DON’T PANIC
Because Hitchhikers may be
harmless or Mostly
Harmless, you don’t need
Deep Thought to calculate
the Answer to the Ultimate
Question... just use ReVive
Coral Cleaner, a new dip
developed by Julian Sprung
for rinsing live corals,
corallimorphs, and
zoanthids. Its formula is
based on powerful plant
extracts, but it isn’t harsh on
coral or anemone tissues
the way iodine-based dips
are. Use ReVive as a part of
acclimation to aquariums,
for rinsing prior to shipping,
and for rinsing newly
fragmented corals, such as
at coral farming facilities.
Know where your towel is?
than it was during the first couple of
years of this new century. This has
been interpreted by some people as ev-
idence that there is no climate change
occurring. Their argument goes, “We
have had a colder than usual winter
this year, obviously they (the unde-
fined “they” making all of this up for
personal gain) are wrong about global
warning.”
About all that statement really
shows is that the person uttering it
either doesn’t know the difference
between “weather” and “climate,”
or that they are firmly ensconced on
the lower extreme of the Smarts Bell
Curve. In a nutshell, weather is what
is happening right now, climate is
what happens over the time scale of
several decades or more.
Climate may also be thought of as
the average of weather trends over a
long period, where weather extremes,
such as rainfall, temperatures, and
wind are averaged out. If the climate
is slowly getting warmer, the number of days with extremely cold temperatures becomes, on the average,
fewer each year; however, the actual
extreme temperatures may still be as
cold. Eventually, there are so few cold
days that the chances of having a really cold snap become so close to zero
that it may be said that those cold
days are gone forever. However, that
will take decades to occur. Nevertheless, throughout that period, the average temperature will be rising.
CURIOUS
ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING?
There are quite a number of good web-
sites that deal with climate change,
and the spurious “controversies”
that surround it. Probably the best of
these is the RealClimate blog located
at http://www.realclimate.org/. Addi-
tionally, if there is a specific counter
argument that is of particular inter-
est, check out the RealClimate Wiki
to see where it goes wrong (e.g. How
to Talk to Global Warming Skeptic:
http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/
index.php?title=RC_Wiki. These two
sites together list hundreds of other
links to specific articles and discus-
sions of interest.
Ronald L. Shimek, Ph.D. is a marine
zoologist who has written numerous peer-reviewed biological papers and taught biology at the university level. He is the author
of The PocketExpert Guide to Marine
Invertebrates (Microcosm/TFH).
