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Oldest Fossil of Ape Discovered | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/35555/title/Oldest-Fossil-of-Ape-Discovered/ fossil ape science research knowledge
shared by grayton downing on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • genes of living primates tell us that the ape lineage, which includes humans, diverged from the Old World monkeys such as baboons and macaques during the late Oligocene period, between 25 and 30 million years ago. B
  • Now, a team of paleontologists have found two new species in Tanzania’s Rukwa Rift Basin that help to fill this gap
  • species were found in sediments that date to precisely 25.2 million years ago.
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  • first new fossil was unearthed in 2011, when the team found a molar belonging to the oldest known Old World monkey or cercopithecoid, which they named Nsungwepithecus gunnelli. A year later and 15 kilometers away, they found the oldest known remains of a hominoid or “ape”—a jawbone and four teeth belonging to a new species that they dubbed Rukwapithecus fleaglei. 
  • fossils from the late Oligocene are rare, partly because there are few deposits of the right age and they tend to be covered in thick vegetation.
  • “That implies that the hominoid-cercopithecoid divergence was well underway.”
  • the new discoveries expand the range of Oligocene primates from a handful of fossils in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, to the more southerly country of Tanzania. This location also suggests that the ape and Old World monkey lineages arose against a background of great geological upheaval. By the time Rukwapithecus and Nsungwepithecus appeared, the climate was warming and the flat Tanzanian landscape had already begun to fragment into mountains, deep rifts, and lakes, creating the beginnings of the Eastern African Rift. These changes could have created many new habitats, and fueled the diversification of the local primates.
  • were expecting [similar] fossils to occur in a more tectonically stable landscape, and were searching to the north in Kenya, Libya, and Egypt,”
  • “The Rukwa Rift Basin Project has succeeded in destroying those preconceived notions and opens many new possibilities.”
  • We suspect that by 25 million years ago, there were already several independent lineages of both apes and monkeys in Africa, but paleontologists just haven’t found their fossil remains yet. We are soon headed back to the field to try to find some more!”
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Whoops! A creationist museum supporter stumbled upon a major fossil find. - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...mbled-upon-a-major-fossil-find evolution
shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Adhering to the most extreme form of religious creationism, the exhibits "prove" that the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.
  • Unfortunately, Nernberg just dug up a 60-million-year-old fish
  • Local outlets report that the man is far from shaken by the bony fish, which he found while excavating a basement in Calgary.
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  • He just doesn't believe they're that old. And he's quite the fossil lover.
  • We all have the same evidence, and it’s just a matter of how you interpret it,”
  • “There’s no dates stamped on these things."
  • Just, you know, isotopic dating, basic geology, really shoddy stuff like that.
  • the science of dating fossils is not shaky -- at least not on the order of tens of millions of years of error -- so this fossil and the rocks around it really do give new earth creationism the boot.
  • But this can go down as one of the best examples ever of why it's downright impossible to convince someone who's "opposed" to evolution that it's a basic fact: If you think the very tenets of science are misguided, pretty much any evidence presented to you can be written off as fabricated or misinterpreted.
  • scientific community is thrilled and grateful for the find, and the University of Calgary will unveil the five fossils on Thursday.
  • It's an important point in Earth's evolutionary history, because new species were popping up all over to make up for the ecological niches dinos left behind.
  • Ironically, Nernberg's contributions at the Creation Science Museum are almost certainly what scientists have to thank for the find
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Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...sil-jaw-ethiopia-olduvai-gorge science Technology brain science fossil family tree
shared by catbclark on 05 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree
  • The new Ethiopian fossil, announced Wednesday online by the journal Science, pushes the arrival of Homo on the East African landscape back almost half a million years, to 2.8 million years ago. The date is tantalizingly close to the last known appearance, around three million years ago, of Australopithecus afarensis, an upright-walking, small-brained species best known from the skeleton called Lucy, believed by many scientists to be the direct ancestor of our genus.
  • "This narrows the time period in which we can now focus our search for the emergence of the human lineage,"
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  • The authors of the Science paper point out that the only known specimens of A. sediba are almost a million years younger than the new Homo jaw from Ethiopia that they would have had to have given rise to.
  • "The idea that [the new jaw] makes anything else unlikely to be an ancestor is ludicrous," says Grine. "That would pretend that the fossil record is complete. And we know it can't be, since they just discovered something that wasn't there before."
  • "But it's still too soon to say that this means climate change is responsible for the origin of Homo."
  • Since it is unlikely that the three contemporaneous species Homo habilis, H. rudolfensis, and H. erectus evolved large brains independently, it follows that their common ancestor had already set the course toward an enlarged brain, much earlier than previously thought.
  • This could reestablish the link between the appearance of larger brains in the hominin lineage and the first stone tools.
  • So perhaps H. habilis—depending on how far back that species lived—was a bona fide Handy Man after all.
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Big Banks Are 'Fueling Climate Chaos' By Pouring Trillions Into Oil, Gas And Coal | Huf... - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...nge_n_605a45b8c5b6cebf58d28d52 climate science research knowledge economics
shared by clairemann on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The world’s largest banks have funneled $3.8 trillion into the fossil fuel industry over the last five years, according to new figures published Wednesday. 
  • “Major banks around the world, led by U.S. banks in particular, are fueling climate chaos by dumping trillions of dollars into the fossil fuels that are causing the crisis
  • Though U.S. banks dominate fossil fuel financing, European banks are also big. French bank BNP Paribas, which has pledged to be a leader in climate strategy, provided $40.8 billion in fossil fuel financing in 2020, an increase of 41% from the previous year. Since 2016, the bank’s fossil fuel financing has risen 142%, according to the report.
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  • Financing for the top 35 companies involved in tar sands — one of the most environmentally destructive fossil fuels to extract and process — decreased 27% since 2019, to $16 billion. 
  • “The policies and commitments that banks have put out so far give us no reason to believe they’re going to make these deep emissions cuts that the science demands,”
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Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...557180 astrobiology alien civilization geology
shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago
  • if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. That means the question shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the idea the Silurian hypothesis
  • could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far.
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  • Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we’d leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development.
  • Now that our industrial civilization has truly gone global, humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive use of fertilizer, for example
  • And then there’s all that plastic. Studies have shown increasing amounts of plastic “marine litter” are being deposited on the seafloor everywhere from coastal areas to deep basins and even in the Arctic. Wind, sun, and waves grind down large-scale plastic artifacts, leaving the seas full of microscopic plastic particles that will eventually rain down on the ocean floor, creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales.
  • Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more of these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because of us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in future sediments, too.
  • Once you realize, through climate change, the need to find lower-impact energy sources, the less impact you will leave. So the more sustainable your civilization becomes, the smaller the signal you’ll leave for future generations.
  • The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Atmospheric scientists call this shift the Suess effect, and the change in isotopic ratios of carbon due to fossil-fuel use is easy to see over the last century. Increases in temperature also leave isotopic signals. These shifts should be apparent to any future scientist who chemically analyzes exposed layers of rock from our era. Along with these spikes, this Anthropocene layer might also hold brief peaks in nitrogen, plastic nanoparticles, and even synthetic steroids
  • Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • While there is evidence that the PETM may have been driven by a massive release of buried fossil carbon into the air, it’s the timescale of these changes that matter. The PETM’s isotope spikes rise and fall over a few hundred thousand years. But what makes the Anthropocene so remarkable in terms of Earth’s history is the speed at which we’re dumping fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has been as high or higher than today, but never before in the planet’s multibillion-year history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the atmosphere so quickly
  • So the isotopic spikes we do see in the geologic record may not be spiky enough to fit the Silurian hypothesis’s bill.
  • ronically, however, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence as an advanced civilization is a by-product of one activity that may threaten it most.
  • “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”
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Bones discovered in an island cave may be an early human species - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-cave-may-be-new-human-species human origins island
shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Piper, Mijares and their team published a description of the foot bone in 2010. They knew it was the oldest human remain in the Philippines, dated to 67,000 years ago, based on the amount of the radioactive element uranium in the fossil
  • Mijares returned to Callao Cave and uncovered more remains in 2011 and 2015. All told, the scientists pulled a dozen fossilized parts from the cave — teeth, a thigh bone, finger bones and foot bones, representing three individuals. Attempts to extract DNA from the remains were unsuccessful.
  • The body parts are diminutive, suggesting Homo luzonensis grew no more than four feet tall. Its molars have modern shapes. The way its leg muscle attached to its thigh bone is “distinctively human,”
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  • The bones in its hands and feet are curved, “spitting images” of the toes and finger bones that belonged to the ancient Australopithecus, Piper said. These hominids, such as the 3 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis Lucy, had digits well-suited for climbing.
  • This species lived at the same time as humans with modern anatomy, who first appeared in the fossil record 200,000 years ago (or perhaps as long as 350,000 years ago). ″We continue to realize that few thousands of years back in time, H. sapiens was definitely not alone on Earth,”
  • Though these fossils are the oldest in the Philippines, evidence for habitation is even older; 700,000 years ago, ancient butchers on Luzon carved up a rhinoceros with stone tools. Which species did the butchering is unknown.
  • A few “mammal species you find on Luzon appear to have come from the mainland,” Piper said. The Asian continent is 400 or more miles away through the Luzon strait. But in the Middle Pleistocene, when glacial sheets locked up vast amounts of water, sea levels dropped by as much as 400 feet, Piper said.
  • “I would just say that when humans could see land or they could smell it or they knew the signs, that birds were coming from it, they sought it out,” he said. “That’s not a Homo sapiens trait. It’s something our ancestors and extinct relatives had.”
  • The cartoon version of evolution, in which a hunched ape becomes a tall and jaunty biped, suggests a journey with a destination. The reality is messier,
  • An island’s confines can rapidly spark evolutionary change; Charles Darwin saw this in finches’ beaks.
  • “Isolation plays games,” Potts said. Homo floresiensis showed anthropologists that an island could be an “odd little laboratory of human evolution,” he said. These bones reinforce that lesson.
  • “It’s beginning to look like the evolutionary process is really fluid,” Potts said. “And it’s surprising that it is so fluid where each species of Homo may actually be a history or a record.” The result is a fusion of the modern and ancient: molars that could be yours alongside toes with millions-year-old curves.
  • Fifteen years ago, Hawks said, anthropologists chalked up the worldwide success of Homo sapiens to our modern anatomy. These new discoveries, in far-flung corners, suggest exceptionalism is not built into our brains or skeletons.
  • “The archaeological record is now showing us that ancient human forms were much more adaptable, and I would say clever, than we imagined,”
  • “This isn’t ‘Flowers for Algernon,’ where, suddenly, we’re super smart and everyone else in the world is behind us.” Scientists are now plumbing genomes for other clues to Homo sapiens’ survival, looking at our metabolisms or resistance to disease, he said. “I’d say the doors have opened, and we haven’t figured out where they lead.”
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Climatologist Michael E Mann: 'Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes' ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...omism-climate-crisis-interview climate response strategy solutions 2021 personal strategy activism
shared by Javier E on 04 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • the “inactivists”, as I call them, haven’t given up; they have simply shifted from hard denial to a new array of tactics that I describe in the book as the new climate war.
  • Who is the enemy in the new climate war?It is fossil fuel interests, climate change deniers, conservative media tycoons, working together with petrostate actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia. I call this the coalition of the unwilling.
  • Today Russia uses cyberware – bot armies and trolls – to get climate activists to fight one another and to seed arguments on social media. Russian trolls have attempted to undermine carbon pricing in Canada and Australia, and Russian fingerprints have been detected in the yellow-vest protests in France.
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  • I am optimistic about a favourable shift in the political wind. The youth climate movement has galvanised attention and re-centred the debate on intergenerational ethics. We are seeing a tipping point in public consciousness. That bodes well. There is still a viable way forward to avoid climate catastrophe.
  • You can see from the talking points of inactivists that they are really in retreat. Republican pollsters like Frank Luntz have advised clients in the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who carry water for them that you can’t get away with denying climate change any more.
  • Let’s dig into deniers’ tactics. One that you mention is deflection. What are the telltale signs?Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies
  • Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries. In the 1970s, Coca Cola and the beverage industry did this very effectively to convince us we don’t need regulations on waste disposal. Because of that we now have a global plastic crisis. The same tactics are evident in the gun lobby’s motto, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, which is classic deflection
  • look at BP, which gave us the world’s first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs.
  • Of course lifestyle changes are necessary but they alone won’t get us where we need to be. They make us more healthy, save money and set a good example for others.
  • But we can’t allow the forces of inaction to convince us these actions alone are the solution and that we don’t need systemic changes
  • I don’t eat meat. We get power from renewable energy. I have a plug-in hybrid vehicle. I do those things and encourage others to do them. but i don’t think it is helpful to shame people people who are not as far along as you.
  • Instead, let’s help everybody to move in that direction. That is what policy and system change is about: creating incentives so even those who don’t think about their environmental footprint are still led in that direction.
  • Another new front in the new climate war is what you call “doomism”. What do you mean by that?Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement
  • They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair.
  • Many of the prominent doomist narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that.
  • Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes. It can be enabling and empowering as long as you don’t get stuck there. It is up to others to help ensure that experience can be cathartic.
  • the entry of new participants. Bill Gates is perhaps the most prominent. His new book, How to Prevent a Climate Disaster, offers a systems analyst approach to the problem, a kind of operating system upgrade for the planet. What do you make of his take?I want to thank him for using his platform to raise awareness of the climate crisis
  • I disagree with him quite sharply on the prescription. His view is overly technocratic and premised on an underestimate of the role that renewable energy can play in decarbonising our civilisation
  • If you understate that potential, you are forced to make other risky choices, such as geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration. Investment in those unproven options would crowd out investment in better solutions.
  • Gates writes that he doesn’t know the political solution to climate change. But the politics are the problem buddy. If you don’t have a prescription of how to solve that, then you don’t have a solution and perhaps your solution might be taking us down the wrong path.
  • What are the prospects for political change with Joe Biden in the White House?Breathtaking. Biden has surprised even the most ardent climate hawks in the boldness of his first 100 day agenda, which goes well beyond any previous president, including Obama when it comes to use of executive actions. He has incorporated climate policy into every single government agency and we have seen massive investments in renewable energy infrastructure, cuts in subsidies for fossil fuels, and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.
  • On the international front, the appointment of John Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris Accord, has telegraphed to the rest of the world that the US is back and ready to lead again
  • That is huge and puts pressure on intransigent state actors like [Australian prime minister] Scott Morrison, who has been a friend of the fossil fuel industry in Australia. Morrison has changed his rhetoric dramatically since Biden became president. I think that creates an opportunity like no other.
  • Have the prospects for that been helped or hindered by Covid?I see a perfect storm of climate opportunity. Terrible as the pandemic has been, this tragedy can also provide lessons, particularly on the importance of listening to the word of science when facing risks
  • Out of this crisis can come a collective reconsideration of our priorities. How to live sustainably on a finite planet with finite space, food and water. A year from now, memories and impacts of coronavirus will still feel painful, but the crisis itself will be in the rear-view mirror thanks to vaccines. What will loom larger will be the greater crisis we face – the climate crisis.
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Scientists Say Canadian Bacteria Fossils May Be Earth's Oldest - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-oldest-bacteria-fossils.html
shared by maxwellokolo on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • On Wednesday, researchers reported that these may be the oldest fossils ever discovered, the remains of bacteria thriving on Earth not long, geologically speaking, after the very birth of the planet. If so, they offer evidence that life here got off to a very early start.
  • maxwellokolo on 03 Mar 17
     
    But additional specimens from other sites came to light over the past two decades, and many of them have withstood scrutiny. There is now solid evidence of life dating back about 3.5 billion years. Earth was a billion years old by then, and scientists have long wondered if even older fossils might be found.
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Scientists Discover Some of the Oldest Signs of Life on Earth - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...541251 life origins geology biology research
shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • The Earth was formed around 4.54 billion years ago. If you condense that huge swath of prehistory into a single calendar year, then the 3.95-billion-year-old graphite that the Tokyo team analyzed was created in the third week of February. By contrast, the earliest fossils ever found are 3.7 billion years old; they were created in the second week of March.
  • Those fossils, from the Isua Belt in southwest Greenland, are stromatolites—layered structures created by communities of bacteria. And as I reported last year, their presence suggests that life already existed in a sophisticated form at the 3.7-billion-year mark, and so must have arisen much earlier. And indeed, scientists have found traces of biologically produced graphite throughout the region, in other Isua Belt rocks that are 3.8 billion years old, and in hydrothermal vents off the coast of Quebec that are at least a similar age, and possibly even older.
  • “As far back as the rock record extends—that is, as far back as we can look for direct evidence of early life, we are finding it. Earth has been a biotic, life-sustaining planet since close to its beginning.”
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  • living organisms concentrate carbon-12 in their cells—and when they die, that signature persists. When scientists find graphite that’s especially enriched in carbon-12, relative to carbon-13, they can deduce that living things were around when that graphite was first formed. And that’s exactly what the Tokyo team found in the Saglek Block—grains of graphite, enriched in carbon-12, encased within 3.95-billion-year-old rock.
  • the team calculated the graphite was created at temperatures between 536 and 622 Celsius—a range that’s consistent with the temperatures at which the surrounding metamorphic rocks were transformed. This suggests that the graphite was already there when the rocks were heated and warped, and didn’t sneak in later. It was truly OG—original graphite.
  • Still, all of this evidence suggests Earth was home to life during its hellish infancy, and that such life abounded in a variety of habitats. Those pioneering organisms—bacteria, probably—haven’t left any fossils behind. But Sano and Komiya hope to find some clues about them by analyzing the Saglek Block rocks. The levels of nitrogen, iron, and sulfur in the rocks could reveal which energy sources those organisms exploited, and which environments they inhabited. They could tell us how life first lived.
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JP Morgan economists warn of 'catastrophic' climate change - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-51581098 climate change economics
shared by johnsonel7 on 23 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • In a hard-hitting report to clients, the economists said that without action being taken there could be "catastrophic outcomes".The bank said the research came from a team that was "wholly independent from the company as a whole".Climate campaigners have previously criticised JP Morgan for its investments in fossil fuels.
  • Carbon emissions in the coming decades "will continue to affect the climate for centuries to come in a way that is likely to be irreversible," they said, adding that climate change action should be motivated "by the likelihood of extreme events".Climate change could affect economic growth, shares, health, and how long people live, they said.
  • Developed countries were worried that cutting emissions would affect competitiveness and jobs, while less developed countries "see carbon intensive activity as a way of raising living standards.""It is a global problem but no global solution is in sight," the report added.
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  • JP Morgan itself has been strongly criticised in the past for heavy investment in fossil fuels.The Rainforest Action Network released a 2019 report claiming that the US banking giant provided the most fossil fuel firm financing of any bank in from 2016 to 2018.
  • He said if the bank's own researchers were "saying the very future of the human race is at stake" then the bank itself should change its direction."It's good they [the researchers] are telling the truth more - it's not good they [the bank] remain a strong funder of fossil fuels," he said."Everyone has to have responsibility for change, whether they are asset managers, or institutional investors, or chief executives, or shareholders," he added.
  • Talking about a timeframe he added: "We are a bit concerned about putting a date on it as yet because some of the technologies are still evolving. We will get there, the only question is how quickly we can get there.''
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Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html climate change science research motivated reasoning bias
shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.
  • One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming.
  • He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.
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  • Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.
  • “The whole doubt-mongering strategy relies on creating the impression of scientific debate,” said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a book about such campaigns. “Willie Soon is playing a role in a certain kind of political theater.”
  • Environmentalists have long questioned Dr. Soon’s work, and his acceptance of funding from the fossil-fuel industry was previously known. But the full extent of the links was not; the documents show that corporate contributions were tied to specific papers and were not disclosed, as required by modern standards of publishing.
  • “What it shows is the continuation of a long-term campaign by specific fossil-fuel companies and interests to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change.
  • Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change.
  • Though often described on conservative news programs as a “Harvard astrophysicist,” Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard. He is a part-time employee of the Smithsonian Institution with a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering. He has received little federal research money over the past decade and is thus responsible for bringing in his own funds, including his salary.
  • Though he has little formal training in climatology, Dr. Soon has for years published papers trying to show that variations in the sun’s energy can explain most recent global warming. His thesis is that human activity has played a relatively small role in causing climate change.
  • As the oil-industry contributions fell, Dr. Soon started receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars through DonorsTrust, an organization based in Alexandria, Va., that accepts money from donors who wish to remain anonymous, then funnels it to various conservative causes.
  • Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a NASA division that studies climate change, said that the sun had probably accounted for no more than 10 percent of recent global warming and that greenhouse gases produced by human activity explained most of it.“The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” Dr. Schmidt said.
  • Dr. Soon has found a warm welcome among politicians in Washington and state capitals who try to block climate action. United States Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who claims that climate change is a global scientific hoax, has repeatedly cited Dr. Soon’s work over the years.
  • Dr. Oreskes, the Harvard science historian, said that academic institutions and scientific journals had been too lax in recent decades in ferreting out dubious research created to serve a corporate agenda.
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Plundering Science, Bone by Bone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ring-science-bone-by-bone.html technology knowledge research science
shared by Sophia C on 26 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It is the dinosaur version of grave robbing: fossil poachers plundering a paleontological dig, frequently smashing ancient skulls and stealing valuable teeth, claws and feet.
  • wrecked, irreplaceable scientific record
  • say, valuable entries in the earth’s book of life will be lost forever, including information about exactly where the fossils were found, what geological formation the creatures were in, how they were lying in the ground, how they were discovered and precisely when they lived, not to mention what surrounded them at death.
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  • It worked in the art world, but it hasn’t hit the fossil world.”
  • Sophia C on 26 Oct 13
     
    Dinasours and losing knowledge
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New Study: Burn it All (Fossil Fuel), Lose it All (Antarctic Ice and Today's Coasts) - ... - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...ntarctic-ice-and-todays-coasts global warming carbon Antarctica
shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The modeling study is far more a thought experiment than a prediction, given that, even in China, there is every indication that the world’s coal, particularly, will not all be exploited.
  • the loss of the entire Antarctic ice sheet would take millenniums, but up to 100 feet of sea level rise could result within 1,000 years, with the rate of the rise beginning to increase a century or two from now. That finding meshes with the 2014 paper on the “collapse” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
  • In interviews, scientists said that such long-term risks raise profound moral questions for people of today. “What right do we have to do things that, even if they don’t affect us, are going to be someone else’s problem a thousand years from now?” asked Ian Joughin, an ice sheet expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new research. “Is it fair to do that so we can go on burning fuel as fast as we can?”
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  • he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)
  • It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.
  • Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.
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Sharks Nearly Went Extinct 19 Million Years Ago From Mystery Event - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sharks-extinction-oceans.html research education extinction
shared by lucieperloff on 08 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Analysis of the fossil record shows a mysterious mass extinction that decimated the diversity of sharks in the world’s oceans, and they’ve never fully recovered.
  • these events give scientists an intimate look at how life recovers after a cataclysm
  • This extinction event transpired in the world’s oceans and decimated shark populations
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  • but sharks slough off about 100 denticles for each tooth they lose, making them common in the fossil record.
  • The reddish clay, extracted from two sediment cores that had been drilled deep into the Pacific Ocean seafloor, contained fish teeth, shark denticles and other marine microfossils.
  • Nineteen million years ago, the ratio of shark denticles to fish teeth changed drastically:
  • sharks suddenly became much less common, relative to fish, during an era known as the early Miocene,
  • “We had a lot of them, and then we had almost none of them,”
  • “We wanted to know if the sharks went extinct, or if they just became less prominent.”
  • The reduction in shark diversity suggests that they experienced an extinction around that time,
  • “There were just a small fraction that survived into this post-extinction world,”
  • uggest that this was truly a “global event,”
  • Sharks never fully recovered from this incident, and they have been declining in abundance in recent decades because of overfishing and other human-caused pressures,
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How to Talk About Climate Change Across the Political Divide | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ge-across-the-political-divide climate change discourse deniers appeal rhetoric
shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • “It was really moving to Texas that set me on this path of figuring out how to communicate about climate change,” she told me. “I was the only climate scientist within two hundred miles.”
  • She records the questions she is asked afterward, using an app, and the two most frequent are: “What gives you hope?” and “How do I talk to my [blank] about climate change?
  • In the late nineties, a Gallup poll found that forty-six per cent of Democrats and forty-seven per cent of Republicans agreed that the effects of global warming had already begun.
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  • In her new book, “Saving Us,” which comes out in September, Hayhoe sets out to answer these questions. Chapter by chapter, she lays out effective strategies for communicating about the urgency of climate change across America’s political divide.
  • She breaks out categories—originally defined by her colleague Anthony Leiserowitz, at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and other researchers—of attitudes toward global warming: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, and doubtful. Only the remaining eight per cent of Americans fall into the final category, dismissive.
  • In the past decade, though, as the scope of the crisis became clear, Democrats began pressing for policies to cut U.S. reliance on fossil fuels, and Republicans were reluctant to commit. Energy companies stepped into the stalemate and began aggressively lobbying politicians, and injecting doubt into the public discourse, to stop such policies from taking effect. “Industry swung into motion to activate the political system in their favor,” Hayhoe said.
  • “In a study of fifty-six countries, researchers found people’s opinions on climate change to be most strongly correlated not with education and knowledge, but rather with ‘values, ideologies, worldviews and political orientation,’ ”
  • One salient problem is an aspect of human behavior that researchers have termed “solution aversion.” Solving the climate crisis will require ending our reliance on fossil fuels, which people believe would involve major sacrifice.
  • “If there’s a problem and we’re not going to fix it, then that makes us bad people,” Hayhoe said. “No one wants to be a bad person.” So instead people are happy to seize on excuses not to take action.
  • Most are what she calls “science-y sounding objections, and, in the U.S., religious-y sounding objections.”
  • Hayhoe often hears that the Earth has always heated and cooled according to its own intrinsic cycle, or that God, not humanity, controls the fate of the planet. These objections can then harden into aspects of our political identity.
  • Hayhoe eschews the term “climate denier,” saying that she has “seen it applied all too often to shut down discussion rather than encourage it.”
  • So much of this is not about the facts,” Leiserowitz told me later. “It’s about trusting the person the facts come from.”
  • research has shown her that dismissives are nearly impossible to influence. They are also few enough that it should be possible to build political will around fighting climate change by focussing on others.
  • “It’s not about the loudest voices,” Hayhoe told me. “It’s about everyone else who doesn’t understand why climate change matters or what they can do about it.”
  • Leiserowitz told me. His work has revealed, for example, that conversations about the climate tend to be more effective if both speakers share a core value or an aspect of their identity. The most effective climate communicators to conservatives are often people of faith, members of the military, and Republicans who are nevertheless committed to the climate.
  • “That’s why it’s so important to seek out like-minded groups: winter athletes, parents, fellow birders or Rotarians, or people who share our faith.”
  • There is a long history within evangelicalism of advocating “creation care,” the belief that God charged humanity with caring for the earth. The Evangelical Environmental Network, which Hayhoe advises, argues that evangelicals should follow a “Biblical mandate to care for creation,”
  • Hayhoe believes that emphasizing the care of plants and animals is less effective than highlighting the potential dangers for our fellow human beings. “It’s not about saving the planet—it’s about saving us,”
  • One of her communication strategies is to talk to people about their own observations, which help them connect the realities of their lives to the abstraction of climate change.
  • With farmers, Hayhoe avoids using the term “climate change,” since the phenomenon is frequently seen as a liberal hoax. “We use the words ‘climate variability’ and ‘long-term trends,’ ” she said.
  • Scott’s work served another purpose. By showing success with his climate-conscious farming techniques, he might persuade other farmers to join in, potentially becoming the center of what Hayhoe calls a cluster. “I preach to my friends about how well it’s doing,” he said.
  • I don’t accost people in diners,” she wrote me, later. “I wait until they come to me.”
  • “As recently as 2008, former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and current House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, cozied up on a love seat in front of the U.S. Capitol to film a commercial about climate change,”
  • She then directed the conversation to Republican-led free market initiatives to combat climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Companies passed their costs onto the rest of us by putting the carbon into the atmosphere, she told Dale, “but what if they had to pay for it? What if, when someone’s house burned down because of a forest fire, the companies making money from selling carbon had to pay a homeowner back?” Dale responded, “Well, I’m in favor of that.”
  • “It’s so important to educate kids about what’s going on, not to frighten them but to show them they can have a hand in solutions.”
  • Through the years, she’s developed a system to manage trolls. “It’s been trial and error, error, error,” she said. She now responds once, offering a link to resources.
  • Most fire back with gendered insults, often plays on her last name, after which she blocks the sender.
  • ayhoe doesn’t urge guilt on her listeners. She only urges that we change our trajectory. “That’s all repentance means,” she said. “To turn.”
  • the most important aspect of fighting climate change is pushing for policies that will cut our reliance on fossil fuels. She urges the alarmed to get involved in politics, beginning with lobbying politicians at the local and state level.
  • she’d come across a book, “Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy,” that examined the role of prophets in society, beginning with the oracle at Delphi, stretching through the Old Testament, and culminating in the work of modern-day scientists.
  • Studies show that early adopters help shift the norms of their communities.
  • By Eliza GriswoldSeptember 16, 2021
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Clouds' Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...st-bastion-for-dissenters.html global warming science methods research clouds
shared by Javier E on 02 May 12 - Cached
  • For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Enlarge This Image Josh Haner/The New York Times A technician at a Department of Energy site in Oklahoma launching a weather balloon to help scientists analyze clouds. More Photos » Temperature Rising Enigma in the Sky This series focuses on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences. More From the Series » if (typeof NYTDVideoManager != "undefined") { NYTDVideoManager.setAllowMultiPlayback(false); } function displayCompanionBanners(banners, tracking) { tmDisplayBanner(banners, "videoAdContent", 300, 250, null, tracking); } Multimedia Interactive Graphic Clouds and Climate Slide Show Understanding the Atmosphere Related Green Blog: Climate Change and the Body Politic (May 1, 2012) An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change (May 1, 2012) A blog about energy and the environment. Go to Blog » Readers’ Comments "There is always some possibility that the scientific consensus may be wrong and Dr. Lindzen may be right, or that both may be wrong. But the worst possible place to resolve such issues is the political arena." Alexander Flax, Potomac, MD Read Full Comment » Post a Comment » Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.
  • They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.
  • At gatherings of climate change skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Lindzen has been treated as a star. During a debate in Australia over carbon taxes, his work was cited repeatedly. When he appears at conferences of the Heartland Institute, the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism, he is greeted by thunderous applause.
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  • His idea has drawn withering criticism from other scientists, who cite errors in his papers and say proof is lacking. Enough evidence is already in hand, they say, to rule out the powerful cooling effect from clouds that would be needed to offset the increase of greenhouse gases.
  • “If you listen to the credible climate skeptics, they’ve really pushed all their chips onto clouds.”
  • Dr. Lindzen is “feeding upon an audience that wants to hear a certain message, and wants to hear it put forth by people with enough scientific reputation that it can be sustained for a while, even if it’s wrong science,” said Christopher S. Bretherton, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Washington. “I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.”
  • With climate policy nearly paralyzed in the United States, many other governments have also declined to take action, and worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases are soaring.
  • The most elaborate computer programs have agreed on a broad conclusion: clouds are not likely to change enough to offset the bulk of the human-caused warming. Some of the analyses predict that clouds could actually amplify the warming trend sharply through several mechanisms, including a reduction of some of the low clouds that reflect a lot of sunlight back to space. Other computer analyses foresee a largely neutral effect. The result is a big spread in forecasts of future temperature, one that scientists have not been able to narrow much in 30 years of effort.
  • The earth’s surface has already warmed about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution, most of that in the last 40 years. Modest as it sounds, it is an average for the whole planet, representing an enormous addition of heat. An even larger amount is being absorbed by the oceans. The increase has caused some of the world’s land ice to melt and the oceans to rise.
  • Even in the low projection, many scientists say, the damage could be substantial. In the high projection, some polar regions could heat up by 20 or 25 degrees Fahrenheit — more than enough, over centuries or longer, to melt the Greenland ice sheet, raising sea level by a catastrophic 20 feet or more. Vast changes in  rainfall, heat waves and other weather patterns would most likely accompany such a large warming. “The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. “Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.”
  • But the problem of how clouds will behave in a future climate is not yet solved — making the unheralded field of cloud research one of the most important pursuits of modern science.
  • for more than a decade, Dr. Lindzen has said that when surface temperature increases, the columns of moist air rising in the tropics will rain out more of their moisture, leaving less available to be thrown off as ice, which forms the thin, high clouds known as cirrus. Just like greenhouse gases, these cirrus clouds act to reduce the cooling of the earth, and a decrease of them would counteract the increase of greenhouse gases. Dr. Lindzen calls his mechanism the iris effect, after the iris of the eye, which opens at night to let in more light. In this case, the earth’s “iris” of high clouds would be opening to let more heat escape.
  • Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper contained “some stupid mistakes” in his handling of the satellite data. “It was just embarrassing,” he said in an interview. “The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque.” Last year, he tried offering more evidence for his case, but after reviewers for a prestigious American journal criticized the paper, Dr. Lindzen published it in a little-known Korean journal. Dr. Lindzen blames groupthink among climate scientists for his publication difficulties, saying the majority is determined to suppress any dissenting views. They, in turn, contend that he routinely misrepresents the work of other researchers.
  • Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late. By then, they say, the atmosphere would contain so much carbon dioxide as to make a substantial warming inevitable, and the gas would not return to a normal level for thousands of years.
  • In his Congressional appearances, speeches and popular writings, Dr. Lindzen offers little hint of how thin the published science supporting his position is. Instead, starting from his disputed iris mechanism, he makes what many of his colleagues see as an unwarranted leap of logic, professing near-certainty that climate change is not a problem society needs to worry about.
  • “Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, ‘We’re sure it’s not a problem,’ ” said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. “It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.”
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BBC News - Viewpoint: Human evolution, from tree to braid - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-25559172 viewpoint evolution science knowledge brain science
shared by Sophia C on 03 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • What was, in my view, a logical conclusion reached by the authors was too much for some researchers to take.
  • he conclusion of the Dmanisi study was that the variation in skull shape and morphology observed in this small sample, derived from a single population of Homo erectus, matched the entire variation observed among African fossils ascribed to three species - H. erectus, H. habilis and H. rudolfensis.
  • a single population of H. erectus,
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  • They all had to be the same species.
  • was not surprising to find that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, a clear expectation of the biological species concept.
  • I wonder when the penny will drop: when we have five pieces of a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, every new bit that we add is likely to change the picture.
  • e identity of the fourth player remains unknown but it was an ancient lineage that had been separate for probably over a million years. H. erectus seems a likely candidate. Whatever the name we choose to give this mystery lineage, what these results show is that gene flow was possible not just among contemporaries but also between ancient and more modern lineages.
  • cientists succeeded in extracting the most ancient mitochondrial DNA so far, from the Sima de los Huesos site in Atapuerca, Spain.
  • We have built a picture of our evolution based on the morphology of fossils and it was wrong.
    • Sophia C
      Sophia C on 03 Jan 14
       
      Kuhn
  • when we know how plastic - or easily changeable - skull shape is in humans. And our paradigms must also change.
  • e must abandon, once and for all, views of modern human superiority over archaic (ancient) humans. The terms "archaic" and "modern" lose all meaning as do concepts of modern human replacement of all other lineages.
  • he deep-rooted shackles that have sought to link human evolution with stone tool-making technological stages - the Stone Ages - even when we have known that these have overlapped with each other for half-a-million years in some instances.
  • e world of our biological and cultural evolution was far too fluid for us to constrain it into a few stages linked by transitions.
  • We have to flesh out the genetic information and this is where archaeology comes into the picture.
  • Rather than focus on differences between modern humans and Neanderthals, what the examples show is the range of possibilities open to humans (Neanderthals included) in different circumstances.
  • research using new technology on old archaeological sites, as at La Chapelle; and
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Ancient Georgian Ancestors | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37913/title/Ancient-Georgian-Ancestors/ fossils science research knowledge
shared by grayton downing on 23 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • unearthed the first ever completely preserved skull of an adult hominin from the Paleolithic era—spanning approximately 2.6 million to 10,000 years ago.
  • l is clearly the cherry on the cake, however, because it is “spectacularly complete,” said White. “It’s an amazing skull,” added Robert Foley, a professor of human evolution at the University of Cambridge, who also was not involved in the work. “Just a fantastic specimen.”
  • Its matching cranium was discovered five years later. It was easy to tell the parts were from the same individual, however, because “the teeth match with each other,”
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  • features of the skull, it is thought to have been a male with large cheek bones, teeth, and jaws, but a small brain
  • newly described skull also expands the morphological variability of the specimens found at the Dmanisi site—some of which appear less primitive. Despite this variability, Zollikofer believes all the specimens are members of the same species. That would be “the most parsimonious explanation,”
  • He suggested that other hominin fossils previously classified as separate species—such as H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, and H. erectus—should be re-examined.
  • urge for a change in perspective, because what has happened in the last ten years is that people tried to divide—they tried to show species diversity—and what we try to show now is diversity, but within one single evolving species,” Zollikofer said.
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Jawbone's Discovery Fills Barren Evolutionary Period - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • Jawbone’s Discovery Fills Barren Evolutionary Perio
  • This was a time when the human genus, Homo, was getting underway. The 2.8-million-year-old jawbone of a Homo habilis predates by at least 400,000 years any previously known Homo fossils.
  • The reconstruction, suggesting a plausible evolutionary link between A. afarensis and H. habilis, yielded a remarkably primitive picture of a deep-rooted diversity of a species that emerged much earlier than the 2.3 million years ago suggested by some specimens. The teeth and jaws appeared to be more similar to A. afarensis than to subsequent Homo erectus or Homo sapiens, modern humans that emerged about 200,000 years ago.
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  • Dr. Spoor’s predictions were drawn from a digital reconstruction of the disturbed remains of the jaws of the original 1.8-million-year-old Homo habilis specimen found 50 years ago by the legendary fossil hunters Louis and Mary Leakey at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
  • possible result of widespread climate change affecting species changes and extinctions.
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