It’s back to WordPress after a long tenure of managing my own site. Upon retirement I took a couple of (pandemic) years away from my “The Physical Environment” project. Before doing so, I placed a Creative Commons copyright on it and gave it away to many of the educators that have used it over the years. It was with great pride to see it land on Libretexts. Kudos to those who put in the hard work to keep the project alive. Check it out at here.

 

 

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.

 

Crunchy numbers

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

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.

1

Google Earth Before and After images of Haiti Quake January 2010

2

Crucial Marine Food Chain Link Withers December 2006

3

Exploring Effects of the Haitian Earthquake January 2010

4

Vital Ocean ‘Carbon Sink’ Nearly Full May 2007

5

Catastrophic earthquake overdue for Los Angeles July 2008

I’ve created a new blog called the Geoscience Channel devoted to sharing geoscience-related videos every Tuesday and Thursday. Find it at The Geoscience Channel on WordPress.

Description from the site: “National Geographic Society Chairman of the Board Gil Grosvenor discusses why effective democracy requires geographic literacy, and other benefits of geographic education. Get resources and learn more about what National Geographic is doing to support geography education at http://nationalgeographic.com/education. ”

NOAA has released its 2010 Arctic report card, and it’s not good. Return to previous Arctic conditions is unlikely.

 

See the report here

“Rob Dunbar hunts for data on our climate from 12,000 years ago, finding clues inside ancient seabeds and corals. His work is vital in setting baselines for fixing our current climate — and, scarily, in tracking the rise of deadly ocean acidification.”

I applaud CNN for attempting to answer questions about ‘Climategate’ but  the article falls flat on one of the most important questions asked: “What impact did ‘Climategate’ have on the case for global warming.” Here is the response:

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