Ant Invasions!

New Scientist reports that, with the advent of global warming, the earth could come under a series of deadly ant attacks. Unfortunately these will not be the frigate-sized mutant ants of 1950s sci-fi. Instead, warming temperatures tend to decrease individual ant size but radically increase the number of ants per colony. This would lead to hideous ant invasions, of the sort I remember seeing once in an episode of MacGyver. (MacGyver saved the day by flooding an irrigation system to stop the ants. I think he used gasoline or something to make a wall of fire, too. Hey, I haven't seen it since I was seven. It made a big impression on me, but obviously not that big.)

Global Warming No Matter What

According to a news blurb in New Scientist, global warming is now inevitable even if all greenhouse emissions were to stop at 2000 levels immediately (way beyond Kyoto, baby). The reason is basically that the oceans take much longer to warm than air and land, and so they are keeping temperatures lower than they otherwise would be. As the oceans slowly absorb the increased atmospheric heat, though, we'll see our temperatures go up even further.

The bad news is that even if we commit ourselves to no further increases in greenhouse emissions (the furthest thing from reality at the moment), temperatures will still increase for the next 100 years or so and global sea levels will rise several inches at minimum, dooming low-lying countries like Togo no matter what. The even worse news is that if we keep going as we're going and wait until things start to get bad before we start making drastic emissions cuts, it'll take another ~100 years on top of that for the oceans to stop warming, meaning things could get VERY uncomfortable before they get better if we don't start cutting emissions ASAP. Happy Friday.

The Indian Way

Sorry to anyone who might read this page from time to time, but I've been MIA lately. No, I didn't morph into an up-and-coming singer from Britain; I've just been really flippin' busy at work and home. But now it's time to blog again.

It's lunchtime, so it's little surprise I was drawn to a post on Treehugger about how tasty and environmentally friendly and tasty and healthy and tasty buffalo meat is. In short, it's got less fat and cholesterol than beef, chicken, pork, or monkey brains, more protein, and also it's tasty. Plus most bison is farmed in its natural habitat by small farmers and is fed on native grasses. There's more, but I'm not gonna repeat the nice post I've already linked to. (P.S. I know that buffalo = water buffalo, like from SE Asia, bison = the animal I'm talking about. But everyone calls it buffalo and I don't want to be confusing.)

Sound elitist and expensive? Not really. It's not as cheap as a bag of lo-grade, 30% fat frozen hamburgers from Super Wal-Mart, but the prices aren't bad if you're not buying it at Whole Foods. Check out this list of ranchers and small businesses that sell bison. You can order directly from most of them. The prices aren't bad, though they vary from rancher to rancher, and you can order a bunch and stock up. It's not like you're using your freezer for anything else, unless you're a serial killer. So eat some buffalo today! Or whenever the shipment arrives.