Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

Being a history and science buff, I have often wondered what the weather and the sky looked like at great moments in history.

Today is one of those dates. At 13 minutes past 10 PM on Friday April 14, 1865, a gunshot rang out in Fords Theatre at Tenth and E street in Washington.

Forty seven years later, almost to the minute, a lookout shouted “ice berg, dead ahead!” on the Royal Mail Ship Titanic.

I’ve been researching the weather on the day Lincoln was shot, on and off, for quite a few years. It was a beautiful spring day that started with some fog and a heavy due. At the moment John Wilkes Booth fired the fatal shot, it was mostly cloudy with temps. likely in the 50′s.

Jim Bishop in the book THE DAY LINCOLN WAS SHOT reports a full moon rising at the time. This is incorrect. The moon was nearly full, but in the gibbous phase.

It IS possible to show the exact position of the stars at the moment the shot rang out in Washington. I used Stellarium to set the date and time along with the location of Washington. The pictures below are where the stars, the moon and the planet were at that moment, when viewed from the street out front of Ford’s Theatre.

The sky over Washington at 10:14 pm Friday April 14 1865. Notice the moon low in the East-Southeast. Click image for a bigger image.

Looking North at 10:14 PM in Washington April 14th 1865. Notice the big dipper high in the sky. Clouds were likely obscuring the stars somewhat at the time. Image from Stellarium.

The Moon phase at the moment President Lincoln was shot. Click image for higher resolution.

The weather for the Titanic’s sinking is well known.

A large polar high was right on top of the ship that night. The sea was described by many witnesses as like glass. It’s thought this had something to do with not seeing the berg until it was too late. Waves would have splashed against the ice berg and made it more visible.

There was no moon that night and the air temperature was a little below freezing. Unfortunately the water was just above freezing.

Below is the sky that was visible at the moment the ship hit the iceberg. Skies were completely clear with no wind.

View of the sky from the position of the RMS Titanic at 11:40 pm local time 14 April 1912. No trees of course. Just ocean, in all directions. Notice the North Star and Big Dipper. The Milky Way was clearly visible in the Northeast.

Cold stars in a cold sea.

Dan

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

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

****

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)

****

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.