Climate change: not just for crunchy liberals and nerds anymore

While the sane/intelligent/non-comatose population has been well aware of the climate change thing for years, the rest of us are finally starting to come around. It's hard (but apparently not impossible) to ignore the physical evidence that the global climate is changing. Yeah, yeah, it does that on its own....well, not like this. Sorry to have to tell you this Bush Administration, Michael Crichton, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Glenn Beck, the rest of the yahoos at Fox News, and 41% OF AMERICANS (!!!!)....but you are all craaazies.

I could rant/yell/spout statistics for days and days about how ridiculous it is that we are even arguing about this, instead of doing something about it. But I won't. I will simply point out a couple of FACTS that the crazies are going to be hardpressed to ignore/refute/conspire against.

So, basically, scientists went to Antarctica and analyzed air pockets in ice cores dating back to 800,000 years ago. They found (spoiler alert) that carbon dioxide was at significantly lower levels back then. That's statistically significant. Which is like, science. In fact, they found that the CO2 levels are higher right this very second than they ever were during any of those previous 800,000 years. "Hmm," you might think, "I wonder what was happening in that general time period." Only the emergence/expansion/explosion of a dominant group of organisms in the genus Homo. Oh wait, wait, that was us.

For a cogent/fascinating/eloquent explanation of the issues we face due to rising carbon dioxide levels, I recommend The Next One Hundred Years, by Jonathan Weiner. This guy won a Pulitzer (for a different book, but still), and does an excellent job of explaining the problem with having too much carbon floating around. In a nutshell: for a long time, the CO2 level held steady around 315 parts per million. During the mid twentieth century, it started creeping up. And by creeping, I mean skyrocketing. See:

It is currently at 389 ppm, a 25-ish percent increase. In 50 years. Holy. Crap. High levels of CO2 lead to ocean acidification, inhibition of plant growth, extreme weather events, sea level rise, species extinctions, and of course, global temperature increase. D'oh! Did I mention that this book was written in the scientific yesteryear of 1991? We've known about this for decades, and we are still arguing about whether or not it's real. Come on, crazies, we've got enough to worry about.

If you're not much of a reader, and all this carbon talk is like Greek (or Latin I guess, which is what it is), there are pictures, too! Believe it or not, there are satellite photos of this stuff. They were actually classified by the Bush Administration, and then Obama came in and was like "What? That's dumb." And he declassified them. So here, for your viewing pleasure, are satellite images taken one (1) year apart (!) of ice melt in Alaska.

See that big, ominous dark spot on the right-hand picture? Just one (1) year before that, it was full of happy/sparkly/crystally ice, as you can see in the left-hand picture. And now it's gone. Ignore that, bitches! Science 1, Crazies 0, Earth, totally screwed.

Because we didn't have enough sheep already...

On July 5, 1996, I was eating a flaming watermelon. Well...not really. It was my brother's eighth birthday, and since he "doesn't like cake" for unknown reasons, we settled on a treat that required minimal effort as far as preparations go (the wax from the candles comes right off). In the height of our sibling rivalry, I wish I had been culturally aware enough to tell him that I was not celebrating his birthday with my enthusiastic watermelon consumption. It was, in fact, a much more important day (and certainly deserving of a slightly richer dessert).

Halfway across the world, in Edinburgh, other people were celebrating a birthday (dancing around in kilts and playing bagpipes, surely). The first cloned mammal, Dolly, had been born! Dolly was a sheep, cloned from a somatic cell of another sheep (quite predictably, also Dolly). It was a cell from a mammary gland, actually, which is why the Scottish people named her Dolly (as in "Dolly Parton sure has giant mammary gland cells!"). Apparently Pamela Anderson hadn't made it into Scottish pop culture yet and they were still listening to music from the late 60s. But you sure can see the resemblance - check it out:



Just kidding. I think.

Anyway, they cloned Dolly by taking the nucleus from the donor cell and implanting it into an unfertilized egg cell (sans its original nucleus). Then they stimulated that cell to divide with an electric shock, and eventually implanted it into a surrogate sheep uterus. Apparently this is a tough process to get right: Dolly was the only survivor of 227 cloning attempts. Oops. The guy whose brainchild (brainlamb?) this was has said that the process will probably never be efficient enough for use in humans. So sad; I was desperately hoping this was an actual possibility.

Dolly lived for six fulfilling years, during which she made six more baby sheep. Her breed is supposed to live for 12 years, but since she was living an extra life, six years of deja vu was probably plenty for her.

After Dolly, a dog named Snuppy (really...?) was successfully cloned in Korea. If dogs and sheep ever become endangered, we'll be able to bring them back, no problem. It's too bad that no one decided to put any serious effort towards cloning a more exciting animal, like a spider monkey or a tasmanian devil. Taxpayers would probably be a little more into the whole cloning thing if we all got to keep genetically identical (and possibly buxom) baby monkeys named Lindsay Lohan or Tara Reid.

And in case you were wondering, that sheep picture is actually Dolly. Her remains are on display at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, where she spent her whole second life. At least that's where her exterior remains are. Her insides? Probably haggis.

Pluto gets plutoed

All that time we spent memorizing the planets for the all-important science class jeopardy game in elementary school...worthless. Turns out, it's even harder to forget random pieces of information once you don't need to know them anymore. Regardless, in 2006, poor Pluto (see above likeness) was downgraded from planet to dwarf planet - more specifically, the largest member of the Kuiper belt. Actually, no one really learned anything new about Pluto. They just sat down and defined the word "planet" for the first time, and it happened to exclude Pluto. Oops.

So a quick science rundown: Pluto was first discovered in 1930 and enjoyed a happy life as the ninth planet in the solar system for 76 years. On August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union defined a planet according to the following guidelines: 1) an object that is in orbit around the sun, 2) has enough mass to maintain a round-ish shape (good one rocket scientists), and 3) has a strong enough gravitational force to be the dominant object in its orbit, ie satellites are okay. Since Pluto only meets the first two of these criteria, it is confined to a sad, lonely life as a dwarf planet.

While nothing has actually changed astronomically, people seemed to take offense to Pluto's supposed mistreatment. Immediately following the reclassification, there was an outpouring of support for Pluto. Petitions, Facebook groups, websites, etc. cropped up to defend Pluto's rights as a planet, and to express appreciation for a chunk of rock and ice that had been there all along. Perhaps the best thing to come out of the Pluto scandal was the 2006 word of the year. "To pluto" was defined by the American Dialect Society as "to demote or devalue something." For example: Hey, what happened to Sarah Palin? Oh, she totally got plutoed.

Pluto is too dwarfy to see from Alaska anyway.