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POPSThe Loneliest man on Earth? Among the few to have clapped eyes on him is Brazilian film-maker Vincent Carelli. It's unclear what happened to the rest of the man's people, but FUNAI reckons "he is the sole survivor of at least two successive massacres", although these massacres have never been proved. The last time FUNAI tried to contact him in 2005, the man shot its field worker in the chest with an arrow, fortunately not fatally. Since then FUNAI has decided to leave him be. The Man of the Hole is not alone in his plight: he's one of an estimated 40,000 isolated people worldwide, about whom we know very little. Sadly, one thing we do know is that many of them are constantly threatened by loggers and oil companies, who want to commercialise the land they live on, or harassed by paramilitary groups, missionaries, drug traffickers and foreign tourists who want to make contact.
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POPSWhat creation? It is one thing to use scripture as a moral guide to life's cunundrums, quite another to use it as a users manual for the Universe.
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POPSWhat makes a compelling conspiracy theory? for example, the assassination of a president by a single, possibly mentally unstable, gunman, or the death of a princess because of a drunk driver. This presents us with a rather chaotic and unpredictable relationship between cause and effect. Instability makes most of us uncomfortable; we prefer to imagine we live in a predictable, safe world, so in a strange way, some conspiracy theories offer us accounts of events that allow us to retain a sense of safety and predictability. Other research has examined how the way we search for and evaluate evidence affects our belief systems. Numerous studies have shown that in general, people give greater attention to information that fits with their existing beliefs, a tendency called "confirmation bias". Reasoning about conspiracy theories follows this pattern.
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POPSThe Last Island of the Savages Then he took a closer look at them. They were small men, well-built, frizzy-haired, and black. They were naked except for narrow belts that circled their waists. And they were holding spears, bows, and arrows which they had begun waving in a manner that seemed not altogether friendly. Not long after this, a wireless operator at the Regent Shipping Company's offices in Hong Kong received an urgent distress call from the Primrose's captain, asking for an immediate airdrop of firearms so that his crew could defend itself. "Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various home-made weapons are making two or three wooden boats," the message read. "Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members' lives not guaranteed." This is a really interesing 16,000 word essay which details almost everything known about a populatin of people who live on an island in the Indian Ocean.
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POPSYet More Climate Change Myths Continued... Comparisons of temperature indicators such as tree-ring records from around the northern hemisphere suggest there were several widespread cold intervals between 1580 and 1850. Yet while there is some evidence of cold intervals in parts of the southern hemisphere during this time, they do not appear to coincide with those in the northern hemisphere. Such findings suggest the Little Ice Age may have been more of a regional phenomenon than a global one. I hope that this adds a little more balance to what seems to have become an argument over politics in recent years than one of scientific investigation.
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POPSMore Climate Change Myths
Continued... Basic physics tells us that gases with this property trap heat radiating from the Earth, that the planet would be a lot colder if this effect was not real and that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will trap even more heat. What is more, CO2 is just one of several greenhouses gases, and greenhouse gases are just one of many factors affecting the climate. There is no reason to expect a perfect correlation between CO2 levels and temperature in the past: if there is a big change in another climate "forcing", the correlation will be obscured. So why has Earth regularly switched between ice ages and warmer interglacial periods in the past million years? It has long been thought that this is due to variations in Earth's orbit. However, the correlation is not perfect and the heating or cooling effect of these orbital variations is small. It has also long been recognised that they cannot fully explain the dramatic temperature switches between ice ages and interglacials.
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POPSClimate Change Myths To counter the recent deluge of myths which have been posted regarding Climate Change from a political point of view, I though that I would Clip some regarding climate change from a scientific perspective.
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POPSAll the Air and Water in the World These remarkable images by Adam Nieman give us some impression of the true scarcity of the vital natural resources available to us on this planet. Viewed like this you can see that the vast oceans and endless sky are merely the thinnest of skins adorning the Earth. These are the resources that we have to live within and share with every other living organism on Earth This is also where a lot of our waste goes, in these very finite environs.
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