Public transit that would work in Houston

No, mass transit is not just for cities like Boston, New York, and Washington D.C. CyberTran^[1] is a form of mass transit suitable for most parts of the nation, from suburbs to the densest parts of Manhattan. It is not so much a new system as an overlooked one. The advantages:

• It offers 24-hour availability.
• Your journey time is about the same as in a car.
• Your rail-car is ready when you are.
• You never need to stand.
• Stops are near your home and your final destination.
• You can read the paper during your trip.

No magic is involved.

A revolutionary bread-making technique, and two new foodie blogs

"Edible Media" takes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web.

This edition of Edible Media will round up several choice morsels.

Well bread

Mark Bittman, the great cookbook writer and author of the indispensable weekly column "The Minimalist" in the NYT, has a provocative one this week on breadmaking.

Bittman reports that Jim Lahey, owner of Manhattan's terrific Sullivan Street Bakery, has taught him a new method for making bread that delivers professional-quality bread with no kneading or special equipment necessary. The result sends Bittman on a decidedly non-minimalist rhetorical jag. The bread is "incredible, a fine-bakery quality, European-style boule that is produced more easily than by any other technique I've used, and will blow your mind."

There's even a sustainability angle: the technique "may yet change the industry. Mr. Lahey is experimenting with using it on a large scale, but although it requires far less electricity than conventional baking, it takes a lot of space and time."

I will be trying this at home; I'll report back.

College field program shows there’s more to citizenship than going to the polls.

Take a break from freaking out about the election and listen to this NPR audio clip about Whitman College's Semester in the West program. It's a biennial, semester-long environmental studies field course, with a heavy emphasis on public lands issues. If you have any passion about environmental issues, traveling, and/or camping, I guarantee this will make you want to go back to school.

(Grist featured Phil Brick, the professor in the story, as an InterActivist back in October 2005.)

I myself am an alumni of the program, and I'd say the audio clip is quite well done. It provides a good snapshot of what life is like during the semester and the kind of intellectual challenges students confront. As the narrator explains, students are "put face to face with people on all sides of complex issues. Students ask their own questions, and draw their own conclusions."

The Great Warming goes to God

My dad, Mike Taylor, has spent most of his adult life running a small production house in Montreal. High production values, integrity, and so on, but no glory, no glamour. Actually, the studio, like so many others there, used to be between the hooker district and the gay village, so I guess there was a certain showbiz air ...

Anyway, the business was what he knew, and he felt a duty to employees to keep it going. Now, the success of the company's first documentary, The Great Warming, may screw all that up -- but it's really his own fault.

An interview with Renate Künast, Germany’s Green Party chair

As the U.N. climate-change conference heats up this week in Nairobi, Kenya, strategies to promote clean energy and slow global...

Harder than it looks

In the latest issue of Sierra Magazine, Seattleite Seth Zuckerman recounts the results of his personal experiment:

‘There is no consensus’–If this is not consensus, what would consensus look like?

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Climate is complicated and there are lots of competing theories and unsolved mysteries. Until this is all worked out, one can't claim there is consensus on global warming theory. Until there is, we should not take any action.

This is similar to the "global warming is a hoax" article, but at least here we can narrow down just what the consensus is about.

Answer: Sure there are plenty of unsolved problems and active debates in climate science. But if you look at the research papers coming out these days, the debates are about things like why model predictions of outgoing longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere in tropical latitudes differ from satellite readings, or how the size of ice crystals in cirrus clouds affect the amount of incoming shortwave reflected back into space, or precisely how much stratospheric cooling can be attributed to ozone depletion rather than an enhanced greenhouse effect.

No one in the climate science community is debating whether or not changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations alter the greenhouse effect, or if the current warming trend is outside of the range of natural variability, or if sea levels have risen over the last century.

This is where there is a consensus.

More navel-gazing!

Now that the wingnuts have moved on to their latest outrage of the day, let's take a closer look at the notorious Nuremberg analogy. On reflection, I've come to think that it's inappropriate -- and not because it gave Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh (and Brit Hume!) one of their patented umbrage woodies. Three reasons:

First off, never violate Godwin's Law. It's a law for a reason.

Two, the Nuremberg trials resulted in executions. I'm opposed to state-sanctioned execution in all cases, but would certainly never advocate it merely for the crime of being a lying scumbag.

Third -- and more to the point -- Nuremberg was primarily about prosecution and punishment. I'm not a particularly vindictive person, and I'm not that interested in retribution. What I'm interested in is the truth: that the truth be aired; that those who have lied own up to it and be held accountable; that those who suffered as a result of the lies be allowed to tell their stories.

For these reasons, a far better analogy for what I had in mind would have been South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or perhaps what the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung:

Some reservations about global warming policy

As one who advocates a rational and methodologically sound approach to global warming policy, I think that the just-published Stern Report provides a strong case that action should be taken.

Before I continue with why I still have some reservations, let me suggest that Grist readers who are critical of economics take a good look at this report. It is the breadth of the economic analysis, the attention to detail, and the range of policy options (informed by sound economic analysis) that make this report so powerful. It is also endorsed by some of the most prominent economists in the world, which gives it immense credibility. It is because it is the work of good economists that it is being taken seriously and may actually motivate government action. Whether you like it or not, the two most powerful groups of scientists engaged in global warming policy are climatologists and economists.

Now to why I am still wary of the conclusions.