Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

Anytime I find some great science lectures online, I try to write about them here. Well, I have found a new one and it gets an A+ from Dan!

Alex Filippenko is an Astronomer and a Professor at the Univ. of California Berkely. He has been named Best Professor on Campus four years running, and after you watch his talks at Princeton, you will know why.

He did three public lectures a few years back in Princeton and I just found the podcasts. Move over Carl Sagan, this guy makes the cosmos easy to understand, and rabidly fascinating.

Go here and enjoy!

http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/

Search on the page for Alex Filippenko.

Ages 9 and up here..Calculus not required!
Stephen Fry would like it, and so will you!

For those of you who read this journal from outside the USA (and thank you by the way!), you will pardon me while I explain to the rest who Stephen Fry is.

In a world where most famous movie stars, and sports celebrities have an education level that is sadly lacking, it is refreshing to have a famous actor/comedian/writer/game show host, who is just the opposite! If you check out my Facebook  profile, you will see that under religious preference I put Stephen Fry!

Mr. Fry is not an easy person to describe. If you have ever watched Black Adder on PBS or BBC America, you have seen him. He is well known in the UK, and in Australia and Canada. While he is an excellent actor, and comedian, he is also a graduate of Cambridge. (Not that the two should be mutually exclusive!) He has a vocabulary to die for! His quiz show QI on BBC 1 is highly rated, and his dramatic series KINGDOM is rapidly becoming a classic.

However, what I like most about Stephen Fry is his relationship with his fans. He has a fabulous web site and is an avowed tech lover.

He of course uses a Mac! He has a bunch of them I understand!

I check out his podgrams and twitter page frequently.  I almost always learn something interesting when I do. Other than being a rabid Doctor Who fan , I really watch little TV.  Mr. Fry is an exception. (David Tennant: Just another year…please? The new guy doesn’t even have eye brows!)

My literary education has always been sorely lacking, and thanks to Stephen Fry, I am enjoying Oscar Wilde immensely. So, if you’re going to be a fan of someone, then a thoroughly decent and intelligent person like Fry is not a bad choice I think.

One last thing here. In one of his recent podgrams, Mr. Fry talks about the BBC, and a proposal to give some of the money from the lic. fee to Channel 4. He argues that this would be a mistake.  He is absolutely right.

You folks in the UK do not understand what a truly national asset you have in the BBC.

QUIT TRYING TO KILL IT!

Thus ends the promised tongue lashing to you UK folks, that I mentioned in a previous post. I did warn you it was coming. You may return to the Archers now;).

While nearly every major  national, and international broadcaster has cut it’s staff of foreign corespondents back to nil, the BBC still covers the world.

They do it with a level of impartiality that is still the gold standard.

(For those that do not know: In the UK to watch TV, you have to buy a yearly license. No, I am not kidding. It costs about 130£. That money goes to the BBC to produce radio and TV programs. The BBC has no commercials. Think of PBS with money.)

All the tax money given to the Foreign Office to promote British values and culture, is peanuts, compared to what the BBC brings the UK just by being there. No, they are not perfect. However, the frequent claims of waste and inefficiency get nowhere with me. I have been to the Broadcast Centre in London, and have seen how they do things. Having worked in Broadcasting for 30 years, I can tell you that they are more efficient than American broadcasters by a mile!

For those in the UK: Yes, they do pay Jonathan Ross too much money, but they should give Stephen Fry a raise. So, perhaps it all balances out. Just think of the tax money you’re giving to Peter Mandelson. I rest my case.

If you want to hear an impassioned plea, by someone who knows how to use the English language properly, then listen to Stephen Fry’s podgram about it. You can find it on iTunes by searching for “Stephen Fry Podgram Episode 4 Broadcasting”. The podgrams are free.

From now on, I plan on using a new word I learned from watching,listening or reading Fry in each of my blogs. I really must improve my vocabulary! I will however promise to expatiate less in my next post! I have a twitter page myself now at http://twitter.com/danwhnt

Later,
Dan

I was going to write this post tomorrow, since the news is embargoed until then. I had agreed to the embargo, but the BBC has beaten me to the punch, and one of the papers authors has also posted the info online…..so…

A new Paper by Eric Steig, and others has shown that the Antarctic has warmed overall in the last 50 years. The Antarctic Peninsula area is warming very rapidly, and in spite of the cooling in some other areas, the overall affect is a warming continent.

The discrepancy in earlier global climate models over this part of the world, was trumpeted as a reason to doubt the overwhelming science. The usual response to these claims by the science community, was something along the lines of “We really do not know what the temp. is doing in Antarctica”. This was a very true statement. Imagine trying to tell someone what the climate in the USA is doing with 4 reporting stations. One in Chicago, one in LA, and two more in New England. You get the idea.

Eric Steig and Micheal Mann have used surface stations, AND satellite temperature data to reconstruct the changes over the last 50 years. Apparently there is another paper, in press, that will show that the newer climate models are agreeing with this data. The BBC has a very well researched article on it’s main web site about this, and the Wilkins Ice Shelf.  New information also coming out this week shows that the giant Wilkins Ice Shelf in the Antarctic Penninsula is close to breaking up.

The march of Science goes on. We learn more, and more,  each year about how are planet’s climate works. Eric Steig points out in a post in Real Climate, that you cannot make certain assumptions from this paper. Antarctica is getting colder in spots, and it’s not warming equally everywhere. What IS interesting is that these results seem to agree well with what the climate experts expect should be happening.

Science never proves anything. This is nothing more, or less, than another book in the growing library of evidence, that humans are changing our climate. Here is image of the temperature change in the Antarctic over the last 50 years produced by Steig et. al. The redder, the warmer. Blue is cooler.

The best way for this planet to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, is to come up with ways of making environmentally good energy, the CHEAPEST energy. Right now, the cheapest energy is the dirtiest. Coal to be exact. Oil is second. The best fossil fuel is Natural Gas.

Since most of the electricity in the USA is produced with dirty coal (There is no such thing as clean coal!….remember that from my previous blog post??), then anything we can do to save electricity means less dirty coal is burned. Less electricity means you save money.

So here is what you do. Replace immediately, EVERY light bulb in your house with a compact fluorescent. These things have come light years since they were first introduced. I like the natural daylight bulbs. We saw our electrical bill drops 20$ a month right away. More in the Summer! Why?

Incandescent bulbs are mainly heat bulbs that also put out light. If you live in a warm climate, then most of your bulbs energy is fighting with your air conditioner as it tries to cool your house. Count how many  regular old fashioned light bulbs  you have burning in your house some evening. These added together, put out an incredible amount of heat!

These light bulbs are actually much more popular in Europe where energy is priced higher than here in the U.S. They will be phased out soon in Europe. Many stores there, have already quit carrying the old bulbs.

So if you want to help reduce greenhouse gases, and save money. Get the new bulbs. I even have compact fluorescent yard lights now.

Later,
Dan

With the very cold air over much of the nation, east of the Rockies, I expected to get some Climate Change questions from viewers. I had a very good one today and it is worthy of a blog post.

The question was this:  Is all this cold air causing the Arctic ice pack to recover some from the near record low of last Summer and the all time record the year before?

The answer is no. As a matter of fact the ice coverage is running at near record lows still. This may be a sign of yet another Summer of major melting on the way. You should know that the majority of Arctic ice experts now think we have reached the tipping point and that the ice will continue to decline fairly rapidly.

What is a tipping point?? Let me explain.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery about of our climate in the past 20 years, is that it does not change slowly over time. It can change very rapidly. In a matter of a few years or a decade!

Thinking about climate as if it is a dimmer switch is not really correct.

It’s more like the wall switch for your front porch light. It’s either off or on. If we put pressure on the climate, it may change slightly, then all of a sudden it makes a big jump to a new condition.  Just like putting pressure on the switch to the front porch light. You increase the pressure and suddenly it flips up, and the light goes on!

This is what a tipping point is. Many scientists feel that as far as Arctic sea ice goes, we have passed the tipping point and the climate is no longer conducive to an ice pack in the Summer over the Arctic Ocean. It will melt and perhaps be gone in as little as 40 years.

If  we do go into a period of low solar activity, this might delay it awhile, but it will still happen. Keep in mind that greenhouse gases are not the only thing that affects our climate. Solar changes, volcanoes and slight changes in our orbit around the sun all play a role. So do ocean currents like El Nino. This is why climate is so hard to predict and understand.

A blast of mild air into the Arctic in December actually caused a slight melting of the sea ice.  So the coverage is still unusually low. Just because we have a cold outbreak here in the Eastern USA, means little as far as the Arctic is concerned. Most of this air came from Alaska and Siberia. It’s unusually warm right now in Alaska, and the Western USA. So assuming that just because  we are very cold, the planet itself has gotten colder is very faulty thinking.

That said, I am sure I will get an email from someone asking if I still think we need to worry about our Climate,  since it is so cold. I will refer to them to this post of course! I wonder if they  will read it?

I am appreciative of the fact that you just did!

Later,

Dan