Science Friday

Probably the second most important (only to preventing nuclear war) issue humanity has ever addressed will be discussed at Copenhagen in less than a month. At this conference, delegates from all over the world will work out a global agreement on how to prevent this catastrophe from occurring. In light of this, the next few weeks' Science Fridays will discuss the various aspects of climate change.

The change humans are causing to the climate is known most commonly as global warming or climate change, though the terms global change and climate crisis are also used. The meaning of these is essentially the same. Some people care a lot about which is best; I don't, except that I think global change is vague and likely to be misunderstood. I will use the other terms interchangeably in this series.

I'll start with an overview on how the Earth's climate has worked for most of recorded history, and how we should make sure it returns to.

I'd like to start this post by promising that the boringness of this post's title in no way reflects the awesomeness of this topic.

The Earth includes several circulation systems—currents on a global scale that carry air, water, or even rock thousands of miles before returning to their starting points. These have interesting and sometimes surprising effects on people. Example 1: a giant floating trash heap in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

I'm working on my Halloween costume (Yoshi!) so I'll cut straight to the news this week:

Science Friday comes to you rather late today because the esteemed author spent last night watching UNC pull defeat to an entirely pathetic, stupid, penalty-ridden, embarrassing, unprofessional, sorry-ass Florida State football team from the jaws of victory. Not that I'm bitter. Today's post: the Physics and Economics Nobel Prizes.

Here's some science for you—I'm taking advantage of the public wireless outside in downtown Carrboro and it's quite unpleasantly chilly out here. Fall sure did roll in since last week, and I'm not looking forward to lows in the 30s over the next few days. But more relevant to this post is that a bunch of Nobel Prizes were awarded over the last couple weeks. The Peace Prize got plenty of attention already, and since the other prizes hardly got any I won't give it any more. This week's post is devoted to the Medicine and Chemistry prizes.