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The Volkswagen scandal: say goodbye to the internal combustion engine!

September 23, 2015

The Volkswagen scandal: say goodbye to the internal combustion engine! By now, I guess that everyone in the world has heard of how Volkswagen cheated consumers by falsifying the results of the emission tests from their diesel engines. It is a true witch hunt unleashed against Volkswagen. Maybe there are good reasons for it, but I think […]

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What happened to peak oil? The cycle of a meme and of its antimemes

September 21, 2015

What happened to peak oil? The cycle of a meme and of its antimemes The result of a Google Trends search for the term “Peak Oil”. The fading out of the concept may be due not so much to reasons related to the validity (or non validity) of the concept but, rather, to a memetic phenomenon equivalent […]

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Global warming: how much heat, exactly?

September 7, 2015

Global warming: how much heat, exactly? It is often difficult to visualize what we are doing to our planet. But a simple calculation shows that the greenhouse effect generated by fossil fuels can be seen as the equivalent of turning on more than a hundred 1 kW electric heaters for each human being on the […]

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Why Johnny can’t understand climate: functional illiteracy and the rise of “unpropaganda”

August 31, 2015

Why Johnny can’t understand climate: functional illiteracy and the rise of “unpropaganda” Image from OECD Skills Outlook 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264204256-en. These data show that most people in OECD countries have very limited capabilities of managing contrasting information. This lack of skill is the source of traditional propaganda (presenting to people a single side of the issue) but […]

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The Limits to Growth in the Soviet Union and in Russia: the story of a failure

August 25, 2015

The Limits to Growth in the Soviet Union and in Russia: the story of a failure Above, you can see the full recording of a 2012 lecture given in Moscow by Dennis Meadows; one of the authors of “The Limits to Growth” report of 1972. It is long, more than an hour, but – if […]

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Fiorina: the next line of defense of climate denialism

August 22, 2015

Fiorina: the next line of defense of climate denialism The recent Republican entrant to the US presidential race gave an interview on Yahoo where she spoke about several issues, including climate change. It is an extremely interesting clip to understand what we could call a “moderate” position in the Republican field. Ms. Fiorina’s statements on climate change are in this clip and are […]

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Happy August 15th (and a little rant from UB)

August 16, 2015

Happy August 15th (and a little rant from UB) August 15th is a big holiday in Italy. Here is a translation of the post I published today on the Italian version of this blog. Happy Aug 15th, everybody! Here, in Florence, the worst seems to be over and the forecasts tell of rain today and tomorrow. This […]

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Cecil the lion: understanding the secret of a supermeme (and its relevance to climate change ommunication)

Cecil the lion: understanding the secret of a supermeme (and its relevance to climate change communication) A “meme” is a unit of knowledge in the communication space. Memes tend to go viral and diffuse rapidly; some are so fast that they can be defined as “supermemes”. Above, you can see the result of a Google […]

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Western style Catastrophism: a few questions for my Russian readers

Western style Catastrophism: a few questions for my Russian readers Weekly page views of “Resource Crisis” on July 30, 2015. Note how Russia is the largest non-English speaking country in the list. These data are not the result of any special post about Russia, they are a normal feature of the blog. I don’t need to say […]

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Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence

Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence Image by James Good Garrett Hardin’s idea of “The Tragedy of the Commons” has become well known, but not always really understood. In my case, I can say that I have big troubles in having my students grasping its mechanism; […]

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Gleaning: an ancient custom that may return in the future

Gleaning: an ancient custom that may return in the future Gleaning women in Italy in 1930 (image source). The ancient peasant society had found in gleaning an elegant and efficient way to optimize the management of low-yield resources. Gleaning is an ancient tradition, deeply embedded in the agricultural world. In the past, it was common practice […]

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Mini Ice Age in 2030: the new anti-science meme?

Mini Ice Age in 2030: the new anti-science meme? Image from Gallup The past decade has seen some truly clever media tricks being used against climate science. The most successful one was the so-called “Climategate” scandal of 2009. You can see its effects on the Gallup poll, above. Climategate was a very successful “meme“, a term […]

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Wicked problems and wicked solutions: the case of the world’s food supply

Wicked problems and wicked solutions: the case of the world’s food supply Can you think of something worse than a wicked problem? Yes, it is perfectly possible: it is a wicked solution. That is, a solution that not only does nothing to solve the problem, but, actually, worsens it. Unfortunately, if you work in system […]

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What killed the dinosaurs? (hint: probably not what you used to think)

What killed the dinosaurs? (hint: probably not what you used to think) In Walt Disney’s movie “Fantasia” (1940), dinosaurs were shown as dying in a hot and dry world, full of active volcanoes. Recent discoveries show that something like that might really have happened and that the idea that the dinosaurs were killed by an […]

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Greece: the bad apple of the bunch?

Greece: the bad apple of the bunch? Posted by Ugo Bardi Image by Vicky Brock The present debate about the Greek financial situation tends often to pit Greece against the rest of the Eurozone. As an example, Joergen Oerstrom Moeller writes that: Since 2010 the Eurozone economy has turned around from contraction to growth – the growth forecast for 2015 is […]

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