Tag Archives: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

We Have Been Doing Things Right For A While

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The world is not going to end tomorrow because of fossil fuels. Man’s use of fossil fuels has not been proven to be the source of climate change. Climate change has happened since climate began. All of these statements are very logical and true, but somehow those pursuing ‘green energy’ work very hard to periodically convince all of us that if we use fossil fuel, we are all going to die next week (while flying around in their private jets). Green energy is in theory a great idea, but I can’t help thinking that the search for a totally green source of energy is somehow related to the search for the perpetual motion machine. It’s a great idea, but it defies the law of physics. At any rate, we are doing better at keeping the environment clean today than we were in the early 1900’s despite much greater energy usage.

WattsUpWithThat posted an article today about some observations from scientists at the Field Museum in Chicago.

The article includes the following picture:

The article explains:

Horned Larks are cute little songbirds with white bellies and yellow chins–at least, now they are. A hundred years ago, at the height of urban smoke pollution in the US, their pale feathers were stained dark gray by the soot in the atmosphere. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the discoloration of birds in museum collections can be used to trace the amount of black carbon in the air over time and the effects of environmental policy upon pollution.

“The soot on these birds’ feathers allowed us to trace the amount of black carbon in the air over time, and we found that the air at the turn of the century was even more polluted than scientists previously thought,” says Shane DuBay, a graduate student at The Field Museum and the University of Chicago and one of the authors of the study. He and co-author Carl Fuldner, also a graduate student at UChicago, analyzed over a thousand birds collected over the last 135 years to determine and quantify the effects of soot in the air over cities in the Rust Belt.

…Birds were also ideal candidates for the study because they molt and grow a new set of feathers every year, meaning that the soot on them had only been accumulating for the past year when they were collected. And there was an apparent trend: old birds were dirtier, and new birds were cleaner.

The article concludes:

DuBay notes that in addition to the environmental implications of the project, their work also shows the importance of museum collections like those they used from The Field Museum in Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology in Ann Arbor. “I hope this study exposes collections as a valuable resource to address present day environmental concerns,” says DuBay. “This paper shows the ways that natural history collections can be used, underlining the value in collections and in continuing to build collections, to help us improve our understanding of human impacts on the natural world.”

Fossil fuel is now abundantly available in America. We can use our scientific talents to make it as clean as possible. Like it or not, it is the basis of our economy.

Who Paid For This Study?

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Yesterday The Washington Post posted an article reporting a study that showed female-named hurricanes kill more people than male-named hurricanes.

The article reports:

Female-named storms have historically killed more because people neither consider them as risky nor take the same precautions, the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes.

Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning  1950 and 2012.  Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities.  (The study excluded Katrina and Audrey, outlier storms that would skew the model).

The difference in death rates between genders was even more pronounced when comparing strongly masculine names versus strongly feminine ones.

We have been naming storms after women since 1950 and men since 1979. That means that there were 30 years of female-named storms before there were male-named storms. Of course there would be more female storms with higher death rates–there were more female storms. I really do wonder about the validity of their research.

The article explains that the study was based on questions to individuals–not actual storm history:

To test the hypothesis the gender of the storm names impacts people’s judgments about a storm, the researchers set up 6 experiments presenting a series of questions to between 100 to 346 people.  The sexism showed up again.

Respondents predicted male hurricanes to be more intense the female hurricanes in one exercise.  In another exercise, the hurricane sex affected how respondents said they would prepare for a hurricane.

“People imagining a ‘female’ hurricane were not as willing to seek shelter,” Shavitt said. “The stereotypes that underlie these judgments are subtle and not necessarily hostile toward women – they may involve viewing women as warmer and less aggressive than men.”

Hurricanes have been named since 1950.  Originally, only female names were used; male names were introduced into the mix in 1979.

That’s not a study–it’s a survey.