Garfield and Dinosaurs

So the comic doesn't want me to embed it and I assume they wouldn't want me to upload it for copyright reasons so go here to enjoy.

Yay dinosaur references!!!

T. Boone Pickens on The Daily Show

So after my last post I figured I would include the extended interview Jon Stewart had with T. Boone Pickens earlier this week.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - T. Boone Pickens Extended Interview
www.thedailyshow.com
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Mr. Pickens is someone who made his money in the oil and gas industry and is now an advocate of trying to get off of OPEC oil and converting to cleaner natural gas that we can find within the US. Mr. Pickens has also been an advocate of other alternative energy sources including wind power.

Wind Power in Oil Country

When most people think of west Texas they think of oil. The southern high plains and areas nearby have long produced many barrels of oil. This is largely due to the presence of the Permian Basin that made this area a rich area at one time. In recent times oil production has decreased as the peak oil for this area has long since been removed. This has led to an economic depression of sorts in cities such as Midland/Odessa and surrounding areas. But some of this is starting to change.

In the mid-1800s when farmers first started settling the southern high plains a major problem to agriculture in this area is the lack of water. At some point in time water was discovered in the Ogallala Aquifer in the rocks making up the Ogallala fromation as well as some of the underlying Cretaceous rocks. This water would allow farmers to grow plants that would not normally have naturally grown. In order to get this water up from the deep the water needed to be pumped up from these depths. To accomplish this task windmills, like the one at left [photo at left of a windmill at the National Ranching Heritage Center (Wikipedia article) in Lubbock, Texas from ~1898 taken by author], were built that would use the naturally occurring high winds in this area to pump the water up (as someone who has living out on the southern high plains trust me the wind is almost always blowing).

Wind is continuing to serve the southern high plains today. With the decline in oil the future in energy is starting to move toward alternative fuels. In Lubbock there is a place known as the American Wind Power Center (Wikipedia article) which showcases the past present and future in wind power. In the wind power center they have a fully functioning moder windmill. Often times these modern windmills are accused of being loud but as you can see in the video I posted to YouTube earlier today is that the windmill itself is quieter than the wind itself. Most of sound that the windmill itself produced could not be heard until right next to it. What is more is that the farmers whose land is being used to put up many of these wind farms enjoy having them, just as they enjoyed having the oil wells before. The footprints of the wind farms are less than those of the oil fields before them and also give the farmers subsidies that are on par with or larger than their subsidies from the oil companies. And after the initial construction of the windmills farmers can continuing farming the land as they were before. All of these things contribute to making west Texas the wind power capital of the U.S.



As with oil before it the future of American power rests in west Texas!

Why you should pay attention in science class

SMBC shows us all why we should pay attention in science class in their comic for today.




EXACTLY!!!!!!

It can be done!

It may at times seem impossible for us in the west to completely give up our coal, oil, and natural gas usage for energy. Well according to a story in the New York Times a Swedish city has managed to almost completely do that.

But Kristianstad has already crossed a crucial threshold: the city and surrounding county, with a population of 80,000, essentially use no oil, natural gas or coal to heat homes and businesses, even during the long frigid winters. It is a complete reversal from 20 years ago, when all of their heat came from fossil fuels.

But this area in southern Sweden, best known as the home of Absolut vodka, has not generally substituted solar panels or wind turbines for the traditional fuels it has forsaken. Instead, as befits a region that is an epicenter of farming and food processing, it generates energy from a motley assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines.

What they have done is to use the agricultural products to produce methane and then capture this to burn to produce steam to turn the turbine in the power plant. They also manage to take some of this and convert it to fuel for cars. Methane is a type of natural gas and as with natural gas it burns much cleaner than these other sources of energy. This source of energy would be hard to manage in some of the larger cities in the U.S. and Europe but for areas where there is already plenty of agricultural waste this is a potential energy source.

The difference between this and the use of ethanol as the U.S. mandated for gasoline is that it uses waste. The ethanol that the U.S. uses comes from corn this is corn that could have been used for eating or agricultural land used for something else. Instead this uses waste that has already been produced and will be produced no matter what and converts it into natural gas.

In the United States, biogas systems are rare. There are now 151 biomass digesters in the country, most of them small and using only manure, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The E.P.A. estimated that installing such plants would be feasible at about 8,000 farms.

So far in the United States, such projects have been limited by high initial costs, scant government financing and the lack of a business model. There is no supply network for moving manure to a centralized plant and no outlet to sell the biogas generated.

Still, a number of states and companies are considering new investment.

It is nice to see that the idea is making inroads into the U.S. but it makes sense considering that consumers want to continue to receive cheap electricity but the backlash against higher carbon producers and against drilling and mining in general. This is positive but more work needs to be done as we try to clean up our act on the environment.

More Climate Change Memes Refuted

Potholer54 (for other posts discussing him and his other channel Potholer54debunks see here, here, here, here, here, and here) has done a good job in his video series on climate change and has now taken to refuting the many internet memes that seem to be continually popping up out there. In this video he takes on the idea that the BP oil spill is stopping the Gulf Stream and the idea that snow was going to stop in the UK due to climate change.

Must See

As someone currently doing research on pterosaurs I find this movie to have a high level of potential. Along with the pterosaurs it stars Sir David Attenborough.



The write up on the official webpage, go here to learn some cool stuff about the pterosaurs themselves as well, says:

220 million years ago dinosaurs were beginning their domination of Earth. But another group of reptiles was about to make an extraordinary leap: pterosaurs were taking control of the skies. The story of how and why these mysterious creatures took to the air is more fantastical than any fiction.

In Flying Monsters 3D, Sir David Attenborough the world’s leading naturalist, sets out to uncover the truth about the enigmatic pterosaurs, whose wingspans of up to 40 feet were equal to that of a modern day jet plane.

The central question and one of the greatest mysteries in palaeontology is: how and why did pterosaurs fly? How did creatures the size of giraffes defy gravity and soar through prehistoric skies?

Driven by the information he finds as he attempts to answer these questions, Attenborough starts to unravel one of science’s more enduring mysteries, discovering that the marvel of pterosaur flight has evolutionary echoes that resonate even today.

I hope this comes to the states soon, the next mission would then be to find a near by IMAX

Vaccines Save Lives!!!

There is no question that the above statement is true but there are many out there who would have us not vaccinate ourselves and our children because of a made up link between autism and vaccines. Recently the British Medical Journal, BMJ, called the only study that anti-vaccine personalities cite saying that vaccines cause autism, fraudulent. This obviously struck a nerve with Jenny McCarthy. Some of the statements that she makes are not only wrong but they are anti-science and anti-medicine. Now while I am not as qualified as some, go here if you are really interested, let me address just some of her concerns.

Dr. Wakefield did something I wish all doctors would do: he listened to parents and reported what they said. His paper also said that, "Onset of behavioral symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps and rubella vaccination in 8 of the 12 children," and that, "further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome [autism with gut disease] and its possible relation to this vaccine."

Believe it or not most doctors do listen to their patients. They have to in order to figure out what is wrong with us. When you go in to the doctor when you are sick does he ever just look at you and take a guess at what you have? No, he asks questions to try to narrow down the focus and then runs some test to see what he can find. As for the MMR vaccine there have been millions of dollars spent trying to see if it does cause autism. So far there have been no studies that conclude that vaccines cause autism, I say none because the one study that did has been retracted. An example can be found here in which those involved found:

Measles, mumps and rubella are three very dangerous infectious diseases which cause a heavy disease, disability and death burden in the developing world. Researchers from the Cochrane Vaccines Field reviewed 139 studies conducted to assess the effects of the live attenuated combined vaccine to prevent measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) in children. MMR protects children against infections of the upper airways but very rarely may cause a benign form of bleeding under the skin and milder forms of measles, mumps and rubella. No credible evidence of an involvement of MMR with either autism or Crohn's disease was found. No field studies of the vaccine's effectiveness were found but the impact of mass immunisation on the elimination of the diseases has been demonstrated worldwide.

Jenny McCarthy continues

American media, why aren't we hearing from these parents? If Brian Deer's allegations are actually false, if the Lancet 12 parents stand with Dr. Wakefield, then what exactly are moms and dads supposed to think about last week's media circus?

I know children regress after vaccination because it happened to my own son. Why aren't there any tests out there on the safety of how vaccines are administered in the real world, six at a time? Why have only 2 of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism? Why hasn't anyone ever studied completely non-vaccinated children to understand their autism rate?

Jenny you just included quotes from the parents why don't you include quotes from parents whose children were infected with some of these diseases. There have been tests, see above, to see how safe the vaccines are in the real world.

Here is the real thing though. These vaccines are not 100% safe, no medicine is, but these diseases were/are worse. In the U.S. we have almost completely eliminated these diseases as seen the the graph below. The problem is that, as seen here and in the wikipedia article on the controversy, as people fight against these vaccines many of the diseases that can be prevented are making a come back and what is more is that we are losing our herd immunity. There will always be some who won't or can't be vaccinated for whatever reason but they were protected by the rest of us having been vaccinated, they/we are losing this now. Also those with immunodeficiency disorders or who have been taking drugs that suppress their immune system will be at high risk because they can't fight off the disease vaccinated or not.



Jenny your stance and people like you are distracting people and resources from being spent looking for the real cause of autism.

If you want to read more about the history of the anti-vaccine movement it appears that two new books have just come out which you can read a long review of one of them here and a quick review here.

Update: A blogger better equipped than me has responded

2010 was the Warmest Year on Record

Well it was at least tied with 2005 that is according to studies released by NASA (their study released for the Meteorological Year which ended November 30th says the same thing) and NOAA. According to the USA Today article covering the news:

The Earth's average temperature in 2010, as in 2005, was 58.12 degrees, which is 1.12 degrees above the 20th-century average of 57 degrees.

It was the 34th consecutive year that the global temperature was above average, according to the data center. The last below-average year was 1976

Greenman3610 at the climate crock blog does a better job breaking this down than I could have so head over there to read up on it.

Miller/Morris Debate

One of the most popular debates on Evolution vs Creationism was the Miller vs. Morris debate of 1981 held at Brown University. Well now the NCSE has a posting of the transcript as well as the audio of the debate online. The transcript can be found here and the 4 videos that make up the audio portion found below. Also if you want to download an mp3 of the debate it is available in 4 parts on the transcript page of the NCSE's website.

Note: Each video is about 50 mins long so be prepared for a long day if you are to watch them all. If you want to go to the specific pages for all of the videos click the label for each video.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Also subscribe to the NCSE's YouTube channel.

But it's cold!!!

I return to Lubbock from Pittsburgh and the low the next morning was in the single digits with a negative wind chill, that means that global warming is false right? Well I have stressed this point enough that most of my readers should know that obviously that is not true. Anyway here is a more humorous video explaining the difference than the last time I used this title.