Climate change may be serious stuff for many of us, but for Al Gore, it’s seriously profitable. He’s about to become the world’s first "carbon" billionaire:

Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy as Mr Gore. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming sceptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first "carbon billionaire," profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, has claimed that Mr Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.

Mr Gore had said that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is.

Link

Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event in which participating bloggers post about a particular issue to raise awareness and trigger global discussion that will – hopefully – bring about positive change. This year’s topic is climate change – which, shall we say, is a wee bit controversial.

We’ll get to some Neatorama-worthy posts on the blog today, but first I’d like to ask YOU what you think about global warming/climate change. Do you believe that it is happening? Or is it just a passing hysteria, much like the concern over global cooling in the 1950s to 1970s?

 Loading ...

It’s an open mike – let’s hear your opinion.

This striking image of a crying glacier (a perfect example of pareidolia) is from a melting glacier in in the Arctic ice cap of Norway. Marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan snapped the photos:

At first glimpse it looks like any other glacier you might find in the freezing Arctic wastes of Norway.

But on closer inspection an eerie face is depicted in the melting ice wall that appears to be crying a river of tears.

The forlorn-looking ‘Mother Nature’ figure appeared to locals during a thaw, with the melting ice and snow falling towards the sea below.

The striking image of the Austfonna ice cap, located on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago, would seem certain to be heavily used by environmentalists protesting against climate change.

Alex Millson of The Daily Mail has more: Link (Photo: Michael Nolan/SpecialistStock/Barcroft Media)

Dutch architect Koen Olthuis responded to the rising sea level by designing a floating apartment building:

The Dutch are uniquely accustomed to dealing with fluctuating water levels; much of the Netherlands is below sea level, and vast swaths of land, known as polders, are continually pumped free of the accumulating rainwater that threatens nearby homes and buildings. The Citadel will simply rise and fall with the changing water levels, making it impervious to flooding, tides, and sea waters inching upward as a result of global warming.

Built atop a floating heavy concrete foundation, The Citadel will house 60 luxury apartments, a parking garage, a floating roadway, and boat docks. Each apartment will naturally have waterfront views via a garden terrace, and greenhouses will be interspersed throughout. But the greenest feature of the Citadel is its cooling system: submerged pipes will pump water throughout the structure to cool it, reducing its energy use by 25 percent compared to a conventional building.

Link

Joe Strummer was a highly political-minded musician with a love of music from all over the world. While many of you may only know a few of The Clash singles like “Rock the Casbah,” the group had a lot of diversity and is celebrated as one of the most unique and innovative punk bands in history. Even fewer people seem to be familiar with Joe’s work after The Clash, but if you’re a fan of the band, I highly recomend checking it out.

• Joe was born John Graham Mellor on August 21, 1952. He was born in Turkey to a British foreign-service diplomat and a nurse. In his early years, he spent time all over the world, including Cairo, Mexico City and Bonn.

• During his school years, Joe and his brother attended a private school in London. Joe developed an interest in rock music, including Little Richard, The Beach Boys and Woody Guthrie –he even started having his friends call him “Woody” for a few years.
• At the same time, his brother became immersed in the National Front and killed himself in July 1970. Joe had to identify his body after it had laid undiscovered for three days. The event dramatically affected Joe, and would certainly play a role in his anti-National Front stance throughout his later life.
• After graduation, Joe began attending college in Surrey, where he considered becoming a professional cartoonist. In 1973, he moved to Wales to attend an art college, but dropped out. While there, he began working as a gravedigger and started playing with his first band, The Vultures.
• When The Vultures broke up, Joe returned to London where he started The 101’ers with his two squatter roommates. The name came out from their address, 101 Walterton Road. They originally played covers of American R&B and blues songs, but soon Joe began writing original material.
• Joe learned to play guitar from his friend and band mate, Tymon Dogg. Unfortunately, Tymon taught him how to play right-handed, despite the fact that he was left-handed. The result was that Joe felt he was mostly limited to strumming chords. After this, Joe dropped his “Woody” nickname and began calling himself Joe Strummer.

• In 1975, Joe married a South African woman for £100 so she could obtain British citizenship. He used the money to buy his telecaster that later became his signature instrument.
• The 101’ers played a show in London in 1976 and a group completely unknown at the time, called the Sex Pistols, opened for them. Strummer was really impressed by the group and when he was approached by Bernie Rhodes and Mick Jones to join their band, London SS, he jumped on the opportunity. Unfortunately, the group broke up right when Joe was about to join. Instead, Joe and Mick formed a new band, called The Clash, with Paul Simonon.
• Interestingly, The Clash’s first show involved them opening for the Sex Pistols on July 4, 1976.
• Within the next year, the group was signed with CBS records. Most of their songs had a highly political theme, such as racism, unemployment, police brutality and more. Joe was highly active in the Anti-Nazi League and the Rock Against Racism campaigns.
• In 1978, Strummer started dating Gaby Salter, the pair stayed together fourteen years and had two daughters. They were never married though, because Joe couldn’t find the woman he married for citizenship to get a divorce.
• While in The Clash, Joe and his other bandmates got in a series of problems with the law. In 1977, he was arrested for spray painting “The Clash” on a hotel wall. A few years later, he was arrested in Germany for hitting a violent audience member with his guitar. The incident affected him and later he remarked, “I nearly murdered somebody, and it made me realize that you can’t face violence with violence. It doesn’t work.”

• Before the release of Combat Rock, Joe’s manager pushed him to disappear to help sell tickets for an upcoming tour. Strummer was only supposed to hide at someone’s house in the city, but he opted to really disappear and ran off to France. During this period, no one, including the band’s managers, knew where he was.
• Around the time “Rock the Casbah” was released, the band members began to argue a lot and Joe fired Mick Jones. This left the group with only two original members.
• In 1985, the group released an album, Cut The Crap, under the band name “The Clash Mark Two.” The album was a major disappointment to fans and critics and Joe decided to disband The Clash.
• Rolling Stone chose London Calling as the top album of the 1980’s.
• After The Clash breakup, Strummer acted in a lot of movies, including Walker, Straight to Hell, Mystery Train and I Hired a Contract Killer. In the last film, he really did little more than play music in a cameo role. The songs from the movie were released on a limited edition promotional single credited as, “Joe Strummer & the Astro Physicians.”
• In the early nineties, Joe replaced Shane MacGowan as the lead singer of The Pogues. He also produced their Hell’s Ditch album.
• Around the end of the millennium, Strummer got together a lot of top-notch, yet mostly unknown musicians to form his new backing band, The Mescaleros. This group soon released a number of albums. When in concert, the group also played a number of Clash favorites.
• At one of the group’s shows, Mick Jones was in the audience and joined the band during the song “Bankrobber.” During the encore, Jones played guitar and sang “White Riot” and “London’s Burning.” This was the first time in almost twenty years that the pair performed on stage together.
• On December 22, 2002, Joe Strummer died unexpectedly at his home in Somerset, England. He became the victim of an undiagnosed heart defect.

• Before his death, Joe worked hard to help create an organization called Future Forests (now changed to The Carbon Neutral Company) that plants trees to combat global warming. He was the first musician to neutralize the carbon created in record pressing through planting trees. Since he began the practice, Foo Fighters, Coldplay and Pink Floyd have all followed in his footsteps.
• To pay tribute to Strummer, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl and other musicians got together to perform “London Calling” at the Grammies.
• Additionally, many bands recorded songs paying tribute to Joe, including Stiff Little Fingers, Street Dogs, Cowboy Mouth and more.
• Even a train was named after Joe, the Class 47 locomotive 47828 was called “Joe Strummer.”
• The 2007 Sundance Festival featured a documentary about his life, called Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten.

Source #1, #2, #3

Well, whadaya know. Tomorrow is Earth Day (shouldn’t every day be Earth Day?). Our very own Jill Harness wrote a neat post over at Inventor Spot about 8 weird but Earth-friendly products you can buy to celebrate.

I particularly love this one: the thermoscope earrings by LeeAnn Herreid. Like a thermometer, the earrings register temperature changes with red alcohol that rises and falls (but without numerical values). So while you don’t know exactly how warm the Earth has gotten with global warming and all, you can still look pretty hot wearin’ em.

Check out the whole list here: Link

After having solved all of the world’s problems like cancer and global warming, scientists turn their attention to the vexing problem of why the top of your shoes get soaked when walking on a wet pavement:

The team used a high-speed video camera to film a person walking on a wet floor. The footage (see above) reveals how water is flung up from the ground, along the sole, and onto the top of the shoe.

The researchers calculated that shoes flick up about a pint of water after walking 20 kilometres on a damp day.

Link (with video clip and a clever animation of the process)

Biggify here: Link

Forget carbon footprint. Long before the Earth will suffer from a climate catastrophe due to global warming, humanity may perish from another environmental disaster: the diminishing supply of fresh water (Don’t believe it? Why, humans have been fighting wars over water for centuries)

In collaboration with Fogelson-Lubliner, GOOD Magazine has an eye-opening infographic of "water footprints", the amount of water an individual uses in the course of a day, as well as ways to save water by making simple changes in your habits.

I, for one, am surprised at the amount of water it takes to yield a pound of beef: Link – via swissmiss

Here’s something for you to ponder the next time you’re in the bathroom: American’s love for soft toilet paper is ecologically hard on forests!

… fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.

Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. “Recycled fiber cannot do it.” [...]

Though most of the pulp comes from tree farms, but not all:

Although brands differ, 25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests, which are an irreplaceable habitat for a variety of endangered species, environmental groups say.

Link

Global warming has an upside!

“It has been so hot in South Australia for over a week…40+ degrees Celsius everyday – 104 F, very dry also. These are the photos of a little Koala that just walked into the back porch of a home around the way looking for a bit of heat relief. The lady of the house filled up a bucket and this is what happened!”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Trace1138.

Our fight against global warming is futile. Nature is going to equalize everything in the end.

Here is a cool animation about plate techtonics before and after our time.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.

Biologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama are suggesting that the rain forests may not be doing so badly after all. While it’s certainly true that original rain forest is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate, until recently biologists have ignored the effect of secondary forests, which are growing on land that was once farmed, logged, or destroyed by natural disaster.  According to the New York Times, "By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics." 

Environmentalists argue that this secondary forest is not as valuable as the original rain forest, but scientists at the Smithsonian and the United Nations point out that the new forests could blunt the effects of rain forest destruction by absorbing carbon dioxide, the leading heat-trapping gas linked to global warming.

Farming lands have been abandoned as previously agricultural people seek higher-paying jobs in cities, and more efficient farming techniques that require less acreage to produce food means that more land can revert to its natural state.

The United Nations is undertaking the first global catalog of the new forests, which vary greatly in their stage of growth.

Photo by Tito Herrera for the New York Times

Link – via pajamasmedia

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

Photo: Red Cross of Argentina

This is a pretty clever guerilla marketing by the Argentinian Red Cross: a "melting" man passing out fliers urging spectators in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to fight global warming.

Link | Photo via Comunicadores.info [in Portuguese] – Thanks Adam!

Previously on Neatorama:

• Ice Sculptures of Melting Men by Nele Azevedo
• Melting Ice Cream Truck

What’s it like when a canal city has a flood? Venice, Italy is undergoing its worst flooding in 22 years as water has risen five feet above normal levels.

Venice’s lagoon often rises to 40 inches above its normal level during ‘acqua alta’ or high tides, particularly in autumn and winter.

But anything above 50 inches risks flooding the city and causing chaos for its 60,000 permanent residents and the tens of thousands of tourists who descend on it each day.

The worst flood in modern times was in 1966, when the lagoon rose more than six feet and caused widespread damage.

Experts say the severity and frequency of floods is becoming worse due to silt deposits raising the floor of the lagoon and a rise in sea levels caused by global warming

Flood control barriers under construction are not expected to be operational until 2012. Link -Thanks, Freshome!

No, New York is not underwater (yet, anyhow) – that’s a clever ad for HSBC by Ogilvy & Mather Mumbai ad agency in India. The bank wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of global warming, so the clever ad guys glued an aerial photo of a city’s skyscrapers to the base of a swimming pool … the effect of a submerged cityscape is fantastic!

Off-topic comments removed from Neatorama posts

From Chester A. Arthur:

wowsers

So many parallels to McCain here.

“– he asked Louis Tiffany to redecorate the White House in the style to which he was accustomed, which resulted in previous generations of White House furniture being sold or destroyed. ”

I can see Cindy McCain and Sarah Palin having a girly ball interior decorating (with cindy’s pocketbook). Those McCains are no joke…7 houses, 13 cars, 300,000 dollar outfits…true socialites!…like Paris…

And McCain is so old he’ll probably be the second sitting president to be denied his party’s nomination, if he wins.

Evil Pundit

Wowsers, your fevered imagination doesn’t equal reality.

As for McCain, at least he doesn’t have a close relationship with terrorists who bombed America, like Obama’s friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Nor does he associate with racist preachers such as Jeremiah Wright. John McCain has never received corrupt payments from convicted fraudster Tony Rezko.

If all you can do is whine about the property owned by McCain’s wife, then you’ve got nothing.

neoconartist

John McCain is an idiot who finished dam near last in his graduating class, is friends with a man who killed way more people than Ayers (who killed none) in Bush (100s of thousands) and was involved in a big banking corruption scandal - Not the kind of president we need at this time in our history!!!!

I wonder if Cindy uses Johns painkillers now instead of stealing them from a charity like she used to, it would explain that off-in-a-distance look she always has…

Evil Pundit

Obama is corrupt.

Let’s start with the numbers. Why is a first term Senator pulling down almost $300,000 a year from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Countrywide Financial, and Washington Mutual? He has not even completed his fourth year in the Senate and received a total of $1,093,329.00 from these eight companies and their employees. (all data from OpenSecrets.org). John McCain’s numbers, according to OpenSecrets.org for the period 1990-2008 (i.e., 18 years worth of data) only collected $549,584.00. In other words, Barack is receiving $273,582.25 (and 2008 is not over) per year while McCain raised a paltry $30,532.44.

Want another shocker? Barack Obama has received more from one source – Goldman Sachs $542,252.00 – than McCain has from all of the companies combined. Who the hell is more beholden to lobbyists? And why does a junior Senator from Illinois rate this kind of dough?”

So Obama has been enriching himself off of these very Wall Street firms he now decries…in addition to pocketing money from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers,Countrywide,and WAMU to the tune of $1,093,329.00 from these eight companies!

Paul in Boca

Umm,
Evil. Rick Davis, McCains campaign manager, collected $30,000 per month for over 5 years as the president of an advocacy group set up by Fannie & Freddie to defend F&M against stricter regulations. The majority of McCains campaign staff are former lobbyists. Phil Gramm, McCain’s top economic advisor, was the architect of completing deregulation between the banking, investing, and insurance companies. Look where that has left us. McCain just said he wants to do to the health industry what he did to banking. And I’m not going to get started on that ” a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not” remark made by that dimbulb from Nanook. But you know what, Evil, there are thousands of political web sites you can post your misbegotten beliefs to, why don’t you post them there? We come here for a break from that kind of stuff, OK?

From Mystery Ship Found off Alabama Coast:

jesus4U

Neatorama please dont engage in the pointless CENSORSHIP of views that the liberal elite doesnt recognize as valid, it is perfectly reasonable that the reason why they dont know the date for this ship is that all dating methods are WRONG, Gods word tells us the earth is 10000 years old or less if you do the geaneology and evolution is a LIE, Ted you should do your own research, don’t beleive the liberal censors, and please vote for Sarah Palin and McCain who will give Christians a say in the science classroom thanks

From Bambi and Thumper:

godisgood

Sorry LIBERAL “snark”, the good govenor Palin is NOT a sadist just because she hunts, sheesh you soft liberals are so sick in the head, don’t you eat meat too? Surely not all of you are hippie tree hugging vegetarians. Go follow the crack smoking Larry Sinclair loving African homosexual over the cliff sheesh you kids are so gullible, our country is going down the toilet with all these liberals.

godisgood

Snark if you think Sarah Palin is just some basket of fluff then you are just as SEXIST as the rest of your liberl buddies, the fact is she is a very capable Christian woman. For those Christians who worry about her natural role being usurped rest assured I have it on good word that Todd is VERY involved as well, they are a wonderful CHRISTIAN couple with values from the HEARTLAND unlike that certain AFRICAN and his socialist cronies who have been smearing her.

Blue eyes

Palin is UGLY inside and out. Anybody who loves to kill as much as she does can’t be trusted. GO BACK TO ALASKA!

Evil Pundit

It’s the hate-filled liberals like Snark and Blue Eyes, and the lying liberal trolls like Godisgood, who are truly the ugly side of politics.

From Doctor Watson's Phobia Factory:

godisgood

This is a perfect example of why the atheist science cabal needs to be balanced by good christian men and women in office with strong morals.
Sarah palin and john McCain will say no to the global warming science elite and make sure creation is taught in science class where it belongs!
They will also but like minded judges in the Supreme court and conservatives will have a majority there for along time, taking it back from the liberals who destroyed our neighborhoods in the 60s. Palin McCain 08! say no to the atheist liberal science elite and that African with no values

godisgood

Adolf Hitler was a Norse Pagan who fell into the trap of beleiving the atheist LIE of evolution which is brainwashed into our children in federal schools and only Palin and McCain are pledging to fight against this November. They will also support Christian homeschooling which will let us teach our children our own Values.

godisgood

I don’t know what trolling is but yes I am trying to get the word out that Palin and Mccain are the best choice for Christians because they will back creationism in science classrooms and stand up to the gobal warming liars like Al Gore. The future of the country depends in large part on the nominees tot he supreme court and we are very close to having a clear pro-Christian majority but if the atheist muslim sympathizer Barack Hussein Obama the African wins then all will be lost in that regard. I have donated to the campaign but am not employed by it.

Thomas

Do not feed the troll. It is fat and lazy enough as it is.

On the topic of John W. McCain giving “points” to people for spreading the word about him, its only to specific websites (i.e. Daily Kos) on specific topics. Today’s topics are “Partnership” and “Jobs for America.” I don’t even think McCain would tell folks to go out and say the uninformed crap that our lovely troll is spewing.

On the off chance that godisgood is a real person, and believes what they’re saying…. well the bible does say to be kind to the least among us, so bless your uninformed heart.

But under any other circumstances, eat a dick.

The Old Farmers Almanac used its time-honored (216 years old!) and complex calculations to predict the weather and came up with this stunning prediction: forget global warming, we’re in for global cooling!

"We at the Almanac are among those who believe that sunspot cycles and their effects on oceans correlate with climate changes," writes meteorologist and climatologist Joseph D’Aleo. "Studying these and other factor suggests that cold, not warm, climate may be our future."

It remains to be seen, said Editor-in-Chief Jud Hale, whether the human impact on global temperatures will cancel out or override any cooling trend.

"We say that if human beings were not contributing to global warming, it would become real cold in the next 50 years," Hale said.

Link

(Photo: Jim Cole/AP)

With all the attention to global warming, are we actually preparing for the right doomsday scenario? Perhaps not, according to physicist Phil Chapman, who thinks that another Ice Age is coming:

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850. [...]

If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale.

Link – via The Daily Galaxy

Of course, this is by no means accepted by most scientists in the world. In fact, the idea of global cooling is still a fringe theory. Read more about global cooling here.

The “Global Warming” rug, created by the Barcelona-based rug company Nanimaquina and the Mexican design collective NEL, can be seen at this year’s “International Furniture Festival” in Valencia, Spain (23-27 September).

Link – via LikeCool

Scientists in Argentina are studying the effect of methane produced by livestock on global warming. To measure the amount of gas produced by cows, animals have been outfitted with pink tanks to collect their farts!

The Argentine researchers discovered methane from cows accounts for more than 30 per cent of the country’s total greenhouse emissions.

As one of the world’s biggest beef producers, Argentina has more than 55 million cows grazing in its famed Pampas grasslands.

Guillermo Berra, a researcher at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology, said every cow produces between 8000 to 1,000 litres of emissions every day.

Researchers say feeding cows clover and alfalfa instead of grain can reduced emissions by 25%. Link -via Arbroath

Photo: Mark Thiessen / National Geographic (Photo Gallery), reproduced with permission from NG

"Good" fires are ecologically crucial, clearing out dead brush and returning nutrients to the soil. Most of these ponderosa pines will survive, even thrive, after a low-intensity burn in South Dakota’s Custer State Park. "Trees respond to fire," says Frank Carroll of the Forest Service, "like roses respond to pruning and fertilizer."

Summer is here – and in the West, along with hot weather comes the threat of wildfires. Last summer, during the Fire Season of 2007, the threat of wildfire became a nightmarish reality for my hometown of Santa Clarita, California – I could see fires burning a hill or two away from my backyard though thankfully they didn’t get any closer to my home than that.

So with that as a backdrop, I read with great interest this article, "Under Fire," from National Geographic by Neil Shea and Mark Thiessen about the history of wildfires, how to fight them, and more importantly, how NOT to fight them:

"The more money we spend, the worse it gets," one fire scientist told me last summer. "If that’s not a condemnation of our fire policies, I don’t know what is." [...]

Historically, the American approach to wildfire has been to try to suppress it whenever and wherever it appears. This strategy is often traced to the great fires of 1910. That year, massive blazes across the West burned millions of acres and killed dozens of firefighters. Smoke drifted as far as New England, along with tales of tragedy and devastation. Gifford Pinchot, first director of the nascent U.S. Forest Service, was convinced that fire threatened the economic well-being of the nation, and as the man in charge of a huge, federally owned empire of forested land, he was in a position to turn his ideas into policy. He began a campaign to banish fire. [...]

But that strategy turned out to be flawed – extremely flawed:

By stamping out small fires and allowing fuel to stockpile, our policies ensured that when conditions were right, fire would return—bigger, hotter, more destructive than ever. And the right conditions could become routine. Most climate models now strongly suggest that the recent drought is not just a temporary phenomenon but part of a long-term drying trend made worse by global warming. There comes a point where no amount of money, no measure of heroism, is enough. Far from "wholly within the control of man," fire becomes unstoppable.

Photo: Mark Thiessen / National Geographic Magazine (Photo Gallery)

Using terrain as a tool, a firefighter shoots flares onto a hillside, hoping to create a chimneylike effect: As heat from this fire rises, it should draw flames upslope, away from unburned forest below. But fire doesn’t always cooperate.

Links: Article at National Geographic Magazine | Photo Gallery | Interview with Mark Thiessen (how did he get into the middle of the fires? He went to firefighting school first!)

Note 1: National Geographic is one of my favorite magazines – I had quite a collection of them (until I, um, misplaced them in the Great Move of 2004 from San Francisco to LA). I’m thankful to National Geographic Magazine for their permission (finally!) to feature their articles and photos on Neatorama – thanks Marilyn!

Note 2: If your house is in a risk area, here’s what you can do to prepare for a wildfire.

"Eureka!" Archimedes screamed, then he ran outside naked ...

Every high school physics student knows about Fourier’s Law of Heat Conduction and Hooke’s Law of Elasticity. But not many know that Joseph Fourier lived inside a wooden box in his old age. Or that Robert Hooke’s arch-nemesis, Isaac Newton, hated him so much that he had Hooke’s portrait removed from the Royal Society and tried to have his papers burned. Imagine how much fun science class would’ve been, had these been taught along side all those equations and formulas.

Well, now you can read about the interesting stuff that your school textbooks didn‘t bother to include. In his latest book, Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them, Cliff Pickover takes some 40 eponymous laws of physics and explains the life of the scientists whom these laws are named after. The book is far from a dry listing of scientific formulas - actually, it’s full of quirky trivia and nifty facts about some of the world’s greatest scientists.

Cliff has graciously allowed us to take samples from the book for this article and generously offer personalized copies of the book to 3 lucky Neatorama readers (see below for details).

So, if you didn’t know that Archimedes sometimes sent his colleagues false theorems in order to trap them when they stole his ideas, or that Daniel Bernoulli‘s father threw him out for winning a science competition, then this Neatorama post is for you. Behold, the 5 Scientific Laws and the Scientists Behind Them (no complicated math, we promise!)

1. Archimedes’ Principle of Buoyancy

The Law: According to Archimedes’ principle, a body wholly or partially submerged in liquid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced liquid. This buoyant force depends on the density of the liquid and the volume of the object, but not its shape.

The law seems simple, but it is actually not intuitive that objects with equal volume experience the same buoyant force when held under water: cubes made of cork and lead would experience the same buoyant force, yet would have completely different behavior. This is because the different ratios of buoyant force to object weights.

Archimedes’ Principle of Buoyancy has many applications, including determining the pressure of a liquid as a function of depth. It helps us understand how floatation works and is one of the founding principles of hydrostatics.

The Famous Legend Behind the Law: One day, King Hieron II of Syracuse, Sicily, wanted to find out whether his wreath-shaped crown was actually made from pure gold. He called upon Archimedes to find out (without damaging the crown, say by melting it down). Roman architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius wrote:

While Archimedes was turning the problem over, he chanced to come to the place of bathing, and there, as he was sitting down in the tub, he noticed that the amount of water which flowed over the tub was equal to the amount by which his body was immersed. This showed him means of solving the problem … In his joy, he leapt out of the tub and, rushing naked toward his home, he cried out with a loud voice that he had found what he sought.

Archimedes was able to obtain the exact volume of the crown by dunking it in water and measuring the displaced water. He then took the weight of the crown and divided it by its volume to get the density of the crown, which turned out to be between that of gold and silver. Archimedes was thus able to show that the wreath was not made out of pure gold (and the royal goldsmith was executed).

Modern scholars suggest that this story was bogus, as it would be unlikely that Archimedes had measuring equipment with sufficient accuracy to detect the difference (plus, he hated to bathe - see below).

The Man Behind the Law: Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 B.C.), was a Greek geometer and is often regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians and scientists who ever lived.

Here are a few things about Archimedes you may not know:

- Plutarch wrote that Archimedes was so obsessed with math that his servants had to force him to bathe, and that while they scrubbed him, he continued to draw geometrical figures on his body!

- Archimedes invented a machine called the Archimedean screw to pump water.

- He also invented a “death ray” weapon using a set of mirrors that focused sunlight on Roman ships, setting them on fire. After many scientists discounted the story as false, David Wallace of MIT actually did the experiment: He had his students build an oak replica of a Roman ship and focused sunlight on it using 127 mirrored tiles from a distance of 30 meters. After ten minutes of exposure, the ship burst into flames!

- When the Romans captured Syracuse in 212 B.C., a Roman soldier came upon the mathematician who was studying a mathematical diagram drawn in the sand. Archimedes was annoyed by the soldier’s interruption, and said “Don’t disturb my circles” before he was killed. Moral of the story: don’t piss off a Roman soldier!

2. Hooke’s Law of Elasticity

The Law: Hooke’s Law of Elasticity states that if an object, such a spring, is elongated by some distance x, then the restoring force F exerted by the object is proportional to x:

The k is a constant called the spring constant if the object is a spring.

The Man Behind the Law: Robert Hooke (1635 - 1702) was an English physicist and polymath. As you can see, Hooke was an ugly man (he was severely disfigured by smallpox). (Photo: Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You)

Here are a few things about Hooke you may not know:

- Robert Hooke was a sickly child and wasn’t expected to reach adulthood, so his parents didn’t bother educating him. Left to his own devices, Hooke made mechanical models and clocks.

- He was the first to coin the word “cell” to describe the basic unit of life (he thought that plant cells, when magnified through a microscope, looked like “cellula,” the living quarters of monks).

- Hooke was a busy man: he was the Surveyor to the City of London, helped rebuild the city after the Great Fire in 1666, and even designed the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital (“Bedlam”) and the Royal College of Physicians.

- In 1672, Hooke criticized Isaac Newton who used a prism to split white light into its various components. Furious at Hooke, Newton had his portraits removed from the Royal Society and even attempted to burn his papers. Hooke mentioned to Newton about a possible inverse-square principle of gravitation, but Newton didn’t credit Hooke when he published Principia Mathematica, saying "Merely because one says something might be so, it does not follow that it has been proved that it is."

- Hooke was interested in the science of respiration, so he had himself placed in a sealed vessel from which air was gradually pumped out. As you can imagine, the experiment was detrimental to Hooke’s health: he damaged his ears and experienced deafness in the process.

- In 2006, the Royal Society purchased a manuscript by Hooke for $1.75 million, in which he wrote 500 pages of notes recorded during Royal Society meetings. In the notes, Hooke castigated Newton and Robert Boyle for stealing his ideas. He also wrote that Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek found "a vast number of small animals in his Excrements which were most abounding when he was troubled with a Looseness and very few or none when he was well."

3. Bernoulli's Law of Fluid Dynamics (Bernoulli's Principle)

The Law: Imagine fluid flowing steadily through a pipe that carries it from the top to the bottom of a hillside. The pressure of the liquid changes along the pipe, and Daniel Bernoulli discovered the law that relates the pressure, flow speed, and height for a fluid flowing in a pipe. Today, this law is written as:

You may not be aware of Bernoulli's Law, but it has numerous applications in real life: Bernoulli's Law is used when designing the Venturi throat, a constricted region in the air passage of a car motor's carburetor that causes a reduction in pressure, and in turn causes fuel vapor to be drawn out of the carburetor bowl.

The design of airplane wings take advantage of the knowledge we gleaned from Bernoulli's Law: these wings are designed to create an area of fast flowing air on its upper surface, which cause pressure near this area to drop and thus pull the wing upward.

Finally, we've all experienced Bernoulli's Law in action: the shower curtain is pulled inward when water first comes out of the shower because the increase in water and air velocity inside the shower causes pressure to drop. The pressure difference between the outside and inside of the curtain causes it to be sucked inward.

The Man Behind the Law: Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782) was polymath that came from a family of extraordinary Swiss mathematicians. In fact, his father, Johann Bernoulli, and his uncle, Jacob, were famous mathematicians.

Interestingly, both Daniel and his father Johann secretly studied mathematics against the wishes of their respective fathers. Just as Johann's father tried to force him into becoming a merchant, Johann did the same to Daniel. Indeed, Johann had his son's future all mapped out, including whom to marry!

Finally, Daniel told his father that he'd had enough, and both of them came to a truce: Daniel would become a doctor and Johann would personally teach him math.

Here are a few things about Daniel Bernoulli you may not know:

- Johann had always been jealous of Daniel's success. In 1735, after both the father and son tied for first place in a science competition held by the Paris Academy of Sciences, Johann was unable to bear the “shame" of being comparable to his son and threw Daniel out of his house for winning the prize that he felt should've been his alone!

- Daniel published his work on fluid physics in a book titled Hydrodynamica (where we get the word "hydrodynamics" from) in 1734. Johann became jealous of Daniel's work and published his own plagiarized version, Hydraulica … and predated it to 1732 to make it seem that his work appeared before his son's!

- Daniel was a prolific author and wrote on whatever subjects struck his fancy. One of his papers discussed the formula for computing the relationship between the number of oarsmen on a ship and the ship's velocity. In another paper, Daniel wrote what would become the basis of the economic theory of risk aversion and overall happiness gained from goods or services.

4. Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures

The Law: Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures states that the total pressure P_t exerted by a mixture of gases in a container is equal to the sum of the separate pressures that each gases would exert if just that single gas occupied the entire volume of the container.

That may seem trivial, but it's actually one of the more useful gas laws for scientists.

The Man Behind the Law: John Dalton (1766 - 1844) grew in a poor family, was a poor speaker, severely color-blind, and was even considered a crude or simple experimentalist. Yet, he achieved significant professional successes and made great contributions to chemistry, meteorology, and physics.

In the early 19th century, Dalton developed the atomic theory, in which he proposed that each chemical element is composed of atoms of single, unique type and that though these atoms are indestructible, they can combine in simple ratios. For this, many consider Dalton to be the "Father of Chemistry".

Here are a few things about John Dalton you may not know:

- Legend has it that Dalton once bought his mother special stockings for her birthday. The mother, a Quaker woman, was shocked that he would buy her scarlet stockings. Dalton thought that they were blue, and asked his brother … who also saw them as blue! At that point, he realized that both he and his brother were color blind.

- Dalton did the first systematic study of color blindness and wrote the very first paper on the subject. In his honor, color blindness is sometimes called Daltonism.

- Since he was 21, Dalton kept a detailed diary of the weather, and continued to update it until the very day of his death. Dalton was so obsessed with records that he kept meticulous records of hits, misses, and other scores when he played the English game of lawn bowling!

- Dalton never married, saying "My head is too full of triangles, chymical process, and electrical experiments, etc., to think much of marriage."

- After his death, and according to his wishes, one of Dalton's eyes was cut open to determine the cause of his color blindness (Dalton had always thought that it was due to colored fluid inside his eyes - but that turned out not to be the case.) In the 1990s, cellular analysis revealed that the eye lacked the pigment that provides sensitivity to green.

5. Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction

The Law: Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction deals with the transmission of heat in materials. The law states that the heat flux, Q (the flow of heat per unit area and per unit of time), is proportional to the gradient of the temperature difference.

Fourier's Law is used in many diverse areas of science, and it explains why diamonds are cool to the touch (they have high thermal conductivity).

The Man Behind the Law: Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830) was a French mathematicians and Egyptologist.

Here are a few things about Fourier you may not know:

- When he was only 16, Fourier discovered a new proof of Descartes’ rule of signs. His teenage achievement quickly became standard proof. By the age of 21, however, Fourier was in doubt whether he could ever make a significant contribution to mathematics. He wrote to his professor "Yesterday was my 21st birthday, at that age Newton and Pascal had already acquired many claims to immortality." It’s a good thing Fourier carried on!

- Instead of a career in science, young Fourier seriously considered being a priest. Indeed, he arrived at the Benedictine abbey of St. Benoit-sur-Leoire to prepare for his vows, but left when he realized that he only had one true love: mathematics.

- During the French Revolution, Fourier tried to defend scientists like Antoine Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry. Appeals to spare Lavoisier’s life was cut short when the judge said “The Republic has no need for geniuses” and he was guillotined. Afterwards, Fourier was thrown in prison but managed to escape death when the political climate changed.

- In his work on heat propagation in thin sheets of material, Fourier invented a very useful mathematical tool that would later become known as the Fourier Series. Here, Fourier showed that any periodic function can be represented by a sum of simple sine and cosine oscillating functions.

- Fourier accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. When he returned, Fourier had a strange medical condition: he was always cold and had to wear several overcoats, even in the heat of summer. It’s ironic to think that though he was an expert in heat transfer, Fourier was not good at regulating his own body heat!

- Global warming? Blame Fourier - he came up with the idea that the atmosphere acts as a “translucent dome,” which like a lid of a pot, absorbs some of the heat of the Sun and reradiates it downward to Earth.

- During his last months, Fourier’s body was so frail that he would live inside a wooden box with holes cut out for his head and arms. This “living coffin” would keep his body upright and let him work on his correspondence!

The article above is but a small selection of the amazing trivia and fascinating stories about some of the greatest names in science. If you love science, or would like to instill the love of science to your children, pick up Cliff Pickover's Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them. You won't be disappointed

Links: Archimedes to Hawking Amazon page | The book's website | Cliff's website

On a personal note, this article took way longer than I thought (and I didn't even get to Stephen Hawking!) ... because I ended up reading Cliff's book from cover to cover! It was definitely an interesting read.

Now, like I mentioned above, Cliff has generously offered free copies of Archimedes to Hawking to Neatorama readers with the most interesting experience with science or funny personal story about a science class ... Write yours in the comment section; the best three will win a free personalized copy of Cliff's book (so make it good!)

Old & busted: depending on the gub’ment for law & order.
The new hotness: survivalism.

Faced with a multitude of threats – from global warming to housing crisis to a declining economy, and spurred on by what they saw happened during Hurricane Katrina (and even the movie "I Am Legend" with Will Smith), some people are turning on to good ol’ survivalism:

They stockpile or grow food in case of a supply breakdown, or buy precious metals in case of economic collapse. Some try to take their houses off the electricity grid, or plan safe houses far away. The point is not to drop out of society, but to be prepared in case the future turns out like something out of “An Inconvenient Truth,” if not “Mad Max.”

“I’m not a gun-nut, camo-wearing skinhead. I don’t even hunt or fish,” said Bill Marcom, 53, a construction executive in Dallas.

Still, motivated by a belief that the credit crunch and a bursting housing bubble might spark widespread economic chaos — “the Greater Depression,” as he put it — Mr. Marcom began to take measures to prepare for the unknown over the last few years: buying old silver coins to use as currency; buying G.P.S. units, a satellite telephone and a hydroponic kit; and building a simple cabin in a remote West Texas desert.

“If all these planets line up and things do get really bad,” Mr. Marcom said, “those who have not prepared will be trapped in the city with thousands of other people needing food and propane and everything else.”

Here’s an interesting NY Times article by Alex Williams: Link

Now excuse me while I stock my bomb shelter with ammo. You never know how soon those zombies will come …

James Lovelock [wiki] is a climate scientist (he was the first to detect widespread presence of CFCs in the atmosphere) and a maverick (he proposed the Gaia Hypothesis, which proposes that earth, and everything living and non-living on it are part of a complex interacting system that can be though of as a single organism).

In 1965, James Lovelock predicted that environment will be the biggest challenge in the 21st century. And in general, he was right.

In an interview by Decca Aitkenhead of The Guardian, Lovelock explains why global warming had passes a tipping point, catastrophe is inevitable, and we are all doomed:

"It’s just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you’re offsetting the carbon? You’re probably making matters worse. You’re far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests." [...]

He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all – renewable energy.

"You’re never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."

Link (Photo: Eamonn McCabe)

Photo: London Media

Yes, your eyes aren’t deceiving you: those are tortoises in Shirley Neely’s refrigerator. She has 75 of them hibernating happily next to her (scant) groceries!

On every shelf, wrapped in tea towels, are slumbering tortoises. The smaller ones are snuggled up in a biscuit tin, but the bigger fellows are laid out side-by-side in their makeshift sleeping bags.

Mrs Neely who runs the Jersey-based Tortoise Sanctuary, had to set up the fridges because of the particularly mild winter. Her tortoises hibernate for up to three months between December and March, and need steady temperatures between 3c and 8c.

They are in danger of waking early if it heats up – and then do not have enough body weight to keep themselves warm and not enough energy to eat or drink. But fridges, at a steady 4c to 6c, are the perfect environment.

Mrs Neely said: "It’s much easier to maintain a constantly cool temperature with a fridge than it is with our ever-warming climate."

Blast global warming! But hooray for refrigeration! Link – via Spluch

Photo: Frank O Smedegård

Hooray for global warming! Melting ice has created a fantastic "ice cathedral" in a grotto under the Nigard Glacier, one of Norway’s major glaciers:

He described the ice grotto as "fantastic," with "extremely blue" colors and large icicles hanging from its ceiling. "But it’s changing from day to day," he said, noting that ice is a "moving phenomenon."

The grotto is believed to have been created by rising temperatures. "It’s the running water under the ice that has made the ice over it melt," noted Kjærvik.

Link

Global warming, acid rain, pollution … the world is a wreck. Maybe it’s time to call Jack Bauer. Actually, Fox’s 24 executive producer Howard Gordon is making Jack Bauer do something about the environment: he’s making the show carbon-neutral!

Politics aside, an environmentally friendly "24" still seems an oxymoronic notion, like eco-conscious coal mining.

For one, the show shoots roughly half of its scenes on location–unlike, say, a medical drama, which mainly adheres to a single interior. This makes "24" something of an energy glutton: Each new venue requires the transportation of crew and equipment, the building (and dismantling) of sets, the rigging of generators to power the voracious lights that illuminate those sets.

And, of course, the series’ numerous special effects (car chases, explosions, shootouts) are not exactly low-emission–the show’s carbon footprint for 2006 was 1,684 metric tons, the annual equivalent of approximately 364 cars or 89 households.

Mike Posey, a Twentieth Century Fox Television production manager who also spearheads the show’s environmental efforts, sums up the logic behind the decision this way: "We could have done it with a sitcom that never leaves the stage and only shoots one day a week and said, ‘Yay! We did it.’ But we picked our toughest show, our most expensive show, and, if we can pull it off, it will be a great achievement."

Can Jack Bauer save the environment? Link – Thanks Ben Wasserstein!