A correction, I have read the Kump & Pollard paper [Amplification of Cretaceous Warmth by Biological Cloud Feedbacks -- Kump and Pollard 320 (5873): 195 -- Science], which I discussed a little yesterday.
I looked at it again briefly, and the main things to add are (1) their experiment is what I thought, which is that they artificially change the effective droplet radius. This is fine, as it is artificially prescribed anyway. And (2) they provide a reference for the assertion that DMS is the primary non-anthropogenic CCN. That reference is actually a perspective in Science by Andreae(DOI: 10.1126/science.1136529). I've just read that piece, which is interesting, but I feel is deeply flawed. Rather than pick it apart, let me just say that my primary concern is that it does not seem to give a broad overview of the current measurements, but cherry picks a few studies that may or may not be designed well enough to get at the points being made. In the end, the firm conclusion is that pre-human aerosol distributions, specifically CCN-sized aerosol, is very poorly understood, and that no good way to guess the concentrations has been devised yet. Good points, and that is all I have to say of that article.
More on CCN later though, as this is a good area to explore!
2008-06-19
2008-06-18
biology in climate models
Just read a quick blurb in Nature [link] that kind of rankled me. The writer, David Beerling, worries about the fidelity of biological processes in climate models. Fair enough. He cites interesting work by Kump & Pollard that suggest a deficiency in climate modeling of the Cretaceous period might be (partly) due to lower numbers of cloud condensation nuclei because phytoplankton are more stressed and produce less dimethylsuphide, producing more cloud cover but thinner clouds.
In the last paragraph, Beerling writes that the results are unsatisfying because "the effects of heat on biological aerosol emissions need to be better described in their model for it to generate really solid conclusions."
I hardly know where to start. I think the comment is fair to an extent, but perhaps misguided.
Starting from the Kump & Pollard paper, which I admit I haven't read yet, I am not convinced that there's much evidence for this biological effect. If they've artificially changed the aerosol concentration or the CCN concentration, then it's almost a foregone conclusion that there'll be big effects in the simulation. That's one of those parameters which, in most large-scale models, is not well constrained and is set to help make a reasonable current climate. That probably means that it could be adjusted to make a "reasonable" past climate, too, but knowing what that means is a different story. The second issue is whether DMS is really such an important source of CCN. I know it is a source, but does stressing phytoplankton really have so much influence on the mean cloud field?
For that matter, this affect would mostly influence regions of low, stratiform cloud. Other regions are probably not that influenced by modest changes in CCN concentration, as the low clouds are mostly convective anyway (and I'm guessing salt would be their main source of CCN -- I could be wrong). So the result is dependent on the way these clouds are parameterized as well as the assumptions about the biological processes influencing CCN. Sounds shaky. I'll look at that paper and post an update. If I can find anything, I'll also post something about the source for CCN, and whether DMS is really that important.
As for adding biology to climate models, I'm very hesitant about the issue. There are potentially important climatic feedbacks. And if we could construct models for the biological interactions, that would help with long-term climate simulations, especially for future climate change and paleoclimate simulations. It'd be great. We're at the very nascent stages though. Current generation climate models incorporate some kind of land model that has simple biology, and usually isn't interactive (meaning the plants don't respond to changing climatic conditions). The ocean usually has no biological model, but there are some marine ecosystem models that exist and are being tested for the next generation of climate models. The complexity ranges dramatically from very simple to quite complex, but there is still much debate about the results from models incorporating these ecosystem components. This is a slippery slope though. Adding ecosystem models seems like a great idea, but if they are true models with prognostic equations, it usually means more expensive simulations (more computer time, more storage, and more human time to analyze the output). And where do we draw the line? Phytoplankton respond not just to temperature and salinity, which are the state variables in ocean models, but also to light availability (varies with depth) and micro- and macronutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous. Should we have include nutrient models, or prescribe the nutrient distributions. Well, if we try to prescribe them, then there will be biologists who (rightfully) will say that the models are missing the feedback between changes in nutrients and biology, which propagates upstream to the rest of the climate model. If we do somehow include nutrient models (perhaps by making the biological production simple diagnostics from available nutrients), then geologists and geographers and social scientists will argue that the processes that are the natural and anthropogenic sources and sinks of nutrients are not properly represented. For example, factories and power plants emit a lot of sulphur, but there's a lot of variability among factories and power plants, as well as seasonal and daily cycles in their emissions. Do we need to simulate these cycles to properly represent the emissions to the atmosphere? If so, that would mean that for climate change simulations, we'll have to model the changing energy needs of populations, since that will impact the amount of emissions from the powerplants. Meanwhile, current climate models to not properly represent processes like wave breaking at the ocean surface which is probably one of the main sources of CCN over the ocean; when will we get to add this? For that matter, different kinds of aerosol have totally different properties as CCN, and what happens chemically to these things in cloud droplets can have an influence on future cloud evolution, so should our microphysical models incorporate the chemistry of individual chemical species within cloud droplets? How do we do that?
My point is not that we should not add more complexity to climate models, only that we don't know how to do it. Even if we stick to the ocean, ice, atmosphere, and land surface, we know we're missing huge chunks of well understood physics. To venture into the chemical and biological world, much less the anthropological, seem hasty at this point. I think we'll do it; I mean, it is being done, but we have to remember that climate models are tools for understanding the natural world. They won't be able to provide solid answers to questions without much thought; climate models can not be run as black boxes with the results taken as truth, no matter how much we add to them.
In the last paragraph, Beerling writes that the results are unsatisfying because "the effects of heat on biological aerosol emissions need to be better described in their model for it to generate really solid conclusions."
I hardly know where to start. I think the comment is fair to an extent, but perhaps misguided.
Starting from the Kump & Pollard paper, which I admit I haven't read yet, I am not convinced that there's much evidence for this biological effect. If they've artificially changed the aerosol concentration or the CCN concentration, then it's almost a foregone conclusion that there'll be big effects in the simulation. That's one of those parameters which, in most large-scale models, is not well constrained and is set to help make a reasonable current climate. That probably means that it could be adjusted to make a "reasonable" past climate, too, but knowing what that means is a different story. The second issue is whether DMS is really such an important source of CCN. I know it is a source, but does stressing phytoplankton really have so much influence on the mean cloud field?
For that matter, this affect would mostly influence regions of low, stratiform cloud. Other regions are probably not that influenced by modest changes in CCN concentration, as the low clouds are mostly convective anyway (and I'm guessing salt would be their main source of CCN -- I could be wrong). So the result is dependent on the way these clouds are parameterized as well as the assumptions about the biological processes influencing CCN. Sounds shaky. I'll look at that paper and post an update. If I can find anything, I'll also post something about the source for CCN, and whether DMS is really that important.
As for adding biology to climate models, I'm very hesitant about the issue. There are potentially important climatic feedbacks. And if we could construct models for the biological interactions, that would help with long-term climate simulations, especially for future climate change and paleoclimate simulations. It'd be great. We're at the very nascent stages though. Current generation climate models incorporate some kind of land model that has simple biology, and usually isn't interactive (meaning the plants don't respond to changing climatic conditions). The ocean usually has no biological model, but there are some marine ecosystem models that exist and are being tested for the next generation of climate models. The complexity ranges dramatically from very simple to quite complex, but there is still much debate about the results from models incorporating these ecosystem components. This is a slippery slope though. Adding ecosystem models seems like a great idea, but if they are true models with prognostic equations, it usually means more expensive simulations (more computer time, more storage, and more human time to analyze the output). And where do we draw the line? Phytoplankton respond not just to temperature and salinity, which are the state variables in ocean models, but also to light availability (varies with depth) and micro- and macronutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous. Should we have include nutrient models, or prescribe the nutrient distributions. Well, if we try to prescribe them, then there will be biologists who (rightfully) will say that the models are missing the feedback between changes in nutrients and biology, which propagates upstream to the rest of the climate model. If we do somehow include nutrient models (perhaps by making the biological production simple diagnostics from available nutrients), then geologists and geographers and social scientists will argue that the processes that are the natural and anthropogenic sources and sinks of nutrients are not properly represented. For example, factories and power plants emit a lot of sulphur, but there's a lot of variability among factories and power plants, as well as seasonal and daily cycles in their emissions. Do we need to simulate these cycles to properly represent the emissions to the atmosphere? If so, that would mean that for climate change simulations, we'll have to model the changing energy needs of populations, since that will impact the amount of emissions from the powerplants. Meanwhile, current climate models to not properly represent processes like wave breaking at the ocean surface which is probably one of the main sources of CCN over the ocean; when will we get to add this? For that matter, different kinds of aerosol have totally different properties as CCN, and what happens chemically to these things in cloud droplets can have an influence on future cloud evolution, so should our microphysical models incorporate the chemistry of individual chemical species within cloud droplets? How do we do that?
My point is not that we should not add more complexity to climate models, only that we don't know how to do it. Even if we stick to the ocean, ice, atmosphere, and land surface, we know we're missing huge chunks of well understood physics. To venture into the chemical and biological world, much less the anthropological, seem hasty at this point. I think we'll do it; I mean, it is being done, but we have to remember that climate models are tools for understanding the natural world. They won't be able to provide solid answers to questions without much thought; climate models can not be run as black boxes with the results taken as truth, no matter how much we add to them.
2008-05-06
Impact of warming on insects and other ectotherms
There has been quite a lot of press coverage of a new paper in PNAS (doi:10.1073/pnas.0709472105) by Deutsch et al. about how global warming might affect land-based invertebrates. The paper is very short, and easy to understand, so I recommend it. It's actually a simple idea, based on empirically derived "fitness curves" for different organisms. As I read it, the story comes down to the fact that tropical temperatures don't vary much during the course of the annual cycle, while at higher latitudes it does. This has affected the organisms that live in these different climate regimes; tropical organisms have come to "expect" a small temperature variance, and don't do well when the temperature changes more than normal. Organisms from places with distinct seasons are more amenable to temperature swings. This has been derived empirically as these fitness curves, which are broad for extra-tropical organisms and narrow for tropical ones. An interesting characteristic is that the maximum fitness level comes at a temperature optimum, followed by a precipitous decline. So Deutsch and co-authors followed up on this, defining a "warming tolerance" and a "thermal safety margin," which just measure how close an organism lives to its maximum temperature tolerance and to it's optimal temperature, respectively. Then they apply a warming scenario to see what happens, and it turns out that tropical insects (the data they used), get pushed really hard compared with midlatitude insects. This is somewhat surprising, since the tropics don't warm as much as higher latitudes, but because the tropical organisms live so close to their maximum temperature already, they are heavily stressed by the more moderate warming. They extrapolate to a global scale of impact on insects, and then three extra classes (lizards, frogs, turtles). This part of the paper does not seem surprising after the initial analysis, though the extension to lizards, frogs, and turtles helps deliver the message.
We often hear about the impact of climate change on biology, ecosystems, etc., but we don't often see such a concise and simple, yet far-reaching and quantitative analysis of "impact." This paper stands out to me because of these traits, and gives an excellent example to use when discussing the importance of climate change beyond temperature, precipitation, etc.
We often hear about the impact of climate change on biology, ecosystems, etc., but we don't often see such a concise and simple, yet far-reaching and quantitative analysis of "impact." This paper stands out to me because of these traits, and gives an excellent example to use when discussing the importance of climate change beyond temperature, precipitation, etc.
2008-04-22
Another example of what should have been done already
Today I read an article posted on Science Daily (Aerodynamic Truck Trailer Cuts Fuel And Emissions By Up To 15 Percent) that made me kind of upset. The story is about a new, more aerodynamic sideskirt design for truck trailers. The design reduces drag, and increases fuel efficiency by about 10%. That is great, right, so why am I so mad about it? Well, because this very small improvement could have been made years ago with little effort, but corporate inertia has kept this kind of innovation from being properly implemented. EVEN MORE EGREGIOUS though, is that there have been radically different designs for trucks for decades that could improve fuel efficiency by 25% WITHOUT CHANGING THE ENGINE. The design that I'm aware of is by Luigi Colani, who I've only become aware of recently by watching "Future Car" on the Discovery Channel. In the 1970s, Colani came up with a radically more aerodynamic truck design, which apparently sat on his shelf unimplemented for a couple decads. In 2001, he introduced a new design, this one 50% more efficient than conventional trucks, but still no one is building it or even stealing some of his ideas. Why? It doesn't make sense.
While I was trying to remember Colani's name, I found two examples of a "more efficient truck." First was just from a couple months ago. Navistar has introduced a new model called LoneStar, which is supposed to be 5-15% more fuel efficient than traditional trucks. The second was from 1995, when the US DOT gave an award to Kenworth for their T600A, which had been produced since 1985. The award was described by Barry Langridge, Kenworth's general manager, "It literally changed the face of the trucking industry forever by creating a new generation of fuel efficient trucks which have saved billions of gallons of fuel. The 70,000 T600s built since '85, when compared to non-aerodynamic conventional models, will save an estimated 1.25 billion gallons during their useful lives." As far as I can tell, these trucks still are getting 6-8 miles per gallon.
Also read a similar post at the "Our Futrure" blog, which sent me to the Colani site and echoes my lack of enthusiasm for current truck design.
While I was trying to remember Colani's name, I found two examples of a "more efficient truck." First was just from a couple months ago. Navistar has introduced a new model called LoneStar, which is supposed to be 5-15% more fuel efficient than traditional trucks. The second was from 1995, when the US DOT gave an award to Kenworth for their T600A, which had been produced since 1985. The award was described by Barry Langridge, Kenworth's general manager, "It literally changed the face of the trucking industry forever by creating a new generation of fuel efficient trucks which have saved billions of gallons of fuel. The 70,000 T600s built since '85, when compared to non-aerodynamic conventional models, will save an estimated 1.25 billion gallons during their useful lives." As far as I can tell, these trucks still are getting 6-8 miles per gallon.
Also read a similar post at the "Our Futrure" blog, which sent me to the Colani site and echoes my lack of enthusiasm for current truck design.
2008-04-21
recent deaths
I just wanted to note a rash of recent deaths of prominent scientists.
Arthur C. Clarke, writer and futurist, died at 90 years old on 19 March 2008. NYTimes Wikipedia
John A. Wheeler, physicist, died at 96 years old on 13 April 2008. NYTimes Wikipedia
Edward N. Lorenz, meteorologist and "discoverer" of chaos, died at 90 years old on 16 April 2008.
NYTimes
Wikipedia
A couple of other notable deaths include:
David Gale, UC Berkeley mathematician, died at 87 on 7 March 2008. Frederick Seitz, physicist, died at 96 on 2 March 2008. Astronaut G. David Low died at 52 on 15 March 2008.
Two very different actors also recently died: Charlton Heston and Paul Scofield.
Arthur C. Clarke, writer and futurist, died at 90 years old on 19 March 2008. NYTimes Wikipedia
John A. Wheeler, physicist, died at 96 years old on 13 April 2008. NYTimes Wikipedia
Edward N. Lorenz, meteorologist and "discoverer" of chaos, died at 90 years old on 16 April 2008.
NYTimes
Wikipedia
A couple of other notable deaths include:
David Gale, UC Berkeley mathematician, died at 87 on 7 March 2008. Frederick Seitz, physicist, died at 96 on 2 March 2008. Astronaut G. David Low died at 52 on 15 March 2008.
Two very different actors also recently died: Charlton Heston and Paul Scofield.
2008-04-15
Science Debate 2008 - May in Oregon!?!
Obama has backed out of the debate scheduled for next week, and McCain and Clinton were non-committal. So organizers are trying to schedule the Science Debate for May in Oregon. [LINK].
Please visit the official Science Debate 2008 web site and find a way to support this important cause. Basic research funding, ethical stands on scientific/technological issues, and policy decisions that should be informed by scientific findings all need to be discussed in an open and fair forum, and the candidates must be expected to be knowledgeable, thoughtful, and articulate about how they will deal with science and technology in the next 4-8 years.
update: If you happen to be reading this and have any doubt that we need a president who cares deeply about science and technology, go read ScienceNOW's April Fool's day joke: Bush to Science: "Let's be friends". This is an official website under the American Association for the Advancement of Science! Can you imagine this kind of attitude from the mainstream scientific organizations with ANY OTHER ADMINISTRATION?
Please visit the official Science Debate 2008 web site and find a way to support this important cause. Basic research funding, ethical stands on scientific/technological issues, and policy decisions that should be informed by scientific findings all need to be discussed in an open and fair forum, and the candidates must be expected to be knowledgeable, thoughtful, and articulate about how they will deal with science and technology in the next 4-8 years.
update: If you happen to be reading this and have any doubt that we need a president who cares deeply about science and technology, go read ScienceNOW's April Fool's day joke: Bush to Science: "Let's be friends". This is an official website under the American Association for the Advancement of Science! Can you imagine this kind of attitude from the mainstream scientific organizations with ANY OTHER ADMINISTRATION?
Brian Greene brings science to the masses?
I just saw a blurb in Science about the World Science Festival, which is apparently an attempt by Brian Greene (The Elegant Universe) and others to popularize science on a large scale. It seems like a good idea, and there look to be some really fun events. However, I do wonder about the effectiveness of making science a cultural event in the middle of New York City, where there are abundances of both cultural events and people interested in science. It will be nice to see such an effort in a less "sophisticated" place, even if it is a big city like Houston, Denver, or the Twin Cities: places that could reach large audiences that don't have such easy access to cultural and scientifically interesting events. Just a thought.
2008-03-22
Leveraging the Amazon Kindle, some ideas
This is off-topic, but I just struck myself with a couple of simple ideas related to the Amazon Kindle. I'm sure you know, but just in case, go look at the Kindle, it's an interesting device that uses "E-Ink" to make it's display look a lot like an actual printed page. It connects wirelessly to a cell phone network to download books from Amazon, or I think it can be connected and synced with a library on a computer, or something like that. The important thing is that it's a small, lightweight device that can (apparently) successfully mimic the experience of reading a page from a physical book, magazine, or newspaper. People have responded pretty well to it, and today I noticed that Amazon has had supply issues because of the large demand. Great, but I'm not trying to advertise this device, which I've never even held in my hands, but really I'm trying to make the case that there is such a device and that it isn't horrible. Many people complain about reading text from monitors of any kind, TVs, computers, iPods/iPhones, etc, and that is why they always print things and carry around books and papers and such. The early success of Kindle shows there's a chance these people could be satisfied with a similar device, at least to some extent. This leads me to some obvious observations about the potential for such devices.
Go to a high school, or better yet, just go across the street from a high school when classes let out and students start pouring out from the school. Yes, you will probably be put on some kind of list with the local law enforcement, but do it anyway. You will see that kids are loaded with gigantic backpacks, hanging improperly from their shoulders. This was an issue when I was in school, and I've seen it recently enough that I know it still is. It isn't just teenage garbage that fills those packs, there are a bunch of heavy textbooks. In my days, I know that I often had to leave some books at school or home because I couldn't fit all my books in my bag every day; there are injuries due to heavy bags, which is just stupid. Many times, students take home textbooks just for a few pages, either of reading or homework assignments. Wouldn't it be convenient if they carried one "book" with them that had all their course material at the ready? A Kindle-like device would be perfect for this.
An added bonus is that if publishers work with the content provider (e.g., Amazon), then new editions of books, or supplements, or any number of extras could be provided to under-funded schools and students at minimal costs. Once the burden of putting ink to paper (incurring costs related to ink, paper, layout of presses, binding, packing, shipping, etc) is removed, the cost of materials drops dramatically. At higher education levels, this is even better, since small, esoteric books are really expensive, and authors don't make any money from them anyway, this could take the cost of such books to the floor, and college students, grad students, and professional researchers could actually afford to buy the books that are most useful to them (do you hear the frustration?). If you don't know what I'm writing about, go look at technical books in just about any field, for example, Cloud Dynamics by Houze costs $80+ on Amazon, which is a graduate/researcher level book that is really useful to a relatively small number of people. If we could just download it to our digital library, the cost SHOULD be dramatically reduced while still preserving the publisher's profit and the royalties that Houze gets (which I bet isn't much).
It would also be possible to self-publish under this model, so instructors could upload their class notes to some service which would make the download available to students. This might hurt copy stores, who make a lot of money by selling over-priced readers to students, but would be great for instructors and students.
Similarly, scholarly journals could use this distribution model very easily. They already have online subscription models, by which most people now go to a web site, find the article of interest and download the pdf of the article, which is then read on-screen or printed. This would be a natural extension of that model, and would reduce printing costs and wasted paper.
What needs to be done to make a Kindle-like device actually work for these educational and scholarly purposes? Very little. One potential gotcha is that the current E-Ink technology used in the Kindle does not allow color. This presents serious limitations compared to having a regular pdf or a printed book. This is especially true for high school and lower-level textbooks, which regularly rely on "creative" layout and color to "draw the student in." There is electronic paper with color already developed, however, so this might not be a deal-breaker (example).
The other technology-related speed bump is speed. One of the criticisms of the Kindle, and E-Ink in general, is that it is slow to render pages. I imagine the problem would be worse with graphics-heavy, color-intensive pages, so quick flipping back and forth would be a problem. And as we know, when doing homework or research, there are often periods of intense page flipping, searching for some specific passage or re-reading something that didn't register the first time. There are myriad potential solutions, from having a little screen-space for "saving" passages or efficient built-in searching, to more dramatic changes in E-Ink.
Other problems are design of the device, which would probably require different models catering to grade-school, high school, college, and professionals. No problem. Then there's the potential problem of getting publishers to embrace this model. They're apparently onboard with Kindle, Amazon offered 80,000+ titles when the Kindle was released, but it might be more difficult for the small publishing houses to deal with such a dramatic change in distribution. I don't know enough about publishing to really have a good guess, but we know the music and movie industries have basically freaked out and tried to avoid moving into a digital distribution framework. And then there is the cost of these devices, and how to widely distribute them to schools already strapped for cash. You can imagine the nightmare scenarios.
So at the end, I don't think any of this is new, and I'm sure it has all been discussed much more elsewhere, but I'm suddenly enamored with the idea of carrying a single "book" wherever I go, having all the books I need, and being able to buy technical books for a fraction of the current cost. Maybe this is an idea that a company like Amazon could actually pursue, too, since they probably have enough sway to get a school district to do a test program by providing Kindles and the textbooks needed (except it doesn't address the color problem yet). It would also help to raise a generation of people who don't "need" to have paper in front of them to read.
UPDATES:
Here's some ideas to improve the Kindle, though I think there's a conflict with some of these suggestions and the E-Ink interface. That E-Ink technology is not as versatile as a lot of bloggers think it is.
Ouch! Here's Scoble on the Kindle, and he's pretty unhappy about the lack of design. Watch the video, I think these are good points that need to be addressed in this commercial form of the product, but also for some future educational applications.
Another overview of the Kindle, with some of the same criticisms. Down in the comments, someone suggests Kindle Textbooks as a good option for this technology, so at least someone else has thought of this.
Here's a post that thinks Kindle has a chance at textbooks.
There's a thread on the Amazon site about college texts on Kindle. There seems to be support for this, but the publishers aren't yet on board. I really don't think it'll work unless you can buy a textbook for, say $25, as opposed to the paper versions for $50-150. The idea of automatic updates to new editions (maybe with some sanity limits) is so sweet for the consumer that it'd sell Kindles alone. The publishers lose out though, except I bet they could increase their profit margins to make up the difference.
Go to a high school, or better yet, just go across the street from a high school when classes let out and students start pouring out from the school. Yes, you will probably be put on some kind of list with the local law enforcement, but do it anyway. You will see that kids are loaded with gigantic backpacks, hanging improperly from their shoulders. This was an issue when I was in school, and I've seen it recently enough that I know it still is. It isn't just teenage garbage that fills those packs, there are a bunch of heavy textbooks. In my days, I know that I often had to leave some books at school or home because I couldn't fit all my books in my bag every day; there are injuries due to heavy bags, which is just stupid. Many times, students take home textbooks just for a few pages, either of reading or homework assignments. Wouldn't it be convenient if they carried one "book" with them that had all their course material at the ready? A Kindle-like device would be perfect for this.
An added bonus is that if publishers work with the content provider (e.g., Amazon), then new editions of books, or supplements, or any number of extras could be provided to under-funded schools and students at minimal costs. Once the burden of putting ink to paper (incurring costs related to ink, paper, layout of presses, binding, packing, shipping, etc) is removed, the cost of materials drops dramatically. At higher education levels, this is even better, since small, esoteric books are really expensive, and authors don't make any money from them anyway, this could take the cost of such books to the floor, and college students, grad students, and professional researchers could actually afford to buy the books that are most useful to them (do you hear the frustration?). If you don't know what I'm writing about, go look at technical books in just about any field, for example, Cloud Dynamics by Houze costs $80+ on Amazon, which is a graduate/researcher level book that is really useful to a relatively small number of people. If we could just download it to our digital library, the cost SHOULD be dramatically reduced while still preserving the publisher's profit and the royalties that Houze gets (which I bet isn't much).
It would also be possible to self-publish under this model, so instructors could upload their class notes to some service which would make the download available to students. This might hurt copy stores, who make a lot of money by selling over-priced readers to students, but would be great for instructors and students.
Similarly, scholarly journals could use this distribution model very easily. They already have online subscription models, by which most people now go to a web site, find the article of interest and download the pdf of the article, which is then read on-screen or printed. This would be a natural extension of that model, and would reduce printing costs and wasted paper.
What needs to be done to make a Kindle-like device actually work for these educational and scholarly purposes? Very little. One potential gotcha is that the current E-Ink technology used in the Kindle does not allow color. This presents serious limitations compared to having a regular pdf or a printed book. This is especially true for high school and lower-level textbooks, which regularly rely on "creative" layout and color to "draw the student in." There is electronic paper with color already developed, however, so this might not be a deal-breaker (example).
The other technology-related speed bump is speed. One of the criticisms of the Kindle, and E-Ink in general, is that it is slow to render pages. I imagine the problem would be worse with graphics-heavy, color-intensive pages, so quick flipping back and forth would be a problem. And as we know, when doing homework or research, there are often periods of intense page flipping, searching for some specific passage or re-reading something that didn't register the first time. There are myriad potential solutions, from having a little screen-space for "saving" passages or efficient built-in searching, to more dramatic changes in E-Ink.
Other problems are design of the device, which would probably require different models catering to grade-school, high school, college, and professionals. No problem. Then there's the potential problem of getting publishers to embrace this model. They're apparently onboard with Kindle, Amazon offered 80,000+ titles when the Kindle was released, but it might be more difficult for the small publishing houses to deal with such a dramatic change in distribution. I don't know enough about publishing to really have a good guess, but we know the music and movie industries have basically freaked out and tried to avoid moving into a digital distribution framework. And then there is the cost of these devices, and how to widely distribute them to schools already strapped for cash. You can imagine the nightmare scenarios.
So at the end, I don't think any of this is new, and I'm sure it has all been discussed much more elsewhere, but I'm suddenly enamored with the idea of carrying a single "book" wherever I go, having all the books I need, and being able to buy technical books for a fraction of the current cost. Maybe this is an idea that a company like Amazon could actually pursue, too, since they probably have enough sway to get a school district to do a test program by providing Kindles and the textbooks needed (except it doesn't address the color problem yet). It would also help to raise a generation of people who don't "need" to have paper in front of them to read.
UPDATES:
Here's some ideas to improve the Kindle, though I think there's a conflict with some of these suggestions and the E-Ink interface. That E-Ink technology is not as versatile as a lot of bloggers think it is.
Ouch! Here's Scoble on the Kindle, and he's pretty unhappy about the lack of design. Watch the video, I think these are good points that need to be addressed in this commercial form of the product, but also for some future educational applications.
Another overview of the Kindle, with some of the same criticisms. Down in the comments, someone suggests Kindle Textbooks as a good option for this technology, so at least someone else has thought of this.
Here's a post that thinks Kindle has a chance at textbooks.
There's a thread on the Amazon site about college texts on Kindle. There seems to be support for this, but the publishers aren't yet on board. I really don't think it'll work unless you can buy a textbook for, say $25, as opposed to the paper versions for $50-150. The idea of automatic updates to new editions (maybe with some sanity limits) is so sweet for the consumer that it'd sell Kindles alone. The publishers lose out though, except I bet they could increase their profit margins to make up the difference.
2008-02-25
2008-02-18
I found the included video from a lecture by Naomi Oreskes on Deltoid. You'll remember Oreskes from her Science article a while back in which she showed that there is strong scientific consensus in the belief that global warming is human-induced. In this lecture, she presents a very brief history of the science of global warming, doing an excellent job of going back to the very roots, and making the important point that scientists have predicted global warming for at least 50 years. A related point is that as time has marched on, the predictions have gotten more detailed, and they've shown to be true so far. I especially think back to the 1988 Hansen paper, which showed projections of climate change from numerical simulations, which has now shown to be a conservative estimate of the warming. In the second half of her lecture, Oreskes discusses the "denial of global warming." This goes back to that now familiar, but surprisingly recent, poll that most Americans still think there is scientific debate about whether global warming is human-induced (versus a "natural cycle" or such). Oreskes asks why this is, when scientists, as she has just shown, really reached consensus about global warming in the 70s/80s and about the cause of the warming in the mid to late 1980s. She traces the origins to the Marshall Institute, and a tactic she calls the "tobacco strategy." She traces the history of the Marshall Institute to its roots as a PR campaign to defend Reagan's star wars program: ultimately a conservative, anti-communist group. She follows the progression, and discusses Fred Singer and others, who have through the past two decades argued against scientific issues essentially to stop government regulation (and thus "creeping communism"). It's a very interesting presentation, clear and objective, and I think shows very well how the "tobacco strategy" has effectively misguided the American public through deliberate manipulation of mass media outlets.
2008-02-07
Environmental Research Letters - Best of 2007
An e-mail I received today:
Environmental Research Letters (ERL) has just released the Best of 2007, a mixture of Perspectives and Letters that best represent the high quality and breadth of the contributions that were published last year in ERL, as chosen by the Editorial Board, guest editors and publishing team.
This special collection includes contributions to invited focus issues on Environmental Health and Justice, Northern Hemisphere High Latitude Climate Change, Tropical Deforestation, and Global Impacts of Particulate Matter Air Pollution, as well as an editorial from ERL's Editor-in-Chief, Professor Daniel M Kammen.
To read the ERL Best of 2007, visit http://herald.iop.org/ERL_Bestof2007/m261/crk//link/1319 where you can access the online table of contents or download the full pdf version of this very special collection.
2008-01-22
Sex bias in peer review
I think this is an important issue, not just in terms of sex bias, but that the whole peer-review process could probably be improved.
This study (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2007.07.008) by Amber Budden at U. Toronto, suggests that female authors are more successful in a double-blind peer review process rather than the more conventional single-blind review.
Just to be clear, double-blind means that the author doesn't know who the reviewers are and the reviewer does not see the name or affiliation of the author(s). Single-blind means the author submits the paper and the journal/editor finds reviewers (the author doesn't know who they are), but the reviewers see the author's name(s). Almost every scientific journal uses this single-blind approach; for no good reason.
From where I sit, there seems no good reason to maintain this single-blind review process. Not only does it possibly discriminate against women, I think there are likely many more negative effects. The most obvious one is that "prestigious" scientists, those who might have published a lot or have contributed seminal work in a field, seem more likely to get through the process less critically. This is part because they are good scientists, of course, but it can also be because there really are not enough reviewers to go around, and much more junior scientists (sometimes grad students) end up reviewing papers. It is intimidating as an inexperienced scientists to be critical of work by someone you know/respect/fear/want-to-work-with/etc. Also, many sub-disciplines are populated by a fairly small number of experts, who end up being asked to review each other's papers all the time. This can go either way: people are likely to be extra critical of rivals and less critical of friends.
Recently, there has been some open discussion of the review process (e.g., DOI: 10.1126/science.319.5859.32b and DOI: 10.1126/science.319.5859.32c), which is good. However, I haven't noticed any large-scale call for double-blind review. This is amazing, since double-blind studies are a foundation of modern science. I honestly can't think of a single reason that every journal should not immediately switch to double-blind reviews.
This study (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2007.07.008) by Amber Budden at U. Toronto, suggests that female authors are more successful in a double-blind peer review process rather than the more conventional single-blind review.
Just to be clear, double-blind means that the author doesn't know who the reviewers are and the reviewer does not see the name or affiliation of the author(s). Single-blind means the author submits the paper and the journal/editor finds reviewers (the author doesn't know who they are), but the reviewers see the author's name(s). Almost every scientific journal uses this single-blind approach; for no good reason.
From where I sit, there seems no good reason to maintain this single-blind review process. Not only does it possibly discriminate against women, I think there are likely many more negative effects. The most obvious one is that "prestigious" scientists, those who might have published a lot or have contributed seminal work in a field, seem more likely to get through the process less critically. This is part because they are good scientists, of course, but it can also be because there really are not enough reviewers to go around, and much more junior scientists (sometimes grad students) end up reviewing papers. It is intimidating as an inexperienced scientists to be critical of work by someone you know/respect/fear/want-to-work-with/etc. Also, many sub-disciplines are populated by a fairly small number of experts, who end up being asked to review each other's papers all the time. This can go either way: people are likely to be extra critical of rivals and less critical of friends.
Recently, there has been some open discussion of the review process (e.g., DOI: 10.1126/science.319.5859.32b and DOI: 10.1126/science.319.5859.32c), which is good. However, I haven't noticed any large-scale call for double-blind review. This is amazing, since double-blind studies are a foundation of modern science. I honestly can't think of a single reason that every journal should not immediately switch to double-blind reviews.
2007-11-26
Watch a YouTube video
This guy on YouTube has spelled out a very nice approach to how "skeptics" should look at the possibility of a changing climate.
2007-10-10
blog action day
If time permits, which is a big if right now, I will try to participate in blog action day.
2007-10-04
Shipping Lanes
I've been sitting on the idea for this post for almost a week, but haven't had a chance to work it up. Since it doesn't look like I'm going to get to do it the way I originally wanted, I'm giving in and just going for the gusto. Maybe (yeah right) I'll come back and round out the rough edges later, but for now I want to get the basic ideas out there.
Ship tracks are the contrails of the sea. Perhaps more accurately, ship tracks are to the marine atmospheric boundary layer what contrails are to the upper troposphere. They are lines of what we will call clouds that form behind a ship. They are the focus of a recent article that I found very interesting. A news summary can be found on the Science (LINK) web site, while the paper appears in GRL. For a good picture of ship tracks, NASA's MODIS is a good resource.
The idea in the paper is to establish the radiative forcing associated with ship tracks on the global scale. This hasn't been done before using observations because ship tracks are very low, very small clouds that cover a tiny amount of Earth's surface area. However, they are common, as the paper points out, in several regions, notably off the coast of Africa and in the North Pacific. These are, somewhat coincidentally (but not really), the same regions where we think about extensive stratocumulus decks.
Schreier et al. use one year of satellite imagery, from the ENVISAT-AATSR, and go through a straight forward but intensive process of identifying ship tracks and then estimating their radiative forcing. The bottom line is that in some regions the radiative impact of ship tracks, lets call it the local radiative effect, can be a non-trivial -0.05 W/m2, but on the global scale the effect is miniscule at -0.4 to -0.6 mW/m2 (plus or minus 40%). Note that the global value is in milliWatts, so is 100 time smaller than the largest regional radiative effect (-0.05 W/m2 = -50 mW/m2). The negative sign arises because ship tracks are very low clouds that are very white (i.e., reflective), so when they appear they provide a more reflective surface for sunlight to bounce off, which to first order reduces the amount of energy in the climate system (because most of the reflected light goes back out to space) and cools the climate. This is familiar if you've been exposed to cloud "feedback" ideas, in which more low cloud cover increases the albedo of Earth and cools it. In fact, this is a terrific example of that effect, but we'll come to that shortly. It is also good to note that the radiative forcing associated with a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is about 4 W/m2, which is itself a small signal in the total radiative budget (with 1365 W/m2 of incoming sunlight at the top of the atmosphere, distributed over a day (divide by 4) and an albedo of about 0.3 you're talking in the neighborhood of a 225 W/m2 of sunlight being absorbed at the surface, and all of global warming comes down to 4W/m2 give or take!).
Okay so before I sign off, leaving you totally confused. I wanted to point out a couple of interesting things about ship tracks that aren't necessarily in the article. First of all, it is helpful to remember why ship tracks form. The ships are steaming ahead, burning fairly dirty fuel to get where they are going, and the exhaust goes right out into the atmosphere. This exhaust contains particulate matter as well as precursors for particles, so the ship is basically making a trail of particles behind it. These particles act as nucleation sites for water, forming small cloud droplets. Because the ships spew out so much stuff, there are enough nucleation sites available to grow lots of droplets and form these linear clouds. Why don't the clouds form anyway if there's that much water in the atmosphere already? Well, a couple of reasons. One is that the relative humidity isn't quite 100% in fair weather conditions, but even if it were, water doesn't like to condense unless there are surfaces (supplied by the particles). At a relative humidity of about 80%, there just aren't enough particles floating around the clean maritime boundary layer to let the water condense into clouds. The ships provide the extra nucleation sites necessary, and make it even easier by supplying the boundary layer with hygroscopic particles, meaning the particles effectively decrease the saturation specific humidity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygroscopic). That just means that the particles are very efficient at turning water vapor into liquid water. So a ship goes by, spews out water-loving particles, water condenses on those particles forming droplets, and a big collection of droplets is a cloud. Fine, what else?
So okay, the ships go by and make lines of clouds, but we now know (or strongly suspect) based on Schrier et al. that the global effect of these cloud is negligible and the local effect is also pretty small. Can we be done with it then? Not quite. These clouds are a great example of the Twomey effect, which is an old idea now and just says that by increasing the number of particles in the air, the size of cloud droplets gets smaller, and when clouds are made up of small droplets they are brighter (i.e., more reflective). Coakley et al. (1987) presented ship tracks as such an example, showing with satellite data that the reflectivity of ship tracks is higher than the surrounding low-level cloud cover. This is exactly what leads to the radiative forcing that has now been estimated by Schreier et al. The important thing to recognize here is that the Coakley et al. study is essentially a proof of concept, showing that pollution can impact atmospheric radiative transfer. They definitely did not say ships were impacting global climate.
There is a related effect, sometimes called the Albrecht effect, which takes into account the change in cloud fraction associated with changes in particles in the atmosphere. It is presented by Albrecht (1989), and is also a pretty simple idea. When extra particles are put into the atmospheric boundary layer, they form droplets and brighter clouds, as discussed above. Smaller droplets can also change the formation of raindrops, or more precisely in the case of shallow maritime clouds, drizzle drops. The change is to reduce the precipitation efficiency, which increases the liquid water in the cloud layer, and can lead to an increase in the fractional cloudiness. The important point here is that not only could increased particle concentration in the marine atmospheric boundary layer make brighter clouds, but could actually increase the overall cloudiness. This would amplify the effects discussed by Coakley et al. because there would now be a larger area covered by brighter clouds. The Albrecht study makes use of ship tracks only in the sense of the Coakley et al. study, and only suggests that changes in precipitation could account for the sustained difference in ship tracks from the stratiform cloud in which they are embedded. This is supported to some extent by aircraft observations.
And finally, since we're covering so many bases, there's another effect that should be mentioned. Pincus and Baker (1994) present a study that extends the Albrecht study in that it accounts for the change in the thickness of clouds in the presence of varying particle concentration. They use a model of a cloudy boundary layer and account for changes in absorption and precipitation with cloud thickness and droplet number, respectively. This effect is not quite as "obvious" as the other indirect effects, but the bottom line is that more droplets can make thicker clouds with a higher albedo, which is thus another facet of this negative feedback associated with changes in atmospheric aerosol (particles). They note, however, that you'd expect to see ship tracks extend higher than surrounding clouds, which at that time was not observed. I'm not sure where this effect really stands, but it is interesting to consider.
So these are the indirect effects of aerosol on climate. We came a long way in this post, from a recent study showing that the globally averaged radiative forcing due to ship tracks is small all the way through aerosol effects on cloud albedo, precipitation processes, and horizontal and vertical cloud distribution. Well done. There are a lot more details that could have been added, and tons more studies. These will be left for future posts, though. I've included some references below for those of you who want to follow up.
References
Schreier, Mathias; Mannstein, Hermann; Eyring, Veronika; Bovensmann, Heinrich
Global ship track distribution and radiative forcing from 1 year of AATSR data
Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 34, No. 17, L17814
10.1029/2007GL030664 (LINK)
JAMES A. COAKLEY JR., ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, and PHILIP A. DURKEE
Effect of Ship-Stack Effluents on Cloud Reflectivity
Science 28 August 1987: Vol. 237. no. 4818, pp. 1020 - 1022 DOI: 10.1126/science.237.4818.1020
BRUCE A. ALBRECHT
Aerosols, Cloud Microphysics, and Fractional Cloudiness
Science 15 September 1989: Vol. 245. no. 4923, pp. 1227 - 1230 DOI: 10.1126/science.245.4923.1227
ROBERT PINCUS & MARCIA B. BAKER
Effect of precipitation on the albedo susceptibility of clouds in the marine boundary layer
Nature 372, 250 - 252 (17 November 2002); doi:10.1038/372250a0
Ship tracks are the contrails of the sea. Perhaps more accurately, ship tracks are to the marine atmospheric boundary layer what contrails are to the upper troposphere. They are lines of what we will call clouds that form behind a ship. They are the focus of a recent article that I found very interesting. A news summary can be found on the Science (LINK) web site, while the paper appears in GRL. For a good picture of ship tracks, NASA's MODIS is a good resource.
The idea in the paper is to establish the radiative forcing associated with ship tracks on the global scale. This hasn't been done before using observations because ship tracks are very low, very small clouds that cover a tiny amount of Earth's surface area. However, they are common, as the paper points out, in several regions, notably off the coast of Africa and in the North Pacific. These are, somewhat coincidentally (but not really), the same regions where we think about extensive stratocumulus decks.
Schreier et al. use one year of satellite imagery, from the ENVISAT-AATSR, and go through a straight forward but intensive process of identifying ship tracks and then estimating their radiative forcing. The bottom line is that in some regions the radiative impact of ship tracks, lets call it the local radiative effect, can be a non-trivial -0.05 W/m2, but on the global scale the effect is miniscule at -0.4 to -0.6 mW/m2 (plus or minus 40%). Note that the global value is in milliWatts, so is 100 time smaller than the largest regional radiative effect (-0.05 W/m2 = -50 mW/m2). The negative sign arises because ship tracks are very low clouds that are very white (i.e., reflective), so when they appear they provide a more reflective surface for sunlight to bounce off, which to first order reduces the amount of energy in the climate system (because most of the reflected light goes back out to space) and cools the climate. This is familiar if you've been exposed to cloud "feedback" ideas, in which more low cloud cover increases the albedo of Earth and cools it. In fact, this is a terrific example of that effect, but we'll come to that shortly. It is also good to note that the radiative forcing associated with a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is about 4 W/m2, which is itself a small signal in the total radiative budget (with 1365 W/m2 of incoming sunlight at the top of the atmosphere, distributed over a day (divide by 4) and an albedo of about 0.3 you're talking in the neighborhood of a 225 W/m2 of sunlight being absorbed at the surface, and all of global warming comes down to 4W/m2 give or take!).
Okay so before I sign off, leaving you totally confused. I wanted to point out a couple of interesting things about ship tracks that aren't necessarily in the article. First of all, it is helpful to remember why ship tracks form. The ships are steaming ahead, burning fairly dirty fuel to get where they are going, and the exhaust goes right out into the atmosphere. This exhaust contains particulate matter as well as precursors for particles, so the ship is basically making a trail of particles behind it. These particles act as nucleation sites for water, forming small cloud droplets. Because the ships spew out so much stuff, there are enough nucleation sites available to grow lots of droplets and form these linear clouds. Why don't the clouds form anyway if there's that much water in the atmosphere already? Well, a couple of reasons. One is that the relative humidity isn't quite 100% in fair weather conditions, but even if it were, water doesn't like to condense unless there are surfaces (supplied by the particles). At a relative humidity of about 80%, there just aren't enough particles floating around the clean maritime boundary layer to let the water condense into clouds. The ships provide the extra nucleation sites necessary, and make it even easier by supplying the boundary layer with hygroscopic particles, meaning the particles effectively decrease the saturation specific humidity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygroscopic). That just means that the particles are very efficient at turning water vapor into liquid water. So a ship goes by, spews out water-loving particles, water condenses on those particles forming droplets, and a big collection of droplets is a cloud. Fine, what else?
So okay, the ships go by and make lines of clouds, but we now know (or strongly suspect) based on Schrier et al. that the global effect of these cloud is negligible and the local effect is also pretty small. Can we be done with it then? Not quite. These clouds are a great example of the Twomey effect, which is an old idea now and just says that by increasing the number of particles in the air, the size of cloud droplets gets smaller, and when clouds are made up of small droplets they are brighter (i.e., more reflective). Coakley et al. (1987) presented ship tracks as such an example, showing with satellite data that the reflectivity of ship tracks is higher than the surrounding low-level cloud cover. This is exactly what leads to the radiative forcing that has now been estimated by Schreier et al. The important thing to recognize here is that the Coakley et al. study is essentially a proof of concept, showing that pollution can impact atmospheric radiative transfer. They definitely did not say ships were impacting global climate.
There is a related effect, sometimes called the Albrecht effect, which takes into account the change in cloud fraction associated with changes in particles in the atmosphere. It is presented by Albrecht (1989), and is also a pretty simple idea. When extra particles are put into the atmospheric boundary layer, they form droplets and brighter clouds, as discussed above. Smaller droplets can also change the formation of raindrops, or more precisely in the case of shallow maritime clouds, drizzle drops. The change is to reduce the precipitation efficiency, which increases the liquid water in the cloud layer, and can lead to an increase in the fractional cloudiness. The important point here is that not only could increased particle concentration in the marine atmospheric boundary layer make brighter clouds, but could actually increase the overall cloudiness. This would amplify the effects discussed by Coakley et al. because there would now be a larger area covered by brighter clouds. The Albrecht study makes use of ship tracks only in the sense of the Coakley et al. study, and only suggests that changes in precipitation could account for the sustained difference in ship tracks from the stratiform cloud in which they are embedded. This is supported to some extent by aircraft observations.
And finally, since we're covering so many bases, there's another effect that should be mentioned. Pincus and Baker (1994) present a study that extends the Albrecht study in that it accounts for the change in the thickness of clouds in the presence of varying particle concentration. They use a model of a cloudy boundary layer and account for changes in absorption and precipitation with cloud thickness and droplet number, respectively. This effect is not quite as "obvious" as the other indirect effects, but the bottom line is that more droplets can make thicker clouds with a higher albedo, which is thus another facet of this negative feedback associated with changes in atmospheric aerosol (particles). They note, however, that you'd expect to see ship tracks extend higher than surrounding clouds, which at that time was not observed. I'm not sure where this effect really stands, but it is interesting to consider.
So these are the indirect effects of aerosol on climate. We came a long way in this post, from a recent study showing that the globally averaged radiative forcing due to ship tracks is small all the way through aerosol effects on cloud albedo, precipitation processes, and horizontal and vertical cloud distribution. Well done. There are a lot more details that could have been added, and tons more studies. These will be left for future posts, though. I've included some references below for those of you who want to follow up.
References
Schreier, Mathias; Mannstein, Hermann; Eyring, Veronika; Bovensmann, Heinrich
Global ship track distribution and radiative forcing from 1 year of AATSR data
Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 34, No. 17, L17814
10.1029/2007GL030664 (LINK)
JAMES A. COAKLEY JR., ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, and PHILIP A. DURKEE
Effect of Ship-Stack Effluents on Cloud Reflectivity
Science 28 August 1987: Vol. 237. no. 4818, pp. 1020 - 1022 DOI: 10.1126/science.237.4818.1020
BRUCE A. ALBRECHT
Aerosols, Cloud Microphysics, and Fractional Cloudiness
Science 15 September 1989: Vol. 245. no. 4923, pp. 1227 - 1230 DOI: 10.1126/science.245.4923.1227
ROBERT PINCUS & MARCIA B. BAKER
Effect of precipitation on the albedo susceptibility of clouds in the marine boundary layer
Nature 372, 250 - 252 (17 November 2002); doi:10.1038/372250a0
2007-09-11
The Arctic and its role in the climate change discourse
I spend most of my time thinking about clouds in the tropics and subtropics, but lately there's been a lot of mainstream coverage of the Arctic and how it relates to climate chage. I've posted about Arctic issues before, of course, but today I not only want to highlight a little of the coverage that I've noticed lately, but also warn you, gentle reader, that this is really just going to be one of myriad posts, articles, stories, and sundry coverage of the Arctic over the coming 2-3 years (and probably beyond). Why? Because of the "International Polar Year," which is a big enough deal to have its own domain: ipy.org. It is, as the name implies, an international effort to better understand the Earth system near the poles, from their web site:
Don't fool yourself either, this is not a group of environmental activists who are out trying prove something; this is a concentrated period of study of the Arctic and Antarctic by the people who do that work anyway. It should lead to some great collaborations and synthesis of datasets that haven't been able to be compared or incorporated in meaningful ways before.
So that is the future, what is going on now?
Well, just over the past few days I've read a few interesting tidbits about the Arctic, which people seem to enjoy discussing more than the Antarctic (but more on that later). One of the poster children for climate change awareness is the polar bear, which relies on big pieces of sea-ice floating around near other pieces of sea-ice. The bears hang out on the ice, get hungry, dive in after fish or seals, and come up onto more ice. Apparently they aren't so well adapted to feeding on land, plus there isn't as much food available on land for them. Anyway, a quick article from the BBC, which came to be via ClimateArk, reports on a study that suggests two-thirds (2/3) of the polar bear population will be gone by the middle of the century [LINK]. That's 30-50 years from now, if you're keeping score at home. Why are the bears going to disappear? Because the ice is going away. So what does that mean for a species that relies on ice rafts as hunting platforms? It means that the bears are going to starve and drown. That is a fact. There is already evidence that some populations of polar bears are losing weight, and it probably isn't in preparation for beach season (Regehr et al 2006, also Roberson 2005 (news), Obbard et al. 2006).
This leads directly into our topic number two: sea-ice. This is one of the reasons it's more interesting to talk about the Arctic than the Antarctic, actually. Think about the globe, and picture the poles; the south pole is covered by a landmass (Antarctica) which is actually pretty large, extending far from the pole before giving way to the Southern Ocean. The fact that it is land, combined with the fact that it is surrounded by a continuous ring of ocean, makes climate change near the pole more difficult to understand: the ice in the middle of Antarctica isn't melting. And the sea-ice is much more seasonal (for the most part, though don't forget the Larson B ice shelf!) than in the Arctic (we're painting with a broad brush here). The Arctic is just an ocean, really, which provides easy passage among North America, Europe, and Asia, you remember the Northwest Passage [news], except that it has historically been blocked up by sea-ice. Lately this isn't so true [news, Randy Boswell].
The opening of the Northwest Passage is due to summertime melting of sea-ice, as discussed in Randy Boswell's very nice piece above. There has always been a lot of seasonal sea-ice around the Arctic. During the winter there is little to no sunshine available to deliver energy to warm the surface or melt ice, so as temperatures drop, ice forms, and it stays there until summer when the sun comes out. So that happens every year, and is perfectly normal and expected. However, what has happened over the past few years is a tremendous summertime melting, and just about every year now we hear about how sea-ice extent and sea-ice area are reaching record lows. One of the problems with this is that there is a potential feedback, since the "permanent" sea-ice (that ice that does not melt during the summer) is being reduced each year, so during the winter the ice that grows is thin, leading to quick melting in the summer, which exposes more permanent sea-ice to warm water and sunshine, leading to more loss and a diminished base amount of ice going into the winter. This most recent report suggests that the speed of this cycle might have been underestimated, and now some experts (yes, they are experts in Arctic sea-ice) say that an ice-free Arctic (in the late summer) could exist by 2030 (Serreze et al 2007a,b), which is right around the corner. This bodes ill for the polar bears.
Finally on this subject, it is interesting to note the relationship between the absurd observed sea-ice melt in the last few years compared with our best comprehensive climate models (Serreze et al. 2007b, Overland & Wang 2007). Some of the current-generation models do sort of okay, while basically all of them show a strong trend in the Arctic, but none of the models accurately predict the magnitude of the observed trend. Let me reiterate that these models don't know anything about the observations; they are physical models of climate system forced by atmospheric composition (carbon dioxide) and sunshine, so this isn't a matter of poor data assimilation or statistical techniques or a poor model (in the sense of statistical modeling). This is a dramatic underestimation of the impact of climate change on a region of the world known to be prone to positive feedbacks. What this means is that our "uncertainty" about the future of climate change goes in both directions. Climate change deniers like to point out problems with the models that they think lead to unlikely warming, but here we have a beautiful example of the models underestimating what is actually happening. Perhaps the models are too conservative? Not really, I just wanted to be provocative for a moment. My interpretation is that we need to improve the physics in the models, and probably spend more effort in doing atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions much better than this round of climate models. That is a rant I'll save for later though, as this post is stretching the average blog reader's patience.
Some references:
Regehr, E.V., Amstrup, S.C., and Stirling, Ian, 2006, Polar bear population status in the southern Beaufort Sea: U.S.
Geological Survey Open-File Report 2006-1337, 20 p. [PDF]
Obbard, Martyn E., Marc R.L. Cattet, Tim Moody, Lyle R. Walton, Derek Potter, Jeremy Inglis, and Christopher Chenier, 2006, Temporal Trends in the Body Condition of
Southern Hudson Bay Polar Bears. Climate Change Research Information Note, Issue 3. Ministry of Natural Resources, Ontario, Canada, 8 p. [PDF, see also MNR SIT]
Serreze, M. C., M. M. Holland, and J. Stroeve. 2007. Perspectives on the Arctic's shrinking sea-ice cover. Science 315(5818): 1533-1536, doi:10.1126/science.1139426. [pdf]
Stroeve, J., M. M. Holland, W. Meier, T. Scambos, and M. Serreze. 2007. Arctic sea ice decline: Faster than forecast. Geophysical Research Letters 34, L09501, doi:10.1029/2007GL029703.
Overland, J. E., and M. Wang (2007), Future regional Arctic sea ice declines, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L17705, doi:10.1029/2007GL030808. [pdf]
IPY, organized through the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), is actually the fourth polar year, following those in 1882-3, 1932-3, and 1957-8. In order to have full and equal coverage of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, IPY 2007-8 covers two full annual cycles from March 2007 to March 2009 and will involve over 200 projects, with thousands of scientists from over 60 nations examining a wide range of physical, biological and social research topics. It is also an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate, follow, and get involved with, cutting edge science in real-time.
Don't fool yourself either, this is not a group of environmental activists who are out trying prove something; this is a concentrated period of study of the Arctic and Antarctic by the people who do that work anyway. It should lead to some great collaborations and synthesis of datasets that haven't been able to be compared or incorporated in meaningful ways before.
So that is the future, what is going on now?
Well, just over the past few days I've read a few interesting tidbits about the Arctic, which people seem to enjoy discussing more than the Antarctic (but more on that later). One of the poster children for climate change awareness is the polar bear, which relies on big pieces of sea-ice floating around near other pieces of sea-ice. The bears hang out on the ice, get hungry, dive in after fish or seals, and come up onto more ice. Apparently they aren't so well adapted to feeding on land, plus there isn't as much food available on land for them. Anyway, a quick article from the BBC, which came to be via ClimateArk, reports on a study that suggests two-thirds (2/3) of the polar bear population will be gone by the middle of the century [LINK]. That's 30-50 years from now, if you're keeping score at home. Why are the bears going to disappear? Because the ice is going away. So what does that mean for a species that relies on ice rafts as hunting platforms? It means that the bears are going to starve and drown. That is a fact. There is already evidence that some populations of polar bears are losing weight, and it probably isn't in preparation for beach season (Regehr et al 2006, also Roberson 2005 (news), Obbard et al. 2006).
This leads directly into our topic number two: sea-ice. This is one of the reasons it's more interesting to talk about the Arctic than the Antarctic, actually. Think about the globe, and picture the poles; the south pole is covered by a landmass (Antarctica) which is actually pretty large, extending far from the pole before giving way to the Southern Ocean. The fact that it is land, combined with the fact that it is surrounded by a continuous ring of ocean, makes climate change near the pole more difficult to understand: the ice in the middle of Antarctica isn't melting. And the sea-ice is much more seasonal (for the most part, though don't forget the Larson B ice shelf!) than in the Arctic (we're painting with a broad brush here). The Arctic is just an ocean, really, which provides easy passage among North America, Europe, and Asia, you remember the Northwest Passage [news], except that it has historically been blocked up by sea-ice. Lately this isn't so true [news, Randy Boswell].
The opening of the Northwest Passage is due to summertime melting of sea-ice, as discussed in Randy Boswell's very nice piece above. There has always been a lot of seasonal sea-ice around the Arctic. During the winter there is little to no sunshine available to deliver energy to warm the surface or melt ice, so as temperatures drop, ice forms, and it stays there until summer when the sun comes out. So that happens every year, and is perfectly normal and expected. However, what has happened over the past few years is a tremendous summertime melting, and just about every year now we hear about how sea-ice extent and sea-ice area are reaching record lows. One of the problems with this is that there is a potential feedback, since the "permanent" sea-ice (that ice that does not melt during the summer) is being reduced each year, so during the winter the ice that grows is thin, leading to quick melting in the summer, which exposes more permanent sea-ice to warm water and sunshine, leading to more loss and a diminished base amount of ice going into the winter. This most recent report suggests that the speed of this cycle might have been underestimated, and now some experts (yes, they are experts in Arctic sea-ice) say that an ice-free Arctic (in the late summer) could exist by 2030 (Serreze et al 2007a,b), which is right around the corner. This bodes ill for the polar bears.
Finally on this subject, it is interesting to note the relationship between the absurd observed sea-ice melt in the last few years compared with our best comprehensive climate models (Serreze et al. 2007b, Overland & Wang 2007). Some of the current-generation models do sort of okay, while basically all of them show a strong trend in the Arctic, but none of the models accurately predict the magnitude of the observed trend. Let me reiterate that these models don't know anything about the observations; they are physical models of climate system forced by atmospheric composition (carbon dioxide) and sunshine, so this isn't a matter of poor data assimilation or statistical techniques or a poor model (in the sense of statistical modeling). This is a dramatic underestimation of the impact of climate change on a region of the world known to be prone to positive feedbacks. What this means is that our "uncertainty" about the future of climate change goes in both directions. Climate change deniers like to point out problems with the models that they think lead to unlikely warming, but here we have a beautiful example of the models underestimating what is actually happening. Perhaps the models are too conservative? Not really, I just wanted to be provocative for a moment. My interpretation is that we need to improve the physics in the models, and probably spend more effort in doing atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions much better than this round of climate models. That is a rant I'll save for later though, as this post is stretching the average blog reader's patience.
Some references:
Regehr, E.V., Amstrup, S.C., and Stirling, Ian, 2006, Polar bear population status in the southern Beaufort Sea: U.S.
Geological Survey Open-File Report 2006-1337, 20 p. [PDF]
Obbard, Martyn E., Marc R.L. Cattet, Tim Moody, Lyle R. Walton, Derek Potter, Jeremy Inglis, and Christopher Chenier, 2006, Temporal Trends in the Body Condition of
Southern Hudson Bay Polar Bears. Climate Change Research Information Note, Issue 3. Ministry of Natural Resources, Ontario, Canada, 8 p. [PDF, see also MNR SIT]
Serreze, M. C., M. M. Holland, and J. Stroeve. 2007. Perspectives on the Arctic's shrinking sea-ice cover. Science 315(5818): 1533-1536, doi:10.1126/science.1139426. [pdf]
Stroeve, J., M. M. Holland, W. Meier, T. Scambos, and M. Serreze. 2007. Arctic sea ice decline: Faster than forecast. Geophysical Research Letters 34, L09501, doi:10.1029/2007GL029703.
Overland, J. E., and M. Wang (2007), Future regional Arctic sea ice declines, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L17705, doi:10.1029/2007GL030808. [pdf]
2007-09-04
hurricanes again
It has been far too long since my last post... the casual blogger's constant lament. In my own defense, a lot has happened in the past few months, not the least of which is that I finished my PhD program and moved to Fort Collins, Colorado as a postdoc. I am now affiliated with both UCLA and CSU via the CMMAP project. Of course, anything I say on this blog has nothing to do with those institutions, and could still be wrong even though I am now officially an "expert."
Now to what I was going to write....
After a rather slow start, the Atlantic hurricane season is really getting going now. Early this morning Hurricane Felix came ashore along the Mosquito Coast in central America as a powerful category 5 hurricane. This is the second category 5 storm to make landfall in the past 3 weeks (following Dean), and apparently is the first time two category 5 storms have made landfall in the same season. It is also worth noting that only about 31 category 5 storms have been recorded in the Atlantic since 1928. Of course, reliable observations were not available until the 1960s; there have been 18 category 5 storms since 1966. Eight of those have occured over the past five years [2003,2007]!
The big storms are not the only story though. There is a lot of tropical activity already, including three tropical storms (Barry, Chantal, and Erin) and numerous disturbances that haven't developed. There is currently an area off the Florida coast that is probably going to develop into a tropical storm over the next few days (although there is significant wind shear). There's also a region out in the central Atlantic that could still develop, basically following the same path as Dean and Felix. These all originate as "easterly waves" coming off the west coast of Africa, and it is starting to look like it's going to be a very active season; don't be surprised to see another category 5 by the end of the month. If that does happen, it will only be the second year with more than two category 5 storms in the Atlantic.
By the way, yes there are tropical cyclones in the Pacific too! Henriette is the third East Pacific hurricane of the year (Cosme, Flossie), and although it is only a category 1 right now (possibly 2 by landfall), it is bringing substantial rain to the west coast of Mexico. In the western Pacific there have already been 7 typhoons this season and 2 tropical storms.
Now to what I was going to write....
After a rather slow start, the Atlantic hurricane season is really getting going now. Early this morning Hurricane Felix came ashore along the Mosquito Coast in central America as a powerful category 5 hurricane. This is the second category 5 storm to make landfall in the past 3 weeks (following Dean), and apparently is the first time two category 5 storms have made landfall in the same season. It is also worth noting that only about 31 category 5 storms have been recorded in the Atlantic since 1928. Of course, reliable observations were not available until the 1960s; there have been 18 category 5 storms since 1966. Eight of those have occured over the past five years [2003,2007]!
The big storms are not the only story though. There is a lot of tropical activity already, including three tropical storms (Barry, Chantal, and Erin) and numerous disturbances that haven't developed. There is currently an area off the Florida coast that is probably going to develop into a tropical storm over the next few days (although there is significant wind shear). There's also a region out in the central Atlantic that could still develop, basically following the same path as Dean and Felix. These all originate as "easterly waves" coming off the west coast of Africa, and it is starting to look like it's going to be a very active season; don't be surprised to see another category 5 by the end of the month. If that does happen, it will only be the second year with more than two category 5 storms in the Atlantic.
By the way, yes there are tropical cyclones in the Pacific too! Henriette is the third East Pacific hurricane of the year (Cosme, Flossie), and although it is only a category 1 right now (possibly 2 by landfall), it is bringing substantial rain to the west coast of Mexico. In the western Pacific there have already been 7 typhoons this season and 2 tropical storms.
2007-04-30
ye olde iron fertilizing effect
So apparently people now think they can make money by throwing iron into the ocean... YES, throwing iron into the ocean.
Here's the, actually very good, story on NYTimes.com: [The Energy Challenge: Recruiting Plankton to Fight Global Warming]
The basic idea is that plankton reproduce like mad when the conditions are right, and in large swaths of the ocean the conditions are right. Except there isn't enough iron. So, when you dump some iron on those areas, plankton bloom, creating regions of increased biological activity. The upside to this, according to some, is that the plankton use carbon from the ocean to make their little calcium carbonate exoskeletons, which when the critters die, can sink to the bottom of the ocean. This means that carbon is removed from the atmosphere-ocean system... it is sequestered, like an OJ juror. So now at least two companies, so cleverly named Planktos and Climos, think they can get governments (or companies working under cap and trade systems) to pay them to go throw some iron into the ocean.
I do not reject this idea outright. There are clearly some good ideas here, but we have to be careful. Here are a couple of my primary concerns.
First, I'm worried that these plankton species will produce a lot of methane waste, possibly negating any decrease in atmospheric CO2 that they might be responsible for. There is similar concern with nitrous oxide, apparently.
Second, the amount of carbon actually deposited might be less than has been thought recently. This is actually in this week's Science [LINK].
Third, as these operations scale up, will they account for their own carbon emissions. Boats are notoriously bad for emissions, and there's going to have to be a lot of boating involved. Also, where is this iron coming from, and how much energy (i.e., carbon) is going into collecting and transporting it?
Finally, there are possible feedbacks that could negate any good this will do. Including the old DMS-cloud condensation nuclei, in which more biology produces more aerosol (in the form of dimethylsulfide, DMS) which acts as nucleation sites for cloud droplets, making more cloud. The effect could be to shade the surface, reduce SST, and thus reduce biological productivity, leaving a rusty sea surface instead of a nice, healthy green one. I don't know if this is feasible, but things like this always seem to come up.
Also consider the amount of carbon dioxide that needs to be removed from the atmosphere. I've just come from a talk that reminded me of this. Carbon dioxide, when frozen, has about the same density as water. That means that a ton of CO2 is about one cubic meter (size of a coffee table). You're now talking about removing billions of tons of carbon dioxide annually, which is an enormous mass, many cubic kilometers of frozen CO2. The ocean is a big place, but we've got to be careful about how and where such deposits are made, or they'd just be mixed back up to the atmosphere. There's just so many potential pitfalls that it is hard to imagine a successful implementation. But as I said at the beginning, I'm willing to keep an open mind on the subject, and would be happy to see a successful strategy.
Here's the, actually very good, story on NYTimes.com: [The Energy Challenge: Recruiting Plankton to Fight Global Warming]
The basic idea is that plankton reproduce like mad when the conditions are right, and in large swaths of the ocean the conditions are right. Except there isn't enough iron. So, when you dump some iron on those areas, plankton bloom, creating regions of increased biological activity. The upside to this, according to some, is that the plankton use carbon from the ocean to make their little calcium carbonate exoskeletons, which when the critters die, can sink to the bottom of the ocean. This means that carbon is removed from the atmosphere-ocean system... it is sequestered, like an OJ juror. So now at least two companies, so cleverly named Planktos and Climos, think they can get governments (or companies working under cap and trade systems) to pay them to go throw some iron into the ocean.
I do not reject this idea outright. There are clearly some good ideas here, but we have to be careful. Here are a couple of my primary concerns.
First, I'm worried that these plankton species will produce a lot of methane waste, possibly negating any decrease in atmospheric CO2 that they might be responsible for. There is similar concern with nitrous oxide, apparently.
Second, the amount of carbon actually deposited might be less than has been thought recently. This is actually in this week's Science [LINK].
Third, as these operations scale up, will they account for their own carbon emissions. Boats are notoriously bad for emissions, and there's going to have to be a lot of boating involved. Also, where is this iron coming from, and how much energy (i.e., carbon) is going into collecting and transporting it?
Finally, there are possible feedbacks that could negate any good this will do. Including the old DMS-cloud condensation nuclei, in which more biology produces more aerosol (in the form of dimethylsulfide, DMS) which acts as nucleation sites for cloud droplets, making more cloud. The effect could be to shade the surface, reduce SST, and thus reduce biological productivity, leaving a rusty sea surface instead of a nice, healthy green one. I don't know if this is feasible, but things like this always seem to come up.
Also consider the amount of carbon dioxide that needs to be removed from the atmosphere. I've just come from a talk that reminded me of this. Carbon dioxide, when frozen, has about the same density as water. That means that a ton of CO2 is about one cubic meter (size of a coffee table). You're now talking about removing billions of tons of carbon dioxide annually, which is an enormous mass, many cubic kilometers of frozen CO2. The ocean is a big place, but we've got to be careful about how and where such deposits are made, or they'd just be mixed back up to the atmosphere. There's just so many potential pitfalls that it is hard to imagine a successful implementation. But as I said at the beginning, I'm willing to keep an open mind on the subject, and would be happy to see a successful strategy.
2007-04-27
US Army getting into supercomputers
Here's a quick story that seems like it is important. I will refrain from any interpretation of speculation here.
Army funds supercomputing center [LINK]
Army funds supercomputing center [LINK]
2007-03-21
Ex-Bush Aide Challenged on Climate Reports - New York Times
For lack of time and energy to blog, please go read an update about our friend Phil Cooney:
Ex-Bush Aide Challenged on Climate Reports - New York Times
Ex-Bush Aide Challenged on Climate Reports - New York Times
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