Science links: Climate change and autism

Posted by Sappho on June 19th, 2016 filed in Environment, Science, Vaccinations

I got one of these off Twitter, and the other off Facebook.

First, Scientific American reports that Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4 Million Years.

… The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.

…

Passing the 400 ppm milestone in is a symbolic but nonetheless important reminder that human activities continue to reshape our planet in profound ways. We’ve seen sea levels rise about a foot in the past 120 years and temperatures go up about 1.8°F (1°C) globally. Arctic sea ice has dwindled 13.4 percent per decade since the 1970s, extreme heat has become more common and oceans are headed for their most acidic levels in millions of years. Recently heat has cooked corals and global warming has contributed in various ways to extreme events around the world.

Climate change denial isn’t the only form of science denial out there, though; there are also people who still cling to a single discredited study to justify their belief that vaccines really, really do cause autism. And this raises the question: Given that we now have ample evidence that vaccines aren’t the cause of the increase in diagnoses of autism, what is? That’s where this next article comes in: Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism — So What Does? It’s a good layperson’s round up of research on autism, and the various explanations that might account for a portion of the increase in autism diagnoses, from broader diagnostic criteria, to air pollution, to the rise of computers allowing some people on the spectrum to more readily find mates, to other possibilities that you’ll have to read the article to find.