Ever wondered why nobody takes the claims of the ‘blogosphere’ all too seriously? Cause apparently, according to the latest headlines, Google is actively censoring the BIGGEST HOAX OF OUR LIFETIME.

Google blocking ‘climategate’ autosuggestion
Google appears to be censoring climate emails searches
Climategate: Googlegate?
“Climategate” surpasses “Global Warming” on Google
Climategate: The IPCC Scumbags of Fraud Achieve New Record, In Google

According to one blog:

The search engine Google.com was blocking the word “climategate” from its autosuggestion routines, and appears to be still doing so.

Screenshots show that when a user tries to spell out the word “climategate,” even when he spells it out almost completely, the Google routine fails to suggest the word–unless that word is part of the user’s prior search-engine history. Instead, the autosuggestion routine returns “Climate Guatemala” and “Climate Guatemala City.”

Clearly this is CENSORSHIP!@#$!@#$!

Given the power of Google to restrict access to information in such an insidious way, it actually begs for a formal investigation.

Indeed! Hang them for treason! It’s just all one big conspiracy. Especially because AL GORE IS IN ON THE CONSPIRACY TOO AS A SENIOR ADVISOR TO GOOGLE.

Despite the attempts to sensationalize the CRU email hack (“climategate”, no points for originality there), this will eventually die a quiet if not prolonged death – just like the last great scandal over the Yamal data, which turned out to be a not so smoking gun either (despite the amount of noise generated). Meanwhile, see this great post by John Bruno (“You want data? You can’t handle the data!“) about how wrong the meme of “those scientists won’t share their data” really is, and check out the Real Climate list of availible data here.

Update: Google appears not to be so active in their censorship here in Australia.

Greeting from Abaco Bahamas.  I am here for a few days to help one of my grad students, Andrea Anton, who is working on lionfish which are EVERYWHERE here as they are across the Bahamas.  The densities, only a few years after arriving, are truly remarkable.

But the real purpose of this post is to show some pictures of the amazing site we worked at today.  It was a remote, shallow reef and easily had more fish and sharks than nearly anywhere else I have ever been.  As soon as we entered the water a large school of tarpon come in to check us out.  Within minutes we were being circled by four 5 ft black tip sharks.  There were very large jack, barracuda, massive snapper, and incredible numbers of a variety of grouper everywhere.  And ocean triggerfish seemed especially abundant.  There were also plenty of Diadema and a fair number of parrotfish, surgeon fish and blue tangs, so there was little macroalgae.  Many extremely large gastropods and more cyphoma that I have ever seen.

Unfortunately the coral cover was very low.  In the shallows, probably < 1%, but this is a very exposed site.  In deeper water, it was roughly 5-8%.  But there were a lot of A. palmata colonies near the shore.  And despite the low coral cover, this was without doubt a thriving and productive ecosystem.  I heard an NGO head recently declare that once coral cover goes below 10%, the reef is functionally extinct and lost.  I couldn’t disagree more.

The funny thing about this reef was that it isn’t in an MPA or in any way managed.  No NGOs are protecting it.  No scientists are studying it.  And the lack of coral clearly hasn’t caused the fish community to collapse. Likewise, the presence of the fish and top predators didn’t maintain “reef resilience”, i.e., the corals still died when they bleached in 98.  Funny how the real world mucks up all those cozy ideas academics dream up.

Did you know that the brain of an adult bottlenose dolphin is about 25% heavier than the average human adult’s brain? This article on why dolphins are ‘deep thinkers’  and how they manage to train their trainers is well worth reading:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins. (Read more)

Here’s some sage advice from the Courier Mail, Brisbane’s very own tabloid newspaper:

THEY’RE faithful, friendly and furry – but under their harmless, fluffy exteriors, dogs and cats, the world’s most popular house pets, use up more energy resources in a year than driving a car, a new book says.

In their book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living, New Zealand-based architects Robert and Brenda Vale say keeping a medium-sized dog has the same ecological impact as driving 10,000km a year in a 4.6 litre Land Cruiser.

The average cat’s eco-footprint, 0.15 ha, weighs in at slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf, but still 10 times a hamster’s 0.014 ha – which is itself half the eco cost of running a plasma television.

Needless to say, it’s probably more ecologically sustainable to eat children instead, but if the calculations are correct, the ecological footprint of things we take for granted is pretty interesting. (Read the full article here)

Boingboing asks: “Quick, what’s pink and thrives on hydrocarbons?” The answer? Ice worms. There’s a bunch of them (8 to be exact) in the photograph above, thriving at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in solid, ice-like lumps of methane hydrate.

Here’s an ice-worm up close,  poking it’s head out from underneath the blanket of methane hydrate. What makes these extremophiles so unique?

First, ice worms are social butterflies. I’ve just mixed some metaphors there, I think, but you get the idea. In the picture above, you can see that they live close to each other, hollowing out little divots on the surface of the hydrate as “burrows”. But they also take advantage of the proximity to interact with their neighbors, Joye says. The worms move around the hydrate. They interact with each other. And they fight. A lot. “They just go at it,” Joye says. “We spent hours videotaping them.”

Also, they’re probably farmers. The ice worms are unique in their particular habitat in that they don’t have symbiotic bacteria that help them process hydrocarbons into food. Instead, Joye and her colleagues think the worms probably live off the thick mat of microbes that grows on the gas hydrate. The worms likely tend their “herd” by simply moving around, circulating the sea water and bringing oxygen to the microbes.

Finally, the worms can be surprisingly tough to spot. In fact, Joye and her colleagues had been studying gas hydrates for years before they realized the worms were there at all. That breakthrough came when Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University oceanographer, designed a better underwater digital camera that could take extreme close-ups of the hydrate surface. “It turned out, we’d been seeing them all along. They’d been in our photographs, but we hadn’t recognized them as life and had just missed the forest for the trees,” Joye says.

Check out the original article here, or read more about the iceworms and ice-methane habitat over at the Gulf Extreme Environment Observatory.

“You can’t change world by wearing sandals”

True enough.

The quote is from Michael O’Leary, Chief Executive Officer of the Irish airline Ryanair.

He has quite a lot to say about climate change, whether it is real and what we should and shouldn’t do about it.  Is he representative of superrich business executives, AKA white men in suits?  Just a crackpot irishman?

Most the quotes are from a Daily Telegraph interview by Alice Thomson.  Thanks to George Marshall at Climate Denial who writes great essays about why we just don’t believe.

“I listen to all this drivel about turning down the central heating, going back to candles, returning to the dark ages. You do that if you want to. But none of it will make any difference. It just panders to your middle-class, middle-aged angst and guilt.”

“I don’t think the advice of a bunch of UN scientists should be taken as gospel truth. Human breathing is one of the biggest problems as far as I can see, so why don’t the environmentalists just shoot all the humans.”

“These hairy environmentalists go to the health store to buy their organic strawberries flown in from South Africa. Why aren’t they whacking a huge tax on bananas and grapes from half way round the world?  Why don’t they eat British turnips all winter if they want to save air flights. Because they can’t live without their scallops from Chile.”

I do share Michael’s loathing of lefty hypocrisy.  And Environ Hero Bill McKibbon (and many others) make the same point, arguing that we all need to start consuming locally grown foods.

“They [CND “nutters” in the 1970s] banged on about being against nuclear war, well we all were. But the point is you can’t change the world by putting on a pair of dungarees or sandals. You need to look at the real culprits and begin negotiations with them.”

“We will go from 40 to 80 million passengers in the next few years. We will take them off British Airways and the other old carriers who are flying gas-guzzling, ancient aircraft and pack them into fuel-efficient planes. So Ryanair will be saving the environment — not that we care much.”

Fine with me.  Just do the right thing, even if it is for the wrong reasons.   But seriously, reducing fossil fuel use usually makes sense for business.  Right?