This is the third in a series of articles published by InsideClimate News disclosing that ExxonMobil was conducting an extensive internal research project internally to analyze the effect of carbon emissions on atmospheric CO2, global warming and climate change. It’s clear from the material described and presented in the article that ExxonMobil, within its science group and at the highest management levels, was aware of the risk of climate change from carbon emissions. Notwithstanding that knowledge, ExxonMobil decided to protect its business model and go down the denial path.
What’s amazing is how accurate the ExxonMobil scientists were in their projections of the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and the effect those levels of concentration would have on global warming.
Here’s an example of an internal memorandum. An explanation of this memo, including more on its contents, the context in which it was written and delivered and the identities of the author and addressee, are included in the article.
A timeline of ExxonMobil’s research and external outreach efforts on the climate change issue. If the text is too tiny or blurred, a better copy, which you can enlarge, is included in the article.
Ever wonder how coal formed?
Well I’M ready for the holidays.
Three quarters of Britain’s juniper is found in Scotland, where it’s important not only to local gin production but also to wildlife, such as the juniper shield bug. Plantlife Scotland has published a free guide to help both professional and amateur botanists and horticulturalists identify, survey and protect the plants. Anyone can participate in the group’s survey and guardianship project.
(via Protect British juniper or risk losing gin’s distinctive flavour (Wired UK))
Without scientific understanding, we don’t run the government, the government runs us” -Carl Sagan, in his final interview.
Last week we released a big batch of new CC-BY licensed content for Citizen Maths a free online course for adults who want to improve their grasp of maths at what in the UK is known as Level 2 (the level that 16 year old school leavers are expected to reach, though many do not).
(Image: Jonathan Worth, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The new course content covers the powerful ideas in maths of “uncertainty” and “representation”. It sits alongside the content for “proportion” which was published last year.
Learning about each idea is supported by a mix of short video tutorials, practical exercises, and quizzes. The practical exercises use a range of approaches including:
* tools like spreadsheets;
* purpose-built self-standing “apps” of various kinds;
* coding in Scratch.
Each powerful idea is shown in action in several different contexts. For example, “uncertainty” involves the following situations:
* Making decisions — value of insurance, risk comparisons;
* Judging — the meaning of cancer screening results;
* Gaming — appreciating odds in roulette, dice, horse-racing;
* Modelling — the uncertain prediction of the weather.
The powerful ideas and the situations in which they are shown in action have been selected in consultation with maths teachers, and with organisations familiar with the learning needs of adults.
http://boingboing.net/2015/11/03/citizen-maths-freeopen-math.html
New Guinea is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world, with more than 1000 distinct languages crammed into an area not much larger than the state of Texas.
Despite this rich variety—for comparison, Europe contains about 280 languages—linguists have only analyzed the grammatical structures of a fraction of the South Pacific island’s languages. Now, Simon Greenhill, a linguist at Australian National University in Canberra, is trying to remedy that situation, by gathering together hundreds of thousands of words from published surveys, book chapters, and articles, as well as the accounts of early European explorers, and putting them into an online database called TransNewGuinea.org.
Updated daily, the site already contains glossaries for more than 1000 languages from 23 different language families, including 145,000 words. There are roughly 1000 different words for “water,” as well as for “louse,” and linguists and language enthusiasts can view all the languages by geographic origin in an interactive map.
Greenhill introduced the scientific community to the site(PDF) this week in the journal PLOS ONE; already, he has used the database to look for clues about how the different languages are related. Through comparative, historical, and computational analyses of the data, he hopes the linguistic community will now use the site to solve long-standing questions about how New Guinean populations expanded and spread their culture.
Africa has done little to contribute to global warming, but it showed some serious climate leadership this week by announcing a $20 billion plan for a massive renewable energy initiative. New goals under the African Renewable Energy Initiative, announced Tuesday at the United Nations climate summit in Paris by the African Development Bank and heads of state, would bring 300 gigawatts of renewable energy online by 2030—that’s twice as much electricity as is currently produced on the continent.
‘Tired of Being in the Dark,’ Africa Announces Radical Renewable Energy Plan | GOOD
Africa, still covered in large swathes of pristine wilderness, is likely to lose much of its biological wealth if dozens of new massive development projects—from highways to railroads to pipelines—get the green light, according to a new study. Most of the projects are designed to increase agricultural production and ease the transport of minerals such as iron and coal. Yet if all are built, they’ll create a spider web of some 53,000 kilometers of corridors through deserts, forests, and savannas—and a host of environmental disasters, scientists say. Even worse, they contend, most won’t help the continent feed its people, even though this is the primary justification behind many of the projects.
“Africa is undergoing the most dramatic era of development it’s ever experienced,” says William Laurance, an ecologist at James Cook University, Cairns, in Australia, and the study’s lead author. “No one disputes its need for food and economic development. But these corridors need to be built without creating environmental crises.”
The scientists’ study is a follow-up to aprevious one they published last year inNature warning about the unprecedented number of road and transportation projects being planned globally.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the myriad of options in the haircare section of your local store, but it turns out that of all those products, the formula within most shampoo and conditioner doesn’t vary much across brands.
A new Y Combinator company, Function of Beauty, is looking to change all that.
The company lets the user choose a scent and describe their own hair type, with options from straight to curly, dry to oily, and thin to coarse hair. From there, users can choose different hair goals, combining things like strengthening to heat protection to anti-frizz.
Function of Beauty currently offers 450 million different combinations based on hair type and goals.
(via Function Of Beauty, Backed By Y Combinator, Offers Customized Shampoo And Conditioner | TechCrunch)