You too can calculate a linear trend, for just $1,800

I just saw the announcement that SPSS Inc. is releasing PASW Statistics 17 [LINK]. This is the new name for what used to be called SPSS Statistics, which was (as far as I know) ubiquitously known as SPSS. I'm not sure what prompted the name change, nor do I know what either SPSS or PASW stand for. SPSS Inc. has updated the interface, which now looks a lot like Matlab, except not as useful. Their promotional video really pushes the syntax highlighting and point and click to put in bookmarks/breakpoints or commands. These are features that other languages have had for many years. There are useful statistical features, like their nearest neighbor analysis tools, though it was hard to tell from the demo what the point of it is.

The price is $1,800. Yeah. This is an amazing price for software that is quite limited.

Especially when you compare it against the language R [news, official], which is free and more powerful, and still focuses on statistical analysis. The R language is based on an older language called S, and I think I remember learning that SPSS is also based on S. So these are two evolutionary lines from S, one free and open source and powerful and one very expensive, somewhat slick, and potentially powerful.

Both R and SPSS are limited to statistics (more or less). If you want to do something a little beyond statistical models or analysis, you'll still have to go to some other scripting language like Matlab, IDL, NCL, etc. And, in my opinion, if you have to know one of those anyway, there's really no reason to deal with R or SPSS, since all the same statistics can be calculated pretty easily in those more general languages. But, of course, there are large numbers of people who's work requires a bit of statistics but not much other computation, and I guess those are the people who use SPSS. So maybe there is a spectrum of users, some who use just SPSS, some who dabble in R, some who only use R, some who use R along with other software, and others who just use more general high-level languages. Still, at that price point, I can't believe anyone uses SPSS.

Munich Re -- the new sun god?

An exciting development in the development of large scale solar power is an upcoming meeting initiated by reinsurance company Munich Re [LINK]. The giant company is pulling interested parties together to, apparently seriously, discuss possibilities of building a series of large solar thermal plants in northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula and transmitting the power via high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) cables.

This isn't a new idea, but the fact that such a gigantic company is getting serious about it is a positive direction. It's an expensive proposition, especially because of the HVDC cables, which would run all the way to Europe (at least). But if these companies can actually put up some capital and show that the system works, then I'm sure the idea would spread and governments in North America and Asia would get involved. (Is it all too late? Maybe, but let's try to be a little optimistic today.)

(Okay, the normal spelling of the Egyptian sun god is Ra, but Re is an acceptable alternate spelling [LINK].)

Are we all going to burn?

Well, if the USA Senate has anything to say about it, we'll all sit and burn coal until we choke on the carbon dioxide floating in the atmosphere. Today the Senate "mothballed" the Waxman-Markey legislation until September [LINK]. Why? Because so-called moderate democrats in the Senate want to make themselves look important. To who? I have no clue, but they claim to be sticking up for farmers and electricity consumers. This is bunk.

This politicization of global climate change is threatening, now more than ever, to doom our entire society to multiple generations of increasing temperature, more extreme weather events, and dramatic alterations to the pattern of rainfall. Not just in far away places, but in regions all across the United States. I'm not just being alarmist here, there is published evidence of the effects already being measurable along with strong evidence that the longer we continue to burn fossil fuels at the present rate, the more irreparable damage is done to the climate system. Examples of recent reports you can take a look at include the new Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, Ecological Impacts of Climate Change (2009), Global Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events: Understanding the Contributions to Infectious Disease Emergence: Workshop Summary (2008), and the IPCC synthesis report. I'm happy to provide individual studies that support the findings of these reports as well, but they are generally easily found in the report bibliographies.

Do you know a scientist? If so, you're a rare bird!

Just a quick article coming from the Christian Science Monitor by Peter N. Spotts. He reports on a recent study by the AAAS and the Pew Research Center. Apparently, not many people know a scientist, which probably says a lot about our social skills. Even so, my reading of the article suggests that the general public mostly respects scientists and their work. However, the average Joe also seems to overestimate what science can do, and simultaneously rejects or denies or misunderstands what is already done.

What's the solution? Is it more scientist bloggers? No, probably not. How can we get the average American to better cope with scientific results and make decisions that are founded on fact? Well, I don't think it's the scientists who can do that. Scientists need to better engage the public, but that can really only get so far. The American public needs to take science education more seriously.... it's not all just reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic any more, I think we need to add biology, chemistry, and physics to the basics, even if they don't "start" with the letter R.

Get ready for some Senate committee action!

There are going to be some hearings starting tomorrow that should give a taste for where the Senate is going to take the Waxman-Markey legislation [LINK].

Waxman-Markey, or some derivative thereof

The NYTimes has an article about the wheeling and dealing going on to get the Waxman-Markey climate/energy legislation through the House [LINK]. It sounds so dirty and counterproductive, but I guess that is how things work in Congress, and without substantial changes to the system, it is the way it has to be. In the end, the Senate is likely to pass the bill, and Obama will sign it into law, and then the USA will finally enter the 21st Century on energy/climate legislation. The questions will remain though: Is it enough? Will it be regulated strongly enough? Do the new rules constrain more powerful action in the future? I don't know the answers to these questions, but with the atmosphere holding 386+ ppm of CO2 [LINK], something has to be done now, so I have to at least support the spirit of the bill. With the recent Copenhagen Synthesis Report urging action, the USA needs to position itself as a leader (if a tardy one) in the mitigation of climate change.

No, there is not a lake on Mars

While I was traveling around over the past couple weeks, I heard some snippets about a lake being found on Mars. I only just now have had the chance to track down the story [example], which perhaps is now old news. Here's the scoop: a team at University of Colorado, Boulder published a study with some details of a large lake on Mars that dried up about 300 million years ago. The surprising part is that this is much later than lakes are expected to occur on Mars. It's a terrific find, and appears to be a good target for looking for fossilized life.

The news reports appear to have been very, very skewed and misleading. Including the picture that I'll try to put here (might die if the link goes bad). It's of a partly filled lake in a Martian-like setting. Even on Discovery.com this was presented without explanation (unless you actually click on the image and read the caption). It's not cool.

Alternative medicine is a crock

I just read this rather poor article on CNN [link] covering "alternative" or "complementary" medicine dosed out by clinics just south of the border. The coverage of the topic is rather uneven, perhaps in an attempt to appear balanced. Essentially, it gives the sense that lots of people are seeking out these complementary treatments even though there is no science to back them up, but leaves the reader with the message that, well, maybe they do work.. at least a little. This is a dangerous view. All the treatments they discuss are in addition to conventional treatment. That is to say, when the supplementary treatment "works," it is in the presence of clinically proven treatment. Note that these clinics don't replace traditional treatment because otherwise their complementary treatment would be ineffective. They are placebo. They make people feel like they are doing something, but in reality, these clinics are bilking people of money, and potentially putting them at great harm by undercutting the actual treatments or displacing real doctors from the treatment of the patient's condition. For every "success" story these alternative medicines tout, just imagine the thousands of people who have died or suffered in the hope that a more "natural" method is better than a scientifically proven treatment. I shudder to think of the number of people who have suffered needlessly, and died for no reason other than an ignorance of science and a blind faith for something that is easy.

Global warming swindle, a link

I am traveling and working to much to keep up with my "regular" posting schedule, but I should be back to normal in another week or so. For now, maybe you should watch another of the great climate denier crock of the week videos that has just been posted:

CoolIris

Holy moly... http://www.cooliris.com

Having just installed this "simple browser plugin" a mere 10 minutes ago, I am wholeheartedly endorsing it and pleading with you to go and install it.

http://www.cooliris.com

I can't even try to describe it, except to say that it is paradigm changing for me.

EPA says carbon emissions to rise (is that a surprise?)

Last week the EPA issued a report that, according the news accounts, says carbon emissions will rise in the next 20 years by about 40%. Here's a link to a very poorly written article: LINK.

So, just thinking out loud here, but the current rise in CO2 concentration is around 2ppm/year (confirmation). If that were constant, then 20 years would be an increase of 40 ppm, taking us to around 420ppm CO2.

Just eye-balling the emissions to concentration curves (curves) suggests a linear fit of about 10ppm increase for every 1Gt increase in emissions. That news article says

As a result, the analysis predicted a steady increase in emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that scientists say threatens a serious warming of the Earth later this century. Between now and 2030, Wednesday's report said, global carbon dioxide pollution is expected to increase by 39%. That translates to 33 billion metric tons in 2015 and 40 billion metric tons by 2030, compared to 29 billion metric tons in 2006, the report said.

So a 40% increase according to that news article is going from 29 to 40, that's 40 divided by 29 (= 1.38, so about 38% increase). The emissions increase by just 11 Gt/year. Using our poor estimate of 10ppm/1Gt, that means 10*11= 110ppm!!

UPDATE: This is mistaken. After consultation with somebody who knows about carbon, I think the way I should have done that is to say that there's a 10ppm increase for a 1Gt/year increase in emission rate. The change from 29 to 40 Gt appears to be the cumulative emissions. This, however, suggests a much lower increase in atmospheric CO2. It isn't totally clear how to make the estimate without making a budget for carbon. I'll try to make that estimate and re-update later.

ClimateWizard.org: A web resource?

Having just ready this brief article [LINK] about a new web site called ClimateWizard.org, I was skeptical of its usefulness. Essentially, this is a web application that just makes reasonably nice map representations of some climate model runs (from the last IPCC report) guided by user input. The input is limited to what geographic region to map, which admittedly is the only way most people think to look at these kinds of simulations. The user can choose the USA and zoom in on specific states, or can choose "global" and choose individual countries and territories. Not everything seems to work (e.g., Guam doesn't show any data), but most of the buttons I clicked generated maps. The user also gets to choose a specific month, or annual average, and can plot the average or change in surface temperature or precipitation either for the past 50 years, the projections at 2050, or (for the USA) projections for 2100. As of writing this, the choices also including picking one of three models or the model average. It is unclear what exactly is being plotted for the past 50 years, the documentation indicates it is a combined observational data set, but there are two curves in a small timeseries plot that are not obviously explained(figure). All in all, it is a fun little application, though not the grandiose life-altering tool that the news article seems to suggest.

Now, a little criticism to go along with the overview. There are definitely really good things about this application, including using Google Maps as the underlying mapping framework. This is nice because it works well, looks good, and people know how to deal with it. That is a definite win. There are some limited download options, too, which is good so that people (especially students??) can just grab the image and put it into a document. They can also get the data in GIS format, which is good for some small set of people who know what to do with that. It would be nice to expand that to include some other common data formats, like HDF or netCDF. Of course, that would be mostly helpful to more experienced users, which gets to another point. This application, as a framework for quickly looking at data and downloading a small subset of it, seems like it could be really useful for all kinds of people, from policy makers to serious scientists, and back to students (and grad students) and teachers (and college profs). In its current state, it's a toy though. The limitation to these three models is curious, since the data from 20+ models should be readily available, and the limitation to surface temperature and precipitation are arbitrary. Yes, that is what most people will be interested in, but having an advanced tab and then having a lot more variables would be great. For example, maybe a high school or college student is doing a report on climate feedbacks, and wants to see how cloud fraction changes in the models. It's a trivial thing to add to this app, but its absence means the student will have to rely on secondhand information or be much more industrious. My other criticism is that the color choices for the contour maps are not that good. It's the standard blue-to-green-to-yellow-to-red rainbow. It works reasonably well for surface temperature and less well for precipitation. The real problem is that they apply it to the changes, which for most places are small making them light yellow or greenish. It's especially apparent in the precipitation, where it is often difficult to even discern the sign of the change.

Okay, one more important criticism. These global models do a poor job in representing regional climate, and there is little evidence that they accurately predict changes in regional climate to the level that this application implies. You can, for example, zoom in on Haiti and see that the model average temperature change at 2050 is about 1C (except for some whitish points that don't make sense on the color scale). But these are about 15 grid points, which are not the native grid points from the model, which have fraction amounts of land and almost no representation of the topography of Haiti. What I'm saying is that you can't trust a few points from one (or three) models to give an accurate portrayal of climate change unless you can verify the fidelity of the models at those points using observations and have an understanding of the limitations of the modeling framework. Looking at the past 50 years is helpful to ascertain some sense of the models' ability in the region, but as mentioned above, it isn't even clear what is being plotted for that in the application. If the blue line is the models and the black line is the observations, then the correlation is generally pretty poor for Haiti, right, but the trend is pretty decent, it's just that the average of the models doesn't have much variability (unless it is the other way around, or if the blue line is one of the models instead of the ensemble... but these are not explained).

So, overall, I like ClimateWizard.org, but I think there is a lot of room for improvement, both for the present purposes and for future expansions to more serious data exploration.

More coverage of the Carteret Islands

In the NYTimes.com today (slash yesterday) there's a story about the disappearing Carteret Islands by NEIL MacFARQUHAR. Again the article paints the sea-level rise in the Carteret Islands as a product of global warming, but I remain very skeptical of the assessment. I still haven't seen a reasonable attribution study about these islands, and the rate of sea-level rise there seems at odds with the small global trend.

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.