Taylor Wilson, is known as the boy who played with fusion, because at the age of 14 became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction.
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Andrew Weaver, Newly elected Green Party MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head The British Columbia Green Party just made history, voters in the riding of Oak Bay-Gordon Head elected Andrew Weaver, Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, and a lead author for a chapter of the IPCC AR4, to the Legislative Assembly. Andrew Weaver is the first Green party member ever to be elected to the legislative Assembly; his election continues the trend started by Elizabeth May, who was the first ever federal Green party member to be elected to the Canadian Parliament in (Read more…) Recently the Canadian National Research Council has, unfortunately, drastically changed course and abandoned pure science research unless it has clear economic benefits. Many people have written eloquent criticisms of this move by the Canadian government. Phil Plait (at the above link) does a good job of explaining the why the move away from pure science funding is a bad idea from a scientific perspective (we don’t know ahead of time what research will yield economic benefits), but I find that Andrew Coyne (a right leaning commentator writing in a right leaning newspaper) does an excellent job of demonstrating why this (Read more…) Open the pod bay door, HAL. What would it take to develop the capability to send humans to another star system? That is the ambitious challenge taken up by the 100 Year Starship project. And they have set a deadline of achieving this ambitious goal within, as their name implies, the next 100 years. Meeting the challenge of sending humans on an interstellar journey that, in all likelihood, will last thousands of years, requires a massive rethink of just about everything. Take something as simple as clothing. It represents a large part of our identities, but it is a major (Read more…) Simon Donner makes a disturbing point: If you look at the global fossil fuel emissions data, all of the major disruptions to energy and oil use in the past 60 years caused carbon emissions to drop or level off. Annual emissions would later continue to rise at a rate similar to that before the disruption, but the total annual emissions would not “catch up” to where it “would have been” without the disruption. The recent world financial crisis appears, on the surface at least, to be an exception. Carbon emissions stopped rising in 2008 and 2009, but rebounded so . . . → Read More: Mind of Dan: This isn’t the recovery you’re looking for Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III is no smelly hippie. North Korea just annulled the 1953 armistice ending its war with South Korea. China and Japan are locked in a dispute over an island chain. But the greatest long-term threat to the peace of East Asia and Pacific Ocean — the part of the world at the heart of the Obama administration’s aspirational defense strategy — is climate change, according to the admiral in charge of U.S. military operations there. Via The Climate Desk There is a new hockey stick in town, one with a shaft extending back all the way back to the end start of the holocene about 12,000 years ago when the last ice age ended: The difference between the warming at the end of the last ice age (left side of the graph) and the current warming (right side of the graph) demonstrates how truly abnormal the current change in climate really is. In the article in science A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years the authors took 73 proxy records of temperature, including (Read more…) From Kevin Trenberth: China now emits more carbon dioxide per year than any other country. They are changing our atmosphere, and by doing so they are changing our climate. We ought to be outraged! David Appell’s recent article on the Nocera/Hansen dustup sums up how I feel about the pipeline perfectly: I’m not sure how I feel about the pipeline — or rather, I have opinions about it all but they go in different directions and, like a quantum cat in Schrodinger’s box I’m in several different states at once because my wave function hasn’t collapsed — but I can certainly see why activists have chosen it for their “crusade.” Now go read the rest of the article. … I do not think it means what you think it means. Ottawa pitches the oil sands as ‘green’ Relying on Canadian crude imports is the best choice for the United States – not just because it’s reliable and secure but because of Canada’s unmatched environmental record, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said Tuesday. More information can be found here: The Canadian government is requiring foreign researchers who collaborate with federal scientists to sign agreements that could potentially muzzle them, a U.S. scientist says. from the what-you-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-you-department: One year after plans were announced for a new system to monitor the environmental effects of the Alberta tar sands, there is still no sign of any formal data… The plans indicated that scientists would release information on an ongoing basis in some cases, and on three and six-month schedules in others. Officials anticipated the first round of information would be released before the end of last year. The public may not have seen any results from this new endeavour, but multiple independent reports released this year have shown that the tar sands environmental footprint stretches significantly (Read more…) Allie Wilkinson writing in ArsTechnica brings us some bad news: Evidence from caves in Siberia indicates that a global temperature increase of 1.5° Celsius may cause substantial thawing of a large tract of permanently frozen soil in Siberia. The thawing of this soil, known as permafrost, could have serious consequences for further changes in the climate. Up until new we have been exceptionally lucky in that about half of the carbon we have emitted into the atmosphere has been absorbed by the biosphere, however at some point our luck will run out and various carbon sinks will stop absorbing In my recent post on the Keystone XL pipeline I mentioned that until digging up the bitumen becomes unprofitable there will be an endless parade of proposals to ship the bitumen to markets around the world. TansCanada (which is also behind the Keystone XL pipeline) has just announced a proposal to convert an existing natural gas pipeline to carry Alberta’s bitumen to the east coast: TransCanada Ltd. is studying the possibility of converting a natural-gas pipeline in its Mainline pipeline network between Alberta and Quebec to carry crude oil instead, spokesperson Grady Semmens said. My latest post on the Keystone XL pipeline was, unsurprisingly, not well received by some of the Planet3.0. I argued that I don’t think the fighting the Keystone XL pipeline is the best use of our limited resources. In the comments Andy Skuce provided a rebuttal that deserves to be promoted to its own post. By Andy Skuce Dan, I agree that KXL is a symbol, but I think it’s a lot more than just a symbol. Also, I believe that it’s a battle worth fighting, even though winning this battle obviously won’t win the war. Even if the . . . → Read More: Mind of Dan: Thinking beyond pipelines: A rebuttal The Keystone XL pipeline proposal, which would transport diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the gulf of Mexico coast, is in the news again because of the recent protests outside the White House and the because of the recent appointment of Senator John Kerry to the position of Secretary of State has bolstered hopes in the climate concerned community (which frankly should be everyone by now) that the Obama administration will ultimately reject the pipeline proposal. Hopes that were bolstered by the Obama’s state of the union address. But also because the journal Nature has thrown . . . → Read More: Mind of Dan: Thinking beyond pipelines Scott Vaughan, Canada’s departing Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, released his final report. In it he describes how the development of Canada’s natural resources is running dangerously ahead of Canada’s laws and policies to protect the environment. The Pembina Institute highlights the clearest example: . . . → Read More: Mind of Dan: Canadian Environmental regulations are falling behind I think a lot of debates we see in the environmental community boil down to people having different “theories of change”. A theory of change is simply that: a theory about how you think the world changes for the better. Some people think the world changes because of political movements. Others think it takes cultural shifts. Or economic transformations… Or radical technological change… Or some mix of the above. The important point is that it should be a working *theory*. That means it starts as a hypothesis (an initial guess) and then is tested through experimentation. If the experiments fail, . . . → Read More: Mind of Dan: Jon Foley on why environmentalists disagree with each other Having the leader of the free world state so clearly that we must respond to the threat of climate change is absolutely a good thing. Having him state that the path is both long and difficult is even better. But forgive me for being cynical; haven’t we heard all of this before? I truly hope my cynicism is unwarranted and that this is just a prelude to real action, but I’ll hold off on my excitement until Obama’s inspiring words are backed by actions. Until then we need to continue pushing for real solutions. Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity -Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013 The past weekend open-access advocate and activist Aaron Swartz sadly took his own life. He was 26 years old. Aaron accomplished more in his 26 years than most people do in a lifetime. At the age of 14 he co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification (RSS is what powers the Planet3.0 blogs section). He became friends with Lawrence Lessig and worked on creative commons , and was a co-creator of Reddit. Afterwards he became more . . . → Read More: Mind of Dan: Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013 The recent Australasian heatwave has been so unprecedented that the Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has had to add a new colour (purple) to represent the hottest region: . . . → Read More: Mind of Dan: The colour of hot or inadequate heatmaps (h/t Peter Sinclair) |
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