Weekly Science Headlines

[fomenter]

kai
I kind of figured with you being in biology you would have a reasonable take on this. The fear mongering is my pet peeve with environmentalism, being stewards of the earth should be obvious, when i see the fear being spread i suspect ulterior/political motives or people buying the hype spread by those that have them.

on local extinction i agree niche species would be the most vulnerable , it is also true that nature abhors a vacuum better adapted life will always move in.

i don't know exactly how biodiversity works but it seems that bio diversity prospers in warm conditions and struggles in colder ones, the bigger threat to diversity i think may be us directly, pesticide/genetic seed companies, humans dragging life around the globe to environments it doesn't belong, plus all the pollution etc you already mentioned. the threat this in turn poses to us can come in unexpected forms (beehive collapse) and show up quickly


edit to add -- biodiversity also would seem to suffer during times of rapid change and prosper in times of steady or slow change, again i suspect the above mentioned human threats would be more likely to cause rapid change than changes to global temperature.

[Vene]

the split is over cause, man made vs natural cycle not if global warming is happening , the other split is between those who think it is increasing at a disastrous rate and those who say we cant predict. on the first split I go with undecided leaning slightly toward natural cycle, on the second I say cant predict yet

When I say global warming, I mean human caused global warming.  Warming from increased CO_s[ levels.  And lets look at the dissenting organizations.  link  Oh shit, there are none!  There's just a handful of nutjobs.

It would be a lot worse if not for the green revolution

politicians have influence on scientific opinion when they hold the purse strings "grants", politicians use those influenced opinions to create fear in the public and gain power from it.

link
The green revolution changed how crops were grown to make it more efficient.  This has shit all to do with politicians.  Politicians are fucking liars, don't listen to them.

news reporting on what scientists were saying

time magazine ice age
http://neoconexpress.blogspot.com/2007/02/time-like-newsweek-predicted-iceage-in.html#

and news week
Newsweek 1975: Scientists Predict Massive Global Cooling

I just fucking told you that the media is unreliable.  For fuck's sake there's a man who covers just how bad journalists are at covering science.  link

[Vene]

Just for fun, some academic sources related to global warming:
http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/academics/courses/203/Readings/SlipperySlope%2017Jun04v21.pdf
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/18/9875.full
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/globalwarmA.html
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ritter/geog101/textbook/climate_systems/climate_change.html
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/evidenceforwarming.htm

[Kai]

kai
I kind of figured with you being in biology you would have a reasonable take on this. The fear mongering is my pet peeve with environmentalism, being stewards of the earth should be obvious, when i see the fear being spread i suspect ulterior/political motives or people buying the hype spread by those that have them.

on local extinction i agree niche species would be the most vulnerable , it is also true that nature abhors a vacuum better adapted life will always move in.

i don't know exactly how biodiversity works but it seems that bio diversity prospers in warm conditions and struggles in colder ones, the bigger threat to diversity i think may be us directly, pesticide/genetic seed companies, humans dragging life around the globe to environments it doesn't belong, plus all the pollution etc you already mentioned. the threat this in turn poses to us can come in unexpected forms (beehive collapse) and show up quickly


edit to add -- biodiversity also would seem to suffer during times of rapid change and prosper in times of steady or slow change, again i suspect the above mentioned human threats would be more likely to cause rapid change than changes to global temperature.

Biodiversity both initially flounders and then increases during and after times of rapid change. steady and slow change tends to have a gradual effect on biodiversity. Instead of a marked drop and leap, its a gradual curve. There is a hypothesis called punctuated equilibrium, that says that lineages change the greatest at punctuated intervals, usually after a catastrophic event. The Permian-Triassic Extinction event lead way to the age of reptiles. The Cretaceous-Tertiary event lead to the "age of mammals". And then we have the 10-20 million year precambrian diversification (most often more incorrectly called the cambrian explosion), caused most likely by the newly oxygenated conditions. This caused a broad diversification of lineages, but also was the end of the Ediacaran life from the period just before. The post Cambrian extinction event saw the loss of many of the weird body plans you would find in the Burgess Shale fossil beds. The point is, we see life's history on earth as having periods of slow change punctuated by catastrophic upheaval leading to extinction and diversification. The tree of life is more like the bush of life, with a few lineages making it and the rest not.

The reason you see diversification after extinction is as you noted above, open niches do not tend to stay open long. Millions of open niches will soon be filled (over millions of years) by diversification of other lineages that made it. Still, 99% percent of all species that ever existed are nonextant. We're left with the 1% of life that actually made it. And there is nothing to say that diversity used to be higher or is higher now, except possibly in angiosperms and insects (I'd argue that insects have been working their way up since the mid paleozoic and aside from the current human induced extinction event, there seems to be no limit to the diversity that can come out of the insect body plan).

Biodiversty prospers when the greatest number of niches are available. The perfect example of this is tropical rainforests. However, climate change will affect the rainforest in the same way that climate change will affect all ecosystems. I'm not so sure whats going to happen. I do know that humans are screwing diversity to hell right now.

I once heard a lecture in undergraduate about biodiversity. The professor told a story about how he was confronted by a teacher once, a chemistry teacher who believed that it would be okay to destroy all life on the planet if it would keep humans alive for one more moment. He didn't know how to argue this with his teacher, he was stunned. He never wanted us to be left the same way, so he gave us some reasons to value biodiversity, things like for medicinal value, for food, for all the environmental tasks they do that we often take for granted, for aesthetic value, but also for the intrinsic value of live itself. I've been reading Reinventing the Sacred as I've noted elsewhere on this forum, and what strikes me as the most important point in that book is the emergence of agency, will, values that are intrinsic to living organisms, from bacterium to mammals, an unremovable part of the system of life. Free will is apparent, because agency is irreducible to physics.

--

Theres another essay I'm thinking of, by Barbara McClintock, the Nobel prize winner that worked with Corn genetics. It doesn't have so much to do with the above, but it has more to do with respect, and the kind of spiritual bond I see myself having with life. Many people wondered how she could work on such a long living organism as corn, when everyone else was working with bacteria. She said "you have to develop a relationship with your organism, you have to be patient and listen to what it has to say". Her patient and respectful relationship with her organism lead to our modern understanding of how genes move around in the DNA molecule, how they can be turned on and off. I want to see myself as having that bond with Cheumatopsyche as she had with Zea, but I also feel that bond to all insects.

[fomenter]

just for fun some articles claiming there is a debate amongst scientist on whether warming is Anthropogenic (man caused)
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,176495.shtml
http://www.petitionproject.org/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-481613/Global-warming-Its-natural-say-experts.html
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=110107A
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/lieberman-warner-debate-senator-rohrabacher-do-you-really-think-the-world-is-filled-with-morons/
http://canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm  also talks about political pressure put on scientist

http://canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5834/36?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=eske+willerslev&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8641
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/07/06/greenland_ice_yields_hope_on_climate/

[fomenter]

kia i am all in favor of valuing bio diversity, well written explanation.

[Kai]

And just because:





Pimp some (I believe) pictures of Cheumatopsyche. Larvae of Cheumatopsyche species have a number of diagnostic characters, but one of the most striking things that most Cheumatopsyche larvae have when alive is the emerald green abdomen. The head sclerites also don't seem to have any patterns, which is true for all Nearctic species in the genus. There are a number of diagnostic characters which I would have to look at to be sure, such as the shape of the fortrochantin (notched), the size of the poststernite sclerites on the prothorax (usually small but in some species can be large, which can confuse you with the genus Hydropsyche except if they are larger the anteromedial emargination of the frontoclypeus lacks a medial notch), the shape of the sternites on the 9th abdominal segment (notched postereorly), and just make sure there isn't a tubercle at the anterior margin of the underside of the head (which would make it genus Potamyia). I learned all of that through patience.

[fomenter]

troutnut. com - i am guessing a big fish can be caught with one? cool looking bug by the way

[Vene]

just for fun some articles claiming there is a debate amongst scientist on whether warming is Anthropogenic (man caused)
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,176495.shtml
http://www.petitionproject.org/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-481613/Global-warming-Its-natural-say-experts.html
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=110107A
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/lieberman-warner-debate-senator-rohrabacher-do-you-really-think-the-world-is-filled-with-morons/
http://canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm  also talks about political pressure put on scientist

http://canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5834/36?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=eske+willerslev&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8641
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/07/06/greenland_ice_yields_hope_on_climate/

Why no academic sources?  Why nothing from university websites?  Why no peer review articles?

Also,  @ you citing the DailyMail.

[Kai]

troutnut. com - i am guessing a big fish can be caught with one? cool looking bug by the way

Caddisfly larvae are aquatic, almost all species have aquatic larvae in that order, and the rest are semiaquatic. As adults they have vestigial mouthparts, can drink but can't feed, and look very much like moths. As larvae, their forms and habitats are diverse, from temporal ponds to streams, lakes, wetlands, springs and seeps, waterfalls, big rivers, and there are even species that inhabit tidepools. In addition to that, caddisfly larvae produce silk which they use to construct net seine retreats or other underwater capture net apparati, portable cases, and do other amazing behavioral things. Cheumatopsyche species are part of the family Hydropsychidae, the net-seine spinning caddisflies. These construct annular structures from which they hang silk nets that look like fishing seines to collect debris or invertebrates.

Since caddisflies are common in trout streams, trout fishers tend to be the people most interested in them, outside of Trichopterology and aquatic ecology.

Edit: was looking for some cooler pictures of Hydropsychid nets and found these:

[fomenter]

just for fun some articles claiming there is a debate amongst scientist on whether warming is Anthropogenic (man caused)
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,176495.shtml
http://www.petitionproject.org/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-481613/Global-warming-Its-natural-say-experts.html
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=110107A
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/lieberman-warner-debate-senator-rohrabacher-do-you-really-think-the-world-is-filled-with-morons/
http://canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm  also talks about political pressure put on scientist

http://canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5834/36?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=eske+willerslev&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8641
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/07/06/greenland_ice_yields_hope_on_climate/

Why no academic sources?  Why nothing from university websites?  Why no peer review articles?

Also,  @ you citing the DailyMail.

if you haven't already made up your mind look them up! the articles  give names jobs/universities of dissenting scientist i am just making the point that there is debate, yes the daily mail is biased (duh ) i culled out most of the wing nut links i have for that reason..

again just to be clear i am not saying global warming is absolutely not man made, i am saying it is being debated i may lean slightly on the side of natural cycles but i have come to no conclusion.
the fear mongering "we are all going to die imminent disaster" wingnuttery is highly suspect (AL gore kool aid ) and is about as dumb as saying there are no environmental problems the environment is there to be raped and pillaged by mankind at will

[Jasper]

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/09/stiletto-vs-dru.html

Anyone seen this?  It's a new Pentagon boat.  Top speed of sixty knots.

[Vene]

just for fun some articles claiming there is a debate amongst scientist on whether warming is Anthropogenic (man caused)
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,176495.shtml
http://www.petitionproject.org/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-481613/Global-warming-Its-natural-say-experts.html
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=110107A
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/lieberman-warner-debate-senator-rohrabacher-do-you-really-think-the-world-is-filled-with-morons/
http://canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm  also talks about political pressure put on scientist

http://canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5834/36?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=eske+willerslev&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8641
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/07/06/greenland_ice_yields_hope_on_climate/

Why no academic sources?  Why nothing from university websites?  Why no peer review articles?

Also,  @ you citing the DailyMail.

if you haven't already made up your mind look them up! the articles  give names jobs/universities of dissenting scientist i am just making the point that there is debate, yes the daily mail is biased (duh ) i culled out most of the wing nut links i have for that reason..

again just to be clear i am not saying global warming is absolutely not man made, i am saying it is being debated i may lean slightly on the side of natural cycles but i have come to no conclusion.
the fear mongering "we are all going to die imminent disaster" wingnuttery is highly suspect (AL gore kool aid ) and is about as dumb as saying there are no environmental problems the environment is there to be raped and pillaged by mankind at will

I'll stick to reading the actual science.  There's a reason I first went to the journals (followed by educational sites).  The 'global warming debate' is the same as the 'evolution-creation debate.'  It doesn't fucking exist.  The debate is more about the long and short term effects of warming, not whether or not it's happening.  The planet is warming, humans are (partially) responsible.  It can cause some major damage.

And Al Gore can just fuck off.  Stop.  Listening.  To.  Politicians.  Gore is not a scientist, he does not represent scientists.  I don't give a shit what Al Gore says.  I give a shit what the Federation of American Scientists says.  I give a shit what the American Meteorological Society says.  I give a shit what the Royal Meteorological Society says.  I give a shit what the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences] says.  Not what some fucking politician says.

[fomenter]

missing the point ...
the warming is not being debated scientist are good at taking measurements
the cause is being debated
the effects are being debated
the rate of warming is being debated
the political solutions to the conclusions being jumped to are being debated
the effects of political influence on scientists opinions on the above debates are being debated

[Kai]

Solutions would be good. If either of you have any I'm sure that the scientific community would be interested, because as far as I know, we don't have a clue how to fix it either.

Just thinking some more about Hydropsychid caddisflies....I would love to get an aquarium set up that could be easily viewed so I could take tones and tones of pictures of hydropsychid net retreats, actually, of hydropsychoidea net retreats in general. I mean, philopotamids make elongate sack nets with extremely fine mesh, Polycentropodids may trumpet shaped nets or open ended tube nets, Psychomyiids build complex tube networks on rocks out of sand, Dipseudopsids make their tube networks underground with entrance and exit holes and build a net within one tube through which they siphon water to collect detritus. Its just all so cool.