Hacked climate emails: conspiracy or tempest in a teapot?
By Pete Spotts | 11.21.09
For all its gee-whiz discoveries and its influence on public policy, science can be a messy, sometimes ugly enterprise.
When the science is paleontology, astronomy, or geophysics, internal politics, thinly or not-so-thinly veiled personal attacks, and water-cooler discussions among influential scientists about whose research is junk and not worth publishing draw a collective yawn from anyone outside the relatively small circle of researchers involved.
When the topic is global warming, however, look out.
This week, more than 169 megabytes worth of global-warming emails and related files were either hacked and/or leaked from computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Center in Britain and released to the world via the Internet.
(If you’re interested in poring through some 169 megabytes of emails and files, you can download 26-megabyte FOI2009.zip from here, then unpack it. You’ll need to set up a free account, then you can download the file.)
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How will California’s new TV energy standards affect you?
By Judy Lowe | 11.20.09
On Wednesday, the California Energy Commission approved new energy-efficiency standards to regulate how much electricity television sets sold in the state can consume.
When do the standards take effect? Jan. 1, 2011, with more stringent rules kicking in two years later.
Do they apply to the TV sets I currently own? No. They also don’t apply to any television set you buy next year. And you can keep using your TVs as long as they last.
What television sets will be regulated? All that measure 58 inches (1,400 square inches) or smaller.
How will future TVs be affected? By 2011, television sets sold in California stories must use a third less power than they do now. That goes up to a 49 percent power savings by 2013.
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Two big advantages of closed-loop geothermal systems
By Alexandra Marks | 11.19.09
When our heating contractor Tony Silverio told us we had a choice between a closed loop and an open loop geothermal system, our first inclination was simply to go with the least expensive.
That’s in part because we already knew we’d be spending significantly more upfront for a geothermal system than we would have for traditional heating in exchange for the long-term savings geothermal produces.
And one of our goals in renovating Sheep Dog Hollow is to test the assertion that building green and economically are no longer mutually exclusive. (I’m finding that they’re not, but only if you’re looking at a five- to 10-year time frame … but more on that later.)
While we wanted to go for the less costly open-loop geothermal system, Tony was quite clear that he’d recommend the more expensive closed-loop system.
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‘Going Rogue’: Is Sarah Palin a creationist?
By Eoin O'Carroll | 11.19.09
In her memoir, “Going Rogue,” Sarah Palin reveals that she has creationist leanings, explicitly rejecting the belief that humans and other species evolved from a common lineage.
There’s no precise definition of “creationism,” but the term generally encompasses those who oppose all or part of the theory – held almost universally by biologists and supported by overwhelming amounts of empirical evidence – that all known species are descended from a common ancestor or gene pool and that complex life arises as a result of random mutation and natural selection.
On the hard-core end of the creationist spectrum are biblically inspired “young-earth creationists,” who tend to believe that Earth is less than 10,000 years old, that humans coexisted with dinosaurs, and that God created all species “as is” in their present form. They usually don’t mind being called creationists.
On the other end are proponents of “intelligent design.” This hypothesis does not reject the timescale of evolution, nor does it reject the belief that all living things share a common ancestor. But intelligent design proponents do hold that certain living structures, such as the bacterial flagella, blood cells, and cellular pumps, are too complex to have arisen by mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection.
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Did 2008 Wenchuan quake strike because China filled a reservoir?
By Pete Spotts | 11.18.09
Scientists have seen this one before: Fill a reservoir behind a new dam, and, oops, you trigger an earthquake nearby not long after the lake is topped off.
Now, a team of researchers led by the University of Colorado’s Shemin Ge suggest that this could well be what happened with the devastating Wenchuan earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province in May 2008.
According to the Chinese government, the magnitude 8.0 quake left nearly 68,000 people killed, some 374,000 injured, and 18,500 people listed at the time as missing. Some estimates put the disaster’s price tag at more than $75 billion. You can read more about the quake here, here, and here.
The reservoir in question is the Zipingpu Reservoir. It was filled in late 2005 and reached its maximum water level in December 2006. The reservoir is situated between the two faults that ruptured during that quake.
