Global warming in principle isn’t new. What’s different is that we’re pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at a greater rate than before, with unpredictable consequences.
The Straight Dope
Are there more natural disasters now than ever before?
According to the World Meteorological Organization, humanity experienced nearly five times as many natural disasters (3,496) in the first decade of this century as we did during the 1980s (743). That said, the increase in the sheer number of events isn’t as simple as it seems.
Is the world more dangerous for kids than it was 30 years ago?
Assuming you’re now 35, you were born in 1980 or so and were 11 in 1991, the worst year on record. And yet you think it was safer then than now. I have some possible explanations.
How safe is “the cloud”?
The real security of the cloud is there are many server farms, and they can’t all go offline, can they?
When does it become OK to dig up a human body?
There’s a common-law principle in play under which it’s not OK to disturb a dead body without proper authorization, although really that mainly applies to bodies interred in modern cemeteries with all paperwork accounted for.
Does negative political campaigning work?
A look at presidential races found that between 2000 and 2012, positive advertising decreased from 40 percent to 14 percent, while negative advertising increased from 29 percent to 64 percent.
Does drug testing actually work?
General Motors reported a 50 percent reduction in workplace injuries after implementing a testing program.
Pay off the national debt with oil shale deposits?
So how much does a trillion barrels of oil get you these days? Depends on your timing.
Anti-vaxxers & Measles
By any measure childhood immunization has been one of humanity’s great achievements. But today few have any clue, leading some to ask why we still need to poke babies with needles and all that jazz.
Can society really exist with no meat?
We’ve spent eons evolving the teeth and the intestinal system needed to digest dead animals as well as celery. And experience suggests that as people attain the wherewithal to eat more meat, they take full advantage:
Mengele & Medicine: How much influence really?
There’s plenty of Nazi-era research that doctors have used and built on ever since. But the data gathered in the concentration camps tended towards the gruesome, unscientific, and fairly useless.
Don’t we pretty much always live at least a little bit in the past?
The sensory input that forms our consciousness is itself shaped by the limits of our neural hardware, meaning that what we experience as the present is actually the very recent past.
