5 posts tagged “news”
NPR has a two-part series this week on the comeback of Bald Eagles in the Chesapeake Bay area.
The first part includes a lengthy interview with a biology professor from my alma mater, William and Mary (in the Center for Conservation Biology, which did not exist while I was there). Even better, there is this animated map showing nesting locations from 1970 to 2000 (go to the site to see the animation).
The second part focuses on the competition for Bayfront property between private land owners and the eagles. Eighty percent of the eagle breeding areas are on private land, so their fate is in the hands of individuals.
Related to my post yesterday on plastic bag-hate. NPR had a good story this morning on San Francisco's proposed ban on plastic bags. The grocery industry opposes it. But their logic doesn't hold water.
"In our opinion, it will frustrate our efforts to continue to reduce, re-use and recycle carry-out bags," Larkin [president of the California Grocers Association] said.
On the other hand, Larkin conceeded that
[There will be a] potential domino effect if San Francisco bans plastic grocery bags. Larkin says he expects a potential ban here would spread in California. The bags have already been outlawed in South Africa, Taiwan and Bangladesh. Ireland imposes a plastic-bag tax.
My prediction? The world will continue to turn around its axis even if plastic bags are outlawed everywhere. And sea creatures will be spared from swallowing them (thinking they are food) and suffocating to death.
This looks like an interesting book. I took a class with Orrin Pilkey, lo those many years ago, and he's a bit of a nut, but he does know what he's talking about based on on-the-ground observation and experience. My first reaction to this was "what the hell?" but then reading further I realized I totally agree. My Master's was based on an ecological model I developed of a commercial fishery in Chesapeake Bay. It was developed using a tool that was intended to make such modeling as transparent as possible. When I gave my results, I gave ballpark ranges, not predictions. I think when used that way, with all the caveats, assumptions, and weaknesses of the model fully laid out and understood, then models do have their place. We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater and give up on modeling just because we can't accurately predict the future with them. They are a tool, one which has to be used with caution and with common sense and instinct fully intact.
February 20, 2007
NY Times Books on Science
The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies
By CORNELIA DEAN
When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.
Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.
Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach. (more at the link above)
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Excerpt from Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future
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Excellent quote from the first page of the book:
Whenever I hear a fishery scientist proclaim that his analysis is rigorous, I am reminded about what John Kenneth Galbraith is reputed to have said once to a group of economists: that the prestige of mathematics has given economics rigor but, alas, also mortis.
-Jim O'Malley, fishing industry representative and executive director of the East Coast Fisheries Federation
Guess I was always ahead of the curve, though we don't even own a Prius:
Vegetarian Is the New Prius
By Kathy Freston, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted February 7, 2007.
Livestock destroy the environment, so fill your bowl with veggies instead of veal.
President Herbert Hoover promised "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." With warnings about global warming reaching feverish levels, many are having second thoughts about all those cars. It seems they should instead be worrying about the chickens.
Last month, the United Nations published a report on livestock and the environment with a stunning conclusion: "The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming.
CNN Science and Space News
'Smoking gun' report to say global warming here
POSTED: 10:27 a.m. EST, January 23, 2007
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Human-caused global warming is here -- visible in the air, water and melting ice -- and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.
"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling."
Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went even further: "This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles."
The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is being released in Paris next week. (More at the link above)
