CLIMATE CHANGE: Gov. Rick Perry fails on climate change and on other significant environmental issues

Posted on September 9, 2011

Via NPR:

Perry is a strong opponent of the Environmental Protection Agency and he has expressed doubts that human activity is causing climate change.

JOHN BURNETT: Last month at a breakfast speech in Bedford, New Hampshire, when Rick Perry was asked about climate change, he gave this answer.

Governor RICK PERRY: There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated…

BURNETT: Perry said there are a substantial number of scientists who’ve manipulated the data so they would have dollars rolling into their projects. The governor went on to say that weekly, indeed daily, scientists are abandoning the theory of manmade global warming. Perry has long been a climate science doubter, a position that has endeared him to certain factions of the electorate. In his book, “Fed Up!” – a screed against the federal government – Perry calls global warming a contrived phony mess that’s falling apart under its own weight.

His statement in New Hampshire prompted blowback from Andrew Dessler, a prominent professor of atmospheric sciences at Perry’s alma mater, Texas A&M University. Dessler fired off an angry editorial that appeared in papers around the country.

ANDREW DESSLER: Well, if Governor Perry wants to talk to us, we can explain to him that the science of climate change is nearly 200 years old and at this point, we have a really well validated and sophisticated understanding of how the climate system works.

BURNETT: The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the science academy of every major industrialized nation believe that human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, have contributed to increased concentrations of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, which is heating the planet. Andrew Dessler says climate change is indisputably part of Texas’ current calamity.

DESSLER: And what that means is it makes the heat more extreme, it increases evaporation from the soil, that makes the drought more extreme. So we can be pretty confident that we’ve made the hellish summer that we just have gone through and we’re sort of still going through, we’ve made this worse than it would have been.

BURNETT: The Perry campaign did not respond to emails requesting clarification of his remarks on climate change. If Rick Perry disdains climate scientists, that’s nothing like his animosity toward the Environmental Protection Agency. Texas has more polluting industrial plants than any other state and Texas SUVs and coal-burning power plants spew out more carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, than any other state. The Perry administration has fought the regional EPA office in Dallas, which has been more aggressive under President Obama in trying to bring Texas polluters into line with federal regulations.

Continue reading this article at NPR.

REDISCOVERED SPECIES: Glow-in-the-dark mushroom rediscovered after almost 170 years of absence

Posted on August 7, 2011

Neonothopanus gardneri image found here

A species of bioluminescent fungi, Neonothopanus gardneri, which hasn’t been seen in almost 170 years, has been rediscovered in Brazil. According to the USA Today, it is “one of the most strongly bioluminescent mushrooms known.” More via USA Today:

Glowing fungi aren’t all that unusual in nature, there are 71 known species. But “this one is incredibly bright for a luminescent mushroom,” says Dennis Desjardin, a professor of evolutionary biology at San Francisco State University who researches fungi. “It glows more brightly than almost all other luminescent mushrooms.”

While most glowing fungi are either tiny or faint, these mushrooms emit a greenish light strong enough “that if you were in a dark room and you put one on a newspaper, you’d be able to read the words,” says Desjardin.

The last time scientists encountered this specific glow-in-the-dark mushroom was in 1840, when English botanist George Gardner saw some boys playing with a glowing object in the streets of Vila de Natividad, a village in the Goiás state in central Brazil.

Gardner sent examples of it to researchers at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew in England. They confirmed it was an unknown species and named it for him, calling it Agaricus gardneri.

After that there were no more reports of it.

Brazilian chemist, Cassius Stevani first heard of the existence of these mushrooms in 2001 or 2002, he said via email from Brazil.

But it wasn’t until February of 2005 that he got more data, from scientists Patricia Izar from São Paulo University in Brazil and Dorothy Fragaszy of the University of Georgia in Athens.

They were studying a band of monkeys in Brazil’s Piauí State and their use of rocks at tools to break nuts. One day they returned to the camp where “they found some mushrooms growing on the base of palms,” Stevani says.

. . .

The group has been looking at the chemical pathways that allow these mushrooms to produce light, a mechanism that is still somewhat mysterious. The newly re-discovered mushroom also allowed them to make chemical comparisons between the four major lineages of mushrooms that are bioluminescent.

Scientists have been trying to understand whether the ability to glow evolved four times or just once, back when these distantly-related mushrooms had a common ancestor. Chemical analysis showed that they share much of the chemistry for producing light, “which suggests the pathway must have evolved early on ,” says Desjardin.

Only 71 species of fungi are bioluminescent, out of the 100,000 known species.

Why certain fungi glow in the dark is another unknown. One theory is that insects attracted to the glow help carry the mushrooms’ spores farther afield. Another is that the light attracts predatory insects that in turn eat insects that snack on the fungus.

One animal that doesn’t eat Neonothopanus gardneri is humans. It’s in a family of mushrooms known to be responsible for poisonings worldwide, says Desjardin.

Continue reading this article at the USA Today.

More images of other species of bioluminescent fungi from around the world:

Panellus stipticus is a cosmopolitan species of bioluminescent mushroom, which is found in North America and around other parts of the world. Image via

Panellus stipticus. Image via

A species of Mycena glowing at night in eastern Australia. Image via Smoken Mirror on Flickr

Image via Christina’s Play Place on Flickr

Mycena sp. Image via Smoken Mirror on Flickr

SCIENCE: Should evolution be taught in schools?

Posted on June 21, 2011

Not that I’m shocked or anything like that, but apparently Alyssa Campanella, our new Miss USA, is a huge science geek, and she believes in evolution!

More responses on whether evolution should be taught in school from the contestants:

Via ThinkProgress

POLITICS: Tea Party-backed Christine O’Donnell is ignorant of the U.S. Constitution (and evolution)

Posted on October 19, 2010

Members of the Tea Party frequently claim that the federal government is destroying the U.S. Constitution, but although the Tea Party utilizes the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me,” the Tea Party is the first to tread on the U.S. Constitution with their shameless ignorance. In a recent debate with the Delaware U.S. Senate Democratic nominee Chris Coons, the Republican nominee and Tea Party-backed Christine O’Donnell said, “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” She also incorrectly declared that evolution isn’t a fact. However, evolution is both a fact and a theory. Intelligent design is a meticulously-crafted lie that was invented to compete with evolution, and intelligent design isn’t science. More via the late Stephen Jay Gould:

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

You can read more about Christine O’Donnell’s frightening views on science at Southern Fried Science.