When you bake your turkey, don't forget to turn on the range hood

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Tis the season for lots of baking, so don't forget that even new stoves can give off very high levels of carbon monoxide. CO is colorless, odorless, and deadly, but a properly working range hood fan can vent it outside.

I plan on doing as little as possible today besides eat and watch football (Lions - meh, Cowboys - boo!) My favorite Thanksgiving football memory was Randy Moss shredding the Cowboys for my long-suffering Vikings (Drew Pearson pushed off! that's how long I have despised the Cowboys).

Oh well, enough of that. Whether you're religious or not there is usually something to be thankful for and I hope you all have a pleasant holiday and drive safe.

When you write about science, you should at least talk to scientists

There is a vast amount of peer-reviewed science showing that the climate of the earth is changing rapidly and humans are the cause.

image from here

And then there is this drivel from Politico claiming that climate scientists are skeptical of climate change and are urging caution, but does not quote a single climate scientist. Joe Romm offers an excellent rebuttal to this on his blog Climate Progress, but it must get frustrating to refute the same old denialist talking points over and over again. Unfortunately many journalists believe that they need to "balance" a story with views from the other side, but this is the equivalent of taking moon landing skeptics as seriously as NASA.

Next week I am attending the EPA Climate Change Symposium in Milwaukee which will look at the changes that are happening now and in the future in the Great Lakes region. I have a keen interest in this subject and have been fortunate to be able to access primary peer-reviewed science on climate and ecology. The consensus among actual climate scientists is as strong as any in science, and muddying the waters to score political points will only delay the actions that are needed to try and slow the rate of change that is occurring. The IPCC report linked above is the scientific equivalent of screaming "this is happening now and we need to do something!" We ignore this at our (and future generations) peril.

Climate Change - Some Good News, Some Bad News

I saw a couple of news items on climate change today.

First, the good news - scientists have found a type of rock that can soak up carbon dioxide.
From the link:

When carbon dioxide comes in contact with the rock, peridotite, the gas is converted into solid minerals such as calcite.

Geologist Peter Kelemen and geochemist Juerg Matter said the naturally occurring process can be supercharged 1 million times to grow underground minerals that can permanently store 2 billion or more of the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity every year.

Their study will appear in the November 11 edition of the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.

Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth's mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. It also appears on the surface, particularly in Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that produces substantial amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of fossil fuels.

Now for the bad news - the warming we are now experiencing is the sharpest increase in the last 5000 years , so we had better hope they can scale up that carbon sequestering rock in a hurry.

Oops! forgot to close the blockquote - the last part in bold is from me, not the link.

Get out and Vote!

Minnesota traditionally has the highest voter turnout in the nation, let's do it again.