San Francisco Chronicle: “When the climate warms, there is a drop in the abundance of the ocean’s phytoplankton, the tiny plants that feed krill, fish and whales, according to scientists who say the just-released research offers new clues to future life under global warming. Ocean temperatures bounce up and down, but over the past century they have been warming along with the atmosphere. Nine years of NASA satellite data released today in the journal Nature show that the growth of phytoplankton drops in warm ocean years and increases in cooler ocean years.”
This Week in Food Chain Problems
– December 7, 2006Posted in: Global Warming
Magic Hours by Tom Bissell: This marvelous collection of essays chronicles everything from film shoots to novelists rescued from oblivion. (The essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, with its portrait of raucous factions, unexpectedly reveals how soft today's literary world has become.) But if you peer between the cracks of these smart pieces, you may very well see how cultural lives are formed from the most unexpected life choices. And as we follow Bissell's development as a writer over the years, that goes for Bissell as well. (
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway: Harkaway's latest novel greatly improves on his previous book, The Gone-Away World, which I'm already on record as praising. Angelmaker adopts genre elements without ever feeling like a genre book, and it leads me to believe that Harkaway is well on his way to a narrative grace close to China Miéville's. Yet inexplicably this very fun book, which includes an eightysomething badass named Edie Banister, a mysterious mechanical object that may destroy the world, farcical scenarios involving lawyers and the police, and some unexpectedly moving moments about fatherhood, doesn't appear to be getting much attention in American newspapers. Nothing from the snobs at The New York Times Book Review, nothing from The Washington Post. And since I can't get Harkaway on Bat Segundo, I hope this Jump Up and Down mention gets you hopping as well.
The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel: Unless you're really pressed for time, forget Jonah Lehrer. If you want to understand creativity and its relationship to neuroscience, then the bowtie-wearing Nobel laureate is your man. In addition to being a physically beautiful book (you will drool over many of the paintings), there are helpful overviews on optical illusions, science, biographical backgrounds, and many vital figures from the Vienna Secession. Kandel's enthusiasm (and his call for greater unity between the humanities and science) is contagious.
Dennis Miller was on Jay Leno the other night and held up a 1971 scientific journal crying out the ‘downfall of all’ as scientists predict global cooling and the dramatic effects it was having on our oceans. That was only 30+ years ago!
Now we have a complete 180 degree turn? I don’t think they have anywhere near a handle on this yet.
Where I live we have large open prairie and the scientists are crying “dust bowl” and “Desert” in a hundred years. Then a soil erosion specialist at the University does a report and says that we are simply in a cyclical change and that the prairies were like that 300 to 400 years ago that is in fact how the prairies came to be.
Global warming-status quo….no one knows. My two bits.
Care to name this ‘scientific journal’ or cite the article? Did Dennis Miller?
Word, dude: don’t get your science from late-night TV.
Well Dude I think it was Popular Science or American Science or something of that nature. Dennis did show it as he opened the mag to the article of which he quoted.