Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

Hat’s off to NASA Astronaut Mike Massimino who not only helped fix the Hubble Space telescope but found time to twitter from space. A first! Once it became know he was going to twitter from Orbit he quickly gathered 300,000 plus followers. No, he is no Stephen Fry, but he has a better view out his window this morning!! Although Stephen Fry is likely at the Chelsea Flower Show, which is not half bad!

So here are some of my favourite pics taken aboard Atlantis and “emailed” down to Houston. Another related Wow after the snaps.

From Atlantis- ctsy. NASA

Who is upright? They all are! from NASA

Can you identify the location they are approaching? Find Cabo San Lucas on a map.

Hubble at orbital sunrise from Atlantis/NASA

….and last but not least you have to see this time lapse of the stars taken with a Canon DSLR at a star party in Fort Davis, Texas. William Castleman did this, and it’s nothing but stunning, or should I just say WOW! (Not bad for a Texan, and that is high praise from an Okie!)

A LAST BIG WOW FOR THE ATLANTIS ASTRONAUTS, AND NASA FOR FIXING HUBBLE!

Later,
dan

Astronomy and Meteorology are two sciences that have legions of non scientist helpers. Thousands of people across the world record weather data each day in places that governments cannot afford to locate “official” stations. In the USA, COCORAHS members record rainfall with high quality, and very accurate rain gauges in thousands of locations. They do it because it matters. This data is invaluable to forecasters like myself, and to future and present researchers in weather and climate. It is very likely that this weather data will be looked at over 100 years from now by researchers not even born yet.

In Astronomy, it’s much the same. Backyard observers are usually the ones who spot a new comet or gamma ray burst. As thanks, a comet finder gets it named after him!

This brings me to the WOW images I talked about.

Thierry Legault is an Engineer in Paris. He is one of these backyard Astronomers who is very familiar to professionals who work in the large telescopes. Thierry specializes in astrophotography and even has an asteroid named after him. (Many asteroids are found by backyard sky watchers.)

A couple of days ago, Thierry took a photo of the sun. The image was taken with his 13 cm wide telescope.

Here it is:

Photo by Thierry Legault Paris

I know what you are thinking. I’ve seen it before you say. I can just go outside.

Well Thierry took this photo at just the right moment. I mean JUST the right moment. Look in the lower left quadrant of the image above. You see a speck? It’s not your monitor.

Here is a blown up image of that speck:

Space Shuttle Atlantis and Hubble Space Telescope Passing in front of Sun by Thierry Legault in Paris.

You see it??

It’s what you think it is.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis, and just below it is the Hubble Space Telescope. He had to time it to the second, and he got it!

He has some other INCREDIBLE images on his website. You MUST see them!

The other image is from NOAA. The National Climate Data Center (NCDC to us wx geeks) has released the April global temperature anomalies.

Here it is:

Ctsy. NOAA NCDC

The red dots indicate areas that were warmer than normal, and the blue dots are areas colder than normal. The bigger the dot, the greater the departure from normal. Notice how many of the red dots are in the far North.

Now look at the global temps for ALL of 2008.

From NCDC NOAA

You see the same thing.
Now here is one more piece of information.

Climate models have improved dramatically over the last twenty years. The early models were crude, but all of the models have been very consistent, in forecasting the greatest warming (from increasing Carbon Dioxide levels) to be in the far North. In Science, a prediction that verifies adds weight to a theory. A theory that makes prediction, after prediction, and keeps verifying, soon comes to have a high level of acceptance among scientists. The images above are just one of hundreds of verifications, seen around the world over the last twenty years.

Climate model forecast of global temps. at end of this century. Compare the warming at the top of the globe, with the previous anomaly images.

This is why there is such a high consensus among climate scientists, that we may be running out of time, to deal with greenhouse gases. I showed the April image on air Friday night. When I show anything to do with climate, I get emails like the one I received tonight:

Subject: GW lunacy

interesting that you make a big deal about the april climate, but i don’t remember you doing so on a cooler month. Your global warming hysteria has become political.

Just to be clear, I don’t do politics. You will see nothing here on the current climate legislation. Yes, I am very much in favour of doing something to srop greenhouse gas emissions globally. We have no choice. REALLY- WE HAVE NO CHOICE. I will leave the political arguments to others. The Science is much more interesting. I just hope  something that works is done, because my kids, and grand kids will have to live with the consequences if we do not. So will yours.

Oh, if you are wondering about those other months that I supposedly am not mentioning. If we get a major volcanic eruption, or a very strong La Nina, we might get one.

It will be temporary though. The CO2 is still increasing, and it will overwhelm the temportary cooling of such events fairly quickly. Dr. James Hansen of NASA says, even a quiet sun with no sunspots (A new Maunder Minimum) would only stop the temp. rise for about 7 years. The CO2 would rise so much, that we would start warming again within a decade.

We tend to think of the atmosphere over us as a gigantic entity. Only astronauts can escape it, but they don’t have to go very high. You might be surprised to know, that by the time the solid rocket boosters burn out , two minutes after launch, the Astronauts in the Shuttle are looking at a nearly black sky. They are already above 95% of the atmosphere. Just two to three minutes from a sunny, and blue Florida sky to the black of space.

I offer in evidence the image below, taken yesterday from Atlantis:

From Space Shuttle Atlantis - 500km above Earth. Click for full res.

Look at the thin blue line around Earth, behind the Hubble Telescope. That’s our atmosphere. Basically the “whole shootin match” as we would say in Oklahoma!

Go Atlantis!

Later,

Dan

I have written little here about the Oceans. I only had one graduate level course in Oceanography, and since I work in Meteorology, it is not a science I keep up with on a day to day basis. However, I have been following this story, and it’s as sad and telling of modern society as they come.

Charlie the Tuna on American Samoa (from wikpedia)

Do you remember the Starkist Tuna commercials back in the 1960′s and 70′s? The catch phrase is always SORRY CHARLEY. The poor fish is just not good enough to be caught. These days, tuna fisherman will take Charlie and every cousin. They will take anybody, and they do. Charlie is being hunted to extinction.

Cod in Newfoundland 1880's from Queen Eliz. II Library St. John NL.

It’s a story that is eerily reminiscent of what happened to the once mighty Atlantic Cod. Early Americans wrote of how the oceans off of New England were teeming with the Cod. No way it was said, could we ever fish enough of them to impact the population.

They’re all mostly gone now, along with the livelihoods of the fisherman who fought the stringent quotas that were proposed to save them. Simply put, there is no more Atlantic Cod fishery. Just like the Bison, and dozens of other species, that man liked on the dinner table, or even just to hunt.

The problem with Tuna is Sushi. It’s a delicacy in Japan, and the price per kilogram is astronomical. It will likely be fished until it’s gone.

Many sushi places will not serve endangered tuna. Sustainable Sushi can be had. Pic from Thomas Lu, and Greenpeace.

In the Atlantic and Mediterranean, it’s the Blue Fin Tuna that’s endangered. In the Pacific, it’s Yellow Fin Tuna. Both are being caught as fast as they can. The organization that was formed to stop the collapse of the fishery is the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). They met last November and the U.S. (based on recommendations of NOAA Scientists) pushed for a moratorium on fishing. Not likely.

We are talking about an organization whose own scientists say is out to lunch. They called the ICCAT’s management of the fishery an “International Disgrace”. I won’t go into the details, but you can get them on the World Wildlife Funds website. NOAA has plenty to say too. Just like the Cod fishery, the restrictions passed were very weak. So much so, that virtually every scientist who is familiar with the situation says that the fishery is nearing collapse.

Now, I do not like to eat fish, let’s be clear about that at the start. Still, I cannot see how people can eat something when it will very likely lead to the collapse of an entire species. Most likely, it’s because they don’t know they are doing it.

You now do know.

Which is why I am writing about fish instead of thunderstorms.

Everyone is talking about Star Trek right now.  The new movie is a big hit. (We are still talking fish here by the way-bear with me. I’m not Tom Clancy, and I’m from Oklahoma, it takes me a minute to get to the point.) I thought that the Star Trek movie (where they go back in time to save the Whales) would really get peoples attention, and that we as humans would do something to save them and our Oceans. Nope. Japan gets a double whammy in this post. They are fighting any meaningful protection for most species of Whales too.

Now, if you read this journal regularly, you are not likely the type who would say something like “who cares about a stupid fish!” If you are the type then why read this when People Magazine can be had at half off!

Still, just in case it was in the back of your mind, I want to end with a lesson in Ecology.

Pisaster ochraceus.

Pisaster Ochraceus is a Keystone Species courtesy NOAA

It’s a starfish.

Robert T. Paine, a zoologist in Washington State, did some experiments, and wrote a now famous paper in 1969. He was studying the coastal ecology on Northwest Washington State. He found that when some species were removed from a coastal environment , along the Washington Coast, that not much happened to the ecosystem. It adjusted.

When he removed that species of starfish though, it had major ramifications. He called the Pisaster ochraceus a KEYSTONE SPECIES. This concept has become accepted across all of Biology and Ecology in the years since.

Keystone species are defined in wikipedia this way: A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionate effect on its environment relative to its abundance. Such species affect many other organisms in an ecosystem, and help to determine the types and numbers of various others species in a community. (corrected specie to species- sorry for the typo)

The problem, is that many times, we do not know which species is the keystone species! We may one day kill off yet another species and find out that it directly impacts our food supply. Think of it this way. Much of the oxygen you are breathing right now, did not come from trees. It came from tiny microscopic organisms called phytoplankton in the ocean. Want to wipe them out?

Someone once asked me how it was possible to wipe out a species of fish when oceans cover 70% of the planet to a depth of nearly 4 kilometers!

Easy.

Most of that water is in a cold and dark place. The temperature is just above freezing, and no light ever reaches it. Only the top 300 meters of the ocean see sunlight, and only the top 100 meters get enough sunlight for photosynthesis. Most of the tropical oceans are biological deserts too. With ships running 50km nets all over the Pacific and massive armadas of Tuna fishers from Turkey (Who mostly ignore what little regulations exist), it won’t take long until someone really means it when they say Sorry Charlie.

Something to think about next time you are in a Sushi restaurant, or the grocery store by the canned tuna or the seafood counter.

Later,

Dan

Sources:

WWF website Greenpeace,  Wikipedia, and http://www.washington.edu/research/pathbreakers/1969g.html

also:  Environmental Science by Richard T. Wright and NOAA

A professor of “Mining Geology” has written a book on Climate change. You get these books from time to time. They are actually quite lucrative. Conspiracy theorists like to be told they are not crazy, and will pay gladly for the privilege. In his book, Ian Plimer makes some rather interesting claims about the sun being a meteorite of some kind. Unfortunately for him, the Australian newspaper got a well known Astrophysicist to review it. I do not think it could have possibly been stated better.

See below:
Michael Ashley | May 09, 2009

Article from: The Australian
Heaven and Earth
By Ian Plimer
Connor Court, 503pp, $39.95
ONE of the peculiar things about being an astronomer is that you receive, from time to time, monographs on topics such as “a new theory of the electric universe”, or “Einstein was wrong”, or “the moon landings were a hoax”.

The writings are always earnest, often involve conspiracy theories and are scientifically worthless.

One such document that arrived last week was Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth. What makes this case unusual is that Plimer is a professor — of mining geology — at the University of Adelaide. If the subject were anything less serious than the future habitability of the planet Earth, I wouldn’t go to the trouble of writing this review.

Plimer sets out to refute the scientific consensus that human emissions of CO2 have changed the climate. He states in his acknowledgments that the book evolved from a dinner in London with three young lawyers who believed the consensus. As Plimer writes: “Although these three had more than adequate intellectual material to destroy the popular paradigm, they had neither the scientific knowledge nor the scientific training to pull it apart stitch by stitch. This was done at dinner.”

This is a remarkable claim. If Plimer is right and he is able to show that the work of literally thousands of oceanographers, solar physicists, biologists, atmospheric scientists, geologists, and snow and ice researchers during the past 100 years is fundamentally flawed, then it would rank as one of the greatest discoveries of the century and would almost certainly earn him a Nobel prize. This is the scale of Plimer’s claim.

Before reading any further, I examined Plimer’s publication list on the University of Adelaide website to see what he has published in refereed journals. There are a scant 17 such papers since 1994, two as first author with the titles “Manganoan garnet rocks associated with the Broken Hill Pb-Zn-Ag orebody” and “Kasolite from the British Empire Mine”. Absolutely nothing on climate science.

Now, before I am accused of attacking the man and not the argument, let me point out that scientists regard peer-reviewed journal publications as fundamental for advancing science. They allow ideas to be exchanged, tested, improved on and, quite frequently, discarded. If Plimer can do what he claims, and can prove that human emissions of CO2 have no effect on the climate, then he owes it to the scientific community and, in fact, humanity, to publish his arguments in a refereed journal.

Perhaps we will find a stitch-by-stitch demolition of climate science in his book, as promised? No such luck. The arguments that Plimer advances in the 503 pages and 2311 footnotes in Heaven and Earth are nonsense. The book is largely a collection of contrarian ideas and conspiracy theories that are rife in the blogosphere. The writing is rambling and repetitive; the arguments flawed and illogical.

He recycles a graph, without attribution, from Martin Durkin’s Great Global Warming Swindle documentary, neglecting even to make the changes that Durkin made following an outcry over the fact that the past two decades of temperature measurements had been mysteriously deleted.

Plimer claims that scientists such as himself, who do not agree with the consensus, are labelled deniers, “yet their scientific doubts are not addressed”. Nothing could be further from the truth. All of Plimer’s arguments have been addressed ad nauseam by patient climate scientists on websites or in the literature.

To appreciate the errors in Plimer’s book you don’t have to be a climate scientist. For example, take the measurement of the global average CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. This is obviously important, so scientists measure it with great care at many locations across the world.

Precision measurements have been made daily since 1958 at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, a mountain-top site with a clear airflow unaffected by local pollution. The data is in excellent agreement with ice cores from several sites in Antarctica and Greenland. Thousands of scientific papers have been written on the topic, hundreds of scientists are involved from many independent research groups.

Plimer, however, writes that a simple home experiment indoors can show that in a week, CO2 can vary by 75 parts per million by volume, equal to about 40 years’ worth of change at the present rate. He thinks this “rings alarm bells” on the veracity of the Mauna Loa data, which shows a smoothly rising concentration.

While it is undoubtedly true that if you measure CO2 in your home it could vary by large amounts from day to day — depending, for example, on whether you have the windows open or closed, or how many people are in the house at the time — this is not the right way to measure a global average. That’s why scientists go to mountain-tops or Antarctica or to the isolated Cape Grimm on the Tasmanian coast rather than measuring CO2 in their living rooms.

Incredible as it may seem, this quality of argument is typical of the book. While the text is annotated profusely with footnotes and refers to papers in the top journals, thus giving it the veneer of scholarship, it is often the case that the cited articles do not support the text. Plimer repeatedly veers off to the climate sceptic’s journal of choice, the bottom-tier Energy and Environment, to advance all manner of absurd theories: for example, that CO2 concentrations actually have fallen since 1942.

Plimer believes “global warming” occurring on Mars, Triton, Jupiter and Pluto proves human emissions of CO2 don’t affect Earth’s climate. He believes that once CO2 levels reached 200ppmv (about half of today’s value) the CO2 had absorbed almost all the infrared energy it could, and further increases will not have much effect. He believes global warming does not lead to biological stress. He believes volcanoes emit significant quantities of chlorofluorocarbons. He believes the sun formed on the collapsed core of a supernova. All these ideas are so wrong as to be laughable: they do not offer an “alternative scientific perspective”.

Plimer probably didn’t expect an astronomer to review his book. I couldn’t help noticing on page120 an almost word-for-word reproduction of the abstract from a well-known loony paper entitled “The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass”. This paper argues that the sun isn’t composed of 98 per cent hydrogen and helium, as astronomers have confirmed through a century of observation and theory, but is instead similar in composition to a meteorite.

It is hard to understate the depth of scientific ignorance that the inclusion of this information demonstrates. It is comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis.

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.

Michael Ashley is professor of astrophysics at the University of NSW.

When I was young, if you were an Astronaut, you were famous. Everyone knew what you looked like. Not so anymore. The public fascination with space waned after the Moon landing and it has not recovered. These days, the only way an Astronaut gets famous, is if he dies or gets caught in a sordid love triangle. Astronauts are not household names anymore.

Some of the reasons for this may be the general lack of Science education in this country. Some have called it a war on Science. Based on some emails  I get from this journal, I tend to agree with them. It extends beyond climate change, and Biology to almost every facet of Earth Science. Some of the statements I hear political leaders make on Science, are stunningly ignorant of the very basics.

The Astronauts flying on the next Shuttle mission deserve some REAL public recognition. This mission is going to be one of the most difficult and dangerous missions ever attempted by NASA. The previous administrator of NASA (Sean O’Keefe) cancelled it for just that reason, but the public and (especially) the scientific community pushed hard for it to be flown. A new NASA Administrator put it back on the schedule. An article in SCIENCE this week suggests that it was his reluctance to approve the mission led to him being replaced.

I’ve had the privilege of talking with two Apollo Astronauts and even strapped into some simulators. (Zero G movement is easy, as long as you don’t care where you go. Try a task and it’s much more difficult than you can imagine). These Astronauts have trained very hard for these 5 days. The risk of death is about 2% for each Shuttle mission. Would you drive to work tomorrow if you had a 2% chance of dying? I wouldn’t.

They will.

NASA picture of the Hubble Telescope.

You probably know already the task ahead for these Astronauts. They are going to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. No telescope has done more to answer the fundamental questions of Physics since Galileo’s (Which is still working in Italy, but good luck getting to look through it!).

Two new cameras will be added along with fresh batteries and new gyroscopes. The new Wide Field Camera will be 10-30 times more sensitive than the previous one! If it all goes well, Hubble will be astoundingly better than before. It’s hoped that it will last until 2014.

It might still be working when the new James Webb telescope sees it’s first star light. The JWT will be the most advanced telescope ever made and will no doubt make profound discoveries. Testing for this telescope is going on only 9 miles away from where I sit writing this, at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

From NASA web.

This mission will use dozens of tools made especially for the mission. It will indeed be dangerous. Remember that satellite collision awhile back? Well some of that debris is orbiting at around 500km. Where Hubble is. When this flight launches, a rescue Shuttle will be on the pad at KSC, just in case. (Addition May 9th: Former Mission Control Scientist James Oberg wrote more about the rescue possibilities and orbital mechanics on MSNBC’s web site.

It will take multiple space walks to do the job, and NASA has collected the best and the brightest of the “Right Stuff” to do it. Two members of the crew have repaired Hubble before. It will be the last repair mission on Hubble. The Shuttle is about to be retired and when the computers and the gyros fail in about 5 years, Hubble will see no more light from across an unimaginable distance of Space and time.

Just 100 years ago, astronomers thought that the Universe and the Galaxy we inhabit, were one and the same. Those fuzzy spiral “nebula” visible in the best telescopes were thought to be relatively nearby. We really had no idea of just how far away they were and how big the galaxy was. It was Astronomer Edwin Hubble who figured out a way to measure the distance to these galaxies. He used a type of star called Cepheid Variable. He realized that these gave him what astronomers now call a standard candle.

In 1998 Hubble stared at what looked like an empty spot in the sky near the Big Dipper. The 10 day exposure showed millions of galaxies at distances too great to fathom.

Think of  it this way. Look at a street light in the far distance. You can tell if it’s near or far, because you know from experience how bright street lights are. If you had some good scientific equipment, you could measure the light from a nearby street light and assuming the distant one is about as bright, you could with some fairly simple math, get a very good estimate of the distance to the far one.

This is exactly what Edwin Hubble did! He found out that these so called nebula were galaxies like our own, but at incredible distances of 250 million light years, and even further. We have now made measurements of galaxies nearly 13 billion light years away. We can only see 13.5 billion light years, because the universe is that old. Light from farther away, could not have reached us yet! (See my previous post on this).

From NASA web site. Click image to go there.

Now we know that we truly are, a grain of sand, in a vast cosmos. There are, however, still fundamental questions to be answered. Most of the universe is invisible to we humans. It’s full of what Cosmologists call dark matter.

What is it?

NOBODY knows. The newly improved Hubble Telescope just might answer that question.

For 7 NASA Astronauts. That’s worth the 2%.

On behalf of Scientists, and Science lovers world wide.

THANK YOU.