eattheview.org to join the effort to bring this to reality.On First Lady promotes 'fresh and local and delicious' veggies at state dinner posted 9 months, 1 week ago 8 Responses

y'know what the funny thing is...

the grizzly bear study could actually lead to less protections for the ESA-listed grizzly bear and help out mining and development interests.

"Kendall's research found that the bears' range was much larger that had been believed, and that the genetic health of the population was good. Those results have been applauded by some who believe the grizzly's endangered status was an impediment to drilling and development in Northwest Montana. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is reviewing the bear's status in Montana. But Kendall says her goal was simply to get a reliable snapshot of the population, to provide good scientific data where none existed."

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=08-P13-00 ...On McCain bashes bear earmark, though Palin asked for similar one for seals posted 1 year, 2 months ago 6 Responses

thanks for the link

Michael Pollan is truly a great writer.

"Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it's one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren't great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can't prove that it will."

True dat.On Pollan envy posted 1 year, 7 months ago 8 Responses

Cheap Water - a basic human right?

While I may agree with your frustration caniscandida, I'm afraid your argument just polarizes views and does more harm than good. People have every right to live in San Diego or any desert region if they want.

Of course, the main issue here is that when we pay our water bills, we really aren't paying the true cost of what it took to get to our taps. The same goes for agriculture, industry, etc. But changing the entire system to get people to pay the actual cost of water is not as easy as flipping a switch. This is a very complex issue with major ramifications for the poor who if they were forced to pay the true cost of water, would have a hard time living comfortably.

And there is no doubt that the true cost of water in the southwest is much higher than in other well-watered parts of the country. So the real question is, how do we get dry regions to pay more money than wet regions because as far as I understand, they pay pretty much the same amount right now and the difference is made through government subsidies.

So yes, we need to somehow provide disincentives to people who want to move to places where the true cost of water is very high. We need innovative solutions quick because right now, the fastest growing parts of the country are exactly the places where the water is most scarce.

But at the same time, we should not be chastising people for where they live (but feel free to chastise them for not conserving water) because it will get us nowhere. The only way that people will stop living in those dry regions is if it costs more to do so.On Science says we are turning the West into a desert posted 1 year, 9 months ago 13 Responses

thanks

I'd like to echo the thanks to Andrew for attempting this debate. I do find it useful, for me at least, to gage how the public perceives this issue. I really believe that the caller who graciously volunteered to be the counterpoint after Ball went MIA is like a lot of people in this country. They don't claim to be scientists but they truly believe, based on what they see in the media, that there is a lot of disagreement in the scientific community over climate change. As we've heard many times before...this stems from the idea that the media is is selling a product. And a debate is much more of a hot seller than a non-debate. Thus, there is this huge disconnection between what the scientific community actually knows about the issue and what the greater public believes the scientific community knows about the issue. In the media, the skeptic arguments exist in an echo chamber and a few loud-mouth skeptic scientists can seem like a whole army to the unsuspecting citizen.

The last caller was also frustrating to listen to. I really didn't understand his point about creating a null hypothesis of "There is a global climate". How do you put numbers to that and test it in a statistically meaningful way? He mentioned correlating nearby climate data to create test the idea of a regional climate but not finding significant correlation between all of the global weather stations wouldn't mean that a global climate doesn't exist. Surely, if you had a large spatial collection of paleoclimate data, you could correlate measurements over geological time during glacials and interglacials. But I still wouldn't know how to phrase that null hypothesis.

I really started to get annoyed when he started with the whole semantic issue of "What is truth" and the argument that nobody should ever utter the word scientific consensus. Andrew, your cancer example was excellent but we never got to hear the caller respond to it. Bottom line: scientific consensus is absolutely essential in a rational society where scientific knowledge influences policy-makers who are not scientists themselves. This scientific knowledge is not the same as absolute truth as the caller wishes it could be but it is (like Andrew said) the best we have to work with.On Climate skeptic plays hookey posted 1 year, 11 months ago 11 Responses

in addition...

increasing corn production not only increases the amount of fertilizer going into streams and rivers but also will undoubtedly lead to more soil erosion. Although soil conservation practices have drastically improved since the beginning of the 20th century, cropland still contributes more erosion than fallow land. There is also a concern that land currently in the conservation reserve program (http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/crp/) will not be for long once their contracts come up for renewal. Corn production is just too enticing at this point for farmers to keep land in conservation reserves.On Unintended or not, the consequences were predictable posted 2 years, 8 months ago 23 Responses

Hansen's testimony

I've just been listening to the committee hearings on C-SPAN radio and I have to say, with all due respect to Dr. Hansen as a scientist, he did a very poor job at explaining scientific uncertainty with regards to the NAS report in 2001 about the IPCC. (Note: I may have missed part of the testimony, so I could be wrong.)

There is always uncertainty with science. There are no absolute and exact answers when dealing with climate change. The contrarians and denialists always use this point to their advantage (like Cooney did today) but where Hansen completely missed the mark was in directly addressing this issue of uncertainty. Yes...there's always uncertainty associated with this issue but the degree of uncertainty is the critical issue. It is very clear (in all of the recent NAS and IPCC reports) that the degree of certainty with regard to human-induced climate change is very high (the recent IPCC report quantified this as 90% certainty).

We all make decisions everyday based on somewhat uncertain data (<100% certainty). But that doesn't freeze us from making informed decisions. The same should be true for much larger policy issues such as climate change. It drives me absolutely crazy that people like Hansen couldn't make this point today. This was an excellent opportunity to make this point and it was completely missed.On At last posted 2 years, 8 months ago 4 Responses

a little late

Whiskerfish -

A very important feedback (at least on geologic time scales) is chemical weathering. CO2 is a necessary component in the dissolution of carbonate and silicate minerals. Since the dissolution of these minerals increases with temperature (and precipitation), this mechanism acts as a negative feedback. But before you go out and start digging up rocks and priming them for dissolution, remember that this process is important on geologic time scales and is not an effective geo-engineering solution.

For more information, see this article in Science magazine, which describes how we are actually seeing more chemical weathering these days in the Mississippi River basin through increased alkalinity in water samples taken by the USGS:

Ittekkot, V. (2003). "A new story from the ol' man river." Science 301(5629): 56-58.

Also, you could just do a Google search for "chemical weathering", I suppose.On 'CO2 doesn't lead, it lags'--Turns out CO2 rise is both a cause and an effect of warming posted 2 years, 8 months ago 43 Responses