Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

Sir Ernest Shackleton's Hut at Cape Royds Antarctica. Mount Erebus, an active volcano in the background.

The only continent that humans did not naturally colonise is Antarctica. As I write this there are only about 250 people on the entire continent. They will be there through the long dark polar night. It will be spring before the New York Air Guard can fly a plane back in.

Robert Falcon Scott's hut is a 15 minute walk from McMurdo Base.

The first person to reach the Pole at the bottom of the world did so just 99 years ago. Having been there, I now have a deep respect for those who came first. Antarctica is a difficult and dangerous place in the 21st century.

The early explorers who survived there were more than just brave. They were shining examples of human curiosity and endurance.

You might think that all traces of their visits are gone now. Buried under snow and ice.

You would be wrong.

Food on the shelf. A century old. The Heinz logo has changed little!

These clothes have been hanging on to dry for a century. Two world wars, the moon landing, the new millennium. They hang still. The clock has stopped at 1907.

Antarctica is a frozen desert. It preserves well everything left there. There are two spots where you can literally walk through a door and go back 100 years. One is at McMurdo Base and the other is not too far away at Cape Royds.

A newspaper in Shackleton's hut that looks like it is a month old. It's over 100 years. My travel colleague Ann Posegate took the pic.

They are the huts built by Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton.

Scott used the hut at McMurdo on his attempt at the Pole in 1910-1912. He reached it  a month after Amundsen. Scott  died with is men before he could return.

Shackleton never reached the Pole, but is a legendary figure for the rescue of his men after his ship became trapped and crushed by the ice. He sailed in a tiny boat across the most treacherous ocean on the planet to South Georgia Island. He returned with help and rescued every single man.

That journey remains the greatest “endurance” of  humans on record.

He is buried at South Georgia, where he died suddenly, on a future expedition.

Sir Ernest Shackleton's Hut at Cape Royds

Shackleton's weather station. I had to have my pic taken here.

When you go into these huts, you walk into another world. A world that no longer exists except in history books and old pictures. Except it does still exist. It is right in front of your eyes. In colour, not an old yellowed photograph. You can touch it. You can smell it. You can feel it.

The cold and dry have preserved everything as Scott, Shackleton and their men left it. Under Shackleton’s hut they just discovered several crates of whiskey. It’s likely still good!

Interior of Shackleton's hut. Notice the hanging socks.

These huts are now protected places.

Permission is needed to enter them. Work is being done to make sure they are protected against the ravages of time and the curious. They are likely safe for a long time to come.

Very few people get this far South into Antarctica. Tourism for the most part is much further North along the Antarctic Peninsula.

I know that most people will never have the chance to stare out the same window that Shackleton looked through.

It was a humbling experience. No one who enters these huts leave them unmoved.

No One.

(Note: These pictures are for non commercial, educational use only. Any other use requires my permission.)

The war on science in America shows no signs of abating. If anything, it’s gotten much worse.

While I try hard to avoid politics on this journal, when people try to change science to their own beliefs or rewrite history for the same reasons, I’m going to talk about it. It doesn’t matter what political party you belong to. This case has to do with some political extremists who run the Texas public schools. Just find me some crazy on the other side of the political spectrum attacking science, and I will gladly give equal time. It’s not about the politics, it IS about the science.

From Climate Progress by Joe Romm. What is happening to science in Texas is downright scary. The cartoon is kinda funny though...

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has this cartoon up. It speaks volumes.

There is not much more that I can add except to say that I was not kidding in the title of this post. If you have kids in Texas public schools, you should probably consider  pulling them out and get them a real science education.

Astronomer Phil Plait has an excellent post on this as well.  It’s not an exaggeration to say that the faculty of almost every science department at every major university in America, are incredulous over these kind of things.

The reason for all of this is the lack of basic science education in the first place. The public’s idea of what a scientific theory is and the reality of what a scientific theory is are totally different.

In many ways- Scientific theories OUT RANK Laws.

Scientific method has taken us from living in wood huts, to walking on the Moon and exploring the outer planets in 400 years. See Science Fights back.

Science will win this war. It always has. It will win because science is based on observation and evidence.

Not political belief.

Update: The NYT has published an editorial today on this subject.

Micahel Tobis, over at Only In It For The Gold, is always a worthy read. Today, he had the image below in a post:

Image courtesy of Only In It For The Gold. Click to go there.

For a much more detailed answer, the go to person is Michael Pollan. Here are two article Dr. Pollan wrote for the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html

The second one is best but much longer. It will make your jaw drop.

Open Letter to President Elect Obama

Image of Seismogram at Nevada Seismic Lab in Nevada. The quake in Chile was so strong it is pegging the meters on seismograms world wide this morning.

An 8.8 Magnitude quake has hit Chile. It was recorded at a depth of only 35km. This is very shallow and likely means that  catastrophic damage is possible. Large aftershocks are already being recorded.

Data and images from USGS- about 300,000,000 people were close to the quake. 6 million felt a magnitude 7 quake.

The quake hit when most people were in bed asleep.

The USGS says this quake occurred 230 km north of the location of the 9.5 quake of May 1960. That quake holds the record for the largest magnitude quake measured with instruments. It killed over 1600 people.

Update Saturday afternoon:

A Tsunami Warning remains in effect for many areas of the Pacific. The BBC web site as usual has the best coverage world wide. The pictures of roads and bridges in Chile are frightening. We live on a very dynamic planet. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.

Note: The images in this post are not related to it. They are from a new update on Climate Science published jointly by a large group of climate experts. It’s based on the most recent published papers and is an unofficial, but peer reviewed update of the last IPCC report. I think they match well with the subject of this post. Hopefully they will make the point I’m trying to make.

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I’ve had a bunch of emails and calls this week over the stolen emails from the U. of East Anglia. A thief hacked into a server at the University of East Anglia in the UK. They grabbed a bunch of private and personal emails from some of the climate experts and released carefully selected (cherry picked) bits online. The selections were made to fit the agenda of those who subscribe to the belief that climate science is all an international conspiracy. They also tried to hack into a blog site run by some NASA scientists here in the U.S.

Let me make it clear that I do not deal in stolen material and none of that will be published here. I doubt very many reputable news organisations will either. The thieves will be caught, and I strongly suspect the way it will happen is by tracing back who had what snippet when.

Thousands of papers, by thousands of scientists have led to every major scientific society on the planet endorsing the IPCC reports. So you can believe them, or a gaggle of thieves releasing cherry picked snippets of stolen property.

Yes I used the word thieves not thief. Ask any cop. They will tell you that knowingly dealing in stolen merchandise makes you a thief.

Does it really matter?

No.

What matters is the science.

The science in the journals. Not the fake science written by those with a political cause. Having trouble telling which is which. See Where NOT to get your science.

The AMS put out a statement on this as well Friday. Update: James Hansen the top NASA Climate expert has weighed in with what I think are very sane words.

I’m an optimist and believe most people have a fundamental ability to make logical choices. While the junk science may confuse them initially, when it comes down to it, the choice is simple. To believe the same very small set of shrill voices, or the thousands of peer reviewed papers that have led to every major scientific society on the planet endorsing the IPCC reports.

That’s the choice.

Yes, some will side with the  gaggle of thieves releasing cherry picked snippets of stolen property. Some people distrust anything to do with science and they will side with those who are always looking for a government conspiracy to expose.

Most, however, will make the logical choice.  A few will email me asking for places to get reliable science info without the politics. That I can do, and if I can’t I have a bunch of friends who are much brighter than me, who can.

Just writing this post is not something I planned to do, but I have come across a couple of very well written posts, that are  telling about those using  shrill claims of hoax and global conspiracy.

The first is a post on Real Climate by Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS. He is one of the World’s top experts on Climate Physics. It’s well worth reading: (I’ve inserted a few line breaks for formatting)

“…let’s examine what is actually happening in the public sphere. There are undeniably people who fervently do not wish for results of the science to be true. This can be motivated many things – vested interest, inclination, background etc. Regardless of why that exists, it undoubtedly does.

However, among the scientific community no-one doubts that humans are causing CO2 (and other GHGs) to rise, no-one is confused about the fact that there is a greenhouse effect and that we are enhancing it, and no-one is in denial of the fact that the temperatures (as predicted) are in fact warming. This information, and the vast amount of ancillary data, theory and modelling that exists has led the science community to warn that continued emissions of GHGs risk changing the climate substantially. Given the first group of people’s inclination to not want this to be true, there have been (and continue to be) determined efforts to undermine the scientific conclusions.

One of the most effective tactics is to continually claim that data is being hidden and that the process is not open and transparent. This is successful, not because anything is actually being hidden, but because regardless of what data is available you can always ask for more.

Five years ago it was a demand than Mann make his code and data available – it was, and nothing changed. A couple of years ago the demand was for the GISTEMP data and code – that was made available… and nothing changed. The requests then moved to CRU, who because of their agreements with the Met Centers, can’t release everything in the public domain. This fact has been greatly exploited by people who conveniently ignore it when making ever more harassing demands for ‘the data’.

Whether they get it or not, nothing will change. The target will simply be moved. Meanwhile, the real need for openness and transparency is set back because the vast majority of demands are very clearly partisan and insincere.

… As for the peer-reviewed literature, bad papers (such as are described in the emails) sometimes make it through the process due to various events. Note that the papers in question are just bad – they come to unjustified conclusions based on faulty reasoning, bad analysis, and (often) a desire to get the ‘right’ result. This is not unique to papers that go counter to the mainstream (there are many bad papers on the other side too), but these are the ones that get picked up by the denial-o-sphere and are loudly touted in Senate hearings as if they undermined a century of work.

Improving the functioning of the peer-review system so that this happens less often is a good idea – because it will lessen the chance of bad papers of any stripe wasting everyone’s time. Note that peer-review is simply an (imperfect) filter that allows scientists to focus on work that has passed a least a basic screening (usually). When we have to respond to obviously flawed, but highly publicised, papers it takes us away from doing real research and focusing on issues about which there is genuine (as opposed to manufactured) uncertainty.

… If people want genuine public debate over issues that matter, the way is clear: Stop fuelling fake witchhunts looking for evidence that GW is a hoax, stop continually going back to long debunked talking points, and instead engage with scientists, here and elsewhere, on real questions.

You will actually find scientists of all stripes remarkably keen to talk about their research and it’s implications once you get past the ‘when did you stop hiding your data’ type accusations. Not everyone has unlimited patience in dealing with constant attacks on their integrity that comes with being in the public eye on these issues, and so many choose not to be involved in that public debate at all. That is a shame, but it’s not a mystery.”

There is another rather long piece you really should read as well. Written by Dr. Jeff Masters the co-founder of Weather Underground. It’s a real eye opener.

Read it here.

OK, that’s it.

Back to the science.

It’s really a lot more interesting.

Dan