Climate science for your iPod – February 10, 2009

Here are this week’s climate related podcasts (and some on only tangentially relevant subjects!).

NOTE: Presentation of content in this list does not imply endorsement of the views expressed within and I may or may not have listened to it myself! Please highlight good, bad or interesting aspects in the comments. You can email suggestions for specific items to include next time or additional sites to keep an eye on to a.few.things.illconsidered@gmail.com

Happy listening!

Quirks and Quarks:

• Fruitless Fall (source page here) – "It’s been a rough couple years for honeybees. Two years ago, hives across North America suddenly began to die out. One day they were fine, the next day they were empty of bees. Nearly two-thirds of North American honeybees have simply vanished. Researchers call it colony collapse disorder. The impact of the collapse goes far beyond not getting our daily fill of golden honey. About one third of our agriculture is dependent on bees for pollination. No bees — no fruit, veggies or nuts. Rowan Jacobsen, a Vermont-based journalist, has been following the bee decline and he’s written about it in his new book, Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. In his book, Mr. Jacobsen explores the origin of the collapse, its worrying consequences and what might be done to save the bees."

BBC Radio 4 Material World:

• Blast! & Ocean Fertilization (source page here for now) – "
  Quentin Cooper hears from brothers Mark and Paul Devlin whose film, BLAST!, records the perilous balloon flights of a special telescope in the Arctic and Antarctic. He also learns how fertilizing the Southern Ocean with iron could to make the plankton there absorb more carbon dioxide.
  (Duration: 28mins | File Size: 13MB)"

Nature Magazine:

• Carbon sequestration in the oceans (source page here) – "Carbon sequestration in the oceans, the sorghum genome, the chemistry of seafood poisoning and our regular round-up of the week’s science news."
• Flailing fisheries code and a plague of caterpillars (source page here) – "A record-breaking long snake, flailing fisheries code, evidence for the earliest animal life, the oldest quasar ever seen, and a plague of caterpillars invade our regular news round-up."

National Public Radio: Environment:

• Inovation seen as key to curbing climate change (source page here) – "An analysis of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions shows the energy plans outlined in Obama’s stimulus package are merely a down payment. Raising the price tag on fossil fuel costs is not enough to curb global warming, experts say."

Science Friday:

• Google Ocean (source page here) – "An update to the Google Earth program adds new data on the rest of the planet — the oceans"
• Largest snake gives clues of ancient climate (source page here) – "Researchers have found fossil remains of a species of snake that they say weighed 2500 pounds, and grew to 45 feet long.

Scientific American:

• CO2 Rising: Follow the bouncing carbon atom (source page here) – "Scientist and author Tyler Volk talks about his new book CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge. Plus, we’ll test your knowledge about some recent science in the news. Web sites related to this episode include http://pages.nyu.edu/~tv1/Volk.htm"
• Why eco-system services matter (source page here) – "You may never have heard of ecosystem services, but you’d be hard-pressed to live without them. David Biello reports"