Buck Naked Politics

Climate Change Climax

posted by Cockney Robin | After days, of "bitter wrangling," they sealed the deal (BBC). Environmental groups are disappointed that there are no firm targets for emissions reductions  (BBC).  Canada, the US, and Japan rejected the EU's press for cuts of 35-40% by 2020  (BBC)  The final text doesn't set targets but acknowledges the need for "deep cuts in global emissions."(BBC)   And hey, at least they've got a roadmap---"the Bali roadmap"! (BBC)   And everyone agreed that delay in reducing emissions makes severe climate changes more likely (BBC).   

The World's Cutest Endangered Rodents

Posted by Damozel |  At the BBC website, this extraordinarily cute and "mysterious" desert rodent is caught on film for the first time here and here and here.  It looks like a hamster---I am very fond of hamsters---but with giant ears and a ridiculously long trailing tail with a black and white tassel at the end, like a Victorian lamp.

According to the article, this is the first time the long-eared jerboa has been caught on tape.  But there is plenty of footage at YouTube of jerboas with slightly less amusingly disproportionate ears.   

Stem Cell Researchers Slam Bush Administration for Standing in the Way of Science

Posted by Cockney Robin & Damozel   | Don't let the wonks and shills blind you with science.  That Bush forced scientists to find a workaround is not only not to his credit, it is an embarrassment and a disgrace.  Though I applaud the scientists, I can barely keep from punching a hole in my laptop screen when I read the self-serving gloatings from America's far right.   And Wisconsin professor James Thomson--- one of the very stem cell researchers praised by Bush---has 'slammed' the Bush Administration for the impediments it placed in the way of progress and the right wing for its self-congratulations for a misguided policy.

New Stem Cell Research 'Vindicates' Sweet F.A.

Posted by Cockney Robin | I am so bloody fed up with the self-congratulatory gloating of American conservatives.  Deconstructing Demagogue quotes Charles Krauthammer---who does more self-serving rationalisation to prove wrong thinking is right than practically any pundit ever----as follows  "the embryonic stem cell debate is over. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president -- so vilified for a moral stance -- been so thoroughly vindicated. (quoted in Is Bush’s Stem Cell Policy Vindicated?)  I'll give him 'vilified.'

Signs of Global Warming: Attack of the Jellyfish

Posted by Cockney Robin | Are the jellyfish, maddened by the impending climate change, organising themselves to take revenge?  Northern Ireland's only salmon farm has lost 100,000 fish at one site and 750,000 at another (BBC News) to an attack by billions of tiny jellyfish, travelling in "a dense pack 10 square miles and 35 feet deep." (BBC News)  At the Northern Ireland farm, a dozen workers tried to rescue the salmon, "but their three boats struggled for hours to push their way through the mass of jellyfish.  All the fish were dead or dying from stings and stress by the time the boats reached the pens..... The sea was red with these jellyfish and there was nothing [they] could do about it, absolutely nothing." (SeattlePi.com)   

New Breakthrough in Stem Cell Research?

Posted by Cockney Robin  | Will a scientific breakthrough permit scientists to alter ordinary human skin cells so that they "take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells"?  According to this article, two landmark papers released on Tuesday report on the success of two different laboratories in reprogramming the skin cells of mice. (SPI via Memeorandum)   Both groups reported creating cells that behaved like skin cells in a variety of tests. (SPI)    "The "direct reprogramming" technique avoids the swarm of ethical, political and practical obstacles that have stymied attempts to produce human stem cells by cloning embryos,"  declares API science editor Malcolm Ritter. (SPI)   Since so many Americans, and especially George W. Bush, believe that every stem's cell's sacred,  let us pray.

Climate Change: Ending an Irrelevant Argument

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of climate change, watch this video. It's not designed to change  -- or even address -- anyone's opinion.  It merely discusses the possible courses of action and their consequences, and it is possibly the most lucid thing I've heard anyone, pro or con, say on the subject. Watch it. It will be nine minutes well spent.

glumbert - The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See

Scientist Withdraws Paper to Prevent Misuse by Creationists

Posted by Cockney Robin | 52 years after its publication, a former chemistry professor has retracted a 1955 scientific paper to prevent its misuse by creationists.(NYT)  At the age of 84, Dr Homer Jacobson discovered in an idle moment's google search that he has attained a sort of fame he neither sought nor could accept:  his paper, 'Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life' has become a popular resource for creationists who want to prove that life could not have begun on earth without divine intervention.(NYT)

Jacobson described the revelation as 'hideous.'  One publication,  "Darwinismrefuted.com, for example, says that Dr. Jacobson’s paper “undermines the scenario that life could have come about by accident.” Another creationist site, Evolution-facts.org, says his findings mean that “within a few minutes, all the various parts of the living organism had to make themselves out of sloshing water,” an impossible feat without a supernatural hand."(NYT)  (He also, and incidentally, discovered a number of substantive problems which fueled his desire to retract it.)    While he has no objection to religion, he objects to being made the enabler of 'malignant' denunciations of Darwin.(NYT) 

British Nobel Laureates: Stripping the Gilt off Gore's Win? (Updated)

Posted by Cockney Robin  (photo by Tim Ereneta) |  Poor Al Gore.  At this rate, soon there will be no gleam left on that Nobel prize, to the delight of envious sods everywhere. And--sadly, because I like and admire the man---the spoilers have in every instance emanated from my country's storied isles.

First, and on the very weekend of his win, there was all that abject  nonsense centering around a British judge's remarks concerning Gore's film.  Last week, British geneticist and acknowledged scientific genius Dr James Watson stepped right in it by placing on firmly racialist grounds both the woes of the entire African continent and the ordinary tensions of the British workplace.  Because he is a geneticist, his comments definitely seemed to weigh more than those of other elderly gentlemen who might entertain similar views in a strictly personal capacity. They did not endear him to the American left (among others). 

Now 88 year old Doris Lessing (winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, bless her little cotton socks), has created alarm and consternation on the American Right (though not only on the Right, as you shall see) by suggesting that the Americans are simply making too much of 9/11.  Here's what she said: 

Elderly Nobel Laureate Demonstrates Selective Nature of Intelligence.

 Posted by Cockney Robin |  Not many scientists seem prepared to concede this point, but being a scientist, and even a genius, doesn't necessarily mean you're good at logic, and specifically at spotting the flaws in your own thinking processes.  Dr James Watson, the 79 year old Nobel laureate helped unravel the double helix, and earned his place in the history of science and for that we are, and must continue to be, profoundly grateful, 

But knowing all there is to know within his specialty doesn't mean he can't be as wrong-headed as the next person when he holds forth on matters outside it----though, like many scientists, he appears not to understand where his area of expertise leaves off.  So now, prompted by Christ knows what conviction that he had a useful "truth" to impart, he has expressed an opinion which---though merely an elderly man's personal opinion---will or might or could easily be taken and exploited by certain ill-intentioned people as a legitimate conclusion of Capital-S Science.... 

According to The Independent, Watson became "embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that 'equal powers of reason' were shared across racial groups was a delusion."(Independent)  Or, more specifically,...

More on Gore and Media Memes: Did "A Gaggle of Journalists" Misreport the "9 Errors" Case?

Posted by Damozel | At the science blog Deltoid, blogger Tim Lambert challenges the report that Gore's views on climate change have somehow been discredited by a British high court judge or indeed that the judge found nine errors.  As we explain in our own piece, the man who attempted to get An Inconvenient Truth banned from British schools argued that it contained nine errors, but the BBC and other papers don't seem to have read the judge's conclusions sufficiently closely.  Lambert---whose piece I  just found via Memeorandum--- goes after the misreporting of this decision and the consequent media misrepresentations.  In his initial piece, he alleges:

Unfortunately a gaggle of useless journalists have misreported this decision as one that AIT contained nine scientific errors. Let me name some of the journalists who got it wrong: Sally Peck in the Daily Telegraph, Nico Hines in the Times, Mike Nizza in the New York Times, James McIntyre in the Independent, PA in Melbourne's Herald Sun, David Adam in the Guardian, Daniel Cressey in Nature, the BBC, Mary Jordan in the Washington Post, Marcus Baram for ABC News, and (of course) Matthew Warren in the Australian.(Deltoid) 

Quoting directly from the opinion of Mr Justice Burton,

A Response to the Critics Acid Raining on Gore's Parade (UPDATED)

 A RESPONSE. Earlier today, my colleague D Cupples pointed out that now Gore has that Nobel Peace Prize, critics are "acid raining on his parade."   

Most of this vitriol-spraying seems to have got its impetus from the media coverage of the conclusions of a British high court judge who had been asked to decide whether An Inconvenient Truth should be banned from British schools.  The 'school governor' who asked for the ban seems to have alleged that it contained nine errors.  The judge eventually included that it should not be banned, but that it should be shown with appropriate caveats and British teachers have been accordingly directed to provide appropriate cautions (in the form of commentary) when they show it.  That's the source of the '9 scientific errors' ballyhoo:  the findings of one British high court judge who was being asked to ban the film from the schools.  Furthermore, Mr Justice Burton does not in fact conclude that the film contained nine scientific errors or that its central thesis was incorrect. 

Delightfully Fast

Posted by Nicholas |  Have you seen this article?  I doubt it, because it wasn’t featured very prominently. I almost missed it myself.  It was on the Daily Telegraph news site, where I frequently visit, but it was in the second string list of articles at the bottom.  And yet this story, if it is true, is devastating.  Think of it – we have always been told that it is impossible (not almost impossible or maybe impossible, but im-bloody-possible) for anything to travel faster than the speed of light. And that’s that, end of discussion.  Then all of  a sudden these two scientists announce that they have managed to make an object travel “instantaneously” between to points.  That is to say, in no time at all.  No time at all, of course, is faster than the speed of 186,000 miles per second that light takes to go from A to B. 

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Score One for Cooler Heads

Posted by PBS Mind | It's no secret by now that the Bush Administration's favorite way of dealing with trouble – or even with anything they don't want to think about or which doesn't go along with their peculiar world view – is to ignore it as long as possible. And it's become evident that their respect for the law is predicated on convenience.

So it should come as no surprise to you that the Bush Administration has been conveniently (there's that word again) ignoring (oh, and that one, too) a 1990 law that requires the United States Government to assess and report on global-warming data. Fortunately for us, someone was watching.

A New and Different Alarming Threat from Climate Change

  Posted by Cockney Robin | Before I get started, let me just say that this article raises an alarming question about the effects of global warming which it answers almost immediately by explaining that probably we don't need to be too fussed.

But I prefer to worry.  If I have enough different things to worry about it all at the same time, all my individual worries seem comparatively less urgent.  Perhaps the human mind is so constituted that it can only panic about one threat---or for the multi-taskers, at most three---at a time.  Or maybe it's just me.  If you look at all the things threatening your/our/humankind's dominance hold on life and dominance over nature, you start developing a certain detachment or at least a certain tolerance for different sorts and kinds of threat.  One day, terrorists; another day, avian flu; now, ancient microbes released from deep in the ice by global warming.

Speaking of which, according to this story, scientists have unfrozen some extremely old and nasty ice from glaciers. Ancient microbes 'revived' in lab (BBC News).   The ice ranged in age from 100,000 years to 8 milliion years.  It contained microbes, some evidently new to science.  And when the ice melted (under laboratory conditions), some of the microbes came back to life (BBC News). Showing that if climate change occurs, and the ice caps melt, "ancient bugs, long frozen in ice, will return to life as climate change causes the glaciers to melt, flushing their genetic material into the oceans."(BBC News).

Drug Causes Man to Bleed Green, like Spock

I couldn't resist this story, as it somewhat involves Star Trek's Mr. Spock. I always liked him. In fact, when a man I recently refused to date called me "Vulcan bitch," I felt somewhat flattered. The BBC reports:

"A team of Canadian surgeons got a shock when the patient they were operating on  began shedding dark greenish-black blood, the Lancet reports. The man emulated Star Trek's Mr Spock - the Enterprise's science officer who supposedly had green Vulcan blood."

Reportedly, the patient's blood changed colors because he'd taken large doses of a migraine drug called Sumatriptan. Five weeks after he stopped taking the drug, his blood appeared normal.

(Photo link from BBC News)

Heated Debate

Posted by Nicholas | There is more joy in heaven for a sinner who repents…   That’s a really good idea if you can get your timing right – have a life devoted to pleasure, sin as much as you like, look down on all the boring goodie goodies, and when your time is almost up, probably when you’re too frail to sin very much anyway, repent ad see the light.   Then up to heaven you go, to join in all the celebrations at your conversion, while all the virtuous prigs, whose arrival is no surprise to anyone, are let in by the side door and told to go sit on a cloud somewhere and shut up.  Of course, if you die early, before repentance time, you’re screwed, but you get the idea.