The Politically Incorrect Hour
Saturday afternoon on the way to some politically incorrect activities: gambling and blood sports I was exposed to some even more political incorrectness on of all places on NPR.
I wasn't shocked that we have enough DNA from Martha the last Passenger Pigeon to bring back a species from the extinct list. I was actually kind of amazed that the Audubon Society hasn't been actively been doing the scientific research to bring back the passenger pigeon. Another interesting nugget was the fact that the passenger pigeon died off at the hand of man through over hunting and that at one time the bird had been so prolific and almost tame that hunters threw nets over them and sold them off as cheap source of protein. Unfortunately for the pigeons the process was way too efficient. We now have a way to correct the errors of our ways, bring back the passenger pigeon.
The second politically incorrect idea of the hour was actively messing with the weather to slow down climate change. The speaker thought that spewing more sulphur into the are could actually slow down the rate of global warming. Evidence that from cloud cover caused by volcanoes which spew a lot of sulphur dioxide can lower temperatures effectively and rapidly was certainly plausible A chemistry professor at ISU thought he could make a buck out of reducing acid rain by figuring out a way to harvest all the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. And on a more hopeful level we could keep our cars and way of life without worrying about Greenland and all the tundra in Siberia melting and raising sea levels and releasing so much methane which makes the process almost impossible to manage. In the name of science and because I live only a few feet above sea level, maybe we should look into sulphur dispensing technology.
I wasn't shocked that we have enough DNA from Martha the last Passenger Pigeon to bring back a species from the extinct list. I was actually kind of amazed that the Audubon Society hasn't been actively been doing the scientific research to bring back the passenger pigeon. Another interesting nugget was the fact that the passenger pigeon died off at the hand of man through over hunting and that at one time the bird had been so prolific and almost tame that hunters threw nets over them and sold them off as cheap source of protein. Unfortunately for the pigeons the process was way too efficient. We now have a way to correct the errors of our ways, bring back the passenger pigeon.
The second politically incorrect idea of the hour was actively messing with the weather to slow down climate change. The speaker thought that spewing more sulphur into the are could actually slow down the rate of global warming. Evidence that from cloud cover caused by volcanoes which spew a lot of sulphur dioxide can lower temperatures effectively and rapidly was certainly plausible A chemistry professor at ISU thought he could make a buck out of reducing acid rain by figuring out a way to harvest all the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. And on a more hopeful level we could keep our cars and way of life without worrying about Greenland and all the tundra in Siberia melting and raising sea levels and releasing so much methane which makes the process almost impossible to manage. In the name of science and because I live only a few feet above sea level, maybe we should look into sulphur dispensing technology.
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