crazy around the globe

Road shot

2007-04-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

Driving through the Badlands of South Dakota

View of the windy city

2007-04-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Armin van Buuren at koolhaus in toronto

2007-04-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

Scientific mud flies over dinosaur footprints

2007-04-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

Scientific mud flies over dinosaur footprints

Randy Boswell
CanWest News Service

Thursday, April 12, 2007

A University of Alberta scientist’s once-in-a-lifetime dinosaur discovery in Croatia has turned into a nightmare after a rival team of European researchers raced to the site of the find and published their own study — without crediting the Canadian and his colleagues.

The dispute has exploded in the pages of the Nature, one of the world’s leading science publications, with U of A paleontologist Michael Caldwell decrying the “intellectual theft” of his team’s discovery of 10 fossilized footprints from a 95-million-year-old titanosaur.

The trackway was found during a 2004 research project — funded partly by the Canadian government agency NSERC and National Geographic — on the Croatian island of Hvar. Caldwell was leading a search by scientists from the Edmonton university and Croatia’s main natural history museum for traces of prehistoric marine lizards when they “stumbled” upon the trail of 30-centimetre-long dinosaur footprints along a rocky shoreline that was once limestone mud.

The long-necked, plant-eating titanosaurs were among the largest of the dinosaurs, up to 20 metres in length and weighing 10 tonnes. The discovery on Hvar — which has helped prove the island was linked to North Africa before drifting to its present position off the Balkan coast — was particularly significant because it was the first dinosaur discovery in the region and it added millions of years to the time frame of the species’ existence.

Caldwell and his team announced the discovery at a press conference in the Croatian capital of Zagreb in 2004. Team members had been compiling research results for a planned journal article when they learned in January they’d been “scooped” by a competing group of scientists.

Led by University of Zagreb paleontologist Aleksander Mezga, a team of four Croatian scientists and one Swiss researcher published an eight-page article about the Hvar titanosaur tracks in the December edition of the British-based scientific journal Cretaceous Research.

The article trumpets the discovery with a string of superlatives, proclaiming it the first dinosaur footprint find along the Croatian coast, as well as the “geologically youngest” and largest specimens ever found in the area.

There was no mention of the Canadian-Croatian team’s discovery of the site. And while Mezga told Nature that “every single word” of the journal article “is our intellectual property,” he admitted making no attempt to contact Caldwell and his team prior to publication.
“If they had mentioned us by name, it would have been clear they were publishing our discovery,” Caldwell told CanWest News Service on Thursday. “They avoided doing so for obvious reasons.”

Caldwell said he expects “sanctions will be forthcoming” and that the parent company of the journal, Elsevier, is considering his team’s demand for a formal retraction of the article.

Asked if reporting of a discovery is subject to time limits, Caldwell replied by e-mail: “Absolutely not — no time limits in paleontology. In fact, Mezga and his team submitted their manuscript before we had gotten the permits from the Croatian Ministry of Science to remove the specimens and rock samples from the country.

“We failed to do nothing — except to realize we were being scooped.”

Quebec City

2007-04-09T16:48:00.000-07:00

Chateau Fontenac

Montreal

2007-04-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

View of McGill and Mont Royal

Lily Allen on stage at Phoenix in Toronto

2007-04-05T19:52:00.000-07:00

Montreal tomorrow?

Lily Allen on stage at Phoenix in Toronto

2007-04-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

Montreal tomorrow?

Lily Allen on stage at Phoenix in Toronto

2007-04-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

Lily Allen on stage at Phoenix in Toronto

2007-04-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

Lily Allen on stage at Phoenix in Toronto

2007-04-05T19:48:00.000-07:00

The Last Oil Shock

2007-03-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6505127.stm

Article from BBC...

End of oil heralds climate pain

VIEWPOINT
David Strahan

Many people think that running out of oil, or "peak oil", would be good for the climate. In his new book The Last Oil Shock, David Strahan begs to differ; he suggests it may bring catastrophe.

It is becoming increasingly clear that global oil production will soon go into terminal decline, with potentially devastating economic consequences.
Although the idea of peak oil has traditionally been ridiculed by the industry, now even some of the world's most senior oilmen concede the case.

Last year Thierry Desmarest, chairman of Total, the world's fourth largest oil company, declared that production would peak by around 2020.

He urged governments to find ways to suppress oil demand growth and put off the witching hour.

Other forecasters are convinced the peak date is even closer.

But many environmentalists continue to resist the idea.

Some seem to suspect that anybody who argues that oil production is set to fall must be a closet climate change denier with a secret agenda.

It is quite possible to run out of oil and pollute the planet to destruction simultaneously

Others, like Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace, instinctively distrust forecasts of an imminent peak, but wish fervently that it would come soon.
"Let's hope that the oil does run out", he told me, "and that the world has to develop alternatives to oil seriously quickly, and from a climate point of view that would be an excellent outcome."

Neither position could be more wrong.

Dirty growth

It is mathematically impossible that peak oil will solve climate change.

Although oil is the biggest single source of energy-related greenhouse gases, coal and gas combined are bigger still, and the expected growth in their emissions would overwhelm any reduction from oil.

As I demonstrate in The Last Oil Shock using the International Energy Agency's "business-as-usual" forecast, even if oil production peaks in 2010 and immediately starts to fall at 3% a year, total emissions would still rise by 25%, reaching 32 billion tonnes in 2030.

Yet by that time, we need to be well on the way to at least a 60% cut in emissions.

Oil depletion has the capacity to worsen emissions and destroy the wealth needed to fight global warming

So it is quite possible to run out of oil and pollute the planet to destruction simultaneously.
In fact peak oil could even make emissions worse if it drives us to exploit the wrong kinds of fuel.

Burning rainforest and peatlands to create palm oil plantations for biofuels releases vast amounts of CO2, and has already made Indonesia, according to some ways of calculating it, the world's third biggest emitter after the US and China.

Synthetic transport fuels made from natural gas using the Fischer-Tropsch process emit even more carbon on a well-to-wheels basis than conventional crude; and when the feedstock is coal, the emissions double.

None of these alternatives are likely to fill the gap left by conventional crude - at least, not in time.

But because they are so much more carbon intensive, it is quite easy to conjure scenarios in which we still suffer fuel shortages while emitting even more CO2 than in the current business-as-usual forecast - the worst of all possible worlds.

Land fill

Although these fuels are likely to prove inadequate, we may be driven to use them because cleaner alternatives are even more inadequate, for a variety of reasons.

Biofuels can be produced sustainably and with real CO2 reductions, but in the industrialised world there simply isn't the land.

In the developing world, however, there are vast swathes of land which could be put to sugar cane in a sustainable fashion; but the scale of the task of replacing crude oil would still be monumental.

I calculate that to substitute the fuel lost through a post-peak oil production annual decline of 3% would mean planting about 200,000 sq km - equivalent to the land area of Cuba, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea - every year.

Alternatively, if we decided to run Britain's road transport system, say, on cleanly produced hydrogen - electrolysing water using non-CO2-emitting forms of generation - our options would be:

67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations
a solar array covering every inch of Norfolk and Derbyshire combined
or a wind farm bigger than the entire southwest region of England.
Price sores

When oil production starts to fall, the economic impacts could well be devastating.

Soaring crude prices could tip the world into a depression deeper than that of the 1930s, and collapsing stock markets cripple our ability to finance the expensive clean energy infrastructure we need.
As the unemployment lines grow, the political will to tackle climate change may be sapped by the need to keep the lights burning as cheaply as possible.

Many environmentalists seem to dismiss or ignore peak oil because they simply cannot see it as significant when compared to climate change.

But this is to miss the point.

Oil depletion is deadly serious in its own right, but it also has the capacity both to worsen emissions and destroy the wealth needed to fight global warming.

For this reason - among others - it too has the power to destroy our civilisation.

David Strahan is an investigative journalist and documentary film-maker

The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man is published by John Murray

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental issues running weekly on the BBC news website

A series of thought-provoking environmental opinion pieces

2007-03-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

Paolo Nutini on stage

2007-03-07T19:20:00.000-08:00

Another excellent Brit act discovered!

Paolo Nutini tonite @ the Mod Club

2007-03-07T11:52:00.000-08:00

So in line with this.. some lyrics...

PAOLO NUTINI

"These Streets"

Cross the border,
Into the big bad world
Where it takes you 'bout an hour
Just to cross the road
Just to stumble across another poor old soul from
The dreary old lanes to the high-street madness
Eye fight with my brain to believe my eyes
And it's harder than you think
To believe this sadness
That creeps up my spine
And haunts me through the night
And life is good and the girls are gorgeous
Suddenly the air smells much greener now
And I'm wondering 'round
With a half pack of cigarettes
Searching for the change that I've lost somehow

These streets have too many names for me
I'm used to Glenfield road and spending my time down in Arkie
I'll get used to this eventually
I know, I know

Where'd the days go? When all we did was play
And the stress that we were under wasn't stress at all
Just a run and a jump into a harmless fall from
Walking by a high-rise to a landmark square
You see millions of people with millions of cares
And I struggle to the train to make my way home
I look at the people as they sit there alone

Life is good, and the sun is shining
Everybody flirts to their ideal place
And the children all smile as a boat shuffled by them
Trying to pretend that they've got some space

These streets have too many names for me
I'm used to Glenfield road and spending my time down in Arkie
I'll get used to this eventually
I know, I know

These streets have too many names for me
I'm used to Glenfield road and spending my time down in Arkie
I'll get used to this eventually
I know, I know

Life is good, and the girls are gorgeous
Suddenly the air smells much greener now
And I'm wondering 'round
With a half pack of cigarettes
Searching for the change that I've lost somehow

These streets have too many names for me
I'm used to Glenfield road and spending my time down in Arkie
I'll get used to this eventually
I know, I know

These streets have too many names for me
I'm used to Glenfield road and spending my time down in our Arkie
I'll get used to this eventually
I know, I know

View of DC

2007-03-04T12:37:00.000-08:00

View of the city from the Custis house at Arlington Cemetery.

In the cradle of democracy

2007-03-03T10:52:00.000-08:00

A beautiful day in DC.

Doggy style

2007-02-27T14:57:00.000-08:00

How come dogs always find the best places to hang out in a car?

At the theatre tonite

2007-02-21T18:24:00.000-08:00

Toronto evening

2007-02-19T10:02:00.000-08:00

Driving through downtown Toronto on a cold winter evening.

White bicycle

2007-02-18T13:29:00.000-08:00

A nice piece of random street art in New York.

Halifax sunrise

2007-02-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

Woke up way too early but saw this from the window!

Peggy's Cove

2007-02-10T14:55:00.000-08:00

Drove down to Peggy's Cove from Halifax. Ended up being pretty cloudy, but still very nice!

Pete's Frootique

2007-02-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

Best damn grocery store ever and they even have a piano player!

Real Canadian winter

2007-02-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

This is how our company parking lot looked like today just before noon. I wonder if I will be able to leave at all tonight!