Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

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

What's the connection between these three famous scientists? Read on!

The class that most impressed me while at university was not taught by one of my meteorology professors. Not that I didn’t have some good ones. One became a provost of the University of Oklahoma, and another has written two text books that are considered the gold standard on dynamics (read that as mean math) and makes frequent appearances on the Discovery Channel with Tornadoes bearing down on him!

The professor who taught me the most about science. Duane Roller.

Instead it was Duane Roller and his class on the history of science. It had a major impact on me.

What he taught me I think has a great deal of relevance to the political atmosphere this week surrounding the stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit at the Univ. of East Anglia in the UK.

I’m convinced that we are living through a period that will be looked upon in history of science texts in much the same way we now look back on the controversy around Galileo and Darwin.

They all had ground shaking discoveries that were diametrically opposed to the establishment of the time. Galileo on our place in the Cosmos. Darwin on man’s place among the life on Earth.

In Galileo’s day it was the Catholic Church which was the establishment. In Darwin’s time it was a deeply religious society raised on a belief that humans were created intact a few thousand years before.

Bring us now to the present day. The discoveries in this case were not by any one person, but several big names can be associated with them. Roger Revelle, Guy Calendar, Charles Keeling, and James Hansen among hundreds. This of course was the discovery that humans were having a very serious impact on our climate.

In this case the establishment is as well funded as the Catholic Church was in Galileo’s day, and just as powerful. The fossil fuel industry and those associated with it.

This time it’s not one person who has to face the establishment against him, but an entire group of scientists who are woefully unprepared to deal with a well funded disinformation campaign.

Kevin Grandia and John Littlemore contribute to one of the best investigative environmental blogs online. They have  written a great post on this. (and Littlemore with James Hoggan, an even better book).

It’s no wonder that the average person on the street does not know what to think about the climate change issue! They are victims of a well organized effort to keep it that way. I started writing this Wild Wild Science Journal in part because I could scarcely believe some of the questions I was getting. Especially in regard to climate change science.

This is not a secret conspiracy, but a well funded under the table campaign to sow doubt. The scientists trying to find out just what it is we face and the risk it poses are up against real professionals. The stolen climate emails show their exasperation at this without doubt.

What they do not show is any cover up or fudging of data. (Despite what you may have read on climate denier blogs – which based on some good reporting by DeSmog blog are in several cases funded by fossil fuel companies!)

The press has done a fairly good job of covering this issue. The best video journalism online may belong to the retired UK science correspondent named “potholer54″ on you tube. He wisely prefers to remain anonymous. Before you believe political pundits calling climate science a fraud- watch it:

One of the best written pieces I’ve seen is this one at the Columbia Journalism Review.

I have collected a few quotes on the issue that are worth posting here as well.

from Brad Johnson via Only In It for the Gold:

“Evidently due to this e-mail conspiracy, Arctic sea ice is at historically low levels, Australia is on fire,the northern United Kingdom is underwater, and the world’s glaciers are disappearing.”

****

“I called this whole thing a non-event because it’s manufactured drama. It is not the smoking gun, it doesn’t discredit climatological research showing the Earth is warming, and it doesn’t show that scientists are some sort of priesthood guarding their domain. As Real Climate points out, it’s not what’s in the files that’s interesting, it’s what’s not in them: nothing about huge conspiracies, nothing about this all being faked. If this is such damning evidence, where’s that evidence?”
Dr. Phil Plait Astronomer-Bad Astronomy

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From SLASHDOT:

“From my point of view, the most important issue is whether anything has been added to or subtracted from the scientific picture of global warming. The answer is simple. Nothing has changed. It remains true that the temperature has warmed over 1.2 degrees last century. It remains true, that the sea level has risen by about 2 inches over the last century, and that’s enough to erode 60 feet around average beech. It remains true that glaciers are warming. And it remains true that the ocean is more acidic than it used to be because of the build up of carbon dioxide.”

Michael Oppenheimer (Climate Scientist IPCC Author)

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and from Joe Romm Fellow of the AAAS
(Physicist by training who has done the defending the climate researchers have so desperately needed)

“The fact that these climate-skeptics were prepared to take these e-mails, pore over them for some choice quotes (which didn’t even look incriminating to me out of context), blatantly misinterpret them without making any kind of good-faith effort to understand the context or the science behind it, and trumpet it all out as some kind of ‘disproval’ of global warming (which wouldn’t have been the case even if they were right), just goes to show that they’re simply not interested in either learning the science, or engaging in a real debate. And it’s in itself pseudo-scientific behavior in action: Decide there’s a big conspiracy of fraud behind climate change, and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.”

The great disconnect between the climate experts and the public. The question was whether humans are changing our climate. I'm on the side of every major science organization on the planet, and 97% of publishing climate scientists. Let's just say I like those odds.

It’s interesting to note that climate change theory is based on a very simple discovery that carbon dioxide blocks long wave radiation. Add more CO2 to a planets atmosphere and it gets warmer. This has been known for a hundred years.

No sane scientist doubts this. It’s basic radiation physics. The only question is how fast it’s happening, and how fast will it happen in the future.

The best science right now is that doubling the CO2 in our atmosphere will raise the planets temperature about 3C on average. This was what researchers thought 100 years ago and they have a ton of science that says the same thing today.

The consequences of such a dramatic change in our climate over such a short period are as of yet unknown with certainty. So far the worlds best scientists have underestimated the consequences.

I quoted the renowned Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson awhile back. It’s apropos here:

“The laws of physics are real – everything else is just opinion.”

Could we trip a climate switch and bring on catastrophe? No one knows for certain, but the scientists trying to find out are thanked by having their names dragged through the mud by people who understand little more about science than what they read on a website, and approve of criminal acts like theft.

Darwin and Galileo were vindicated by doing good science in the face of powerful opposition. This time you have an overwhelming consensus of the brightest physicists on Earth. They will someday be vindicated as well because they are doing good science.

Some of our descendants will hear about all this from a history of science professor. I think the lecture will be about the most important scientific discovery of the age and how it was fought tooth and nail by the carbon based establishment of the day.

I wonder what the planet’s climate will be like outside the classroom?

later,

Dan

ps Joe Romm put together a press interview with several of the top climate experts on Friday. Listen to it here.

Darwin Exhibition last Fall in London- Dan's picture

It was an idea that did nothing less than revolutionise Science. It all started 150 ears ago today when Charles Darwin published the famous book “On The Origin of The Species”. It’s always amazed me how few people have read it. I suspect that very few of those who still criticise it have. Almost everyone who has read it, thinks it’s genius and wonders why no one thought of it before!

Yes, it’s incompatible with a literal reading of the fundamental writings of Islam and Christianity, but only a literal reading. I know many people with deeply held religious beliefs who accept Darwin’s Big idea as the work of genius. If a supreme being with unlimited power wanted to make an earth with millions of species, then Darwin figured out how he did it!

No matter what you think, Natural Selection published by Darwin 150 years ago today has become the foundation for modern biology and life science. It’s so simple it has to be right. If you have never read it, pick it up. It’s not a long read, and it’s nothing to be afraid of.

Here’s to you Charley!

dan

To me the most fascinating part of synoptic forecasting is Satellite Meteorology. I can still remember working in Tulsa at KJRH TV where we had a GOES Unifax machine. Every 15 minutes a high resolution image would spit out. During the day the resolution was 1 km on a visible image. This was good enough to see jet contrails at times.

Jet Contrails from the NASA Modis Satellite- It sees true colour. GOES does not. These contrails keep the nights warmer and days slightly cooler over much of America.

One afternoon a large contrail was visible across Northeast Oklahoma and I ran outside the station and there it was! I was looking at the bottom of it, the satellite was seeing the top from 36,000km away. This seems like no big deal now, but in 1978, it was a very big deal!

TV viewers have since grown very accustomed to seeing satellite images on TV weather reports and now even online. What the average person does not know is just how incredibly valuable these images are.

It was once said that if the GOES Satellites could see nothing but hurricanes in the ocean, they would be worth 100 times the money spent to build them and put them in orbit. I certainly agree.

They do however see MUCH more than just hurricanes. Read on learn some of the incredible ways these satellites are making accurate forecasts and early severe weather warnings possible.

First some misconceptions.

1. Satellite images are not in colour. TV Weather graphic equipment remaps the cloud images over colour maps. The next generation of weather satellites GOES R will be able to see almost true colour. It is really not that necessary to forecasting anyhow.

2. These satellites are VERY high. About 1/10th the way to the moon. The reason is that at 36k km they orbit the earth once a day, and since the Earth turns once a day, they appear to hover over the same spot. If one breaks, the Space Shuttle cannot even get one tenth of the way up to fix them.

3. They are called GOES for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite. We use two if them in the USA. Goes East and GOES West. They are in orbit over the Equator and cannot see well in the high latitudes because of the curve of the Earth. Alaska, and Northern Canada forecasters use the Polar Orbiting satellites, but only get a few pics a day. The current operational east satellite is GOES 12. GOES 13 and 14 are in orbit, but in storage until needed.

GOES Water Vapor IR imagery Image from July 4 05Z

4. They take mages every 15 minutes and can do an image over a small area every 7 minutes in rapid scan mode.

5. They do not have cameras per say. They have sensors that detect electromagnetic radiation. The visible light that your camera records when you take a picture is electromagnetic radiation. It’s light in the visible part of the spectrum.

X-rays and the radio waves from your favourite FM station are “light” as well. We humans just cannot see that light. So is infra-red radiation that “night goggles” use. You can buy video cameras now that see in the IR wavelengths.

The GOES imaging sensors actually see electromagnetic radiation in 5 different bands. One visible and 4 in the infra red. The GOES also has another sensor called the sounding radiometer. The sounder imager can actually detect temperatures and moisture at different levels in the atmosphere. Even under clear skies.

We can actually take a sounding without launching a weather balloon. (They cost you the tax payer about 100$ a pop too)

Even in daytime we get both the IR and visible images. At night we only get the IR of course. The visible channel can resolve objects bigger than about 1 km square. The IR imager is 4 km. One image you see rarely on TV is the Water Vapor IR images. These images look almost like an atmospheric X-ray and are very valuable to forecasters like me.

IR Image from GOES East Midnight 4 July 2009. See the storms in Kansas!

Using water vapor imagery we can see the outlines of troughs and even upper level low pressure centers called vorticity maximums. These “vort maxes” can kick off convection or intensify a low pressure system. Skies may clear suddenly behind them. Knowing their position also allows us to compare the real world with a forecast model. If the model has forecasted it well,then confidence in the models forecast is increased!

Since the amount of radiation an object gives off is related to it’s temperature, the IR images also can tell us the height of clouds and thunderstorms! The colder the cloud, the higher it is! High ice crystal cirrus clouds show up bright white on IR images, where ground fog is sometimes hard to see since it’s the same temp. as the ground.

A new technique has been developed that subtracts one channel from another and makes it possible to see fog at night. We call it the “fog Product“. High clouds over a fog layer will usually keep it from dissipating as fast so seeing the different layers of clouds is very important.

Lines of building cumulus clouds can be seen long before radar echoes show up. Many times when the atmosphere is unstable, these building towers are the first clue that severe convection is imminent and a tornado watch may be issued.

Geostationary weather satellites are over Europe and Asia, along with the Middle East, So we can actually see every corner of the globe. Not the high latitudes though, we only get images of the poles a few times a day. Forecasters in these high latitudes get very good at interpreting the lower and higher resolution images from the polar orbiting satellites. If you have the money, you can download the images from these satellites as they pass overhead. Lots of people do it!

Temperature structure of the atmosphere near Huntsville AL. From GOES. Numbers on the right are indexes that tell the forecaster about instability etc.

There are other sensors on these satellites as well. If you crash in a remote island, your plane will have an ELT on it. This Emergency Locating Transmitter will be picked up by the GOES. Detection of solar storms is also made possible by GOES along with other satellites. Arctic Ice in shipping lanes is also monitored with GOES. If there were GOES in 1912, maybe the Titanic would have missed that berg.

Yes, it cost a lot of money to put these satellites up in space and even more to build them, however the images they provide are very nearly priceless.

My son underneath one of the 5 first stage engines.

There is only one upright model of a Saturn V Moon Rocket. It’s right here in Huntsville, and it’s next to the first Saturn V ever built. (The real one is in a building to protect it!). The rocket that took man to the Moon is 363 feet high. That’s 36 stories.

Saturn 5 mock up- next to the real thing (enclosed).

It’s one of only three remaining, and is a priceless object of history. For my readers in other states, and other countries, it’s well worth a visit. The U.S. Space and Rocket Center is also located here, and is the home of Space Camp.

The Saturn 5 was built here in Huntsville and many residents still remember their windows rattling as the GIANT engines were tested in the mid 1960’s.

The real Saturn in the Davidson Center in Huntsville. It was the first one built. Only three Saturn Moon Rockets remain.

Walking through the Davidson Center is a truly awe inspiring experience. I am very lucky to have met two people who rode one of these beasts to the Moon.

WHNT -TV, the TV station I work for, installed a high definition camera at the top of the Saturn. I thought you might enjoy seeing a time lapse of Sunset from the top of the rocket. Taken on Wednesday evening 20 May 2009.

sunset0520

The photos are mine.

Later,

dan