Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

NASA has produced a very visual display of the warming of the planet over the past 125 years. One thing that is important to realize that almost all of the climate models run with increasing CO2 show that the warming is greatest in the high northern latitudes. In case you are thinking it’s the Sun- see Another Climate Myth is Finally Buried.

From NASA GISS Based ondata from 1884-2008

See the animation: GCMyearly.m4v1.mp4

An astronomer (Anthony Wesley) in OZ first noticed it Sunday. On the eve of the 40th anniversary if the Moon landing. An Earth sized black spot near the South polar regions of Jupiter. It looked remarkably like the images seen when the Shoemaker Levy comet hit Jupiter in 1994.

Image from Anthony Wesley (I rotated it to correct angle) 1555Z 19 July 2009

From NASA Mauna Kea infrared telescope in Hawaii

This image started a mad rush in the astronomical world! Observations from the giant telescopes of the world began and NASA JPL tonight has an IR image showing strong indications that this was indeed an asteroid, or a comet.

Thanks to Phil Plait and his great blog “Bad Astronomy” for the heads up! You should really bookmark his site if you are at all interested in Science/ Astronomy.

The Hubble Telescope, still being calibrated after the Shuttle repair, was quickly turned toward Jupiter. The result is stunning!

We live in a hostile universe, and if something that big had hit Earth, the cockroaches would likely be the largest survivors. The formula for the Kinetic energy of an object is quite simple. KE= 1/2 mass * velocity squared. Double the mass, and the energy doubles. Double the velocity and it goes up 4 times. Do the math on an object of 10,000 metric tons going 60 km/sec.

BIG OUCH. By by dinosaurs, hello Mammals!

Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite

Dan

I have found another  good book that I can highly recommend for Summer consumption.

The book is a bit depressing actually, because it hits home so hard.

Unscientific America- by Chris Mooney

Click to order from Amazon

He discusses the horrible state of science education in America. (Ever seen Jay Leno’s jaywalking segment?)

Without doubt this ignorance of basic science is sowing the seeds of catastrophe. I can hardly believe some of the emails I get on a weekly basis. My personal feeling is that the situation is worse than Mooney thinks!

It’s important to distinguish between ignorance and stupidity here. I have great sympathy for the ignorant, but those who are proudly stubborn, and defend their stupidity, I have little patience for. There almost seems to be a group of people in this country who look down on anyone who has an education. That is truly scary.

Here is an example of what I mean. I received a twitter message implying that global warming was a hoax because it has been cool all summer in Wisconsin. Coldest day in over 100 years this weekend supposedly. It is certainly a gorgeous day here in North Alabama for July. It feels more like September!  We may even approach a record low here tonight as well. (I hope so- I despise summer in these parts with a purple pink passion!)

Does this mean anything scientifically in regard to climate change?

No, of course not. Let me be clear here, this itself shows a basic ignorance of basic scientific knowledge. You might be interested to see what the month of June 2009 has been like on a global basis:

Red dots are above normal. The bigger the dot the warmer it was. From NOAA NCDC

Yup, it’s been cool in Wisconsin and Boston. The month of June 2009 was actually the second warmest month on the instrumental record. If you exclude land, then June 2009 was THE WARMEST month on the instrumental record. Keep in mind though, that one month does not a climate make.

You might be surprised to know that when you run the global climate models to predict the the next 100 years, nearly every run has periods where the planet gets cooler for awhile. Sometimes for over a decade! This is because of the natural variability that exists in the climate system.

Asking how a cool month relates to climate forecasts, is a perfectly valid question. I actually get it frequently. Instead, many, who know nearly nothing of any science, post twitter messages, and blog comments, with statements like “this proves global warming is a hoax”. I’m tempted to reply, “Pardon me while I alert the media, and the world’s top scientists of your opinion!”

I mentioned above. I sometimes wonder if they would still do it, knowing how silly this makes them seem to those who do have a bit of science background.

Thanks to Anthony Broccoli at Dep. Env. Sci Rutgers for this. (Source: Easterling, D. R., and M. F. Wehner (2009), Is the climate warming or cooling?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L08706, doi:10.1029/2009GL037810.

We live in a world where a curious young student can access the best libraries and collections on Earth, via the Internet. Are we allowing our children to waste/ignore  this resource? There seems to be a growing digital divide in the world between those who use the Internet to educate themselves, and those who could care less. To me entertainment is learning new things, and that is true for many of my friends. If we do not allow our students to discover this for themselves, we cannot hope to solve the problem of scientific illiteracy.

Somehow we have instilled in a large section of the population, a belief that anything a little difficult and/or time consuming is work. Telling a child not to worry about a bad grade in math or science is no big deal because you never “got it” either, is an egregious, and damaging error. Newton Minnow, past chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (Brits read OFCOM here), described television as a vast wasteland in the 1960′s. Is the Internet following in it’s footsteps?

Only if we let it.

If you are in the East of North America, enjoy the cool sunshine this weekend. Those of you in the UK….I’m so sorry, try and stay dry! Me, I am off to entertain myself by seeing Harry Potter- that’s entertainment too!

Hundreds of TV weatherman (and Meteorologists who work in TV) around the country received a slick booklet a couple of months back. It was printed by the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank funded in part by Exxon and others. They recently held what they called a “Climate Conference” that itself was funded not by the NSF but by an interesting group of energy companies and right wing foundations. DeSmog Blog did some excellent journalism on this.

The front cover of this pamphlet touted an article by Anthony Watts (Labeled as a Meteorologist, but I can find no evidence he has a degree in any atmospheric science after serious looking). The gist of the article is that the U.S. Temperature record cannot be trusted. It implies that the warming that NOAA scientists have reported over the last century is based on faulty data.

Which is Science and which is Propaganda? It's not that hard to tell.

Apparently he has sent legions of people to go around, and take pictures of hundreds of NOAA reporting stations to show that they are badly sited, and cannot be relied on. The article even has a few cherry picked examples of these badly sited stations. It concludes that we cannot trust what NOAA scientists are telling us because the data is bad. Apparently there are only about 70 good or excellent stations that are acceptably sited to Mr. Watts.

Before discussing the faulty logic in this little piece of propaganda, let’s be clear about what it is not. Specifically, it’s not Science. This was not published to alert NOAA scientists that there was  a problem in their research. To do that, it would have been written in acceptable science form and submitted to a peer reviewed journal. (Since all of the issues it raises have long ago been investigated, and thoroughly settled- it would never get published anyhow)

Instead, the purpose of this pamphlet was to influence the TV folks who mostly have little or no background in Climate Science. The hope was that this would get mentioned on air, and in blogs written by them.

So WATTS WRONG with it??

Plenty.

It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of statistical analysis, and how the U.S. temperature record has been obtained. Certainly some stations are not as well sited as they should be, they were placed to record local weather, and not as a way to measure climate changes. No scientist has EVER had a set of perfect data. Such things do not exist, and there are always corrections that have to be made. In this case, you should remember that corrections for such things as  urban heat islands, and micro climates, are made to adjust for biases.

More importantly, climate scientists are interested not so much in the temperature, but in the DELTA T. The change in temperature. A station with a cold or hot bias, will still show temperature changes. It may show them quite accurately.

Many times the badly sited stations tend to balance each other out. The robustness of the NOAA record has been shown statistically many times in many papers published in peer review. Detailed papers on how the U.S. Temp. record was constructed have been published and debated in numerous peer reviewed journals. One of the experts on this is Tom Karl, the director of the National Climate Data Center in Asheville, NC. He is also the president of the American Meteorological Society.

The NOAA scientists whose research, and science, were attacked in this pamphlet have every right to respond, and respond they did (Here comes the funny part).

They first explained how the record was compiled and went into detail on why the data is considered accurate. They went further though. They assumed that Watts was not WRONG. They took the 70 stations that Watts found acceptable and ran the data with those. They then compared it to their temperature record. See the graph below:

U.S. Temp. Record from NOAA and using Watts 70 stations only. (from NOAA)

OOOOPS! Slain by your own argument!

There are a couple of morals to this story.

1. If you are going to tell a bunch of NOAA scientists they are wrong, then

1. Get a science education, and do your homework first.

2. Do the work to see if your hypothesis makes any sense, before you make a fool of yourself.

3. Send your work to a peer reviewed journal instead of a PR organization that takes money from Exxon.

It was worth the best laugh I had all month, and for that I am grateful! You can read the entire response from NOAA/NCDC here: response-v2.

Later,

Dan

There are few things that calm my soul like a cerulean blue sky full of Cirrus clouds. I cannot remember a time when I walked outside without noticing the sky and being a real lover of sunsets (And sunset photography) the cirrus clouds rarely disappoint.

I just finished reading the best book on cloud I have ever come across and if you have always wondered what those cloud names we weather geeks throw around really mean, then you should definitely get it. It’s less than £6.39 on Amazon.co.uk and under 10$ on Amazon.com in the U.S.

Click the image to order from Amazon (or check your favorite dealer)

The book is by Richard Hamblyn the Chief Meteorologist for the UK Met. Office. After reading it, I can tell we are meteorological soul mates!

I have run across what I think is the most beautiful picture of cirrus, I’ve ever seen tonight. It was taken by a chap named Peter who has a web site called flagstaffotos.com.au . This guy is one incredible photographer.

He has uploaded a bunch of his cloud shots to wikipedia, and granted a lic. The least I can do is show his work! (see below)

Cloud names sound a lot more complicated than they really are. The names we use today were proposed by an amateur English Meteorologist named Luke Howard. Legend has it, that he though it up while riding a horse to a scientific meeting. Hamblyn tells much more of his story in his book. If you love Constable paintings like I do, you are in for a pleasant surprise.

Clouds are named taxonomically now, just like animal and plant species are in Biology. The names, however, are based on Luke Howards original idea, to this day.

Cirrus uncinus and Cirrus spissatus over Swifts Creek, Victoria (Down under mate!) by Peter at flagstaffotos.com.au (Fir0002/Flagstaffotos)

There are three types of clouds. This is the complicated part. Are you ready?

Low

Middle

High

Yea, it’s a bit tough but you will catch on!

It does actually get a bit more detailed. The three types are broken down into 10 Genera of cloud.

1.Cumulus 2.Cumulonimbus 3. Stratocumulus 4. Stratus 5. Altostratus 6. Nimbostratus 7.Altocumulus 8.Cirrus  9. Cirrostratus and 10. Cirrocumulus.

Cirrus spissatus above Cumulus humilis in London (Dan's photo)

That’s it. Now each of these clouds has it’s own species. Lets just talk about number 8. My favourite. Cirrus clouds.

Cirrus fibratus off the coast of Greenland (by Dan)

There is Cirrus uncinus (Notice how the species name is not capitalized, like in taxonomic names), and Cirrus fibratus, Cirrus floccus, Cirrus castellanus, and finally spissatus, intortus, radiatus, vertebratus, and last, but definitely not least- Cirrus duplicatus.

(quit laughing, this is serious!)

In the coming weeks, I will show you some more cirrus clouds, but I doubt they will be as fabulous as that shot. I really must get down to OZ! In the meantime- get the book. It will open up a lifetime of enjoyment, looking at the sky.