Drought and Climate Change

Another great video by Greenman3610 talking about how climate change is effecting the drought that is destroying agriculture in much of Texas right now.

This Strawman is Getting Old

The last of the Golden Crocoduck videos has been posted by Potholer54 and while there isn't going to actually be voting this year, for reasons you can see here, I figured I would still post this video. I have heard this nonsense so many times and have heard it refuted but as long as creationists keep using it it will keep having to be debunked.

History Channel

So anyone who has followed me for a little while on Twitter will know my feelings about what the History Channel (Wikipedia page), and to a lesser but still important extent Discovery Channel, has become, and I am not the only one (but I can't find a relevant link right now so please post some in the comments if you come across them). A channel that used to have mostly shows that were based on true history now has shows called Ancient Aliens and MonsterQuest that contain very little to no actual evidence except for maybe one piece of evidence that we "can't explain", yet. It also contains shows that seem to have very little to do with true history such as Ice Road Truckers, or all of the equally "relevant" IRT shows. I will admit that sometimes I will take a guilty pleasure in watching one or two of those shows but it has been so long since I have regularly tuned in to History Channel that when my channel guide showed Vietnam in HD (Wikipedia page which as of the time of writing looks pretty new), which must have been a new show, I was caught off guard but didn't stop because I figured that was one of those series you had to see from the start. Also the History Channel owns what used to be known as History International (now H2) and that used to show more shows like what History Channel used to show but has now become nothing more than more of the same. It was also why I was glad to see this week's South Park make fun of what the History Channel has become (relevant clips below, 2 of which are below the fold, and the full episode can be found here). Now I should state that there are good shows on History/H2 but to me it seems that they are trying to get away from history and more on to entertainment which kind of leads too a little bit of false advertising.

A History Channel Thanksgiving
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Evolution and Thanksgiving

SMBC is at it again this time combining evolution with thanksgiving also dinosaurs because who doesn't love dinosaurs. Yes I know this was posted on their site almost a week ago but I have been busy.

The Daily Show on Climate Change and those oh so evil scientists

I am sure by now most people are familiar with The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, if you aren't you must have been living under a rock. Well last night's episode Jon discussed how the new BEST data continues to support the conclusion that the earth is warming.

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Now while that wasn't perfect, the "climategate" scandal was a lot of stuff taken out of context and Jon doesn't ever acknowledge that, he does point out how no body is talking about this, well except for him. That is why I am trying to let everyone know.

Now naturally with more evidence supporting climate change the next "logical" question is what are scientists up to? For this he sends Aasif Mandvi to find out in the clip below the fold.

Why we need NASA!

I have made the case in the past that NASA is important to our understanding of science and how the universe works, oh and that it is just cool as well. Well Neil deGrasse Tyson (Twitter and Facebook), a great popularizer of science in general and space in particular (oh and also an Astrophysicist), has been saying similar things, although much more elegantly than I, and that trend apparently continued this year at TAM. This video was put together by pointmanzero using some amazing images of space and Tyson's speech from TAM and it is quite moving and even without seeing him you can tell how much Dr. Tyson loves this stuff.



H/T lefayad1991

The "BEST" Climate Data

I have been quite busy this month and don't expect that to slow down any time soon but I will try to get a few posts together before I leave town for a few days early next week. Anyway I am sure most of you have heard that the UC Berkeley team released their climate data earlier this week and, shocking to no one but the climate change denialists, it feel in line with all previous climate change data. Greenman3610 was quick to put out a video to show this and it is up to his normal quality.

Happy 150th Birthday Archaeopteryx

I was hoping to have the book Archaeopteryx: Icon of Evolution by Peter Wellnhofer finished by today but as life has gotten in the way I have not been able to do that, hmm maybe I should read not that I am feeling inspired...

150 years ago today (today being 30 September 2011 and 150 years ago being 30 September 1861) an article was published by Hermann von Meyer which while only being 2 paragraphs long the first of which said this [German from the H. v. Meyer (1861) and English translation from Wellnhofer (2009)]

Nachtrüglich zu meinem Schreiben vom 15 verflossenen Monats Kann ich Ihuen nunmehr mittheilen, dass ich die Feder von Solenhofen nach allen Richtungen hin genau untersucht habe und dabei zu dem Ergebniss gekommen bin, dass sie eine wirklich Versteinerung des lithographischen Schiefers ist und vollkommen mit einer Vogel-Feder übereinstimmt. Zugleich erhalte ich von Herrn Obergerichtsrath Witte die Nachricht, dass das fast vollständige Skelet eines mit Federn bedeckten Thiers im lithographischen Schiefer gefunden worden sey. Von unseren lebenden Vögeln zeige es manche Abweichung. Die von mir untersuchie Feder werde ich mit genauer Abbildung veröffentlichen. Zur Bezeichnung des Thieres halte ich die Benennung Archaeopteryx lithographica geeignet.
[In addition to my letter of the 15th of last month I can now report that I have carefully studied the feather in all respects with the result that it is a real fossil from the lithographic shale and perfectly agrees with a bird's feather. Coincidentally I received a message from the "Obergerichtsrath" Witte that an almost complete skeleton of an animal covered with feathers was found in the lithographic shale. It showed several differences from living birds. The feather I had studied will be published along with a detailed description. For the name of the animal I consider Archaeopteryx lithographica as suitable.](emphasis mine)

Obviously there has been some confusion if the feather should be the type specimen or the fossil of the whole animal, which would eventually become the London Specimen, but the ICZN has clarified it as the animal is the type specimen so no worries anymore.

Archaeopteryx is an amazing find and even if it isn't a true bird it represents more than that. The specimens showed transitions between animals it has the feathers and many of the body parts of a bird but they are not completely bird like, it also has long claws and the teeth of the dinosaurs. This showed that dinosaurs and birds were related and while Darwin never used it as an icon for evolution it truly is one. 150 years ago paleontology was still young and we were still trying to understand what we were looking at to find an animal with feathers and dinosaur traits then was amazing and never heard of, after all animals fit neatly into their groups. Today a feathered dinosaur gets its five minutes of fame, nope doesn't even get a full 15 anymore, and then disappears where only paleontologists seem to remember it. It is amazing to see how far we have come! So in honor of that I figured I would share some links to other sites celebrating the day, links to my posts on closely related subjects (if I find more I will post them and if you have anymore feel free to share them in the comments), and some of the pictures I took of one specimen of Archaeopteryx, the Thermopolis Specimen, I was lucky enough to see. Enjoy and do something to celebrate the amazing animal that became part of the scientific record today!

Links:

The Witmer Lab is celebrating by unveiling a webpage that will link to some of their fancy 3D pdfs so I will let you go to their announcement page.

David at History of Geology talks briefly about the first feather.

Dinosaur Tracking gets a rare guest post from the associate web editor for Smithsonian.com Brian Wolly on his recent trip to Munich and getting to see the, surprisingly nick-named, Munich Specimen

My Pages:

My visit to the Houston Museum of Natural Science in which I got to see the Thermopolis Specimen.

My book review on the book Solnhofen: A Study in Mesozoic Palaeontology by K.W. Barthel, N.H.M. Swinburne, and S. Conway Morris which is the locality from where all the Archaeopteryx specimens have been found.

Pictures (below the fold to speed up page loading and all images are by the author)

2011 Arctic Sea Ice Minimum

So it appears we have reached the sea ice minimum for 2011 and it is depressingly low, close to the record low of 2007. Greenman3610 has a video wrapping up the sea ice minimum for the year.



Below the fold is a video by NASA explaining the importance of Arctic sea ice, I figured 2 videos in one post on my main page would probably slow down the page loading too much

Burden of Proof

So I wanted to publish this last week when the video first came out but I had some technical problems with blogger and therefore didn't sorry. In this video David Mitchell pretty much says what I have been saying for a long time, even if the earth isn't warming and/or humans aren't the ones doing it then why shouldn't we just make a better world to make a better world?