"You are a creature of the sun"

Kim Stanley Robinson in 2312:

"Most of the sunwalkers [on Mercury] over time try all the various viewing filters, and then make choices to suit themselves. Particular filters or sequences of filters become forms of worship, rituals either personal or shared. It’s very easy to get lost in these rituals; as the sunwalkers stand on their points and watch, it’s not uncommon for devotees to become entranced by something in the sight, some pattern never seen before, something in the pulse and flow that snags the mind; suddenly the sizzle of the fiery cilia becomes audible, a turbulent roaring--that’s your own blood, rushing through your ears, but in those moments it sounds just like the sun burning. And so people stay too long. Some have their retinas burned; some are blinded; others are killed outright, betrayed by an overwhelmed spacesuit. Some are cooked in groups of a dozen or more.

"Do you imagine they must have been fools? Do you think you would never make such a mistake? Don’t you be so sure. Really you have no idea. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. You may think you are inured, that nothing outside the mind can really interest you anymore, as sophisticated and knowledgeable as you are. But you would be wrong. You are a creature of the sun. The beauty and terror of it seen from so close can empty any mind, thrust anyone into a trance. It’s like seeing the face of God, some people say, and it is true that the sun powers all living creatures in the solar system, and in that sense is our god. The sight of it can strike thought clean out of your head. People seek it out precisely for that."

Asian Pollution Causing Computer Failures

Here's how bad the air pollution is in some Chinese and Indian cities: it can occasionally corrode computer circuitry, causing them to fail:

Intel engineers in Oregon are now discovering that rotten air is also taking a toll on electronics in China and India, with sulfur corroding the copper circuitry that provides neural networks for PCs and servers and wrecking the motherboards that run whole systems.

“We got the board and it was pretty obvious. You open the chassis up and you see blackish material on every type of surface,” said Anil Kurella, the Hillsboro material scientist who’s leading Intel’s research effort.

Intel has been looking at the problem for a year, and investigating using some material other than copper for circuitry, but hasn't found an affordable solution yet.

I suppose the problem is self-limiting: at some pollution level no computer can operate, at which point the large power plants that require them can no longer exist, solving the problem by way by self-strangulation. Which sounds like a John Brunner novel.

Heavy smog in China

Incredible pictures of heavy smog in China:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/china-smog-photos-pollution_n_4137675.html

U.S. 2012 CO2 Emissions Down 4% (But Never Enough)

The U.S. Energy Information Agency released its number for last year's energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide from the consumption of fossil fuels: 5.29 gigatons, down 3.8% from 2011.

That's an absolute decrease of 209 megatonnes CO2, from 2011 to 2012.

Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions have declined in five of the last seven years and are the lowest they have been since 1994.

GDP was up 2.8% last year, and energy intensity -- energy use per unit of GDP -- dropped 5.1% in a single year.

The carbon intensity of the US is now 0.34 tonnes CO2 per 2009-dollar, down from 0.88 t CO2/$₂₀₀₉ in 1973, the earliest year I have statistics for.

The EIA writes,

With population growth of about 0.7 percent, per capita output rose by about 2 percent in 2012. The emissions decline was the largest in a year with positive growth in per capita output and the only year to show a decline where per capita output increased 2 percent or more. However, emissions would have increased by about 143 MMTCO2 if the energy and carbon intensities had not decreased at the rates they did.

and gives this chart for 2012:

Unfortunately, no matter what the annual decline, it never seems enough (because it isn't).

Numbers on China's Urbanization

From a letter to the editor titled "China's rapid urbanization" in last week's issue (sub required) of Science:

"Between 1980 and 2012, China's urbanization increased from 19.4 to 52.6%.

"By 2012, 262 million people had migrated to urban areas.

"The number of rural children left behind [by men migrating to cities to look for work] increased from 22 million in 2004 to 58 million in  2010, and the women and aging parents left behind have reached more than 47 million and 40 million, respectively.

"These three groups now account for more than 22% of China’s total rural population

"Of the 16,928 species that are threatened with extinction worldwide, almost 800 are in China; 25% of China’s species are endangered, and 233 vertebrate animal species are facing extinction."

Pitiless in Pink

How cool is this: yesterday the University of Oregon's football game wore pink helmets, socks and cleats in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month.

U of O 62, Washington State 38.

The Ducks are 7 and 0, and are still ranked #2 in the nation. The lowest number of points they scored in a game this year is 45.

Deniers Dropped from Merchant Networks

August: Credit card companies have decided they will no longer process payments from eight Holocause-denial organizations that were in their merchant networks.

October: The Los Angeles Times has decided it will no longer publish letters from climate change deniers.

So I wonder how this is going to evolve....

Joe Bastardi, a Bad Penny

Like a bad penny, Joe Bastardi keeps turning up, begging for attention.

This time it's on Judith Curry's blog, where Bastardi is reduced to ridiculing others because they aren't...wait for it...weather forecasters!

(He also comes across as rather intimidated by PhDs, by, of course, claiming he's not intimidated by PhDs.)

Bastardi runs around on Twitter nipping at the heels of (especially) Michael Mann, complaning others won't debate him. With elementary mistakes like this, and failed predictions like these, can you really blame them for not wanting to waste their time?

If Bastardi wants to be begin to be taken seriously, perhaps he should first focus on being published somewhere other than on Fox News (whose reputation just took another brutal body blow this past week). Or at least getting over his utterly wrong notion that, because CO2 is a "trace gas" -- which he repeats on Curry's blog -- it can't do much of anything to the climate. That doesn't even rise to the level of "amateurish."

Seriously though, how dispiriting is it that someone like this is taken seriously by our media -- any media?
 

Added: Here is some of Joe's work:


With more patience than I can muster, Skeptical Science dissects Joe's bad physics here.

Mark Steyn: Wrong on the Science, If Not More

Mark Steyn, who seems rather perturbed at having to defend his own slurs in court, still seems to be ignorant of the science he writes about.

If you're going to insult a climate scientist, wouldn't you at least try to get a bead on their work??

Steyn doesn't. He writes:

...I’m currently being sued in the District of Columbia by Dr. Michael Mann, the eminent global warm-monger, for mocking (in America’s National Review) his increasingly discredited climate-change “hockey stick.”

What planet does Steyn live on? What journals does he read? The hockey stick isn't discredited, at all -- and certainly not "increasingly" so. It seems to me that the Mann et al work has never been more confirmed, what with several confirmations over the years, including the independent mathematics of Tingley and Huybers, the Holocene-wide study of Marcott et al, and the vast PAGES 2k Consortium study in Nature Geosciences, which consisted of over 70 scientists.

I think Steyn's comparison of Mann to Jerry Sandusky was low, hardly accurate, and scurrilous. And most probably defamatory. (Steyn's claim that Mann and Sandusky were "colleagues" because they were employed by the same university isn't worthy of the intellectualism Steyn pretends to represent.)

But if Steyn wants to defend his right to free expression -- a right most of us also value, within its limits -- then he should stand forthright for that value, without repeating obviously false information about Mann's scientific work.

Simply put, it detracts from Steyn's case -- if he can't understand the work for what it is, and place it in its proper context, how can he possibly put his evaluation of Mann in a proper (and truthful) context?

He can't.

And no pretending, no false bravado, is going to change that. All of the abuse heaped on Michael Mann is only because too many people found his result inconvenient, and, having no legitimate scientific comeback, choose to demonize him instead.

It had been done before (Ben Santer), and it will be done again. (Indeed, Marc Morano has made an industry of it.)

But if Steyn thinks his right to insult Mann was proper and legal, then he should defend his right on its own terms and principles. Pretending Mann's science is bad detracts from Steyn's case -- and, I suspect, not only for those who do understand the science.

When Elephants Fight....

Current headline on the Huffington Post

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."

-- African proverb

New Steven Weinberg Essay

Steven Weinberg, whose essays in the New York Review of Books are always excellent, has another one, in the current issue: "Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know."

(Because there's more to life than climate change, you know.)

EPA Sued to Stop PacNW Ocean Acidification

The Center for Biological Diversity is suing the EPA -- again -- for failing to halt ocean acidification in the Pacific Northwest.

CBD is a private, membership environmental organization (625,000 members) based in Tucson. They sued the EPA for the same thing back in 2009, and the EPA agreed with them and said it could address ocean acidification under the Clean Water Act.

But the EPA hasn't done much since, so CBD is going in again.

Why the Pacific Northwest? The CBD writes:

Since about 2005, shellfish hatcheries in Washington and Oregon have experienced massive die-offs of oyster larvae with losses of up to 80 percent of production. Oysters are failing to reproduce in Willapa Bay, Wash., and, elsewhere, corals are growing more sluggishly, while some plankton have thin, weak shells.

But why is this problem particularly bad off the coast of the Pacific Northwest? Mostly because of upwelling deeper water, as surface water gets pushed from shore. Chemical and Engineering News wrote recently:

In the Pacific Northwest, the problem of ocean acidification is especially bad for several reasons. One reason is that prevailing winds push surface waters away from the coast, causing a local upwelling of carbon-rich water from the deeper ocean to the surface. This upwelled water is naturally rich in nutrients, is high in CO2, and has low pH. But now, the upwelled waters are also carrying an ever-growing load of human-generated CO2 picked up from the atmosphere 30 to 50 years ago when the water was last in contact with the atmosphere. As a result, deep water today is more corrosive than ever to shell-building organisms such as oysters, clams, scallops, mussels, crabs, abalone, and pteropods (small sea snails eaten by fish and other marine life).

A separate acidification process is under way in the vast expanse of Puget Sound, just as in other estuaries along the world’s coastlines. Runoff from farms, storm sewers, and urban pollution flushes organic carbon and other nutrients into estuaries that are nurseries to growing shellfish. These nutrients fuel blooms of marine algae, which then die, fall to the bottom, and during decomposition result in more CO2 being released to the water. In the air, emissions of nitrogen and sulfur oxides from factories, cars, and power plants are yet another source of nutrients that cause blooms that lead to more acidic waters.

The chemical soup resulting from all of these acidification processes has made both Puget Sound and the Washington coastal area among the most acidic water­ways on the planet, according to Jan Newton, senior principal oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

The Seattle Times had a nice multimedia presentation on OA last month, that looks at the whole food chain in the ocean.

Of course, there's only so much the EPA can do to curtail ocean acidification, since it can only regulate US emissions (which, let's face it, aren't going to zero anytime soon). So the CBD's lawsuit seems more to bring attention to the problem than anything else.

A press release sent out yesterday by Oregon State University was pretty blunt about it all: Study concludes climate change will wreak havoc on oceans by 2100

A new study looking at the impacts of climate change on the world’s ocean systems concludes that by the year 2100, about 98 percent of the oceans will be affected by acidification, warming temperatures, low oxygen, or lack of biological productivity – and most areas will be stricken by a multitude of these stressors.

Humans can -- will -- adapt to climate change, one way or the other, for better or worse. But how is the ocean and its creatures supposed to adapt to acidification?

Arctic Ice Refreeze Much Lower Than Last Year

33 days after their respective minima, the gain in Arctic sea ice is a full 20% behind last year's increase.

Is this the start of a new, rapid melting phase??

Hat tip: Hotwhopper, and watts-his-name?

The Supercollider That Never Was

I have an article up at Scientific American: "The Supercollider That Never Was," about problems that led to the demise of the Superconducting Supercollider project on the 20th anniversary of its cancellation.

The Debate is Not About Scientific Facts

Sean Carroll has a post about what a recent study shows is driving the Republican extremists -- mostly, they're afraid of change. especially when it involves minorities (who are, of course, starting to become the new majority).

Basically, they resent that this no longer the 1950s.

He writes, about the major points of the study:

The scariest part of the report is that last bullet point, that “climate is next.” The Republican civil war is already bringing the US to the brink of financial disaster. It could end up causing the entire planet immeasurable harm. Scientists need to realize that the climate change debate, like the creationism-in-schools debate from a while a back, is actually not about scientific facts. It’s about culture, and that’s a much more difficult problem to address.

So what then are those concerned about climate change supposed to do, if facts have little effect and more of them will have less?

Various Interesting Things

Various things:

• Sometimes they make it so easy. Joe the Plumber:

  "Wanting a white Republican president doesn’t make you racist, it just makes you American," Wurzelbacher wrote on his website Oct. 10. (Link)

• This is insane, and should be considered criminal: Global wealth inequality: top 1% own 41%; top 10% own 86%; bottom half own just 1%. Someday it will be. 
• The coastal exodus begins (as it should):

  Sharp increases in federal flood insurance rates are distressing coastal homeowners from Hawaii to New England and are starting to hurt property values and housing sales in areas just beginning to recover from the recession, according to residents and legislators.

  Oh sure, the affluent love their government subsidies (read the whole article).... Look, this will be going on for the next thousand years or so. You can't fight physics, and you can't tell it where to put its coastlines.... There is not going to be a trustworthy coastline for the next several centuries. Just imagine how society's psychology is going to be affected for the next N-hundred years as the seas keep rising and inundating coastal cities across the planet. You think Venice has troubles? You ain't seen a thing yet.... There will, in the not so far future, be drowned cities everywhere, half-submerged, sad pathetic places ruined by ignorance and greed, and trying to figure out what to do -- import gondolas, or move to the mountains?

"Clean tech came too late to save Earth"

Kim Stanley Robinson's book 2312 has humans (and all their advanced variations) zipping around the solar system, living nearly everywhere. But they have an expression: "All trouble comes from Earth."

Towards the middle of the book he has this transition:

 But clean tech came too late to save Earth from the catastrophes of the early Anthropocene. It was one of the ironies of their time that they could radically change the surfaces of the other planets, but not Earth. The methods they employed in space were almost too crude and violent. Only with the utmost caution could they tinker with anything on Earth, because everything there was so tightly balanced and interwoven. Anything done for good somewhere usually caused ill somewhere else.

This caution about terraforming Earth expressed itself in clots and gouts of sometimes military bickering. Political crosschop led to legal gridlock. Big geoengineering projects were all assumed to contain within them an accident like the Little Ice Age of the 2140’s, which was generally said to have caused the death of a billion people. Nothing now could overcome that fear.

Also, for many of Earth’s problems, there was simply nothing to be done. The heating and subsequent expansion of the ocean’s water – also its acidification – nothing could be done about these. There was no terraforming technique that would help. Some water had been pumped onto the dry basins of North Africa and central Asia, but the capacity was not there to hold very much of the ocean’s excess volume. Maintaining the one healthy ice cap remaining to them, high on East Antarctica, was a priority that meant no one was comfortable pumping salt water up there to freeze, as had sometimes been proposed, because if something went wrong and they lost the whole ice cap, it would raise sea level another fifty meters and deal humanity something very like a death blow. So caution was in order, and ultimately it had to be admitted, the new sea level could not be substantially altered. And it was much the same with many of their other problems. The many delicate physical, biological, and legal situations were so tightly knitted together that none of the cosmic engineering they were doing elsewhere in the solar system could be fitted to the needs of the place.

Despite this people tried things. So much more power than ever before was at their command that some felt they could at last begin to overturn Jevons Paradox, which states that the better human technology gets, the more harm we do with it. That painful paradox has never yet failed to manifest itself in human history, but perhaps now was the tipping point – Archimedes’ lever brought to bear at last – the moment when they could get something out of their growing powers besides redoubled destruction.

But no one could be sure. They still hung suspended between catastrophe and paradise, spinning bluely in space like some terrible telenovela. Scheherazade was Earth’s muse, it seemed; it was just one damn thing after another, always one more cliffhanger, clinging to life and sanity by the skin of one’s teeth; and so the spacers kept on coming home, home to home’s nightmares, with the Gordian knot tied in their guts.

Via The Brissioni Blog

Wanted: Climate-change Denier with a Lot of Money

From National Geographic's article "Rising Seas":

In a state exposed to hurricanes as well as rising seas, people like John Van Leer, an oceanographer at the University of Miami, worry that one day they will no longer be able to insure—or sell—their houses. “If buyers can’t insure it, they can’t get a mortgage on it. And if they can’t get a mortgage, you can only sell to cash buyers,” Van Leer says. “What I’m looking for is a climate-change denier with a lot of money.”

There should be opportunities for climate scoffers to clean up on cheap real estate, if they have the courage of their convictions.

From the Department of God-Can-Be-a-Mean-Bastard:

An Oregon father, who was walking across the country to tell others about his bullied, gay son who committed suicide, was himself struck and killed by a long-distance truck driver in Colorado who fell asleep.

Earlier this year a man who was dribbling a soccer ball to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup, to promote a charity that donates durable blue soccer balls to people in developing countries, was also struck and killed by a car near the Oregon coast. (No, he wasn't dribbling a soccer ball at the time.)

Their hearts were definitely in the right place, but man, walking long-distance along a big highway is just too risky. There's got to be a better way to draw attention to a cause.

UAH Data Has Killed the Pause

Some "Pause" -- UAH's record of the average temperture of the lower troposphere now shows 0.21°C (0.37°F) of warming over the last 15 years (=slope*interval).

Except it's not quite statistically significant. The SkS trend calculator gives a 15-year trend of 0.135 ± 0.217°C/decade (2σ), which is a statistical signfiicance of 79%, less than the canonical (and arbitrary) standard of 95%. The large uncertainty just shows that 15 years is too small of an interval to make statistically meaningful conclusions about trends. If the 15-yr trend uncertainty is 0.217°C/decade (2σ), the trend would need to be 0.213°C/decade for a statistical significance of 95% -- and the UAH record has had a 15-year trend of 0.213°C/decade or greater only 32% of the time. (Yes, I know that the uncertainty varies somewhat with the interval, but this estimate is good enough for blog work.)

The last 5 years are still the warmest 5 years in the UAH LT record:

New Careers Would Be Nice

From a commenter at the Washington Post:

The Value of Blue-Sky Research

"I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research."

-- Peter Higgs, statement today after winning the Nobel Prize for Physics for his prediction of the Higgs boson

On the other hand, there is this, from Steven Weinberg in the New York Review of Books last year:

What really motivates elementary particle physicists is a sense of how the world is ordered—it is, they believe, a world governed by simple universal principles that we are capable of discovering. But not everyone feels the importance of this. During the debate over the SSC, I was on the Larry King radio show with a congressman who opposed it. He said that he wasn’t against spending on science, but that we had to set priorities. I explained that the SSC was going to help us learn the laws of nature, and I asked if that didn’t deserve a high priority. I remember every word of his answer. It was “No.”

CERN CLOUD Results Negative on Aerosol Formation

Here's an interesting and important result from the CLOUD experiment at CERN that bears directly on the Svensmark hypothesis: ionising radiation has a negligible influence on the formation rates of aerosols.

*******************************************
Source: CERN
Content: Press Release
Date Issued: 6 October 2013
*******************************************

CERN's CLOUD experiment shines new light on climate change

Geneva, 6 October 2013. In a paper published today in the journal Nature (http://dx.doi.org/, DOI number 10.1038/nature12663), the CLOUD experiment at CERN* reports a major advance towards solving a long-standing enigma in climate science: how do aerosols - tiny solid or liquid particles suspended in the air - form in the atmosphere, and which gases are responsible? This is a key question in understanding the climate, since aerosols cause a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight and by seeding cloud droplets.

The CLOUD researchers made two key discoveries. Firstly, they found that minute concentrations of amine vapours combine with sulphuric acid to form aerosol particles at rates similar to those observed in the atmosphere. Then, using a pion beam from the CERN Proton Synchrotron, they found that ionising radiation such as the cosmic radiation that bombards the atmosphere from space has negligible influence on the formation rates of these particular aerosols.

"Thanks to CERN's expertise in materials, gas systems and ultra-high vacuum technologies," said CLOUD spokesperson Jasper Kirkby, "we were able to build a chamber with unprecedented cleanliness, allowing us to simulate the atmosphere and introduce minute amounts of various atmospheric vapours under carefully controlled conditions – in this case amines and sulphuric acid."

Amines are atmospheric vapours closely related to ammonia, and are emitted both from human activities such as animal husbandry, and from natural sources. Amines are responsible for odours emanating from the decomposition of organic matter that contains proteins. For example, the smell of rotten fish is due to trimethylamine. The CLOUD experiment's unique ultra-clean chamber allowed the collaboration to demonstrate that the extremely low concentrations of amines typically found in the atmosphere - a few parts per trillion by volume - are sufficient to combine with sulphuric acid to form highly stable aerosol particles at high rates.

The measured sensitivity of aerosol formation to amines came as a surprise, and points to a potentially significant climate cooling mechanism. Moreover, since amine scrubbing is likely to become an important technology for capturing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuelled power plants, this effect is likely to rise in future.

The CLOUD result adds another significant measurement in understanding the climate. But it does not rule out a role for cosmic radiation, nor does it offer a quick fix for global warming.

"This is the first time that atmospheric particle formation has been reproduced with complete knowledge of the participating molecules", said Kirkby. "However our measurements leave open the possibility that the formation of aerosols in the atmosphere may also proceed with other vapours, for which the effect of cosmic rays may be different. This is an important step forward, but we still have a long way to go before we fully understand the processes of aerosol formation and their effects on clouds and climate."

Treason, by Definition

How does this not apply to Congressional Republicans?

18 USC § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

Writhing in its Internal Decision

"the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth's biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312

WATERMARK Trailer

This looks like an interesting upcoming film. (Well, at least the subject is interesting and the music is dramatic.)



via Kottke

"He sees America as a crazy house..."

"But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all come about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house... He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted... He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun—the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it."

-- Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

Causes of Warming Since 1951

Speaking at the Royal Society, Thomas Stocker put up this chart on the causes of warming since 1951. Via @ed_hawkings on Twitter.