The Market Notices

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The insurance market seems to have noticed global climate change, according to this story:

The world’s second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.

In a report revealing how climate change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said the economic costs of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion a year in 10 years, hitting insurers with $30-40 billion in claims, or the equivalent of one World Trade Center attack annually.

(Thanks to Greg Mello for pointing this out.)

Zimmer on the Dawn of Medicine

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Carl Zimmer has a thoughtful take on the issues raised by a New York Times story this week on the First Chapter for the History of Medicine.

The NYT story talks about a 3,500-year-old painting showing the medicinal use of a plant, saying the researchers have “pushed back by hundreds of years the earliest use of a medicinal plant.” Says Zimmer, one of the most interesting writers on evolution these days (and thank heavens he’s blogging!), “Whoa.”

He suggests there is evidence that our hominid ancestors were using plants as medicines before we were human, before our brains got big. We did it, he argues, and only later had ideas about what it might mean. “Looking for the dawn of medicine in archaeology, rather than in human evolution, is like looking for stars through the wrong end of a telescope.”

The 2003 Outlier

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Dang but it’s hard to keep up with the climate blogging thing without David Appell for inspiration. But one must soldier on, most recently with a new paper from Martin Beniston in the latest Geophysical Research Letters on the summer of 2003 in Europe.

Model results suggest that under enhanced atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, summer temperatures are likely to increase by over 4?C on average, with a corresponding increase in the frequency of severe heat waves. Statistical features of the 2003 heat wave for the Swiss site of Basel are investigated and compared to both past, 20th century events and possible future extreme temperatures based on model simulations of climatic change. For many purposes, the 2003 event can be used as an analog of future summers in coming decades in climate impacts and policy studies.

Continue reading ‘The 2003 Outlier’ »

God Hates Shrimp

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These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.

And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:

They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.

Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

Leviticus 11:9-12

A Smart Mob of Suburban Parents

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Nora was returning this evening from a three-day trip with her theater group. She called from the bus about 6:30 p.m., saying they’d be arriving at her school in 15 minutes. I timed it, drove over, and arrived at the appointed time at a dark and empty campus. Within five minutes, at least ten other cars had pulled up, followed shortly by the bus.

Another example of how cell phones change everything.