Black Lamb

February 2009 in Black Lamb

Volume 8, Number 2 — February 2010

February 1st, 2010

In our cover article, Do inquiring minds want to know?, Terry Ross does some research and finds, surprisingly, that scientists are not in agreement on global warming, and that global warming may not even be occurring. Former prison inmate Dean Suess resigns himself to praying alone in Church without walls. In Ready for your closeup? Ed Goldberg ponders what lengths people will go to to achieve fame.

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Do inquiring minds want to know?

What one curious person discovered about global warming

February 1st, 2010

BY TERRY ROSS

When I was in my early teens I used to read — devour, really — the magazine Scientific American. There was no doubt in my mind that I would one day become a scientist. Along with four or five like-minded classmates, I even got to be on a TV panel show discussing science with a science teacher. No one saw the show except our families, because it was on the educational station, but that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.

None of the kids who were on that show became scientists. Somewhere along the line I shifted my allegiance to the humanities and let science make its way without me, but over the past few years I’ve re-subscribed to Scientific American, and each month I dutifully try to plow through the articles. Cosmology always attracts me, even when I bump up against my mind’s inability to imagine, for example, a curved universe. I can follow some of the medical stuff, and I do my best with everything else.

This is all by way of prelude to my saying that if I’m not a scientist in any sense of the word, I am still interested in things scientific. Which has led me recently to the subject of global warming. I’ve done my best to read up on the subject, in hopes of discovering whether the predictions of virtually imminent catastrophe are something I should be worrying about, and I’ve made a few discoveries.

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