Knight Science Journalism Tracker - Updates

Knight Science Journalism Tracker Home Suggest Stories About Us Staff Contact Us Log In Register to Comment New Scientist : How long before green energy becomes just energy source to be capped?

What a terrific story. New Scientist’s Anil Ananthaswamy throws his vision into full-fisheye, wide-angle mode to put human use of energy into long term future-history context. Do that, he writes, and it starts to become clear that at some point, there can be too much energy even if it is all green energy. This is an outlier scenario that puts today’s arguments over the price of energy – both directly economic and indirectly environmental – into sharper focus.

The theme question embraces such things as whether solar panels with their surface albedo change, wind turbines with their sapping of wind, and all such energy use by civilization with its heat production, don’t eventually become environment disruptors themselves.

We’re not there yet, he reports, except in a few local and regional instances. But it’s surprising that a “green” energy global eco-fiasco is even foreseeable. The message is that if our civilization is to continue to thrive into the distant future, somehow we must figure out how to get almost [...]

Wall Street Journal: No need for global warming panic ; Daily Mail: Forget global warming ; James Hansen : Don’t forget, and get busy.

A couple of stories got to this tracker over the weekend:

1) The Wall Street Journal‘s Op-Ed page on Friday provided it’s opinion (again) that rising CO2 is probably good for us and won’t change the climate much and that those scientists who say so are doing it for the grant money while shutting out contrary voices within science. I don’t ordinarily read the Journal’s editorial pages, but a brother-in-law to whom I am very close even though we reside at opposite poles in politics asked me to read it and tell him what I think.

It’s a letter, signed by 16 scientists and engineers. It has several points: More and more scientists and engineers doubt GW’s magnitude is great enough to spur significant action, global warming has stopped for at least the last ten years and was already rising more slowly than various groups expected, CO2 is not a pollutant because it is already in the air and not toxic at levels now or foreseeable, [...]

Llamar la atención con el cerebro de Messi, predecir crímenes, y aprovechar el litio chileno en lugar de sólo venderlo

(English intro to Spanish lang post) A few stories from Chile today: the first is about extremely fast decision making in elite athletes. The article is extensive and very well written, but it is presented to the readers as if scientists were analyzing Lionel Messi’s brain (the Barça world’s best soccer player). They are not. It seems that researchers cited Messi as an example, and the reporter created a whole story about his “unique” capabilities. The second story is about software that analyzes climate, economic factors, darkness of streets, previous delinquency and many other elements to predict crimes in specific areas and moments.

We also reflect on a story suggesting that Chile needs to support research on lithium batteries to take full advantage of its huge resources. The point is that Chile may get lots of money as one of the world’s biggest exporters of lithium, butit can get much more if it built the batteries itself. But will take investment in research now to get such an industry [...]

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