Apparently the interwebs are aflutter because Pepsi is “blogging” on Scienceblogs.com. Of course, they aren’t blogging the the traditional sense, it’s advertising fluff. Even the header says it’s an “advertorial”, whatever beast that is. Wikipedia says it’s “an advertorial is an advertisement written in the form of an objective article, and presented in a printed publication—usually designed to look like a legitimate and independent news story.” Yup. Just a big ol’ advertisement dressed up as a blog. Nothing new for Scienceblogs. They tried it before when Shell decided to buy a few “scientists”. That one didn’t last long, just over a month; I predict this one will last an even shorter time.

Interesting tidbit. The “advertorial” part of the header on the blog isn’t linked, giving the impression that only some of the posts will be advertising. Wrongo. Compare Header2 with Header. Bad idea and good idea respectively.

h/t to mt

I very much doubt there will be any surprises. But the National Research Council has issued it’s report at the request of the Bush administration.

In the summary of the science part they write:

Conclusion 1: Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for—and in many cases is already affecting—a broad range of human and natural systems.

This conclusion is based on a substantial array of scientific evidence, including recent work, and is consistent with the conclusions of recent assessments by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP, 2009a, and others), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2007a-d), and other assessments of the state of scientific knowledge on climate change. Both our assessment—the details of which can be found in Chapter 2 and Part II (Chapters 6-17) of the report—and these previous assessments place high or very high confidence in the following findings:

• Earth is warming. Detailed observations of surface temperature assembled and analyzed by several different research groups show that the planet’s average surface temperature was 1.4 ºF (0.8 ºC) warmer during the first decade of the 21st century than during the first decade of the 20th century, with the most pronounced warming over the past three decades. These data are corroborated by a variety of independent observations that indicate warming in other parts of the Earth system, including the cryosphere (snow and ice covered regions), the lower atmosphere, and the oceans.
• Most of the warming over the last several decades can be attributed to human activities that release carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—for energy is the single largest human driver of climate change, but agriculture, forest clearing, and certain industrial activities also make significant contributions.
• Natural climate variability leads to year-to-year and decade-to-decade fluctuations in temperature and other climate variables, as well as significant regional differences, but cannot explain or offset the long-term warming trend.
• Global warming is closely associated with a broad spectrum of other climate changes, such as increases in the frequency of intense rainfall, decreases in snow cover and sea ice, more frequent and intense heat waves, rising sea levels, and widespread ocean acidification.
• Individually and collectively, these changes pose risks for a wide range of human and environmental systems, including freshwater resources, the coastal environment, ecosystems, agriculture, fisheries, human health, and national security, among others.
• Human-induced climate change and its impacts will continue for many decades, and in some cases for many centuries. The ultimate magnitude of climate change and the severity of its impacts depend strongly on the actions that human societies take to respond to these risks.

It’s over. And I didn’t see any of you there.

Talk went good. Saw some people with Wikipedia articles. Saw other more notable people without Wikipedia articles.

Other musings:
You can tell how popular your talk title is by the number of people that session-hop from a talk by Kerry Emanuel which was running late to your talk which was running early. (There were none, if you’re interested.) Still, I think there were more people at my talk than at Bill Gray’s. (I may be biased, but I think my talk was better too. Even though mine wasn’t that good…)

Funniest thing heard:
“This is Hurricane Katrina, which I’m sure you’ve all heard about…” (That’s not the end of the quote, but I think it’s funny nonetheless.)

Best talk:
Not sure. Possibly Peter Black, Hugh Willoughby, Morris Bender, or Greg Holland. Bonus points if anyone in the peanut gallery (that’s you) has ever heard of any of them.

While eating breakfast, I saw this stupid story on “Airports cash in on tax dollars by giving away free flights“, and it pissed me off enough to break out the blog. Oh my god, they got a million dollars. Anyone happen to have a copy of the US budget on hand. My guess is that $1,000,000 is a small portion of it. I bet the budget is more than a million million dollars. This handy link gives the current US public debt at over 12 trillion. Yup. By cutting 12 million of these programs, we can reduce the deficit to zero! No mention of the fact that this program only got about 171 million last year. For reference, Goldman Sach netted 3.5 billion (or 5.1 billion) in first quarter profits.

Also, how can one run a whole piece on this and not mention how it is funded. The original source of it’s funding is from airline deregulation. Huh? Yup, that’s right. All this indignation for something that happened in 1978! When Congress deregulated the airlines, they set up what’s called the Essential Air Service program. And contrary to the “report” by Griffin, it’s not earmarks. The program is codified in 49 U.S.C. § 41731–41748 (mucho thanks to WP otherwise I’d have had to look it up).

He also reports that you could stay all day and not see a plane. Which is, of course, a flat out lie. And he says so in his next sentence. Because if you stayed all day, you’d see 3 commercial aircraft. Nice hyperbole, Drew. Of course, according to Airnav.com the airport saw an average of 125 flight operations per day in 2008. (An operation is either a takeoff or landing.) It’s not a lot compared to Atlanta, which saw an average of 2959 operation per day in 2008. But 15% of those flights were military, and 23% were commercial. To me, that was about 50 flights per day, or about 18 thousand flights per year that were convenienced by the extra million dollars. Flights may have dropped off since 2008, I don’t know. I don’t have the flight data from 2009 or 2010 yet. But I can guarantee, that $1 million to improve our nations infrastructure is a good buy, not a bad one.

So your media took 32 years to get on this story. Pretty soon they’ll report on the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Drew Griffin. Another mainstreet media moron (MMM).