Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Painful sunburns are usually associated with people, but many whales are now acutely sunburned, with cases escalating in recent years, according to new research.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is the first to demonstrate that sun damage to whale skin is on the rise and is likely tied to increasing levels of ultraviolet radiation resulting from the thinning ozone layer.
“The thing is, whales do not have hair, fur or feathers that could offer some protection, and they are forced to surface in order to breathe,” co-author Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse told Discovery News.
“Other animals have behavioral adaptations — hiding in the shade, for example — but whales cannot afford to do so,” added Acevedo-Whitehouse, a postdoctoral fellow at the Zoological Society of London.
So what are you standing there for? Do something! Like, uh, call the Justice League…
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Sunburned Whales. Sounds like a great name for a band.
“Now here’s the Sunburned Whales, singing their hit single ‘Hawaiian Tropic’ off their new CD ‘SPF 45’.”
Then a band member dies and the remaining band mates form a new band called the ‘Hot Blowholes’. With their hit single ‘Al Gore touched me there” on their CD ‘A Big Umbrella is All I Need’.
Sorry, couldn’t stop myself.
- tim | 11/10/2010 @ 12:06“We’re sorry, the program you were watching, ‘Why Global Warming is Your Fault’ is experiencing some … uh … technical difficulties. We return to previously viewed episodes of ‘Why The Thinning Ozone Layer is Your Fault.'”
- DarcsFalcon | 11/10/2010 @ 12:10Global warming is our fault, and the time to act is now!!!!!11!1!eleventy
I keep asking my leftist friends (paraphrasing P.J. O’Rourke) why they keep proposing the exact same stuff as they did back in the seventies, when global cooling was the problem and the time to act was then.
Still haven’t gotten much of an answer… funny, that.
- Severian | 11/10/2010 @ 12:35This is another example of the nonsense that permeates the environmental literature. There is NO reduction in the ozone layer. There is an ozone hole over Antarctica (part natural), but the whales do not surf the ice.
No doubt some half-educated graduate student (half-educated by definition of the phrase “graduate student”) noticed a sunburned whale, or what s/he thought was a sunburn (or a whale) and believed this was a new discovery.
I taught environmental engineering and science for 37 years, and debunking supertitious nonsense like this was a major part of the job.
- Bob Sykes | 11/11/2010 @ 07:23@DarcsFalcon – that was beautiful.
@tim – right up there. Tres funny.
Here’s the thing about that “ozone hole”. We didn’t look for ozone holes, nor have a good way for looking global “ozone layer” thickness until relatively recent times. Then we thorized that CFCs would eat giant holes in the “ozone layer” (I put scare quotes on it because the name tends to convey a uniform blanket around the world … and there’s no evidence or reason to believe that it ever was).
We sent up some sattelites with sensors to look at ozone layer thickness, and lo and behold, we found holes.
Ergo the CFC theory must be correct, right?
Uh, no. Not right. As I mentioned before, there was no control for the “experiment”. So all it was was an observation coupled with a theory, which doesn’t tell us much.
Same goes for polar ice cap extent/thickness measurements. Until relatively recently (say the last 70-ish years), we really haven’t had a way to get a good look at it and measure it. For all we know it grows and shrinks and grows and shrinks, cyclically, non cyclically … the earth is a big place with a long history and complex inputs — most of which we’ve only been able to measure for a couple of short human generations.
We have theories, and they may be well-based theories, but they may also very well be incorrect. Scientific method includes verification and explanations as to why your observations can’t be explained by anything other than your theory.
Observation-wise, we are sorely lacking, and there are lots of other explanations why we see holes in the ozone layer, and why the polar ice caps shrank, and why the Snows of Kilimanjaro have receeded.
And don’t even get me started on the Polar Bears
- philmon | 11/11/2010 @ 08:26I haven’t heard about the “ozone hole” in almost twenty years now, or for that matter, CFCs. I didn’t think anyone was still worried about this.
- cylarz | 11/15/2010 @ 00:14