Read the sunspots
Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.Because Hollywood and the mainstream press in America have pretty much decided that human activity have caused global warming, I am always interested when I come across reports of an alternative way of thinking .
Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change." --R. Timothy Patterson --Read the sunspots (Financial Post)
Environmental reporting is an area in which journalists who are sympathetic to the agenda of environmentalists (after all, who doesn't want clean water and air?) are too quick to pass along scary statistics and predictions that have little or no basis in scientific fact.
Recent Related Entries
At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the BlackboardAt M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required -- classical mechanics and electromagnetism -- but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered...
Global Warming: A Tale of Two Writers
While the Church gets a lot of guff for its skeptical responses to Galileo's astronomical findings, some Jesuit astronomers not only listened to his ideas but repeated his observations, and some university faculty members flatly refused to look through a...
Proving the Benefits of Peer Instruction
Another article that's on my mind as I consider how to integrate group work into an unusually large literature class. In an undergraduate genetics course, students were, on 16 occasions during the course of a semester, asked a pair of...
Ray Bradbury's National Geographic Essay
I like to think of the cosmos as a theater, yet a theater cannot exist without an audience, to witness and to celebrate. Robot craft and mighty telescopes will continue to show us unimaginable wonders. But when humans return to...
A New Fleet of Spacecraft - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
This NYT overview of the NASA craft designed to replace the space shuttle is a great example of 3D animation in a news context....

Leave a comment