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Archive for January 15th, 2011
Australian floods: Why were we so surprised?
Posted by Guardian: Germaine Greer on January 15th, 2011
Guardian: What's going on in Australia is rain. British people might think that they're rain experts. Truth is that they hardly know what rain is. The kind of cold angel sweat that wets British windscreens isn't proper rain. For weeks now rain has been drumming in my ears, leaping off my corrugated steel roof, frothing through the rocks, spouting off the trees, and running, running, running past my house and down into the gully, into the little creek, into the bigger creek, and on to the Nerang river and out...
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What’s happening to the Arctic ice?
Posted by Ventura County Star: None Given on January 15th, 2011
Ventura County Star: I recently received another vitriolic e-mail chiding me for writing about global warming when the Northeast was under several feet of snow and experiencing unseasonably cold temperatures. So how can a warming world, especially in the mid-latitudes, be undergoing such intense periods of deep freezes?
Perhaps it’s best summed up by Jane Lubchenco, the undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator: “Whatever is going to happen in the rest of the world happens first,...
Learn to love uncertainty and failure, say leading thinkers
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on January 15th, 2011
Guardian: Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people's lives, according to some of the world's leading thinkers.
The ideas were submitted as part of an annual exercise by the web magazine Edge, which invites scientists, philosophers and artists to opine on a major question of the moment. This year it was, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?" ...
Does climate change explain the fall of the Roman Empire?
Posted by Washington Post: Stephen Stromberg on January 15th, 2011
Washington Post: Professional and amateur historians have offered thousands of explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire. It was barbarians. It was Christianity. It was lead poisoning. It was "decadence" (in some circles understood as "homosexuality"). How many of these factors were really causal and how many are merely the imposition of contemporary agendas on ancient events (chemicals in food, the culture wars, etc.) is always a matter of dispute.
Now a group of scientists is adding another explanation for...