Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet came to Caltech and gave SASS talk on Monday night, and ran a science media messaging workshop entitled Speaking Science Bootcamp all day Tuesday. It was great. Anybody who’s getting a PhD in science should go through at least that much communication training, and if they’re in an area that has policy implications, or they have any interest whatsoever in doing outreach or communication of science, they should have a week long course on the same material.
Continue reading Science Framed at Caltech
Our Drought Aware Shower
Water rates in all of the SoCal MWD are going up this summer by 15-30%. Drought has been declared. There’s talk of Lake Mead being completely dry by 2021, and our shower has decided to conserve water. It refuses to stay on for more than a few seconds at a time, strongly suggesting that you conserve water. At first this might seem annoying, but long showers have been a guilty pleasure of mine, and I actually don’t mind getting some backtalk from the plumbing. Continue reading Our Drought Aware Shower
Bicycle Building Trance
Because my bicycle is my only non-pedestrian transportation, and because I have only one bicycle, major maintenance is terrifyingly imperative. It strands me. My annual tear-down, cleaning, and re-build is a focusing event. You might say this argues for having more than one bike, and I might agree, except that any time I’ve had more than one bike, it’s felt like having a mistress (or so I imagine). Continue reading Bicycle Building Trance
The Two Mile Time Machine by Richard B. Alley
I just finished reading Richard Alley’s little book The Two Mile Time Machine. It’s by far the best climate change book I’ve read so far. More information, less polemic. Personally I would have loved more plots and fewer long complex sentences explaining the relationships between different climatic variables, but maybe that’s just because I’m a scientist. Continue reading The Two Mile Time Machine by Richard B. Alley
How important is local food?
From a purely climatic point of view.
Assuming the following:
- For each calorie of food you consume, the equivalent of 9 additional calories worth of gas were burned to get the food to your plate (this is industrial food production).
- You eat 2000 calories per day.
- Your car gets 30 miles per gallon.
- Each gallon of gas contains the equivalent of 30,000 calories worth of energy. Continue reading How important is local food?
Freeman Dyson on Climate
The futurist and physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books on Climate Change. He’s a very (very) bright guy, but I think he is wrong. Actually, I think that the whole framing of the climate issue in the media, in the government, and possibly in many scientific circles, is wrong. Continue reading Freeman Dyson on Climate