Kit Stolz

The Pope: Another Denier?

Pope Benedict has drawn praise from enviros for his appeals to preserve the planet. Now, in light of a child abuse stain spreading over the church from the Munich Archdiocese, one begins to wonder if the Papacy was speaking so boldly about the environment to cover up other sins.

In the words of Hans Kung, the premier German philosopher and Catholic thinker today, in a piece for the National Catholic Reporter called Ratzinger's Responsibility:

Why does the pope continue to assert that what he calls
"holy" celibacy is a "precious gift", thus ignoring the biblical
teaching that explicitly permits and even encourages marriage for all
office holders in the Church? Celibacy is not "holy"; it is not even
"fortunate"; it is "unfortunate", for it excludes many perfectly good
candidates from the priesthood and forces numerous priests out of their
office, simply because they want to marry. The rule of celibacy is not a
truth of faith, but a church law going back to the 11th Century; it
should have been abolished already in the 16th Century, when it was
trenchantly criticized by the Reformers.

And that's Kung the philosopher. When he gets down to the details of the allegations, it looks even worse for Pope Benedict.

Which raises another question: Why are German philosophers, who from the time of Kant have been notoriously impenetrable to readers, so much more straightforward to read today than American thinkers?

California condors spread their wings over central coast

Really good front-page news from the Monterey Herald — an egg has been spied in a nest of young California condors living in the Pinnacles Mts., far away from the site of the endangered species into the environment in Ventura county about two decades ago.

In other words, the species appears to be re-establishing itself in California, after a near-brush with extinction.

Biologists at Pinnacles National Monument are celebrating the first condor egg laid by a mating pair inside the park boundaries in more than a century.

The egg marks the latest encouraging development in the slow recovery of the endangered flying giants in the regions they historically inhabited. The effort has been hampered by hunters and lead poisoning of the birds.

A female released in 2004 in the park that straddles Monterey and San Benito counties, and a male released the same year 30 miles west at Big Sur, had been observed engaged in courtship behavior earlier this year, park spokesman Carl Brenner said.

"They are now the proud parents of a small egg," Brenner said.

What really makes the story is the picture that goes with it, which is just so cool. Makes one want to be a condor, just to be able to live in a beautiful aerie far far above the madding crowd.

Almost. Still kinda like being a human, despite my species' flaws.

Birds adapt to environmental change…and humans too

A friend points me to a fascinating article about how bird wings are changing as their habitats change.

(The article can be found on a terrific new conservation/habitat research site, Conservation Maven - I've bookmarked it, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in land/conservation issues.)

In short, the researcher found that in boreal forests, which have been greatly diminished by habitat loss, bird wings would become pointier, to further birds ability to fly, in an era of habitat loss. In temperate areas, where forests are in contrast recovering, he battle deforestation. In temperate areas, where forests are coming back, the researcher Andre Desrochers hypothesized that the birds' wings would become rounder, to help with take-off and landing in leafy areas.

This was just what he found, in 11 out of 21 species. This tells us that evolution is not over. That's true for us too. In a story in the Wall Street Journal, Melinda Beck looks at recent human evolution, and finds many examples of how we have changed in the last 10,000 years…and the last 100 years.

Not all of the changes have been good. A researcher at Texas Tech has a great phrase for this:

And some body parts that provided a benefit at some time in human history pose challenges today—a phenomenon Texas Tech University geneticist Lewis I. Held Jr. calls "bislagiatt," an acronym for "but it seemed like a good idea at the time."

Among the examples Held cites are hanging testicles (useful for keeping sperm cool, but vulnerable to injury), a narrow pelvis (useful for walking, but dangerous for childbirth) and the appendix, which researchers now believe was once useful for fermenting bacteria to help humans digest, and is believed to be of no use now. .

Well, at least researchers now have a theory about that…for more, see the excellent story

Speaking of which, the WSJ now appears to be moving its science reporters to the llifestyle/"news you can use" beat. Well, it's better than pushing them out the door en masse, the usual evolutionary response.

The queen of Hostel Obispo

Last night my wife and I stayed at Hostel Obispo, in San Luis Obispo, a charming place in a house over a hundred years old, with fresh sourdough pancakes and fresh-ground coffee in the morning, lots of interesting chatter, and a lovely neighborhood.

All that was great, but especially great was this character, Chloe, who appears to run the place. One of the kids who runs the hostel — named Johnny — told me that she has her own social life, entirely independent of the hostel, that folks comes to see her, take her out on walks, weekends at the beach.

Perhaps she's waiting for one of them now…

Alice in Wonderland, the movie, the beta

According to the ever-sensible Ken Turan of the Los Angeles Times, middling.

According to the ever-brilliant David Edelstain of New York, delightfully garish.

According to Metacritic, the critical consensus comes in at 55 on a scale of 100, mixed or average.

This puzzles your truly. Tim Burton's movies aren't always great, but they're never "average." Who else could even make a movie called Corpse Bride? And be successful with same? The reaction may be mathematical, yet it still bewilders.

But as long as Tim Burton is allowed to continue making big movies, with all the visual and creative resources given to a man in his position, yours truly will not complain. No one else in the business is a true artist — a man who can draw and paint and so much more — as is Burton.

No matter. Truth is, what will happen with this movie, even if is being released by family-friendly Disney, was probably best described by a texter from the addictive site, Texts from Last Night:

im pretty sure every drug dealer is going to be able to retire the day after alice in wonderland comes out

El Nino sceptic repents as rain continues to fall

Bill Patzert and "The Los Angeles Times" are likethis, as the gossip columnists say, and deservedly so: the newspaper is by far the biggest in the West, and Patzert is the most interesting forecaster in our region, perhaps the country.

For one, he admits when he gets it wrong. How many other forecasters confess?

He said that after studying satellite images, he thought this El Niño year would be similar to the one from the record dry spell in 2006-07.

But this time, Patzert concedes, it was his forecast that was all wet.

"I was wrong. I repent," he said. "This thing had longer legs than I thought it would."

But he's also the king of the meteorological/historical/climactic quote; for instance, from a recent interview with the funny Patt Morrison at the paper, here he is talking about the history of California…

California is an amazing weather story and water story — you can't separate the water from the weather. There's nothing natural in California anymore. We changed the Sacramento River during the Gold Rush. We changed the [San Francisco] Bay Delta and Imperial County [with] aqueducts. There's enough water in Southern California for 3 [million] or 4 million people, and now it's pushing 20 million.

L.A. is almost 5 degrees warmer than it was a century ago, essentially because we've done an extreme makeover. Urban heat islands. [Irrigation] makes it warmer. A lawn or a golf course captures heat. We used to have a couple of days a year above 95 degrees. Now we have two-week heat waves. So anybody who thinks that Californians haven't had a profound impact on the climate . . .

Who else could say as much in as few words? Well, perhaps a graph from a study of his:

Yes, I'm a fan. So shoot me.

Global warming skeptics see a couple of trees, miss forest

Those who would like to see humanity take action to reduce the harmful effects of global warming have had a frustrating couple of months, due in part to over-reaching by those urging action.

Skeptics and deniers had a field day when, for instance, Al Gore claimed the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer in as soon as five years, based on the work of a scientist who quickly insisted he had said no such thing.

It's frustrating not just because Al Gore should know better, but because although his mistake looks bad to the uninformed, in the broader picture it's a trivial error.

That's right — trivial.

The Arctic probably won't be ice-free in the summer by 2015…but ice-free in the summer by 2023 is a real possibility, or so I was told at the 2008 American Geophysical Union by J.C. Comiso, an expert on ice-sheet dynamics at GISS. No one raised an eyebrow over this estimate: it's middle of the road.

Similarly, the deniers are crowing because the 2007 IPCC report included a projection that the Himalayan glaciers that support five major rivers, on which one billion people in Asia depend for water, were estimated to be likely to melt away by 2035.

The actual date in which these glaciers are estimated to disappear?

2050.

That's according to a tiny story on page A6 in the Los Angeles Times published today, too small, unfortunately, to be included in the on-line version. Here's the full gist of the detail:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been under fire after it was found that one of its 2007 reports wrongly included a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035. The figure should have been 2050.

So, by the apparent logic of the skeptics, because those who worry about global warming over-reached slightly, we can safely ignore the effects of an ice-free Arctic nor a Tibetan plateau without glaciers.

All that will still happen — but not as soon as some feared.

Excuse me for asking, but why is reassuring?

Nonetheless, apparently it is…as veteran science journalist Charlie Petite puts it, in his mild way:

One thousand parts per million CO2, here we come?

The problem with global warming

It's the wrong phrase, as "gentleman cartoonist" Keith Knight so wittily demonstrates:

Or, as Barry Goldwater might say, extremism in defense of weather is no vice.

Antarctic ice in broad-scale retreat: USGS

According to the USGS, the Antarctic ice shelves contain about 91% of the world's frozen water. So news that they are melting across the full extent of the planet's coldest continent, and have been steadily since l949 because of global warming, is not great news, despite what deniers such as George Will call the "tantrums" of climate scientists.

In the introduction to the paper, the team of international researchers warns:

Antarctica is Earth’s largest reservoir of glacial ice. Melting of the
West Antarctic part alone of the Antarctic ice sheet would cause a
sea-level rise of approximately 6 meters (m), and the potential
sea-level rise after melting of the entire Antarctic ice sheet is
estimated to be 65 m (Lythe and others, 2001) to 73 m (Williams and
Hall, 1993).

Yes, that's a heck of a lot of ice. Won't happen overnight. But the map of the melting is not reassuring.

The geographers write (speaking of the ice shelf connection to Charcot Island):

From 1947 to 1986, southern Wilkins “b” [connection] was fairly stable, with only a slight amount of retreat. By 1990, southern Wilkins “b” exhibited an increased rate of retreat (table 7A). Retreat continued until 1997, then the rate of retreat increased from 1997 to 2000 and increased consider- ably more from 2000 to 2002 (the period of fastest retreat), with some measurements showing a retreat of more than 1.5 km a-1. The retreat of both Wilkins “a” and Wilkins “b” ice fronts from 2002 to 2009 left only a narrow strip of ice pin- ning the shelf to Charcot Island. When the ice bridge fractured in 2009, Wilkins “b” ice front disappeared. Considering that the flow of the ice shelf is in a northerly direction (Vaughan and others, 1993), there is little recharge of ice to this area, leaving it very unlikely that the ice shelf will recover.

Oh well. After all, George Will tells us we have had "no statistically significant warming since l995."

The hamburger of the future?

A prize-winning image from a Science magazine visualization competition:

An explanation from Science: "…marine scientistJennifer Jacquet of the University of British Columbia in Canadaand digital artist Dave Beck's illustration uses this absurd,grotesque image to make their point: Overfishing and climatechange have significant consequences for marine ecosystems.As the numbers of larger fish dwindle and ocean temperaturesrise, the sea becomes more and more ideal for the floating creatures,Jacquet says."

Scary thing is, although the jellyfish burger might be grotesque and not be that tasty, the idea is not so absurd: the proliferation of huge jellyfish and squid has already been observed along the coasts of Japan and California.

h/t: Bioephemera