starving walruses

The Inuit, the natives of high northern latitudes, have noticed climate change for years, and it is only getting worse [LINK]. A lot of popular press have mentioned that "experts" and/or "scientists" think the polar region will feel climate change first and worst. This seems to be an accurate statement, based on current understanding of global warming scenarios. The effect is usually described as polar amplification, conveniently described by a recent RealClimate.org column [LINK]. Most of the time people like to talk about the ice-albedo feedback to support polar amplification. That is basically the idea that the change in atmospheric composition leads to warmer surface conditions, which melts snow or sea-ice, which decreases the albedo (reflectance) and leads to more warming. This can be coupled with myriad other positive feedbacks to get a larger effect. There are also dynamic arguments that the circulation (polar vortices, e.g.) are changing in response to warming. Michael Winton (GFDL/NOAA) seems to think the models say the change in clouds and water vapor are at least as important as surface effects [PDF]. I like to think about it the other way around, that is, the atmosphere warms, but the tropics don't warm as much as they "should," which forces more energy to higher latitudes by various heat transports. The increase in poleward heat transport is manifest by larger outgoing longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere and higher temperatures to provide that radiation. I'll have to look more deeply into the literature to see if my view is at odds with the accepted ways of looking at polar amplification, but I think it should be pretty much the same. They describe the processes that result from increased poleward heat transport (like more precipitation at high latitudes leading to more melting of snow and ice, and definitely more eddy energy (storms) moving tropospheric moisture poleward from the tropics and subtropics).

SSRD supplied the first WaPo article linked above, and set me off on this tangential discussion of poleward heat transport... thanks SSRD.

Un-installing Norton anti-environment

Hee hee.... that's a good headline, IMHO.

Anyway, Gale Norton resigned, and I thought it should be publicized: [LINK]

One more week, ten fewer species

This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to do the Timothy Treadwell thing, i.e., escape into the wilderness and turn semi-feral. Of course, Treadwell was a narcissistic nutball; I just mean that human society has some issues, actually similar issues to Treadwell.... hmmm...

Anyway, today's link is to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a pro-environmental organization of actual scientists who issue opinions about policy-related environmental issues. I don't alway agree with them, especially over the use of nuclear energy, but today they are rallying scientists and other citizens to stand up for the Endangered Species Act: [LINK]. The House has already taken steps to undermine the ESA, so the Senate needs to be heavily lobbied on this matter before they doom hundreds of species in the name of the all-mighty dollar.

Peter Barrett discusses the insidious threat of GHG

Here's the link: [LINK]

more doom and gloom

Independent Online Edition > Jim Hansen spreads the word that the world will actually end in ice. Somebody inform Robert Frost*.

Someday the Sun Will Go Out and the World Will End (but Don't Tell Anyone) - New York Times

I even kept the headline from a NYTimes.com commentary by Dennis Overbye for today's post, I hope he doesn't mind [LINK]. The commentary is about important people being interested in science. The focus is on astronomy, which is Overbye's general beat. Yes, this is related to the NASA scandal, and yes, I seem to be a NYTimes.com sycophant more and more these days (don't worry, they'll drop the ball soon, and I'll be all over them like birdshot on a Texas lawyer), but I really do think this scandal has brought a lot of issues out into the open again. Of course, the most obvious issue is this administration's apparent neglect and even scorn for modern science, but there are other issues here, like the more general topic of what governmental organizations (e.g., NASA) are allowed to do independent of the very government that is funding them, and what the relationship should be between these kinds of organizations and the general public, for whom the organizations ultimately work.

Overbye brings up some important points about astronomers staying in the wings of the political stage while, for example, Kansas stopped teaching about the big bang in science classrooms. What? Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but we all know that Kansas has some serious troubles (see this BOOK and the Flying Spaghetti Monster). He touches on George Deutsch ordering NASA web sites to add "theory" after any mention of "big bang." Then he moves on to a less egregious offense at NASA: a sentence about observations of a white dwarf being similar to our sun's fate being removed from a new release.

The statement wasn't removed for being political or policy related, as it is common knowledge that our sun will die in about 5,000,000,000 years. Instead it was removed because it was too much "gloom and doom" to give the public. Never mind that it's true. Do governments, or scientists working for the government, need to sugar-coat findings for the public? What would this mean for avian flu stories? Is it inevitable that a pandemic will occur, and we're just being told about less gloomy scenarios? Is the public so spoiled, or so dumb, that we can no longer trust them to deal with hard realities?

Despite my innate cynicism, I don't think the American public has fallen that far yet. It is mysterious to me why the government and media seem to pander to the least curious, and intellectually laziest among us. A bad analogy: it's like keeping a population happy by slipping some sedatives into the water supply. I'll make it more extended: what happens when we find out the sedative is actually toxic? Maybe I took it too far. Well, that's what blogs are for.

Australia copies everything the USA does

Now the aussies are up to it. Well, at least there are some stories being spread about climate scientists (at CSIRO) being censored by the government. If I had to take a stance based on what I've read, it sounds like this case is less severe than the NASA scandal from a couple weeks ago, but serious in its own right. It sounds like the CSIRO scientists wanted to talk about climate mitigation, which could be interpretted as "policy." That is what the governments seem to think scientists should keep their noses out of. Of course, in a field like climate science, at least in the last few years and presumably for the next 10-50 years, the scientists are doing work that should directly influence policy. Further, the science has been coming down on the side of actively fighting climate change, and policies don't seem to be following. So what are climate scientistis to do? If the science has clear implications, yet the government is unwilling to take the science at face value and act, it seems important to take the science to the people, and let that populace drive policy.

Here's the links:

[LINK, smh.com.au]

[LINK, The Australian]

this story got much more play than I thought it would

Yet another WaPo article about Jim Hansen and censorship in climate science, [LINK]. That guy who had been making trouble at NASA, the 24-year-old nearly-graduated-from-college George Deutsch resigned last week, by the way. Although it was techically over lying on his resume, clearly he was forced out under the enormous pressure this issue with Hansen has put on NASA. An especially great quote from Deutsch is the linked article:

"'Anyone perceived to be a Republican, a Bush supporter or a Christian is singled out and labeled a threat to their views. I encourage anyone interested in this story to consider the other side, to consider Dr. Hansen' s true motivations and to consider the dangerous implications of only hearing out one side of the global warming debate,' Deutsch said."

Yes, consider it.

roundup time

I was considering writing a longer post than normal about how badly the current administration has treated science. It's a topic that keeps coming up, and now there are even books about the topic [e.g., The Republican War On Science]. I got as far as writing down some notes, which I may go back to in the future, but for now I think Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post has done a quick review [LINK]. Actually, only about the first half of the column, which is really more of a list of links, is specifically about science, and not all of that is about climate science, but there seems to be a strong case that GWB and his buddies don't value science when it doesn't help them out directly, and that prejudice is present in other areas, as important as national security, as well.

Another WaPo article, this one by Juliet Eilperin, discusses the possibility of a climate change "tipping point" [LINK]. It gets into the James Hansen/NASA story toward the end.

UW scientists subtract stratosphere, find global warming

There's a study in Nature about using microwave measurements of temperature in the atmosphere to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between temperature change at the surface and in the upper troposphere (about 11 km up). The problem is that everything we know about physics tells us that there should be commensurate warming, but the measurements haven't really born that out. According to this study, it is the cooling of the stratosphere (predicted in a global warming scenario and observed) that is contaminating the measurements. Some folks at UW made a statistical relationship, and then subtracted the upper level signature from the temperature, and lo and behold, global warming. [LINK] There are critics of the method, and that is good. But since there seems to be mounting evidence that observations really do show the kind of warming expected, we can give this study the slight advantage over skeptics. I expect we'll hear about similar studies doing slightly different things and getting basically the same results in the next year or two, which along with new observations will pretty much seal the deal.

maybe now we'll grow an exoskeleton

There's an interesting review in National Geographic by James Owen [LINK] about evidence that early human species probably evolved along with changing regional climate in Africa. The studies cited tie the evolutionary stages of humans to changes in rainfall and vegetation in the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. The idea seems pretty straightforward. As the climate dried out, tropical vegetation gave way to grasslands, making the ability to run an advantage in finding food and staying alive. Then a series of climate shifts made eastern Africa wetter and drier over a few millennia, which made early humans adapt several times. That favors bigger brains that can cope with a variety of climates, as well as a host of other physiological traits that may have helped early humans.

This kind of study shows some of the potential for very multidisciplinary studies among biology, geology, and atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and even including anthropology, etc. It warms my heart.

it's the climate, stupid

Tony Blair included a forward to a UK Met Office report on climate change [LINK]. It sounds like the report is the UK's own personal IPCC-style assessment, and it sounds like they aren't holding back, even invoking the holy of holies, the west Antarctic ice sheet. If that ice starts melting, which according to scenarios dreamed up by people like Jim Hansen could happen quickly once it starts, the southern ocean will be flooded with fresh water, heat uptake by the ocean would be shut down in a climatically important region, and sea-levels would immediately rise. It would be bad news.

The report is available: [LINK]

Lovelock has a new book

Thanks to Renee for pointing out Jame Lovelock's latest essay to promote his new book [LINK]. Apparently instead of angering the earth, only to be crushed as it rebels against it, humans have made earth sick enough that it might go into a coma. I'm not making this up, it is in the essay.

This will probably set the mark for the most extreme serious climate change scenarios for this decade, giving us a feel for what the upper limit is right now. Of course, if we don't seriously think about what is happening, this extreme scenario might actually come to pass. Maybe not in 100 years, but maybe 150 or 200 years.

THE REVENGE OF GAIA

( I can't wait for the movie. I hope it is better than The Day After Tomorrow.)

slick willy v. chilly willy?

Bill Clinton is talking about climate change; he says it is the world's biggest problem [LINK]. Clinton's VP, and former (only former?) presidential candidate, Al Gore has a supercharged powerpoint (or is it keynote?) presentation that has been turned into a movie, An Inconvenient Truth. It even premiered at Sundance, and is now looking for distribution:

• [LINK1]
  
• [LINK2]
  
• [official site]
  
• [production company]
  
• [I was there]
  

I got a little carried away with those links, but hey, I was practically part of the production!!

Washington watches climate scientists...

I know I'm not supposed to post a whole article, but I didn't think it would be right to just link to it. It is from NYTimes.com, and I think you should read it. It is freely available for two weeks on the NYTimes.com website, and then goes into the archives. Read the article, and don't tell anybody I put it up!!

January 29, 2006
Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."

He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It's about coordination."

Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.

"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."

Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore.

In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide.

He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.

But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.

In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."

He said he was particularly incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.

Dr. Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there had been no official "order or pressure to say shut Jim up." But Dr. Einaudi added, "That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied."

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet."

The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.

Mr. Acosta said the calls and meetings with Goddard press officers were not to introduce restrictions, but to review existing rules. He said Dr. Hansen had continued to speak frequently with the news media.

But Dr. Hansen and some of his colleagues said interviews were canceled as a result.

In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority.

But she added: "I'm a career civil servant and Jim Hansen is a scientist. That's not our job. That's not our mission. The inference was that Hansen was disloyal."

Normally, Ms. McCarthy would not be free to describe such conversations to the news media, but she agreed to an interview after Mr. Acosta, at NASA headquarters, told The Times that she would not face any retribution for doing so.

Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations, he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta.

Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: "Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don't have a dog in this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?"

Mr. Acosta said that for the moment he had no way of judging who was telling the truth. Several colleagues of both Ms. McCarthy and Dr. Hansen said Ms. McCarthy's statements were consistent with what she told them when the conversations occurred.

"He's not trying to create a war over this," said Larry D. Travis, an astronomer who is Dr. Hansen's deputy at Goddard, "but really feels very strongly that this is an obligation we have as federal scientists, to inform the public."

Dr. Travis said he walked into Ms. McCarthy's office in mid-December at the end of one of the calls from Mr. Deutsch demanding that Dr. Hansen be better controlled.

In an interview on Friday, Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's leading independent scientific body, praised Dr. Hansen's scientific contributions and said he had always seemed to describe his public statements clearly as his personal views.

"He really is one of the most productive and creative scientists in the world," Dr. Cicerone said. "I've heard Hansen speak many times and I've read many of his papers, starting in the late 70's. Every single time, in writing or when I've heard him speak, he's always clear that he's speaking for himself, not for NASA or the administration, whichever administration it's been."

The fight between Dr. Hansen and administration officials echoes other recent disputes. At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.

Where scientists' points of view on climate policy align with those of the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on extracurricular lectures or writing.

One example is Indur M. Goklany, assistant director of science and technology policy in the policy office of the Interior Department. For years, Dr. Goklany, an electrical engineer by training, has written in papers and books that it may be better not to force cuts in greenhouse gases because the added prosperity from unfettered economic activity would allow countries to exploit benefits of warming and adapt to problems.

In an e-mail exchange on Friday, Dr. Goklany said that in the Clinton administration he was shifted to nonclimate-related work, but added that he had never had to stop his outside writing, as long as he identified the views as his own.

"One reason why I still continue to do the extracurricular stuff," he wrote, "is because one doesn't have to get clearance for what I plan on saying or writing."

deSmogBlog | Clearing the air on climate change

I don't know if I've had a chance to direct you to desmogblog.com [LINK], but if not, you should take a look. It is maintained by Jim Hoggan, a Canadian lawyer, and the posts are mostly about the treatment of climate science in the media and in public relations. It has some really good stuff, and is often much more on top of news stories than I can be. From now on, you can also link to it directly from this blog's links menu on the right side of the page.

Let's raise gas prices

There's an old saying that if Americans used public transportation at the same rate as Europeans (roughly 10% of total daily travel needs) the US would reduce its need for imported oil by more than 40% (at the current level of domestic production). Okay, it isn't that old, it is what the American Public Transportation Association says [LINK]. Being interested in public transportation, they also monitor how many people use it, and apparently people use it more when gas prices are high:

"With high gas prices in the third quarter of 2005, national transit ridership grew by 3.3 % from the same period in 2004, according to a report released by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) today." [LINK]

And the increase is even more in big cities (even LA!).

So with higher gas prices people take public transportation more. That decreases teh number of cars on the road which makes driving more efficient for those who do it, but decreases the petroleum products use by Americans. That decreases our oil needs, and also decreases the CO2 emissions.

Raising gas prices, through an at-the-pump tax, would then decrease traffic, decrease dependence on foreign oil, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions. The money raised by the tax could be used for better public transportation, providing a positive feedback, since better transport will attract more riders, further reducing traffic, oil dependency, and ghg emissions. Why aren't we doing this?

need a larf? Check out APC.

Today I came across a link to the American Policy Center's statement on global warming [LINK]. Their statement is that there is no global warming, and the good scientists have proved it, and anybody who says different is part of a vast conspiracy to redistribute America's wealth to foreign powers. Yeah, because all of us on the left hate the USA. At first I was angry that such a statement, with such blantanly false assertions, could exist at all. After reading more, I decided that this statement was too funny to cause anger. In fact, I now see it as a classic work of satire. It is brilliant, on par with anything Swift could have written. I highly suggest reading it.

I haven't looked at them yet, but it looks like the APC article index is full of this kind of stuff. I think I have a new favorite site.

grumble grumble...

Another dataset seems doomed to never be today. NASA has cut the funding for the Deep Space Climage Observatory, a satellite that was to sit between Earth and the sun and observe the entire dayside of Earth [LINK; DOI: 10.1126/science.311.5757.26b]. As a bonus, the satellite could stare back at the sun to observe solar activity like flares and CMEs.

Oh well, at least we have an infinite supply of Iraqi oil. Damn.

A public service announcement... A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Just a snippet I saw in wired.com today. Pete Townshend is trying to get the word out that headphones can lead to permanent loss of hearing [LINK]. This has been a common warning to people listening to loud music for many years, but I'm guessing the current generation of teenagers and 20-somethings should take heed. Ear buds and headphones are pervasive these days, and based on the amount of your music that I can hear from across a crowded bus, the volume is turned way up. We should all think about turning it down, to save our ears and also decrease the general noise (as I've blogged about before [LINK]).