One of the best ways to consume news on the iPad is with the Flipboard app (flipboard.com). Flipoard links to rss feeds, Twitter, and Facebook to bring you the news that most interests you.The app ingests feeds and formats them in a pleasing, magazine-like format easy for browsing.   View a short passage from the article and tap to see more. Create favorites, share your discoveries, and follow your favorite curators.

Flipboard is currently featuring The Physical Environment Twitter feed under the Tech & Science section.

Personal and professional obligations are keeping me from updating this blog on a regular basis. To keep up with daily geoscience related news, subscribe to my “The Physical Environment Daily” newspaper of news shared on Twitter.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 47,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 6 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 10 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 276 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 211kb.

The busiest day of the year was January 14th with 632 views. The most popular post that day was Google Earth Before and After images of Haiti Quake.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were uwsp.edu, google-latlong.blogspot.com, socioecohistory.wordpress.com, search.conduit.com, and freesexmovie.irwanaf.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for physical environment, ocean food chain, food chain, ocean food web, and marine biome food web.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Google Earth Before and After images of Haiti Quake January 2010

Crucial Marine Food Chain Link Withers December 2006

Exploring Effects of the Haitian Earthquake January 2010

Vital Ocean ‘Carbon Sink’ Nearly Full May 2007

Catastrophic earthquake overdue for Los Angeles July 2008

See the report here

The e-mails appeared just weeks before the United Nations Conference on Climate Change held in Copenhagen in December 2009.

At the time, many climate change experts claimed the files were stolen in an attempt to undermine the talks. “Given the wide-ranging nature of change that is likely to be taken in hand, some naturally find it inconvenient to accept its inevitability,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri told reporters in the Danish capital.

“The recent incident of stealing the e-mails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts, perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC.”

After its completion, the December Copenhagen climate conference was widely seen to have failed in its aim of agreeing a global deal on climate change.(1)

CNN’s answer implies that the emails led to the failure of the Copenhagen Conference. It does not, however, enlighten the reader to the true impact of the emails on the “the case for global warming”. Instead, the answer tries to relate the emails to the failure of the Copenhagen Conference. The Copenhagen Conference wasn’t about making a case for global warming, it was an attempt to do something about it. The failure of the Copenhagen Conference was not due to the case for global warming, it was due to the failure of participating countries to agree on how to respond and the level of responsibility each much bare. If you want to know why the conference failed, turn to the BBC. CNN’s answer says nothing about the impact of the emails on the case for global warming.

Reporting like this does not inform the public and offers poor answers to the pressing issue of global warming and climate change.

1. CNN (2010) Q&A: ‘Climategate explained’. http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/07/climategate.emails.explainer/index.html Last accessed July 7, 2010

The Laframboise report appears to consider any source that was not published in a peer-reviewed journal as grey literature. I didn’t see a breakdown of the grey sources categorizing them by secondhand newspaper articles, government reports, academic books, etc. Comments appended to the “How to Audit” document indicate that books are considered grey sources and not peer-reviewed. All academic books I have been involved with have gone through a peer-review process. To be accurate, those auditing should have investigated which books were or were not peer-reviewed.

Although correct in its reporting, the Fox News article is rather shallow in its analysis. Fox News provides feedback from both IPCC supporters and climate change deniers. What they don’t do, is to look deeper into the story. Their headline may lead one to believe that the Laframboise report debunks climate change science. All the report does is tally the IPCC sources. And in the last paragraph Fox News states that “Others are calling for a more cautious approach than spending public or private dollars on discredited scientific research.” Characterizing the IPCC reports as “discredited” is a misnomer. Questioning the IPCC’s conclusions, yes, but few of the conclusion have been outright discredited with equally valid research.

In a bit of journalistic slight of hand, Ms Laframboise states that “For years we’ve been told the UN’s climate bible bases its conclusions solely on peer-reviewed scientific literature”. What she should state is that Professor Pachauri has stated on several occasions between 2007 and 2009, that the IPCC reports relied on such. If one digs past these statements, the public has been been told that grey literature was indeed used .

The Laframboise report provides very little valuable information to the public in order to ascertain the validity of the science underlying the IPCC reports. The Laframboise report is only a challenge to comments, some unfortunate, by the IPCC chair. The fundamental issue that remains unaddressed by the Laframboise report is the validity grey literature. Just because research appears in a doctoral dissertation, which is reviewed by the candidate’s dissertation committee, does not weaken its validity. Until such a review is completed, one can never know if the hoopla over the issue of grey literature has any basis in fact. Alarmist and lackluster reports such as those produced by noconsensus.org do little to further our understanding of climate change or the process of doing scientific research.

Services like Bing and Google Earth permit one to explore the aerial views of destruction. The Search Engine Land blog has created a video demonstrating how to use these services.

Supersites is a collaborative effort of the geohazard scientific community. As described by their home page, “The Supersites provide access to spaceborne and in-situ geophysical data of selected sites prone to earthquake, volcano or other hazards.” Here you’ll find a USGS ShakeMap, a simulated ground deformation map, historical seismicity, stress change maps among others. At the Google Crisis Response site, a number of post-quake layers can be viewed and downloaded in KML format. The New York Times has created an interactive map using GeoEye technology.

YouTube is replete with videos from a number of sources, while Immersive Media puts you at ground level with 360 degree videos.

The Physical Environment Link: Tectonics and Landforms

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