What happened in the year 774/775?

Something odd happened to the Earth around the year 774/775. For the background, head over to Gred Laden's blog, where this is just part of a larger question about climate reconstruction.

A few exerts follow to give you  a taste of what caught me eye.

A long time ago, probably in our galaxy but kind of far away, a cosmic event happened that caused the Earth to be bathed in Gamma rays in AD 774 or 775.
...
There is chemical and physical evidence, though, of the Gamma ray burst. The best evidence is the large scale conversion of stable Nitrogen isotopes into unstable Carbon–14 isotopes in the upper atmosphere. As you know, radioactive (meaning, unstable) Carbon–14 is created continuously but at a somewhat variable rate in the upper atmosphere. Some of that Carbon is incorporated, along with regular stable Carbon, into living tissues. After the living tissue is created and further biological activity that might retrofit some of the Carbon atoms ends (i.e., the thing dies) the ratio of radioactive Carbon to stable Carbon slowly changes as the radioactive Carbon changes back into Nitrogen. By measuring the ratio now, we can estimate how many years ago, plus or minus, the originally living thing lived and died. But it does vary. Solar activity, nuclear testing, other things, can change the amount of Carbon–14 that gets produced. And, a cosmic event that happened in 774/775 caused the production of enough Carbon–14 to throw off the chronology by hundreds of years.

Now why haven't I heard of this event before? How certain are we that it was a Gamma Ray Burst, and if so, where was the source?

Astroblog: "Unscientific America" and the case of Pluto

Ian Musgrave has a great post ("Unscientific America" and the case of Pluto) that lays out the scientific reasons why Pluto was ultimately demoted from full planet status.

The fuss some people put up about Pluto's demotion was the basis for Mooney & Kirshenbaum's opening argument in their recent book "Unscientific America." M&K portray the antagonism toward this decision as an example of scientist's detachment and inability to communicate with the public, before going onto to blame general scientific illiteracy on aloof snobbish scientists.:

The furor over Pluto is just one particularly colorful example of the rift that exists today between the world of science and the rest of our society.

Musgrave does a great job of explaining the scientific events leading up to the IAU's "controversial" 2006 decision, and even some of the social events: I had forgotten completely about the mini-fuss in 2001 associated with the Hayden Planetarium not including Pluto as a planet. I certainly wasn't aware that Neil deGrasse Tyson received hate mail from 3rd graders for that!

There is one issue that Musgrave touches on but does not explore as deeply as I think it deserves:

Astronomers did forsee an outcry from the public, and they did care (especially as several of their own number had a strong attachment to Pluto s [sic] a planet). [emphasis mine]

M&K's thesis rests most easily on the assumption that the Pluto controversy was a simple case of clueless scientists versus an offended public.

But this simple picture ignores the internal conflict within the astronomical community that the media played upon (aided by those who disagreed with the results of the IAU vote). I remember getting emails from astronomer colleagues asking for signatures on petitions protesting the outcome of the IAU vote. That internal discord was certainly picked up by, or fed to, the media given their love for reporting controversy.

Not only do different scientists have strong personal opinions regarding their favourite objects, but there were strong political/financial reasons that would lead some to oppose Pluto's demotion. For example, its not hard to guess why many of the people associated with New Horizons (the fast Pluto fly-by mission) might not like Pluto being demoted (A mission to the only planet we haven't yet visited becomes rather less pressing when Pluto is now only one of many Minor Planets). In if NASA budgets weren't strained the justification for a mission and its funding matter a lot. I can certainly empathize with the scientists who oppose the IAU decision, even if I don't agree with them.

Given that Pluto "controversy" was fed or hyped to some significant extent by a genuine minority of disaffected astronomers it is a bad example of the (supposed) difficulties scientist's have with communicating with the public, and hence a bad foundation for M+K to start their book.

Certainly a better example of controversies where public attitude fail to reflect scientific consensus would be climate change, or stem cells. But there it is also obvious that whatever the limitations of scientist's own public outreach are, the majority of the opposition to the scientific consensus is deliberately fed by groups or organizations with their own socio-political agendas.

And that, I suspect, does not conform to the narrative M+K wish to present.

Michael Ashley reviews Ian Plimer's "Heaven and Earth"

Michael Ashley, a Professor of Astrophysics as the University of New South Wales, has written a very cogent review of Ian Plimer's "Heaven and Earth," a new book which claims to demolish the argument the scientific consensus that human emissions of CO2 have changed the climate.

Notable points: Plimer believes that the crank paper "The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass" accurately describes the Sun. Given the wealth of good popular science and semi-technical literature available on stellar structure and stellar evolution its hard to imagine how a non-astronomer would, in good faith, end up using a relatively obscure crank paper to describe the Sun.

Ashley's final paragraph is worth repeating in its entirety:

Plimer has done an enormous disservice to science, and the dedicated scientists who are trying to understand climate and the influence of humans, by publishing this book. It is not "merely" atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics. Plimer's book deserves to languish on the shelves along with similar pseudo-science such as the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken.

Orbiting Carbon Observatory launch fails

NASA's Orbiting Climate Observatory, launched this morning (Tues Feb 24th 2009) on a Taurus XL (which doesn't seem to have a stunning record of success), failed to achieve orbit and crashed in Antarctica (BBC article).

The aim of the OCO was to improve our understanding of atmospheric carbon (specifically CO2) sources and sinks , rather important for bettering our scientific understanding of Global Climate Change (GCC) and for formulating effective politcal policies to combat it. Thankfully the recently launched Japanese IBUKI (aka GOSAT) satellite should be able to perform similar measurements.

Of course, if you're a conservative talking head like George Will or John Tierney you don't need no stinking science to know what is going on or to inform policy. Its all a communist conspiracy by evil lefty scientists to undermine Western capitalism!

[Update: In case its not blatantly obvious to you what is so dishonest about Tierney's column then a post at Climate Progress spells it out for you.]

Interesting Astrophysics: Feb 16 to Feb 19

Another collection of interesting papers and preprints. Quite a lot of potentially interesting stuff this week, from the galaxy mass versus effective yield relationship at redshift z~3 to the effect of nearby historical supernova on Earth's atmosphere, along with tons of Spitzer observations of galaxies and AGN and a possible stellar disruption event.

I plan on doing a separate list of what I consider to be the most interesting White Papers submitted to the Astro2010 Decadal Survey and were also posted for public consumption on arXiv's astro-ph preprint service. I'll post that once it appears that posting of White Papers to arXiv is tailing off.

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Galaxies and Starbursts

The present-day galaxy population in spiral galaxies
Reynier Peletier, arXiv:0902.2279 [ps, pdf, other]

Comments: 8 pages, Proceedings of 'Probing Stellar Populations out to the Distant Universe', Cefalu, Italy, Sep 7-19, 2008, AIP Conf. Proc. Series. Higher resolution version available at this http URL

Estimating the H I gas fractions of galaxies in the local Universe
Wei Zhang, Cheng Li, Guinevere Kauffmann, Hu Zou, Barbara Catinella, Shiyin Shen, Qi Guo, Ruixiang Chang, arXiv:0902.2392 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 11 pages, 8 figures, submitted for publication in MNRAS

Gas-poor galaxies do have higher gas-phase abundances than (less evolved) gas rich galaxies. Interesting. Compares to semi-analytic models, but the devil lies in the details of the recipe used for supernova feedback in the SAMs.

LSD: Lyman-break galaxies Stellar populations and Dynamics. I: Mass, metallicity and gas at z~3.1
F. Mannucci, G. Cresci, R. Maiolino, A. Marconi, G. Pastorini, L. Pozzetti, A. Gnerucci, G. Risaliti, R. Schneider, M. Lehnert, M. Salvati, arXiv:0902.2398 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: submitted to MNRAS

Surprisingly find that effective yields are lower in the more massive galaxies, and approach Solar at the low mass end of the sample. Unsurprisingly they end up requiring gas accretion to be more effective in the most massive galaxies in order to explain this. This is totally reversed from the local galaxy M-y_eff relationship. Is this consistent the other estimates of M-Z relationship at z > 2?

Physical conditions in the ISM of intensely star-forming galaxies at redshift~2
M. D. Lehnert, N. P. H. Nesvadba, L. Le Tiran, P. Di Matteo, W. van Driel, L. S. Douglas, L. Chemin, F. Bournaud, arXiv:0902.2784 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: ApJ accepted main journal, 21 pages, 12 figures

Bulges Of Nearby Galaxies With Spitzer: The Growth Of Pseudobulges In Disk Galaxies And Its Connection To Outer Disks
David B. Fisher, Niv Drory, Maximilian H. Fabricius, arXiv:0902.3258 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: Accepted to ApJ

From the abstract: "In almost all galaxies in our sample the specific SFR (SFR per unit stellar mass) of the bulge is higher than that of the outer disk, suggesting that almost all galaxies are increasing their B/T through internal star formation."

The First Galaxies: Signatures of the Initial Starburst
Jarrett L. Johnson, Thomas H. Greif, Volker Bromm, Ralf S. Klessen, Joseph Ippolito, arXiv:0902.3263 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 11 pages, 10 figures; to be submitted to MNRAS

The Radio Luminosity Function and Galaxy Evolution in the Coma Cluster
Neal A. Miller, Ann E. Hornschemeier, Bahram Mobasher, Terry J. Bridges, Michael J. Hudson, Ronald O. Marzke, Russell J. Smith, arXiv:0902.3388 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 45 pages with 13 figures, accepted for publication in AJ

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Black Holes and AGN

Mass Outflow in the Seyfert 1 Galaxy NGC 5548
D.M. Crenshaw, S.B. Kraemer, H.R. Schmitt, J.S. Kaastra, N. Arav, J.R. Gabel, K.T. Korista, arXiv:0902.2310 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 39 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

AGN–starburst connection in NGC 7582: Gemini near-infrared spectrograph integral field unit observations (p 783-797)
Rogemar A. Riffel, Thaisa Storchi-Bergmann, Oli L. Dors Jr, Cláudia Winge, 2009, MNRAS, 393, 783
Full Text: HTML, PDF (Size: 3067K)

Resolving the mid-infrared cores of local Seyferts
P. Gandhi, H. Horst, A. Smette, S. Hoenig, A. Comastri, R. Gilli, C. Vignali, W. Duschl, arXiv:0902.2777 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

Spitzer spectra of Seyfert galaxies
Luigi Spinoglio, Silvia Tommasin, Matthew A. Malkan, Kevin Hainline, arXiv:0902.3341 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: to appear in the proceedings of "The Starburst-AGN Connection Conference", Shanghai, China, 27 Oct - 1 Nov 2008, ASP Conference Series

Mid-infrared spectroscopy of infrared-luminous galaxies at z~0.5-3
A. Hernan-Caballero, I. Perez-Fournon, E. Hatziminaoglou, A. Afonso-Luis, M. Rowan-Robinson, D. Rigopoulou, D. Farrah, C. J. Lonsdale, T. Babbedge, D. Clements, S. Serjeant, F. Pozzi, M. Vaccari, F. M. Montenegro-Montes, I. Valtchanov, E. Gonzalez-Solares, S. Oliver, D. Shupe, C. Gruppioni, B. Vila-Vilaro, C. Lari, F. La Franca, arXiv:0902.3369 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 32 pages, 24 figures, 15 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS

NTT, Spitzer and Chandra spectroscopy of SDSSJ095209.56+214313.3: the most luminous coronal-line supernova ever observed, or a stellar tidal disruption event ?
S. Komossa, H. Zhou, A. Rau, M. Dopita, A. Gal-Yam, J. Greiner, J. Zuther, M. Salvato, D. Xu, H. Lu, R. Saxton, M. Ajello, arXiv:0902.3248 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 18 pages, 8 (colour) figures; submitted to ApJ

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X-rays

Spectral States and Evolution of Ultraluminous X-ray Sources
Hua Feng, Philip Kaaret, arXiv:0902.2607 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 17 pages, 9 tables, 10 figures, accepted by ApJ

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Cosmology, in particular numerical cosmology

Probing recent star formation with absorption-line strengths in hierarchical models and observations
S.C. Trager, R.S. Somerville, arXiv:0902.2336 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 17 pages

Cosmological formation and chemical evolution of an elliptical galaxy
E. Colavitti, A. Pipino, F. Matteucci, arXiv:0902.2768 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication by A&A

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Numerical Astrophysics and Hydrodynamics

Cosmological AMR MHD with Enzo
David C. Collins, Hao Xu, Michael L. Norman, Hui Li, Shengtai Li, arXiv:0902.2594 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 56 pages, 26 figures, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Suppliments

Galaxy Mergers with Adaptive Mesh Refinement: Star Formation and Hot Gas Outflow
Ji-hoon Kim, John H. Wise, Tom Abel, arXiv:0902.3001 [ps, pdf, other]

Comments: 4 pages, 5 figures, Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Image resolution greatly reduced, High-resolution version of this article and movies are available at this http URL

Interesting, but hardly deserves to be a Letter given that they're probably going to do a full paper as well.

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Stars, Supernovae and Planets

An Antarctic ice core recording both supernovae and solar cycles
Yuko Motizuki, Kazuya Takahashi, Kazuo Makishima, Aya Bamba, Yoichi Nakai, Yasushige Yano, Makoto Igarashi, Hideaki Motoyama, Kokichi Kamiyama, Keisuke Suzuki, Takashi Imamura, arXiv:0902.3446 [pdf]
Comments: 18 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Nature

Pretty amazing stuff, although prior attempts at this sort of thing were not robust. From the text: "When a SN explodes close to the earth, the nuclear γ-rays produced (~0.1–1 MeV)
can lead to an enhancement of nitrogen oxide production in the middle atmosphere or
the stratosphere. SN events could therefore be traced in ice cores as NO₃^– concentration spikes."

The Secret XUV Lives of Cepheids: FUV/X-ray Observations of Polaris and beta Dor
Scott G. Engle, Edward F. Guinan, Joseph DePasquale, Nancy Evans, arXiv:0902.3449 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure, to appear in the proceedings of the "Future Directions in Ultraviolet Spectroscopy" Meeting - October 20-22, 2008; Annapolis, Maryland, USA

The Physical Properties of Red Supergiants
Emily M. Levesque, arXiv:0902.2789 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures; to appear in proceedings of "Hot and Cool: Bridging Gaps in Massive Star Evolution"

Bob Park's take on what NASA's mission should be

In January 2nd's "What's New" (*) Bob Park at UMD presented his typically blunt view of what NASA's future should and should not involve:

4. NASA: A HOPELESSLY OLD-FASHIONED VISION OF THE FUTURE.
In discussing NASA’s future on Tuesday, the NY Times was mesmerized by the "gap" between the end of the shuttle and the launch of a new bus to transport astronauts. Forget the damn gap. The 21st Century will be focused on planets around other suns, and on the bad news about what’s happening to our own planet. Astronauts can’t go to other stars, but we can build better telescopes and get a better look at them. Astronauts will be no help either in studying our own Sun and our own planet, Earth. We need to finish what we set out to do a decade ago, but were stopped from doing by the Bush administration: launch an updated Deep Space Climate Observatory. There is still time, but we urgently need to get started.

While some might consider this extreme, it does makes sense.

Proponents of manned space flight have got to start making a realistic case for their very expensive passion. Continuing to use empty buzzwords and catch-phrases "exploration" or "only astronauts can go fossil hunting on Mars" is not going to work on Congress and the tax-payer forever.

(*) The 01/02/09 edition was yet available on the What's New website when this post was written.

The JASONs got climate change right

I knew that in the later 1970's the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a report on possible future climate change due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission at the request of President Carter's science adviser. The resulting Charney report basically said climate change is happening and gave a reasonably accurate (by today's standards) estimate of what the effects would be.

I didn't know that the NAS report was preceded by a (then secret) report by the JASONs, who had essentially independently come to the same conclusions. A fascinating article on the times online by Naomi Oreskes and Jonathan Renouf spells out the JASON's conclusions:

Right on the first page, the Jasons predicted that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would double from their preindustrial levels by about 2035. Today it’s expected this will happen by about 2050. They suggested that this doubling of carbon dioxide would lead to an average warming across the planet of 2-3C. Again, that’s smack in the middle of today’s predictions. They warned that polar regions would warm by much more than the average, perhaps by as much as 10C or 12C. That prediction is already coming true – last year the Arctic sea ice melted to a new record low. This year may well set another record.

Nor were the Jasons frightened of drawing the obvious conclusions for civilisation: the cause for concern was clear when one noted “the fragility of the world’s crop-producing capacity, particularly in those marginal areas where small alterations in temperature and precipitation can bring about major changes in total productivity”.

Note that the JASONs are not being "alarmist" - they merely highlight that GCC will almost certainly cause widespread economic, social and political disruption, in particular in those countries too poor to mitigate its effects. Such unrest is almost certainly not in the best interests of the United States.

Had the Carter administration's moves toward energy independence and alternative energy sources been followed the world would have had 30 years head start on combating Global Climate Change.

I also didn't know that the Charney report was followed by another report commissioned by the Reagan administration that was elected in 1980. They knew how to deal with reports whose conclusions they didn't like: commission another report and put someone to your liking in charge of it.

Nierenberg’s report was unusual in that individual chapters were written by different authors. Many of these chapters recorded mainstream scientific thinking similar to the Charney and Jason reports. But the key chapter was Nierenberg’s synthesis – which chose largely to ignore the scientific consensus.

[...]

Overall, the synopsis emphasised the positive effects of climate change over the negative, the uncertainty surrounding predictions of future change rather than the emerging consensus and the low end of harmful impact estimates rather than the high end. Faced with this rather benign scenario, adaptation was the key.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. Similar arguments have been used by global warming sceptics ever since Nierenberg first formulated them in 1983. Global warming was duly kicked into the political long grass – a distant problem for another day. At a political level, Nierenberg had won.

But this was only the beginning of his involvement in what eventually became a movement of global warming sceptics. A year after his report came out he became a co-founder of the George C Marshall Institute, one of the leading think tanks that would go on to challenge almost every aspect of the scientific consensus on climate change. Nierenberg hardened his position. He began to argue not just that global warming wasn’t a problem, but also that it wasn’t happening at all. There was no systematic warming trend, the climate was simply going through its normal, natural fluctuations.

The creed that Nierenberg originated all those years ago still has its dwindling band of followers. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, recently responded to a question about global warming by saying: “I’m not one who would attribute it to being man-made.”

Because doing so would mean that its would be in the United State's best long-term interests to take actions that would be bad financially for certain polluting mega-corporations.

Running the A/C and cutting down trees is not good for the environment

If this post could have a subtitle it would be "The stupid, it burns!"

I must confess a shameful interest in the actual mechanics of the computing I rely on to do science. A lot of astrophysicists proudly ignore the details of technology, blithely purchasing whatever hardware seems popular at the time (Sun workstations and Windows laptops a decade ago, Mac Pros and MacBook Pros now), but I enjoy reading the occasional Tech web site, because you can often actually learn something valuable from them.

Occasionally even reputable Tech sites will post absolute idiocy, and it becomes apparent that not everyone who has access to a computer actually knows or wants to think logically.

This week Real Climate has to take the time to deconstruct a simultaneously amusingly and depressingly stupid set of articles in Wired that argue that air conditioning is green than heating and that tree farms are greener than keeping old growth forest.

Pretty obvious isn't it? If you came up with the answer that it takes less energy to cool something in a heat bath down by a fixed amount than to heat it up by the same amount you might want to check your calculations, because you would remember this rather fundamental thing called the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Yet Matt Power, the article of those Wired articles, didn't even blink an eye before publishing them. I can only presume he skipped his physics classes while he was registering Republican. Looks like Wired's Matt Power is their equivalent to Daily Tech's Michael Asher.

Venus's atmosphere

Real Climate has an interesting post on Venus's atmosphere, highlighting results from ESA's Venus Express spacecraft. How long does a day on Venus last? The sidereal day is 243 Earth days long (longer than Venus's year of 225 Earth days), but the solar day is 117 Earth days. Confused? Go read the post, as it has one of the clearest explanations of the different types of day that I can remember reading.


The image is of Venus Express's launch in 2005 from Baikonur on a a Russian Soyuz-Fregat.

The Milky Way's spiral arms and climate change

Do astronomical objects influence Earth's climate? This is a fascinating question that never seems to get robustly answered, and often seems to be misused by global climate change denialists. The latest salvo - spiral arm crossings - is discussed over at Real Climate.

I wasn't aware the spiral arm pattern speeds were so ill-determined.

The image of a current model for the spiral arm structure of our own Milky Way galaxy, taken from an excellent web page from the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey (CGPS) - go there for more information.

Sigh

Bob Park's What's New for June 1, 2007.

Back to the climate... again.

I often seem to end up blogging (or ranting) more about climate change than astrophysics, even though I am not in the climate sciences. But it is an issue of great importance (I'd prefer not to experience the possible consequences of unchecked climate change in later life) and the science (matter interacting with radiation, thermodynamics etc) is close enough to the physics I specialize in that I can understand why they're saying what they're saying.

After all, Earth is just another planet orbiting a moderately typical star, so its all astronomy at the end of the day.

The climate is, as with all science, interesting, and I try to keep up to date on whats happening in the broader scientific world by reading popular science magazines, science blogs and even newspaper science sections. Earlier this week the NYT published a piece by journalist named William J. Broad with the title "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype." As you might guess, the subject is Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth". What is the article about? Well, here is the second paragraph:

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

I thought this claim seemed very odd. I've seen Inconvenient Truth, and found it very nicely presented. I didn't notice anything in it that really jarred me as being something outrageous that I'd never seem claimed in other reputable writing about climate change. There were one or two slips of the tongue, an over-simplification of a few physical concepts, but its a presentation. Even when talking professionally to scientific colleagues at departmental colloquia or full conferences you pretty much have to simplify some aspects of what you're talking about.

Talking to a general non-science audience is even harder, and Gore did a great job, I thought. So how many climate scientists would be so pedantic as take Gore to task? On reading further into the article I became very suspicious, very quickly. The very small number of named scientists who actually make negative statements regarding Gore's presentation, and the details of statements they made, all made me think this was a hatchet job by climate deniers, a sort of "OK, we cant get away with claiming that there is no evidence for climate change, or that its largely man made, so lets change tactics and says there no way its going to be a big problem."

Some of the rhetoric used really set off the alarm bells:

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

The scientists who've been studying climate change for decades, whose work and predictions have been independently validated in more and more detail, who were in a very real sense right about there being recent unprecedented climate change, are now "zealots" and "extremists" according to article. The people who continue to deny climate change in the face of ever-increasing evidence for it are also painted as extremists, but only as extremist "skeptics." Mmmh, there is a time for valid skepticism, but that time is long past. And so we're meant to accept that in a polarized argument about a scientific issue, between the vast majority of professional scientists and a fringe of contrarians and non-scientists with a vested financial interest in climate change denial, that it is really the people in middle, the self-proclaimed "centrists" who are the most intellectually honest?

Centrism as a word has very clear political overtones, especially in the modern theatre of US politics, so its use in an article claiming to be a-political is somewhat inappropriate. Nevertheless, and please don't misunderstand me, the "golden mean" or "happy median" is a valid concept in certain situations, buts its use here is just wrong.

Should we also accept that there is a valid argument about whether the Earth orbits the Sun or vice versa, and that in such a "debate" between profession astronomers and some very strange religious conservatives, that the astronomers are zealots, the fundamentalist merely skeptics, and the best position is to be centrist and say "we don't know"?

How about a purely hypothetical scenario, between zealous mathematicians proclaiming 2+2=4, and skeptics claiming 2+2=5? Is the even a valid debate, let alone something where "centrism" is valid?

Anyway, to cut the story short it seems like I was right to dismiss the article as pure propaganda. Over at RealClimate, Michael Mann (he of the hockey stick graph fame) and Gavin Schmidt dissect the William Broad article and reveal the inaccuracies (or to be honest about it, the deliberate lies and dishonesty) put forth by both the few scientists in the article, and its author Broad (who also appears to have a history of climate denial). The post is well worth reading, so please go read it (the link repeated here for those too tired to move the mouse up to the previous link).

More scientists muzzled by the administration? Part II: The Non-satisfying Explanation

Last week I mentioned (my wife would say "ranted") the apparently politically-motivated muzzling of scientists working for the Fish & Wildlife service with regards climate change and polar bears.

In a follow-up piece in the NYT the situation becomes clearer, limiting the scope of the orders to two scientists at international meetings (one a diplomatic meeting, one not), but the official explanation for the gag-order does not clear the administration from the charge of unwarranted political interference.

The official explanation is that its really about being good diplomats, following protocol and staying on the meeting agenda:

The stipulations that the employees “will not be speaking on or responding to” questions about climate change, polar bears and sea ice are “consistent with staying with our commitment to the other countries to talk about only what’s on the agenda,” said the director of the agency, H. Dale Hall. [From the NYT article]

The meeting referred to here is "a delegation to Norway led by Julia Gourley of the State Department at a meeting on conserving Arctic animals and plants."

Are we really supposed to believe that conserving Arctic animals (e.g. polar bears, perhaps?) and plants can be done without discussing climate change?

The second case is of "...Craig Perham, an expert on polar bears, was invited by the World Wildlife Fund to help advise villagers along the Siberian coast on avoiding encounters with the bears, said Margaret Williams, director of the Bering Sea program of the fund."

This does not sound like a diplomatic meeting, and although not a true scientific meeting, it is certainly a venue where free speech should apply, and where the "diplomatic protocol" argument clearly should not be applicable (even if it had any validity, which I'm rather skeptical about).

Clearly the issue is that the administration, and the F&WL service itself, do not want its employees to discuss climate change and the associated environmental impact in any way that could be construed as a institutional endorsement of the validity of climate change or highlighting its severe consequences.

In a purely diplomatic setting the general concept is understandable - wrong-headed in this case - but understandable from the perspective that diplomats are generally expected to serve as the mouth piece of administration policy and not go off on a tangent of personal opinion (however well informed or correct they might be).

But this explanation does not work. Supposedly Bush and the administration now accept the validity of climate change [indeed, they're even trying to revise history so as to claim Bush has always agreed that GCC is both real and human-made], so why try to avoid the subject (especially when it the only valid basis under which to try to understand and solve the environmental changes in the arctic)? Why try to apply it to non-diplomatic meetings with known wildlife-lobbying groups?

If the "just normal protocol" argument we are being presented isn't true, then the alternative, that this really is classic Republican War On Science behaviour, remains the best explanation.


J. Marquis points out some important contextual information that I hadn't appreciated before:

Polar bears are a hot topic for the Bush administration, which decided in December to consider whether to list the white-furred behemoths as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, because of scientific reports that the bears' icy habitat is melting due to global warming... ...A "threatened" listing would bar the government from taking any action that jeopardizes the animal's existence, and might spur debate about tougher measures to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming.

In other words this is not purely about not contradicting the administration's message, it actually has the potential to force real action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and thus to reduce the profits of the powerful companies that fund and control the Republican party. The claimed White House acceptance of the validity ongoing climate change appears not to be little more than a smoke screen, an attempt to reduce pressure on them when ultimately they have no intention of doing anything to curb emissions.

In other news...

The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people will not have enough water, top scientists are likely to say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

More scientists muzzled by the administration?

Today's (08 March 2007) NYT has an article discussing charges that the US Fish & Wildlife service (i.e. the administration) has issued memos to its employees stating that they may not discuss climate change, melting ice, drowning polar bears etc, unless officially charged to do so.

[The image, originally from NASA, is of the extent of floating polar ice in summer now, compared to in 1979. See this page at the NRDC for a low-level Q&A that points out that this is not "normal" decadal variation.]

I hope this is not true, but I won't be surprised if it is true. We astronomers should be thankful that our pursuit of knowledge is not (yet) considered as a political threat by those in political power.

Of course, if you follow Fox news (or the WSJ) then you won't worry about this too much, as you have lots of unqualified hacks from various "think"-tanks to re-assure you that man-made global climate change is "junk." Strange how its only the right wing think-tanks, specifically the ones funded by old inefficient and dirty industries, that have worked out that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community is wrong.

But instead of having to spend time denying GCC every time some more evidence of it comes out, why not get the story to go away completely? See no evidence of you and your party's funders evil wastefulness, hear no evidence of your evil wastefulness. Brilliant!

[From Zenbowl at DailyKos]

The WHite House's Climate Change Palimpset

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." -- George Orwell; 1984.

Chris Mooney (author of "The Republican War on Science") highlights an attempt by White House Science Advisor John Marberger and Council on Environmental Quality chair James Connaugton to rewrite history. In a letter likely to be quoted blindly in the media and on right-wing blogs they claim

"Beginning in June 2001, President Bush has consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem."

Mooney demonstrates this is totally false, as even last year Bush was (dishonestly) claiming that there existed a valid debate over whether the unprecedented climate change in the 20th century was "manmade[sic] or naturally caused."



Mooney also demonstrates how Marburger and Connaugton's letter cherry picks phrases from the 2001-era speech they mention in order to make it appear as if Bush acknowledged the man-made nature of recent climate change - when in fact he was trying to argue there was no evidence connecting the fact of man-made changes in greenhouse gas concentrations to the observed climate changes.

RealClimate reviews 2006

RealClimate summarizes the highlights of 2006, climate-wise.

Cosmic Rays and Climate Change: RealClimate's analysis

The always interesting RealClimate blog has an interesting analysis of a paper by Svensmark et al [Svensmark, H., et al, 2006, Proc. Royal. Soc. A., xx, 1364] investigating whether Cosmic Rays can promote low altitude cloud formation, a paper with the snappy title "Experimental evidence for the role of ions in particle nucleation under atmospheric conditions"

The paper itself (go read it) is pretty innocuous and hardly applies their results to anything, but the press release isn't shy about explaining the (supposed) implications:

"A team at the Danish National Space Center has discovered how cosmic rays from exploding stars can help to make clouds in the atmosphere. The results support the theory that cosmic rays influence Earth’s climate."

Here are some more choice bits from the press release:

The experimental results lend strong empirical support to the theory proposed a decade ago by Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen that cosmic rays influence Earth’s climate through their effect on cloud formation. The original theory rested on data showing a strong correlation between variation in the intensity of cosmic radiation penetrating the atmosphere and the amount of low-altitude clouds. Cloud cover increases when the intensity of cosmic rays grows and decreases when the intensity declines.

It is known that low-altitude clouds have an overall cooling effect on the Earth’s surface. Hence, variations in cloud cover caused by cosmic rays can change the surface temperature. The existence of such a cosmic connection to Earth’s climate might thus help to explain past and present variations in Earth’s climate.

Interestingly, during the 20th Century, the Sun’s magnetic field which shields Earth from cosmic rays more than doubled, thereby reducing the average influx of cosmic rays. The resulting reduction in cloudiness, especially of low-altitude clouds, may be a significant factor in the global warming Earth has undergone during the last century. However, until now, there has been no experimental evidence of how the causal mechanism linking cosmic rays and cloud formation may work.

Its not quite claiming that ALL climate change is due to changes in the Cosmic Ray irradiance, but its not making any attempt to say this might only be a small effect.


If you're interested in a discussion of the physics, and why Gavin at RealClimate isn't buying the PR spin, then go over to RC.

What I'd like to know is who chose to put the emphasis in the press release on climate change? It certainly sounds like it was written by someone who doesn't believe that human activity is responsible for the unprecedented climate change in the 20th century.

Buts its not clear to me as yet that we know who put this spin into the press release.

Within the last year we've seen the case of a unqualified political hack who somehow got a job in the NASA press office editing scientific press releases to reflect his personal beliefs, and attempting to cut of press access to a prominent climate scientist. Perhaps something similar has happened in this case?

There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party.

Remember the flap a while back about a unqualified (but Bush-loyal) hack at NASA editing press-releases and denying the press interview with climate scientists? Merely a bad-apple, you might say, not part of a deliberate and concerted effort to weaken and sideline science.

Well, this time it seems the plausible deniability is wearing thin. CNBC's request for an interview with NOAO scientist Dr. Tom Knutson gets vetted by none-other than Commerce department press secretary Chuck Fuqua...

"What is Knutson's view on global warming vs. decadal cycles?" Fuqua asked his subordinate.

He's "a bit of a different animal" than the higher-ups at the NOAA, the aide responded.

"Why can't we have one of the other guys on then?" Fuqua emailed back.

NOAA ultimately denied CNBC the interview.

The ever vigilant Henry Waxman (D-CA) is on the case, but until the house and/or senate fall under Democrat control I doubt any investigation will get anywhere.

The "There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party." quote is (of course) from 1984.