First Burmese pythons, now this:
At the Aups market, the black truffle’s price has more than doubled over the past five years, to about €850 per kilo ($560 a pound).
Farmers say production is down by 50-75 percent this winter season and they blame global warming, warning that if thermometers keep rising — as many scientists predict they could — France’s black truffle will one day be just a memory.
Will the madness never end?
Via Stoat, I see a nice story in USA Today about an interesting new analysis by some clever folk* on the history of the old “global cooling” canard:
The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.
The ’70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.
* For full disclosures, read last paragraph of USA Today article.
I find the combinatorics of language simply staggering.
In today’s Zippy the Pinhead, Bill Griffith has a character say:
“When Mark Twain is picture smoking a pipe, he certainly looks contented.”
A Google search shows that not only has that sentence never been committed to the Googleverse, but that a simple five word subset has never been digitally uttered within earshot of Google’s bots. I find that richness of variety in language simply staggering.
My modest attempts to understand energy economics have left me unprepared for today’s hundred-dollar-a-barrel milestone. With the U.S. economy teetering on the brink of recession, future demand is expected to be low, which the smarty-pants economists tell me should mean lower oil prices. Yet…
Thankfully for my ego, the folks at the Daily Diary of the American Dream are similarly puzzled:
The U.S. economy is slowing, and so is China’s. The growth in gasoline consumption is ebbing, particularly in the U.S., as three years of steadily increasing pump prices bite. The International Energy Agency has cut its forecast for 2008 oil-demand growth by nearly half a percentage point. U.S. supplies of crude oil and gasoline are rising.
So today, for the first time ever, oil closed above $100 a barrel. To be precise: $100.01.
What gives?
Matthew Nisbet has an interesting post up today about the future of science journalism. He sees it in things like Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth, or the excellent Yale Forum on Science and the Media. Nisbet wonders whether these sorts of non-traditional approaches are the future of my business:
With fewer and fewer outlets for science coverage at the mainstream news organizations, The Observatory, Dot Earth, and the Yale Forum represent the future of science journalism. The future will be online, in film, and/or multi-media, merging reporting with synthesis, analysis, personal narrative, and opinion. The goals will be to inform but also to persuade and to mobilize. And most importantly, it will be non-profit, sponsored by universities, museums, think tanks, foundations, professional societies such as AAAS, or government affiliated organizations such as NSF or the National Academies.
I strongly disagree.
As I said in the comments on his blog, I love the sites Nisbet cited. I expect a large proportion of you, at least the science wonk part of Inkstain’s modest readership, already read Dot Earth and the like. But Inkstain and Dot Earth have a self-selected readership. I love what Revkin’s doing on the blog, but it does not come close to the importance of what he does in the main paper. This is because the newspaper thrown on readers’ driveways (do New Yorkers have driveways?) reaches a broad audience, not merely the self-selected audience that adds Revkin to their RSS reader. I love reading the New York Times (I read it in paper form) as much for the exposure to ideas I never would have sought out. I love writing for the Albuquerque Journal because I think the issues I cover are important, and working for a broad circulation newspaper allows me to get those issues in front of the eyeballs of people who might not have sought them out, but who I believe will benefit by being exposed to them.
Dot Earths and Flocks of Dodos are great, but in terms of reach they will never replace the opportunity afforded by broad circulation mainstream media.
Nora needs some help from some of you sciencey types. Head on over….
The water wonks have been all over the story about Tucson’s problems with low-flow toilets: not enough water to get the, umm, solids to the sewage treatment plant. I’ll go with Shaun McKinnon:
Tucson’s sewer pipes may have a case of the feeble flushes, suffering from cramps brought on by too little water in the system.
Michael Tobis had a post today about Lance Armstrong’s plans for an 18,000-square-foot bike shop in Austin that seems, at least in part, to be marketed at the bike commuter:
“This city is exploding downtown. Are all these people in high rises going to drive everywhere? We have to promote (bike) commuting…”
The thing is, as I mentioned on Michael’s blog, you don’t really need an expensive bike shop (and expensive bike gear) for bike commuting. But you do need it to promote a consumer culture surrounding bike commuting. And it may be that, in order to make bike commuting work for those same upscale people who drive expensive cars when cheap cars would do just as well, you need to create an upscale consumer culture around bike commuting to make the whole thing work.
So I guess this is a good thing.
John Mashey, in the bowels of an old thread, had this to say on the incentives and disincentives to rational transit economics:
Think about the logical effects of local statutes that a certain amount of parking spaces be provided per resident, worker, or customer. In effect, parking spaces are required, thus spreading buildings further apart, and *incenting* people to use cars more, because now, the spots are there.
John suggests Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking
A reader raises an interesting question about the Easy-Do Parties lady: Why is she alone in the kitchen, and why do the party guests in the background appear to be on fire?
Nora, an expert in electricity and people being on fire (or, perhaps, the magical arts) suggests that the Easy-Do Parties lady (her name is Betty) is a “elemental mage” with a specialty in electricity. This allows her to harness the power of Thor to set her party guests aflame. (Note the electrical sparks being emitted from her wooden spoon. Imagine her power were she to use a metal spoon.)
Our reader suggests another possibility: “Perhaps it’s actually the late sixties, and this liberated woman has laced her goose liver fondue with acid.”
