I'm moving!

Please note that I am pulling up my stakes at this blog and re-locating to http://chrissasaki.wordpress.com. If you've been enjoying my posts here, I hope you'll follow me to my new address where I'm welcoming everyone with a new posting. It's about a talk I attended recently at the 2009 conference of the Canadian Science Writers Association. James Hoggan talked about his new book, Climate Cover-up--a fascinating story about the campaign to sow confusion and doubt about global warming.

How much science does our science minister understand?

To many in the research community, last week's federal budget cut to the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmosphere Sciences is a sign that the Harper government is "skeptical of climate-change science and hostile to those who provide evidence that aggressive action must be taken to avert catastrophic global warming." (http://tgam.ca/JaU) As a result of the cut, scientists have begun to shut down the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, located on Ellsmere Island some 1,100 kilometres from the North Pole, which served as a base for the collection of data on climate change.

Skeptical of climate-change science? The report reminded me of the flap from a year ago, when Gary Goodyear, our science minister, refused to reveal if he believed in evolution. (http://bit.ly/9LLs2l) His initial refusal, followed by a confusing and disingenuous "yes, I believe in evolution", bolstered the suspicions of many that our science minister was a creationist and wasn't quite on the same page as Darwin when it came to the origin of species.

You have to wonder what other scientific concepts--to go along with climate change and evolution--Goodyear doesn't quite have a handle on. Germ theory, plate tectonics, gravity, atomic theory? Should we worry about future cuts to Canada's space program because he's pretty sure the Earth is flat?

Giving up the ghost bird?

In February, 2004, a lone kayaker paddling through an Arkansas swamp spotted a magnificent black and white bird. According to the kayaker, it was an Ivory-billed woodpecker, referred to as the “Lord God Bird” because that’s what everyone says when they see it: “Lord God!” The woodpecker had been considered extinct in the U.S. and the sighting was the first in decades. It triggered a fascinating and controversial quest to verify the existence of the ghostly species.

According to a February 10, 2010, report in Nature News (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/full/463718a.html?s=news_rss), the woodpecker remains a spectre, while the controversy is as real as ever:

"After five years of fruitless searching, hopes of saving the species have faded. 'We don't believe a recoverable population of ivory-billed woodpeckers exists,' says Ron Rohrbaugh, a conservation biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who headed the original search team."

Scott Crocker, in his brilliant 2009 documentary film Ghost Bird, tells the fascinating story of the reaction to the sighting and the controversial attempts to verify the Ivory-bill's existence. For my review of the film, see my May, 2009, post: http://chrissasaki.blogspot.com/2009/05/ghost-bird-hot-docs-2009.html

For more about Crocker's film: http://www.ghostbirdmovie.com