The future of energy: oil sands

According to an article from Agence France-Presse, ExxonMobil's Canadian subsidiary is going ahead with a $7BILLION project in Alberta to mine oil out of the oil sands. It's supposed to eventually produce 300,000 barrels per day. That's a spicy meatball.

The company is also touting (read: "greenwashing") it's carbon emissions and efficiency standards, claiming to have reduced emissions by 7% last year. To their credit, they aren't talking about reducing their use of fossil fuels, just being more efficient with them.

What does it all mean? ExxonMobil's products account for a gigantic chunk of fossil fuel carbon emissions, and the fact that they are pouring billions of dollars into expansion means they don't expect to be selling less fossil fuel any time soon. That they are getting more efficient in their treatment of fossil fuel just indicates that they are trying to squeeze every last penny from the cheap fuel (and also get to claim they are being "green"). At the end of the day, these stories are the ones that make me pessimistic that anything will abate humanity's appetite for cheap, dirty energy. Sure there is hope in increasingly aggressive restrictions and regulation of carbon emissions, but with the power/money behind the ExxonMobils of the world, it's hard to imagine that they don't have plenty of wiggle room, nor that they will fail to get more wiggle room built into future regulations.

Or maybe I'm just having a bad day. Read more about ExxonMobil's intersection with climate and environmental issues in a WaPo piece from a couple years ago by Steven Mufson.

Nuclear power, the book

Though I haven't read a word of this book yet, I'm going to post the link just to get the word out. It's called Prescription for the Planet, and it is written by Tom Blees. He seems like an interesting guy, who has spent much of his life running a small fishing boat, traveling, and trying to provide safe drinking water to Central American children. Somehow in the course of his adventures, he came to be interested in technologies that he think provide a relatively easy way to solve global warming issues. One of them is the Integral Fast Reactor. Not convinced, neither am I, but you can start by checking out Barry Brook's latest blog entry, which provides links to his other entries on this book. Brook seems to be on board, devoting a series of extended posts to discussing the ideas in the book. There is also an official Prescriptionfortheplanet.com website, and you can read chapter 4 for free [link].

I'm hoping to have a chance to devote some time to the book soon, or at least explore some of the technologies that it promotes. If I do, then I'm sure you'll read it here!

Saturday means a video

Okay... not every saturday means a video, but this one does.

I just wanted to share this week's installment of Climate Denial Crock of the Week with Peter Sinclair, which I have to admit that I've really taken to in the past couple weeks. It is a series of well-produced (by internet standards) short videos that dissect global warming deniers arguments.

This video is actually directly related to a pair of recent posts, in which I showed you Rep. Boehner being a jack-hole and also explained that breathing does not produce a net source of carbon dioxide. It's like blogosphere synergy!

Friday means a comic

Ok... not every friday means a comic, but this one might as well. It's PhD comics from a couple days ago. I won't paste it in here to avoid copyright issues, but here's the link.

And while you are clicking, hit one of those ads at the top. It's friday after all.

Stubbornness is a function of age?

I like this quote from Carl Sagan quite a lot:

At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track.
-- Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, Parade, February 1, 1987

There is a lot of information in that quote, really. The part at the end, that scientists cam make mistakes in their attempt to understand the world, is what I want to point out today. Further, it seems to be common for older scientists to become mistaken, and I think for many of them it is that they become locked into that ruthless skepticism that Sagan refers to, but lose part of their openness. We discussed this in depth with Freeman Dyson, who seems to have an emotional reaction to climate change that fires up his skepticism and closes down his openness.

Another example seems to be George Kukla, a renowned scientists from Columbia University. Kukla is best known for his tremendous work in paleoclimate, where his specialty has been in exposing the role that orbital variation plays in changing climate [see bio]. Kukla is now emeritus at Columbia, but is a "special research scientist" at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and appears to be marginally involved with some ongoing research. Though less visible than Dyson, or less credible people like Pat Michaels or Fred Singer, Kukla has been a skeptic of anthropogenic climate change. He is often quoted (or liberally paraphrased) as believing that variations in sunlight are causing the current global warming, which will turn toward a new ice age in the future.

I just read a 2007 interview with Kukla [link] in Gelf Magazine. I urge you to check it out. Somehow I ended up there after watching a short video clip from Letterman [link] in which Kukla appears. In the interview, Kukla seems to present evidence that the current warming is very similar to warming during previous interglacial periods that then transitioned to glacials. However, there are several points of fact that are misrepresented. For example, Kukla says

The knowledgeable climate students know that the global climate works in cycles. The relatively short cycles happen to be about 60 to 80 years long, out of which one half goes up and the other half down. Right now the Northern Hemisphere appears to be at the turning point of the warming branch. Just wait!

Well, there certainly are cycles in climate, but the "short cycles" of 60-80 years are certainly not well quantified or understood. In fact, I know of no compelling evidence for periodicity in this range. There is a lot of interest in "decadal variability" in the climate system, which could certainly be a source of noise in the spectrum around 60-80 years, but is unlikely to be a cycle by any sort of sensible definition of the word. The second part of the quote above, that the northern hemisphere is now turning from warming to cooling, is likely to be shown false very shortly. This is really just a regurgitation of the common climate change denier tactic of using insignificant short-term trends to say something that is false. We can only hope that Kukla is around in a few more years to see the results.

Here's another quote from the interview:

What happened then was that the shifting sun warmed the tropics and cooled the Arctic and Antarctic. Because the tropics are so much larger than the poles, the area-weighted global mean temperature was increasing. But also increasing was the temperature difference between the oceans and the poles, the basic condition of polar ice growth. Believe it or not, the last glacial started with "global warming"! The shifts of solar orbit today are about two to three times weaker than in the last glacial, or by the way, in the last 400,000 years. So, on that basis, we have little to worry.

In this we see Kukla's motivation: he is so enraptured by the astronomical theory of climate change, that he has closed his mind to other forms of climate change. This is his downfall on this topic, for some reason he can't see the vast difference between past climate change and current global warming. He's still not nearly as severe an offender as other skeptics, though. He recognizes important aspects of anthropogenic activity, but somehow ignores them. He also sees, as he says above, that changes in sunshine are very small right now, and later in the article he even acknowledges that, "No doubt that we have about 10,000 or even possibly 20,000 years still ahead before the major ice advance can start." This implicitly means that there are very different timescales involved, but this just isn't enough for Kukla. Above, he also says that a sign of the oncoming ice age is a warming tropics and cooling poles. However direct observation shows that the polar regions are now warming twice as fast (at least in the Arctic, more mixed in the Antarctic) as the globe as a whole. This should be a red flag, but to the true believer, it is evidence against the common thinking.

Okay, you are getting the idea, and I don't want to beat up on this guy, so just one more quote, showing again that Kukla almost accepts the current thinking:

The CO2 certainly has an influence. For instance, it appears that already now, with still relatively low concentrations, it may have a significant warming impact on the night [temperature] minima. And because the usual way to determine the daily mean is as the average of the daily minimum and maximum, here we go! But it is difficult to be sure: more clouds can do the same.

So he clearly says that people are changing climate, yet then he says they aren't. If you are confused about what Kukla believes, then I think you join a long list that probably also includes Kukla himself.

Again, let me stress that George Kukla has made impressive and important contributions to our understanding of paleoclimates. All I am saying is that his current opinions about global warming seem to be somewhat off the mark. My opinion is that he has become fixated on the astronomical theory of climate change to such a degree that he can no longer tolerate the rational arguments for anthropogenic climate change, which are founded in basic science and backed up by direct observation. Like quite a lot of scientists who are, well, let's just say "getting up there in years," he has developed an emotional response to the current science that can not be defended by scientific arguments. I hope he comes around at some point.

Veggiedag!

To be better global citizens, the government employees of Ghent, Belgium will give up meat one day per week. That's cool.

Marathon runners not a source of CO2 to atmosphere -- shocker!

I'm so glad that RSS exists, so that I don't miss stories like "Barton worries that EPA will regulate runners" from Kate Sheppard at Grist. Did you read it yet? Just in case you didn't, let me recap for you. Representative (from Texas) Joe Barton (Republican) is the ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which means he's the most senior Republican on the committee. This committee's role is, from Wikipedia:

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce has developed what is arguably the broadest (non-tax-oriented) jurisdiction of any Congressional committee. Today, it maintains principal responsibility for legislative oversight relating to telecommunications, consumer protection, food and drug safety, public health, air quality and environmental health, the supply and delivery of energy, and interstate and foreign commerce in general. This jurisdiction extends over five Cabinet-level departments and seven independent agencies--from the Energy Department, Health and Human Services, the Transportation Department to the Federal Trade Commission, Food and Drug Administration, and Federal Communications Commission — and sundry quasi-governmental organizations.

Which is to say, this is a pretty powerful committee. They get to advance (or squelch) a lot of potentially important legislation. And Barton, as ranking member, is a powerful guy within this powerful committee. So it matter that he thinks crazy things, like that marathon runners could be considered a source of pollution. Yeah, didn't you read that article? It goes back to the EPA's decision that carbon dioxide can be considered a pollutant, and as such can be regulated. Barton thinks that people are point sources of carbon dioxide, and I guess because marathons are a large group of heavily exhaling people, Joe thinks that means a large source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The point Barton is trying, and failing, to make is that carbon dioxide is difficult to regulate because it is a naturally occurring substance that is a basic part of all life on Earth. The reason he is trying to make this point is because he doesn't want to believe that the EPA has the right to regulate carbon dioxide. There are two reasons he doesn't want to accept that. First, because he's a Republican, and that party has decided to oppose regulation of nearly any kind. (Examples, regulating financial institutions like AIG or energy brokers like Enron.) Second, as part of Barton's ideology, he can't accept that humans affect the Earth adversely, so he emotionally reacts to climate change by denying it.

The point I want to make is that Barton is wrong about marathon runners. They aren't a source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, even though they do exhale carbon dioxide. The reason is that humans are part of the terrestrial biosphere, which is part of the global carbon cycle, which is basically in balance except for the perturbation from burning fossil fuels. To see this, think about that air you just exhaled, which is relatively enriched in carbon dioxide. Note, you don't breathe in pure oxygen, and you don't exhale pure carbon dioxide. How did that CO2 get into your breath? It is a byproduct of your physiology, mostly it come from breaking down sugars, which provides you with energy. So that means we're a source! No, wait a minute, where did those sugars come from? You ate them! This is exactly why we eat, to ingest the nutrients that will supply us with energy. So think about that for a second: we eat foods that have carbon in various organic molecules, which we break down to get energy, and CO2 is made as a byproduct and respired.

But that means humans (and all animals) make CO2 and put it into the air.

Yeah, but it all comes from somewhere. Let's take me as a simple example, or a cow. The point being, the cow and I are vegetarians, so most of the CO2 we respire comes from breaking down plant matter. Where does the carbon in that plant matter come from? Remember what we all learned as kids, plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen. Yes, plants take the CO2 right out of the air. They take CO2 from the air, water from the soil, and sunlight, and perform photosynthesis, which is to say 6CO₂ + 6H₂O → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂. Like magic, isn't it. On the right side are just 6 molecules of oxygen along with a sugar molecule that is holding onto some carbon and oxygen, which I'll eat and break down for energy, releasing CO2. Magic.

So there's a balance... like a cycle of carbon in the biosphere. This is why, in principle, biofuels should be carbon neutral. Breaking down plant matter moves CO2 around, eventually expelling it into the atmosphere, but eventually it is sucked back into the biosphere by autotrophs like plants and phytoplankton.

So what's the problem with burning fossil fuels? Well, that takes carbon from the lithosphere and suddenly introduces it to the atmosphere-biosphere-ocean system. There is normally exchange between the lithosphere and the rest of the climate system, but that is a very slow process, which combustion accelerates. There's no where for that extra CO2 to go because each part of the cycle only has so much wiggle room. The result is a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, where it enhances the greenhouse effect, and chaos ensues. Carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant like CFCs, then, but the carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels is basically the same. Whatever oil, coal, or natural gas is pulled out of the rocks needs to be accounted for, because that is the potentially harmful carbon.

We should get Bachmann and Pence together

Wow. Via DeSmogBlog:

Climate change refugees

George Monbiot says that about 2,600 people are evacuating from Carteret Islands in the tropical west Pacific. He attributes the evacuation to three things, mostly sea-level rise, but also the removal of mangroves and local volcanic activity. The sea-level rise apparently is manifest as high tides in springtime, which flood the very low atoll. The YouTube video below appears to corroborate the view that sea-level rise is pushing these people from their homes.

I don't have any real knowledge of this situation, but I have to admit that I am skeptical that this "sea-level rise" is due to global warming. There certainly has been measured sea-level rise, and some regions are likely to be harder hit than others, but the video appears to suggest this atoll has been cut into two by rising water, and the shoreline has receded by tens of meters (reportedly in just a few years). This does not suggest the kind of sea-level rise expected globally. The wikipedia page for the Carteret Islands also imply that there is not much evidence for this being a result of global warming, pointing out other influences that might be deleterious to the atoll, including normal erosive processes, isostatic adjustment, and use of dynamite fishing. If anyone knows of a true attribution study, that would be great, but until I see one, I am working under the assumption that this migration is probably related to human activities, but unlikely to be strongly related to global warming.

A new physics book

Without time this week to keep up with the latest climate news, I haven't been able to blog much. Last night a friend of mine sent a message about a new physics book, which you can see below. So in lieu of actually writing something interesting, I'll just say that this new book exists and is written by Jason Zimba, who was a graduate student of physics while I was an undergraduate. He was a TA while my cohort and I were going through the introductory series, and was quite liked as an instructor. So it makes sense that he has gone on to write an introductory text himself, so with no further delay, check out Forces in Motion:

Marketing climate science to influence public opinion

There's an article in the NYTimes.com about a report about to be issued relating to the way global warming issues are discussed in public forums. I don't think I totally understand what the report says, and I guess we'll see when it is officially released, but I think the take-home message is going to be that we have to use marketing techniques to convince the public that climate change is an important issue. This is a direct (and obvious) reaction to the tactics of the right-wing conservatives, who use exactly the same thinking when issuing their talking points. 

For my $0.02, I don't like it. I'm not opposed to more effective communication and education techniques, I'm actually all for them. To change the focus of the arguments, however, to avoid using words like "environment" and "global warming" seems to be a big much. I do agree that making the link between renewable energy sources and a more productive and cleaner future is great, as is the flip side of linking dirty fossil fuels to a poorer and scarier future. But from my point of view, we should focus on rational thought and scientific findings to guide us, and not marketing chatter. 

Of course, that's why I'm a scientist and not an marketing professional. Which brings up another point, that is sometimes overlooked. Who's delivering this message to the public? It is often scientists themselves, and this is a mistake. Scientists have a particular culture, and the way we communicate is often not the most effective way to convey things to an impatient public. Sure there are some really great popularizers of science, and they are invaluable to both the scientific community and the general public. But when it comes to convincing "Joe the plumber" that the government needs to take action on climate change, it's hard to imagine that Jim Hansen or even the late greats Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman could have had much influence. No, at a certain point this leaves the realm of the scientists, and needs to be handled by professionals. I don't know who these people are, or what their motives and incentives to popularize the rational views on climate policy will be, but I do know that scientists only stand to screw it up... we've all seen scientists trying to talk to the public, and more often than not it doesn't go well.

Melting glaciers, changing rivers

Well, in another blatant theft from DeSmogBlog, I bring you Jeanne Roberts' article about glaciers in the Swiss-Italian Alps melting. The interesting part of this article is not just that the glaciers in Europe are melting, this is really old news by now, but actually that the Swiss and Italian governments are implicitly acknowledging -- and I dare say adapting to? -- climate change by renegotiating their border. Yeah, two countries are talking about how to redefine their border without bothering to send a bunch of kids to their horrible dismemberment and death. 

The importance of the melting glaciers is clear for countries like Switzerland, which are landlocked and use mountain runoff for freshwater. The melting glaciers provide a lot of fresh water to streams and rivers, that is then used for the human population of those countries. In a glacier-free Europe, that source of water is gone, and countries will have to rely solely on seasonal snowpack melting. This isn't a great strategy, though, since the melt season is getting longer and longer, and seasonal snowpack is quite variable. Essentially the absence of the glaciers will add a level of instability to the water resources of interior Europe.

It is also worth noting that this story comes on the heels of a scientific paper about changing streamflow made waves two weeks ago. The paper is by Dai et al., and is in the upcoming issue of Journal of Climate. Some of the news coverage of the paper was a bit out of control. The paper is a compilation of data sets from around the world, measuring streamflow in large rivers. The main point of the paper is to show the basic results of the combined data set, and to provide a climatology to other researchers who want to know how much freshwater is going from the land into the oceans. You wouldn't have gotten that from the media coverage, much of which seemed to focus on the Colorado river, which isn't even mentioned in the paper by name. The headline grabbing aspect of the paper is a cursory examination of the trends in the data. Freshwater input into all the ocean basins except the Arctic show a decrease in overall streamflow, while the Arctic has an increase. It is not clear from my reading of the paper that these trends are (1) statistically significant or (2) attributable to climate change. The first point will be cleared up over the next couple of years as more people look at the statistics of this and other data sets. The second point will hopefully be better accounted for in future studies by trying to explicitly incorporate human-made changes in streamflow (for agriculture and including building dams and resevoirs). In the meantime, it is an interesting data set, and could have important implications for budgets of freshwater flux to the oceans. Whether the rivers are drying up remains an open question, and one that a lot of us are very interested in. 

“There isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas” says Rep. Michele Bachmann

One of my least favorite members of Congress these days is the representative from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann. This might not be totally true, as she is a wealth, a cornucopia, of craziness that I normally only get to enjoy late at night listening to Coast-to-Coast-AM. She is a member of Congress, but seems to have little grasp of reality, and certainly no grasp of science. Below is a video clip of her on the floor of the House (via Kate Sheppard... via Wonk Room).

Wow.

Let's not get into the details. Let's just all agree that, yes, carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas, and that it is a trace gas in the atmosphere. But let's also agree that carbon dioxide can be a deadly poison!

Former senators in the house

I just read Kate Sheppard's coverage of Friday's debate of the climate bill currently going through the House of Representatives [LINK]. The core of the article is drawing the dichotomy between Al Gore's testimony and Newt Gingrich.

Essentially, Al Gore says what he always says, which is what he's been saying for a decade. Namely, that the time to adopt strong regulation of carbon emissions is nigh, and that it is our moral responsibility to transition from polluting technologies to clean ones.

Then Newt Gingrich said that he doesn't think there's any need to rush into anything. He concedes that climate is changing, but doesn't think we understand it. Here's a quote from the article: [Gingrich] also argued for more studies of the problem. “On the facts of climate change, we need a national inquiry,” said Gingrich. “I want to invite Vice President Al Gore to participate in a nonpartisan inquiry, and I’d love to have this committee agree to help sponsor it, so that every high school and college campus this coming October could have a discussion about the facts.”

Here's the thing about such a national inquiry, though: we've done it. We did it in the late 1970s. We did it in the 1990s, and GW Bush even did it just a couple of years ago. The National Academies issued a report in response to a request from then-president Bush, and they confirmed strongly the findings of the IPCC.

This also allows us to address on of those common denier lines of argument, namely that climate scientists have a vested interest in climate change, that they are reaping millions of dollars of research money... blah blah. The problem is that if true, it would suggest that climate scientists would widely agree with Gingrich, who's now calling for more research into the issues of climate change. Instead, though, climate scientists nearly ubiquitously side with Al Gore, calling for decisive action, which would shift the focus from basic science to adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Boehner and the conservative fight against climate change

Another quick post today, basically sending you over to DeSmogBlog, where they have more details in addtion to the video below. The video clip is of House Minority Leader John Boehner basically poo-pooing climate change, specifically carbon dioxide emissions as something that need to be regulated. 

Dealing with climate change deniers is something that gets a lot of play in the blogosphere, and there are blogs/sites that are basically devoted to explaining why the "skeptical" standpoint on climate change is unreasoned and unjustified. Here, we don't deal a lot with debunking these ridiculous claims, both because those other sites do it well and also because it more widely disseminates that illogical viewpoint. When it comes to public figures, especially government officials, I take a slightly different stand. These people represent a direct interface between the science, the public, and the policy, and when congress-people or other government officials ignore the entire science part of the issue, pandering to some fringe subset of the public and undercutting effective policymaking, it hurts our society. Representative Boehner is not an isolated incidence of climate change denialism in Congress, and in fact as the DeSmogBlog post reminds us, the GOP leadership seems to hold fictitious ideas about climate change. This viewpoint is predominantly held by far-right to mid-right conservatives, for no really apparent reason except that climate change has some association with environmentalism, and conservatives have in the past 2-3 decades been (and again apparently without a good reason) anti-environmentalism.

Adopting appropriate measures to combat climate change would be hard enough for a purely centrist congress that accepts scientific findings, but throwing these irrational arguments into to the pot will only make the job more difficult. My fear is that whatever climate policy can escape from congress will be impotent, and the practices that have lead to global warming will continue unabated for another decade before effective measures can be instated, and by then it could be too late to stop a good deal of life-altering climate change.

Brook takes down Plimer, as usual

I just read Barry Brook's response to Ian Plimer's new book, Heaven+Earth. Plimer is a notorious climate change denier in Australia, and apparently has enough "cred" to get a book deal. According to Barry, the book is 500 pages of rubbish, rehashing the same old arguments that all the climate change deniers always march out. It sounds like Plimer also takes ALL climate scientists to task for being bad scientists, by committing intellectual fraud and misleading the public about climate change. Brook gives a broad overview, and a list of specific errors and misrepresentations from the book. What will be interesting to see, over the next year or two, is whether this book becomes the standard go-to reference for climate change denial. I hope it does, as I'm sure that there will soon be compilations of fact-checking focused on the book, and having a pre-existing refutation of everything in the book would be disarming for (at least some) people sympathetic to the denier worldview.

China gently asked to please think about playing nice someday

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has approached China, "warning" the country that it needs to reduce carbon emissions. [LINK] Will China take this warning to heart, and start cleaning up its act? Well, considering that 80% of China's electricity is from burning coal, and the well-used statistics that China is opening a new coal-fired power plant every week, I think not. 

Maybe I'm just feeling pessimistic today, but I just don't see China and India shaping  up in time to stop atmospheric CO2 levels reaching 450, and probably 550, ppm. The two countries have more than 2 billion people, and are both "developing" nations, which now seems to mean nations that are trying to replicate what the USA and other "Western" nations did 50 years ago. The desire to "catch up" with the developed world is so great that these giants can not rationally address climate issues. 

What is the solution? Well, ignoring geoengineering for now, the only way to get China and India to shift away from fossil fuels is to demonstrate a better system, that is more efficient and at least as cheap as the fossil fuel based one that has taken hold. One big obstacle on that front is that China has enormous coal reserves, so burning coal is amazingly cheap in China, and it's hard to imagine an energy system that will be cheaper for China than coal. That even holds for a system that will be cheap in, say, the USA, since such a system would either be sold to China or reverse-engineered, which would incur additional costs.

The IEA warns of some kind of regulation, which I guess could be effective if such regulations were very widely adopted. That would add up to the same kind of carbon tariffs that India wants to avoid. The problem is that China is such a gigantic manufacturer that it would be difficult for many countries (e.g., the USA) to penalize China without hurting themselves. Clearly this is a sticky issue, and there's not a good solution. The problem is that a solution is desperately needed to avoid dangerous levels of anthropogenic climate change.

UPDATE:

I just came across an article in New Scientist that suggests China and the USA might be coming together on plans for reduced carbon emissions. In actuality, these are two unrelated stories. The one about China is kind of interesting. China's climate negotiator, Su Wei, says that in their next 5-year plan, China will likely reduce the "carbon intensity" of their energy production. Here's what he says, "China hasn't reached the stage where we can reduce overall emissions, but we can reduce energy intensity and carbon intensity." What does that mean? Not much. As I have to keep saying, it doesn't matter what the carbon emissions per capita are, only the total amount of carbon. Just because China will become more efficient in their use of energy doesn't mitigate global warming. In fact, by continuing to increase carbon emission, China continues to exacerbate the problem.

EPA rules on greenhouse gases

The EPA today ruled that greenhouse gases are pollutants, and thus can be regulated by the EPA. This is potentially a game-changing decision, since it says that greenhouse gases cause substantive harm to people, just like sulfur emissions (acid rain), CFCs (ozone hole), or mercury (drinking water, fish), which are all regulated. No rules or even targets have been announced, and the EPA (and Obama administration) say they would rather have Congress control greenhouse gas emissions. The bottom line, though, is that if Congress drops the ball (yet again) on adopting strict regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, the administration now has a strong case in stepping forward with its own set of rules. See story in NYTimes.com for more details.

Notes on Freeman Dyson's irrelevance

The New York Times Magazine recently ran a long profile of Freeman Dyson, a brilliant mathematical physicist known for contributions to the unification of quantum theory with electrodynamics. Unfortunately, that seminal work was mostly done by 1949, and ever after Dyson bounced eclectically from topic to topic. His contributions have been significant, if notably unfocused, and he is generally regarded highly in the physics community. I've actually met Dyson, when he visited my undergraduate physics department to give a talk, and met with a group of undergraduates, and then attended a meeting of the research group I was part of. Dyson was very nice, and seemed incredibly bright, but even then he was very old.

In the past few years, Freeman Dyson has come out as something of a climate change denier. This isn't really news anymore, as it really has been a while, but for some reason Dyson seems to be getting more press recently. The NYT Magazine piece spends most of its effort on the climate change issue, I think in an attempt to bring across Dyson's independent spirit, or maverickness. It does not totally work because it degenerates into a fictional publicity struggle between Dyson and James Hansen. The author, Nicholas Dawidoff, exaggerates the situation and paints Hansen as a caricature.

Here I just want to pull some of the relevant things that Dyson is saying, hopefully in context, and evaluate them. The main point I want to make is that Dyson is not dealing with climate change as a science issue. Here's an excerpt from that article that starts to make my case:

... in a 2007 interview with Salon.com [Dyson said] that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books ... that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism.

We all are aware that there are chunks of environmentalism that are not exactly science-based, but to lump the entirety of the global warming issue into one of environmentalism is offensive to say the least. Note that there's no science in his declaration, though.

Not all his issues are so explicitly non-scientific,

Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. “The biologists have essentially been pushed aside,” he continues. “Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”

This does bring up an important point in the first half. Though he misrepresents the evolution of the science, which started from a physical science point of view because the models started as weather prediction models. The role of biology and chemistry have long been recognized, and inclusion of chemical and biological processes in climate models is still being incorporated. As a practical matter this has been slow because there are trade-offs between complexity and resolution in climate modeling, which is a consequence of the limited computer power that has been available. More focus has been on physical processes because they are thought to be of lower-order importance overall; there are examples including new processes and getting wildly different solutions, though usually less realistic ones. The trend is for more and more complexity, though, and over the next few years we will have much more comprehensive representations of the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle. The bottom line, though, is that the main results are unlikely to change much, even if some regional effects are substantial. The second half of the quote is just specious, and has nothing to do with science.

In the next paragraph of the NYT Mag article, a list of common climate denier talk is rehashed. In order, the article suggests Dyson believes that (1) rising carbon dioxide just doesn't matter much to the Earth, (2) the globe isn't warming everywhere so it isn't really global warming, (3) more carbon dioxide could be good for the climate, (4) ocean acidification is probably exaggerated, (5) sea-levels are rising but we don't really know why, and ending by essentially saying we have to do more work and figure stuff out. After a paragraph about coal, this last issue is more explicitly stated; apparently Dyson wants to see more evidence. And then this:

One of Dyson’s more significant surmises is that a warming climate could be forestalling a new ice age. Is he wrong? No one can say for sure.Beyond the specific points of factual dispute, Dyson has said that it all boils down to “a deeper disagreement about values” between those who think “nature knows best” and that “any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil,” and “humanists,” like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment.

Where to start? Well, I think a lot of the real answer starts to come in the following paragraph, which states, "Embedded in all of Dyson’s strong opinions about public policy is a dual spirit of social activism and uneasiness about class dating all the way back to Winchester, where he was raised in the 1920s and ’30s by his father..." In fact, I think this captures an essential aspect of Dyson's denial, as well as quite a lot of other climate change deniers, particularly the issues of class in the first half of the 20th century. As energy became cheaper and cheaper, manufacturing became easier, and wealth began to get distributed to a larger chunk of the population, at least in the countries we now think of as developed. This was all a result of the "second industrial revolution" and the advances made in the immediate aftermath, and going into World War I. Dyson seems to be concerned about distribution of wealth and opportunity, and is a proponent of equal rights, which are all worthy things, and have nothing to do with climate change. In Dyson's worldview, as far as I can tell, an important part of breaking down class barriers and spreading peace and freedom is the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels did completely change the world, and particularly in the early 20th century in western Europe and North America. I think this is a foundation for denying climate change: some people see the attribution of climate change to burning fossil fuel as a threat to humanity's progress. For the oldest generation or two, this can be a visceral threat, which evokes suspicion or anger. Denying climate change might be a psychological response to this feeling of threat. I also have a hunch that this fits well with Naomi Oreskes' findings linking conservative, anti-communist groups to first opposition of smoking-cancer links and later to fossil fuel-climate change links. (Even if Dyson himself isn't all that conservative in many ways, his connections with the Orion program and JASON do connect him strongly with groups that are strongly associated with that ideology.)

As for Dyson's particular claims, I don't need to devote any time to them because they come straight out of the standard climate change denier language. Take a look at how to talk to a climate change skeptic, or RealClimate's wiki. All of these claims are debunked in detail. Also note that whenever an impending ice age is invoked, it should trigger red flags, as this is a last bastion of the desperate denier.

India won't play nice

An article by Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post is a reminder that despite the increasing concern about global warming and carbon emissions, developing nations still want to develop without constraint. Put pretty succinctly by one of the Indian delegates to a recent UN conference, "It is morally wrong for us to agree to reduce [carbon emissions] when 40 percent of Indians do not have access to electricity."

The article goes on to say, "Last week, India's special envoy on climate change, Shyam Saran, told reporters in Bonn that he opposed any attempt by the European Union and the United States to impose 'carbon tariffs' on exports of Indian goods produced in energy-intensive industries such as steel, aluminum, cement and fertilizer." It also says that India doesn't think it is fair to be targeted for its emissions because per capita India emits 1/10 of what the US does.

The problem, clearly, is that the population of India is over 1 billion people, and growing. A second problem is that the climate system just doesn't care about the population; the temperature rises in direct proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, without dividing by the number of humans who put it there.

There are tricky ethical issues here, and there is no absolutely right answer. India does deserve to continue to develop, bringing the standard of living up for its citizens. India must take responsibility for its contribution to global warming, which threatens the standard of living for just as many people around the world (through changes in precipitation, sea-level, ecosystem response, melting of permafrost, changing migratory patterns, etc).

What can the UN or the United States do to spur India to action, to make a real effort to reduce CO2 emissions? Well, not a whole lot for now. However, going back to Shyam Saran's comment above, I see no reason not to impose carbon tariffs in the near future. This will depend on the adoption of some kind of carbon pricing mechanism (e.g., "cap and trade"). Once a price is placed on carbon use, then it will have to be applied to imports as well, including the amount of energy that goes into transporting material goods.

From my simple viewpoint, which might be naive, it seems like there would absolutely have to be such tariffs. Otherwise, it would become even cheaper to outsource jobs to developing countries. This includes non-manufacturing. Already it is very cheap for companies in the US (and elsewhere) to hire Indian companies to do a lot of work (see e.g., The World is Flat
). If energy costs were to rise substantially in the US because of the price of carbon emissions, without a commensurate rise in price of outsourcing, then there would be little choice left other than to send those jobs overseas, which would be a severe blow to the local economy. So a carbon pricing system imposed, say, on American companies would necessarily include the carbon emitted by their contractors, provided that the contractors are not already paying for those emissions. The job of tracking all the emissions and who pays for what seems gargantuan and nearly intractable. In the end, the whole goal of the system would be to get enough people paying enough money that large-scale shifts in energy generation would ensue, eventually eliminating the need for burning fossil fuels. But the path is tortuous, even if paved with good intentions.

I build crowds, guaranteed!

There's something kind of mesmerizing about this video. He's like the dad character in Drop Dead Gorgeous.

The super chimney that will save us all!

Yesterday I threw up a teaser for a future post about the Super Chimney, and here it is. I can not resist the pull of this posting, it has been rattling in my head since I found the Super Chimney (via SGTU podcast #192). The site that is home to the Super Chimney is simply superchimney.org, and is run by a man named Michael Pesochinsky. I know nothing about Mr. Pesochinsky, his motives, his background, or his mental state. I can only take the site at face value, as there is no indication that it is farce, and it appears that some effort has been put into the site, excepting quite a few grammar and spelling errors.

Here is the skinny on the Super Chimney: Mr. Pesochinsky suggests that building a few (around 10) Super Chimneys of diameter 1 km and height 5 km, anthropogenic global warming will be mitigated, the world's energy problems will be solved, and carbon will be sequestered in the newly arable land that is created by rain around the chimneys. So, what is the idea, well by clicking a link to the "principle," it is quite simply explained: "Hot air rises above cold air because hot air is less dense and therefore, it is lighter than cold air." Quite right, and really the underlying principle for a surprisingly large amount of the atmospheric sciences. The Super Chimney idea simply says that you can throw up a structure with openings at the bottom and top, and hot near-surface air will rush in at the base and rise with striking speed up the chimney because the surface air is so much hotter than the air at 5 km up. Along the way, harness all the kinetic energy of the updraft by installing turbines.

The idea is simple, and at first makes sense to a lot of people, which makes it a bit dangerous. In this post, I want to address two points: (1) be skeptical of things that seem too good to be true, and (2) the Super Chimney is a ridiculous and naive idea that has no hope of working in any way.

So, the first point about being skeptical. Whenever a new idea is presented, whether a product like a "dietary supplement," a medical treatment, intelligent design, or a mitigation strategy for global warming, there are several levels of skepticism that have to be addressed. If the idea/product/etc claims to solve even one "grand challenge" problem, that is a red flag, and if the claim is that multiple important problems are solved, many, many red flags should be waving in your head. These difficult problems, the problems of all humanity, are hard to solve, and lots of people are working to solve them. Rarely does one obscure idea emerge from the din to successfully tackle an important problem. This goes back to the old saying about something being too good to be true... Also, it is good to ask whether this miraculous idea/device/medicine/etc has been vetted by the scientific community, or have the interested parties gone straight to the media or public? And consider the source itself. Is this a single person, from outside the field, or a respected professional? Does the person have any experience relevant to the topic at all, and is there any information even available about the background?

In the case of the Super Chimney, let's see if the idea really merits much consideration just based on these questions. Well, the claim is that building 10 Super Chimneys will produce arable land, sequester carbon, generate the world's energy needs, and mitigate global warming. No small feat!! So, it sounds too good to be true, and claims to solve huge problems. The source seems only to be this website, and there's no scientific publication to back up the claims. On the plus side, there are no testimonials on the site yet. Finally, Mr. Pesochinsky is not a climate scientist, and we don't really know anything about him. None of this suggests that the proposal should be considered seriously. How does it stand up to scrutiny?

To start, let's suppose that it is feasible to build towers of the size suggested (1km wide, 5km tall); there are some issues with this, but I'm totally willing to concede the engineering is possible.

Next, let's not get caught up with the end results for now, and only address the physical principle underlying the proposal.

HOT AIR RISES
Yes, hot air rises, and it is because hot air is less dense than cold air. The Super Chimney relies on hot air at the surface entering the tower and then rising because, as is stated, "As we climb up, the temperature drops 10° C (roughly 20° F) every 1000 meters." So because of this unstable situation, i.e., cold air over warm air, the warm air rises.

Hold on a second.... there's warm air at the surface -- check -- the temperature decreases with height -- check -- warm air rises -- check... BUT ALL THE AIR HIGH UP IS COLDER THAN THE AIR AT THE SURFACE!!! Everyone please don't panic, proceed to the nearest shelter, we expect the Earth's atmosphere to blow upward from the surface at supersonic speeds at any moment. Just as soon as the atmosphere realizes that the surface is warmer than the air aloft.

There is a logical fallacy going on here. The air at the surface is warmer than the air aloft, but it is not necessarily buoyant, and where it is, it does indeed rise. An important aspect of atmospheric dynamics exactly involves instability and convection, with the take-home message that convection acts to eliminate instability. This really means that the atmosphere will convect, i.e., air will rise, as long as it can and then it will stop.

Imagine you take a blob of warm air from the surface up to some height, and you do it such that all the energy in the blob is retained. Physically, this transformation has to change the temperature of the air in the blob. When you are done moving the blob and you measure the temperature inside the blob and outside the blob (at the same height), if the temperature of the blob is greater than the environment, it is buoyant and could continue to rise, but if it has cooled to a temperature less than the environment it would sink. We'd say that in the former case the blob is unstable to this "adiabatic" transformation while the latter situation is stable. The way that meteorologists make this kind of problem simple is by defining alternative temperatures; in this case the quantity that would be of particular value would be the potential temperature, which is simply the temperature air would have if it were brought to a reference height in this kind of transformation. It turns out to be very easy to derive an equation that says that the temperature decreases by 10 degrees C per about 1000 m of height with no vertical motion. That explains why the air above the surface is colder than the air at the surface without being unstable; in a dry atmosphere this would be the situation everywhere, but it turns out that the condensation of water changes this temperature change, and for the tropics and sub-tropics the change is more like 6.5 degrees of cooling for every 1000m of height.

The fact that the surface air is NOT unstable to vertical displacements makes the Super Chimney idea fall flat. Of course, if you warm the air at the surface enough, it will become unstable and rise, but doing so requires pumping energy into the air, and removes any benefits that could be achieved by the chimney. It simply can not work.

Additional Considerations?
There are a host of other potential problems with the physics of the Super Chimney idea. In fact, every claim that is made on that site is suspect, and most of them are demonstrably wrong.

Unfortunately, given the fundamental flaw in the premise of the Super Chimney, it is impossible to address many of the outrageous claims made. For instance, take the idea that the venting air at the top of the chimney would cool down, condense water vapor, and rain in the vicinity of the tower. My first thought is that, no, this won't happen, you will really get the cloud forming inside the tower, and rising up out of it. However, that requires the air within the tower to have a reasonable temperature profile, which immediately invalidates the crazy claims of a constant updraft of more than 100 m/s. If you did have an updraft in the tower, though, the cloud base would form about where liquid water can exist, which in most environments would be around 1-2km above the surface. The result would be, among other things, a downpour within the tower itself which would cool the lower part of the tower as liquid water fell into the warm air and evaporated, and this would stabilize the column by cooling the low levels. You could actually then imagine outflow from the the base of the tower! (And, by similar reasoning to the original Super Chimney idea, maybe you could then pump cold air down to the surface and solve global warming via refrigeration!)

Another ludicrous claim is that just 10 of these towers would dramatically alter the Earth's climate. Just from a scaling perspective, this can be dismissed. A single tropical thunderstorm is an updraft that reaches from near the surface up to 15km or so, and is several km in diameter. There are thousands of such storms at any given time across the tropics. Yes the energy contained within them is enormous, but the idea that just putting 10 small, but intense storms in fixed locations and expecting them to completely change the temperature structure of the atmosphere is beyond the pale.

In retrospect, I probably should have ignored this topic, as the more I look at that site and think about it, the more and more crazy it is. The whole thing is based on completely misunderstanding the basic physics of the atmosphere, and that is even before we start considering the implications for global warming or energy production. The lesson to be learned is that if an idea doesn't pass snuff on the basic skeptical questions, it probably isn't worth digging into it in any depth, at risk of your own mental well-being. However, just as a reminder that craziness can have consequences, I suggest checking out the website WhatsTheHarm.net.

oh, a good post is coming...

Thanks to the Skeptical Guide to the Universe, I have come across superchimney.org. The premise is that by constructing a very large chimney, we can defeat global warming (by producing electricity) and create arable land in the desert. I have only had a couple minutes to look at the site, but I already have several ideas for how to prove that this idea does not work. It's bunk from the premise, so consider this a teaser for a more complete post later.

Earth Day '09 ... better start your shopping early!

Well, I am informed by Amazon that Earth Day is approaching, and what better way to celebrate the Earth than by buying some products from Amazon. Probably something that you don't really need, shipped from somewhere far away from you. 

Anyway, if you do want to take a look, just follow this link. 

Conflicting reports about Colorado snow pack?

Just last week I posted a link to an article saying the northern Colorado snow pack was slightly above the 30-year average, even though much of the state remains in drought conditions. Saturday, the same news source posted an article saying the state's snow pack is slightly below the 30-year average. 

So, what's the story? 

As of 1 March, the state-wide snow pack was above average for all the major basins. February was, however, quite dry, and lead to decreases in the percent of normal across all basins. [source: US Dept of Agriculture, Nat'l Resources Conservation Service] It is also notable that the dry conditions in early 2009 have made the snowpack much less than in 2008. The story from Friday, supposedly from GreeleyTribune.com (I can not find the article) specifically is about the 1 April report, though. 

Although the report from the USDA NRCS for 1 April does not appear to be available, the data is. Looking at the Basin reports, it is clear that the FortCollinsNow.com article from 1 April is misleading. Here are the relevant numbers:

CACHE LA POUDRE BASIN
BENNETT CREEK         83 64
BIG SOUTH             50 79
CAMERON PASS         105 108
CHAMBERS LAKE         74 72
DEADMAN HILL SNOTEL   92 99
HOURGLASS LAKE        69 64
JOE WRIGHT SNOTEL    100 110
LONG DRAW RESERVOIR   97 ****
RED FEATHER           91 94
Basin Totals          93% 95%
Number Courses         9  8
                   (LSWE = 108.5) (SWE = 93.3)
                   (LAST = 117.0) (AVG = 97.7)

Cameron pass is 108% of average, and 105% of last year (these numbers are as of today), just as the article reported. However, Joe Write Resevoir is just 110% of average, not the 112% reported. More importantly though, note that every other station in the Cache La Poudre Basin is below normal, some amazingly below normal. The basin as a whole is at 95% of normal, which is clearly below 100%. 

The Colorado state-wide snowpack stands at 96% of normal as of 1 April. This is the value given in the FortCollinsNow.com article from yesterday.

So to summarize, I think we've learned a couple of things. First, Colorado is, on average, below the 30-year mean snowpack. Second, there is large regional variability, and very large station-to-station variability. Third, we are reminded that news sources are not as reliable as they should be; the numbers in the article I linked to on Friday are a clear cherry-pick. Two spot measurements clearly do not reflect the overall situation in either the Cache La Poudre basin or state-wide. 

Northern Colorado has water!

Yes, according to a recent survey of mountain snow pack, northern Colorado is (slightly) above the 30-year average. I guess that means no water shortages this summer, right? Don't get too excited, Coloradoans, since almost the whole state is still in drought conditions according to the US Drought Monitor.

Flutter, taking the nanoblogging world by storm!

A really nice video explaining flutter. It'll change your life:



source: SlateV.com

Ads that drive content

Just for fun (well, we'll see if it is JUST for fun), I have added Ads by Google to the blog. There's one up there, between the title and the content, and then another down to the right in the bar. There's also an Amazon tag-cloud, but more on that another time. Google tries to target the adds based on the words on the page, which here will include clouds, climate, carbon dioxide, global warming, you see the pattern. Of course, there are only so many advertisers for climate-related topics, and also Google doesn't deal with the semantic content, just the literal words, all with the result that some interesting ads have already been reported.

One in particular is an add for something called the Douglass Report, which is a climate change denier site operated by Dr. William Campbell Douglass. The add takes you to a page that asks for your email address, in return Douglass sends you his report about how climate change is all a big hoax AND a you get a subscription to his medical newsletter.

The claims on that page are absolutely outrageous. Douglass drags out all the old, debunked claims that deniers always use. I don't often deal with these claims here because they've all been beaten to death elsewhere (cf., RealClimate's wiki). Let's just point out the two that really get my goat. First is,

"Scientists have reaped MILLIONS from their global warming 'research.' They've turned supporting global warming - despite what the science really says - into a cash cow!"

Oh, don't even get me started. One definitive answer to this canard is that if scientists are getting so much money from studying global warming, why would the vast majority of climate scientists be calling for intense investment in R&D of climate solutions, rather than additional funding for climate studies? If this is about the avarice of scientists, then they'd all be saying, "let's wait and see," but the truth is that almost no one who seriously studies climate change thinks waiting is a reasonable strategy at this point.

Second, is the tired argument that "these same scientists were trying to convince us the world was cooling just a few decades ago, when that's where the grant money was." No, actually that is just not true. There was discussion of a new ice age, but there was no serious concern that we'd precipitously enter into one, since that isn't how ice ages work. In fact, there was already quite a bit of serious concern about global warming by the mid-1970s. Read more in the BAMS article that tackles this issue in some depth. (See also (1) and (2).)

This guy is also apparently well-known as a medical crackpot, peddling snake oil and discouraging proper health practices. For example, he doesn't think that exposure to sunlight causes melanoma. He also believes that there is no evidence that cholesterol in any amount is bad for you, and that DDT (yes, the poison) might prevent breast cancer! There's more craziness if you do a quick search (example). And I kid you not, he's not only been a guest on Coast-To-Coast, but went on to talk about the health benefits of tobacco!!! (here). The bottom line is that this guy seems to be wrong about everything, and I have to now assume he is a brilliant satirist, as no one could believe all the garbage that comes out of this guys head. So kudos to Dr William Campbell Douglass.

Getting back to the ads on the blog. Here's the great thing. First, we've already gotten quite a kick out of the ads that have shown up, so that makes it all worthwhile. And second, if you can't believe what you're seeing, click it. Worst case scenario is that you make me a few pennies, and cost some terrible web site a few. Good deal.

Is this the ultimate greenwash?

A recent study finds that manufacturing processes used to make a lot of stuff, apparently especially tech stuff, is incredibly inefficient when it comes to energy consumption. [LINK] A particularly painful example is the manufacture of solar panels, which is so inefficient that it diminishes the long-term payoff of using renewable energy.

Earth Hour coming tomorrow

Well, Earth Hour is coming up tomorrow, (28 March, 8:30PM). It's an hour when people voluntarily turn out the lights to mark awareness of the link between energy generation/use and climate change. Last year, Google joined in the fun by making their front page black (I don't remember if it was just for an hour or a whole day). The event is organized through an official web site at earthhour.org.

An article on Yahoo! news cover the "event." Toward the end, they quote Bjorn Lomborg (infamously of the skeptical environmentalist), saying Even if a billion people turn off their lights this Saturday the entire event will be equivalent to switching off China's emissions for six short seconds." This followed a sentence saying, "Critics said the initiative was little more than empty symbolism."

Um, yeah.

The whole point is to make a gesture. It's like wearing an AIDS ribbon (back in the days before it lost all meaning). The ribbon doesn't cure AIDS, and turning out your lights doesn't change global warming. But if the Las Vegas strip is dark for an hour (as planned) and the Sydney Harbour is dark for an hour, and now even China is joining in, that is a meaningful gesture. It shows how far we are coming (despite my previous post) in educating the public about the dangers of climate change.

Plus it reduces light pollution, which is a good cause unto itself.

Americans still don't want to believe

Gallup has a new poll out, conducted using 1,012 Americans over the phone over three days early in March 2009. The results?

First the positive:

• 60% of Americans are personally worrying about global warming a "great deal" or a "fair amount."
  
• 53% of Americans believe the effects of global warming have already started.
  

Just as a reminder, the symptoms of global warming have been diagnosed from observations (and observations"), and this has been true for many years. Also, the impacts of global warming are also being felt already. Examples include the extinction of some species (notably the golden toad), the steady decline of artic sea-ice (which endangers the polar bear and other arctic species), melting permafrost, changing migration patterns, etc.

What else does the poll say?

• 60% of Americans don't think global warming will pose a serious threat to themselves or their way of life.
  
• 41% of Americans think the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated by the media.
  
• Global warming ranks 8th out of 8 environmental issues Gallup asked about in terms of how much people are worried, including 40% of people who worry "not at all" or "only a little" about global warming.
  
• Trends for all these show that people are worried less about global warming and think the seriousness is exaggerated than in previous years. All age groups except the 18-29 year olds show the trend in thinking the threat is exaggerated.
  

I'd like to insert a big sigh here.

Well, here's a prediction, then. There won't be significant political action to tax carbon emissions in the United States until a majority of Americans think global warming does pose a serious risk to their way of life. When this happens (and it will happen), it will be far too late to stop dangerous climate change from occurring. That is, unless the mainstream media starts covering the issue in a truly unbiased way (i.e., no longer presenting the big issue as controversial). That might convince the majority of Americans that they need to be concerned.


UPDATE:This just goes to show why some Americans still don't get it:

"We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I use my fingers as quotation marks, is part of the cooling process."

-- Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele, filling in for radio host William Bennett

OCO crashes and burns

Well, about 6 hours ago (as of writing time), a Taurus XL rocket built by Orbital Sciences Corporation of Virginia ignited and launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory on board, which was a new NASA satellite designed to very accurately (and sensitively) detect carbon dioxide. The goal was to better describe the sources and sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, that mission will now fall more heavily on the similar Japanese satellite called Ibuki than planned because a few minutes after launching, the Taurus XL's second stage didn't fully complete, leaving a part of the rocket attached to the 3rd and 4th stages, weight that could not be accommodated. The rocket crashed into the Southern Ocean, currently a large sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide A few more details at NYTimes.com [LINK]

Wrath of the Chronophage, my new book.

Not really. Just a cool clock, check out this video.

Code development in the cloud

Well, perhaps this diversion into the world of cloud-computing and "Web 2.0" and emerging technology is more than just a diversion. Maybe it is a full-fledged series. Today, I have just learned about a Mozilla Labs project called Bespin, which fits so neatly into my overall picture of how computational science should be done that I felt compelled to throw it up here to make a record of it.

First of all, Bespin is a Star Wars reference. It's the moon where Cloud City is, which you can see in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Remember? Lando is in charge of Cloud City. Anyway....

The software Bespin is a code editing environment implemented in java and within a modern web browser. The idea is that you open your browser, presumably from any computer you are sitting in front of, and navigate to your code. I'm not sure of the details of where the code resides, if you have a Bespin-related repository, or if you have to provide your own storage that is web-accessible (I'll check), but in any case, you have some code somewhere in the cloud. Bespin provides a unified front end to access and edit the code, including a file browser that they are calling a dashboard. Select your file, and it opens within the Bespin environment, and you have an actual text editor, where you can modify or write code and save. They're also working on collaboration tools, wherein you'd be editing a file and your friend could be editing the same file and you can see what each other are doing. Combined with Skype or other chat client, this could be a really useful way for people to work on code together without constant e-mails and attachments, or the possibility of getting divergent forks in a small project.

The editor is supposed to be very flexible. What this means in reality is yet to be seen. I'm not sure if you can just click a button to use Emacs encodings versus Vi, say, or if you are stuck learning a new editor and figuring out how to customize it. This could be the downfall of Bespin. People are so hung up on their editors (yes, I use emacs and don't want to learn another set of keyboard commands) that they will forego a new useful tool in favor of their comfortable, customized, "efficient" (really, probably not) system. But we shall see.

How does this fit into my vision of science? Well, first let's establish that in several branches of science there are very large computational projects that are used and modified by a fairly large number of people. Let's also put out there now that, at least in atmospheric science, these projects are climate models or the components thereof, and that the people modifying the code are usually NOT developers. At least in the sense that they don't have backgrounds in computer science, they don't keep up with trends in software development, and they don't necessarily know a lot about proper coding. They are, instead, scientists who want the model to do something differently than some other scientist designed it to do. Some equation is changed, or a new process is introduced, or some grad student just wants to run a sensitivity study by changing some parameter. So, each of these uses is going to be working with their own collection of the code, with their modifications. Maybe a group at some university wants to take an established model, and tinker with it collectively, so they'd want their own centralized repository of code that they can all access, but isn't accessible to the general community working with that model. There are lots of permutations and combinations that need to be transparently established by something like Bespin. And more importantly, these people (and I'm definitely throwing myself into this group) need to be able to get into Bespin and forget that they are using it. They need to log in, find their code and start working, with minimal investment in modifying and customizing and tweaking and generally fiddling. It needs to "just work."

Now, back to the point. It would be terrific to have the code accessible from anywhere for all users (or a subset of users, or your own code just for you). This could be especially useful for code that is going to be run on powerful remote computers (just downstairs maybe, but maybe in another state, or across the globe) because it would reduce the overhead of just getting to the code. Many of us have a multistep process to log in to these computers, and then we are stuck with the environment that is set up on the computer (which varies from computer to computer even within the same institution). Having a secure log-in to a website, where all our files would be sitting immediately, always in the same format with the same permissions and color scheme and shortcuts/aliases/keyboard macros/etc would increase productivity overnight. The possibility that one could use a computer in San Diego or Illinois or Virginia and the only difference be the URL that you navigate to would blow people's minds. Sure, there are some technical details I'm glazing over, like how do you compile and run the code from Bespin (that's not what it does, as far as I know), but just getting things set up in the code from a uniform environment would be life altering.

The impediments to this vision are several-fold. The first is inertia. We've had thirty years of using nearly the same simple environment, and for half that time almost exactly the same methods (from an end-user perspective) for accessing computers, setting up our user accounts, customizing our editors and other software tools, and learning how to move things around and get code to run. Change comes slowly to people set in their ways. Second, I think this needs to be adopted by large institutions, such as the supercomputing centers, and promoted very strongly as the "right way" to edit files on those machines. Similarly, the big science codes, like the community climate system model, should adopt this as a preferred method of modifying code within the development process, and that will spread to the research community. Third, these centers/projects/etc have to address security concerns in a reasonable way, with users in mind. This might be a separate thread from promoting a more efficient way of editing and sharing code, but there needs to be some sensical security procedures for getting into the big computers without a bevy of passwords and a pocket full of devices for accessing different computers.

Note that in the impediments, I never use the word Bespin, because it does not have to be Bespin. The scientific community is in need of new tools, that are powerful, flexible, and easy to use. It does not matter what they are, as long as they can be used across platforms and computing environments. Walls need to be broken down, code needs to be cleaned up, and resources need to be better used. Something like Bespin might provide one more piece of the puzzle to getting some of these things done.

For more about Bespin, check out their web site, and/or watch this screencast:

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

Files flying around the cloud

Related to my previous post about cloud computing and such, I've been trolling the interwebs and trying to learn something. In doing so, I have come across various "Web 2.0" technologies, some of which seem neat, others not so much. No, I haven't made any progress toward finding the massive storage and high-performance, massively-parallel computing solutions that I want for climate science purposes, but I'd like to share two (and a half) software+service technologies that I'm now using daily.

First and foremost, I have adopted full-hearted the use of Dropbox (getdropbox.com), which is a simple, elegant, and multifaceted tool for syncing files across multiple computers. The idea is that you install a little software package, which makes a folder called Dropbox in some obvious place (your home directory in OS X). Now whatever file you put into that folder gets silently sent to the dropbox servers -- out in the cloud. That alone, plus a simple (maybe too simple) web interface on the dropbox site, provides a very useful form of backup/archiving for these files. But for me the most amazing, wonderful, life-changing thing about dropbox is that when I go to another computer (with dropbox similarly installed), those files are there in the dropbox folder. They aren't available for download from the dropbox site, they are local copies of the files, right there in a folder. This provides another backup for the files, as they now exist on the first computer, the dropbox servers, and the second computer. It also allows me to simply navigate to that folder to continue working on whatever I put there, and when I press "save" the file is then sent back to the dropbox server, and sent on to the first computer. Amazing. For those who don't move files around between computers, it might seem silly, but it is so, SO much better than e-mail files to myself, or putting files on some server, or using (s)ftp to move the files around, or carrying a thumb drive around, etc. For those who are intrigued, go check out the screencast. Oh, and it's 2 GB of storage for free, $99 for 50GB for a year, and I think they will introduce a more flexible pricing system in the future. And yes, you can share a folder between users! Amazing.

Second, and less new and impressive, is simply delicious.com, which we used to know as del.icio.us. It's a "social bookmarking" system. For me this just means that when I want to bookmark something at work, like a paper I want to read later, I do it using a different browser button, and then I can add a description and/or tags to the bookmark. Then I go somewhere else, home or anywhere else with an internet connnection, and I can go to my delicious home page and find the link to that paper. The social part is that you can share bookmarks and whatnot. It is not as life-altering as dropbox, but it is actually quite convenient. You've probably seen on blogs and news sites little delicious symbols (there might be one right below this post). That provides a way to promote a blog or web page using your delicious account, essentially advertising it to other delicious users, and possibly making a list of things you've been reading for your friends. The firefox plugin for delicious is great, and I hope they bring such a simple interface to Safari.

Similarly, Digg.com is a bookmarking tool. I use this to try to promote news stories that I've read and like. I am not in love with digg, but I have kept using it for months. My main complaint is that when I hit a digg button from a page, like NYTimes.com or LATimes.com, it then makes me log in, looks for that article, suggests it might be a duplicate, asks me to write a summary and pick a category if no one else has dugg it, etc. It can be an ordeal. I want to digg something and not have to interact with the digg machine at all, and that hasn't happened very often.

Cloud computing and computing clouds

More and more I'm frustrated with the cyber-infrastructure of climate science. It seems to be on the verge of crisis, in a Kuhnian sense. Everyone has individual solutions for how to do large computations, manage very large data sets, and collaborate between institutions. For example, due to limited resources, I just had to move some simulation output from a remote server to a local, external hard drive. One simulation (not a big one) generated some 50GB of output that I don't really want to throw away. Retrieving this data took hours, and then several more hours to send it from the remote site to my desk. It's crazy, inefficient, and isolating.

There needs to be a better way. We need to harness the power inherent in "cloud computing" and the latest technology for using simple, intuitive web interfaces for accessing remote data (e.g., MobileMe, Google applications, etc.) and apply them to scientific computation, data storage, and data analysis.

We have seen small steps in these directions from projects like SETI@home and climateprediction.net, among others. I have also just read an article from Nature [LINK] saying that Amazon (see update below) and Google have both started down these roads, as has the NSF with something called DataNet. However, as the article notes, there are serious challenges, not just in terms of technology but also dealing with access, cost, and fairness. These can be touchy issues, especially in fields where the rate of work can vary greatly among different research groups.

I'll also just complain that even besides dealing with sharing and storing data, the ever-growing size of data sets in Earth Sciences, and particularly in the climate sciences, demands new tools for analyzing and visualizing the data. I've seen some projects that seek to deal with the emerging issues, but the progress of these new tools seems to be lagging significantly behind the growing data sets. As a concrete example, take the analysis of output from the NICAM, a global cloud-system resolving model. This is a model that has points every 7km over the entire surface of the earth. A good deal of variable are on vertical levels, say about 50 of them. It is conceivable that you'd be interested in examining global fields every hour for several years. On a typical desktop, loading a single 3-dimensional field for ONE hour would require all (or more) of the available memory, making operating on the field pretty slow, and doing serious number crunching is basically impossible. This isn't going to be a special case for long, either. A new generation of cutting-edge models will have similar resolution, and as they start producing actual simulations (i.e., ones from which scientific results are desired), analysis tools need to be available to do the job. Right now, I don't have any such tools. Those that do exist need to be made available and useable, and soon.

UPDATE:
I have been looking into these vague notions a bit more. Amazon has a side company called Amazon Web Services that sells cloud computing (computation, storage, database query, etc). The service seems to leverage the fact that Amazon has a ton of computational power and storage just sitting around, so they try to sell their downtime to companies that need more cyberinfrastructure than they can afford. It's a pay as you go system, and you only pay for the compute power/time that you actually use. It seems very interesting. Of course, the problem is transferring this kind of system to a more science community system. It would be nice, for example, if the same kind of system were available from an NSF computing center, and you could access data interactively using a web browser, or submit large simulations from a web browser that then run in the cloud with results going to the online storage facility. Of course, the problem is that "science" doesn't have a giant existing distributed computing environment with plenty of downtime, and there's not a lot of incentive to set one up (i.e., the NSF isn't that altruistic). These are just thoughts to chew on.

Climate blog smackdown

So for those who follow the climate blogs (by which I mean the blogs in which climate change deniers' arguments are routinely dismantled with high school math and physics), Tamino has just posted one of the best smackdowns to a denier analysis I've seen in a while. Tamino writes the "Open Mind" blog, and the entry is from 19 January [LINK]. Basically, a denier says that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is not anthropogenic, but natural, and presents a time series analysis of the Mauna Loa CO2 data using carbon isotopes. It probably sounds good if you aren't being critical about it, but in about three lines of algebra, Tamino proves that the analysis is exactly wrong, and the "result" is dictated by the terrible way the analysis was done. Smack. Fail. Totally worth reading.