Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

I am a proud member of the International Association of Broadcast Meteorologists. Many of us who do weather on TV and radio realise that we may very well be the only person of science the average person sees each day. Those of us in the IABM take that responsibility very seriously. We strive to give accurate information on not only weather but on science in general.

Paul Gross of the IABM and the chair of the AMS Station Science Committee has an excellent editorial in the most recent issue of the IABM journal UP FRONT. (Full disclosure- Paul is a friend, and I am a member of the committee)

Here is a well reasoned and fact based look at the issue. I deserved wider dissemination than just us TV science types.

Click image for full pdf.

I have my own little mention in the UP FRONT. It is a summary of my trip to Antarctica. You can read it below.

Click to read. TV types- you should consider applying for membership in the IABM.

One of the very best science blogs online is written by astronomer and author Phil Plait. He has been covering the story of the magic wands the Iraqi government has been buying to detect bombs. These things work as well as those copper bracelets you see advertised on late night TV. You know, the ones that are supposed to make you feel great and work better.

They even have sports stars singing their praises! (This advert would be totally banned in most countries)

Horse Hockey

It’s all bunk of course.

There has never been any scientific study (or known physics) for that matter that would indicate that they can do anything except turn your wrist green from wearing it!

Now copper bracelets are one thing. If someone wants to spend their money on them, it’s their business. When people are wasting millions on a product that is so fraudulent the British government has arrested the maker, then that is something different. The sad fact is that it is daily costing lives. Lives of innocent men, women and children. Possibly lives of American servicemen as well.

So click the image below to read Phil’s post and bookmark his site. He is one of the best science writers out there. His book Death from the Skies would be a great one for a high school astronomy class too.

See what I mean. Carl Sagan is turning over in his grave. Before you get smug about how archaic they are in Iraq, open your morning paper and read your horoscope.

Later,
Dan

The National Climate Data Center (NOAA) has released the January global temperature data. January 2010 is the 4th warmest on record globally. What is more interesting is that looking at ocean temps. alone it was the second warmest on record. Only 1998, with it’s very strong El Nino, were the oceans warmer.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the heavy snowfall events of the past 6 weeks along the Eastern Seaboard could very well be related to the fact that the atmosphere holds more water now than 40 years ago. The unusually warm oceans may very well have played a role in the record snow event in Washington. Keep in mind we are talking about climate, and not weather. You cannot ascribe any one event to climate change. You can however say if the changes we have seen would make such an event more likely.

In this case the answer seems to be a “likely yes”.

It would not surprise me to hear some people claim that a blizzard somehow nullifies 100 years of peer reviewed science. Even someone like Donald Trump expressing such ignorance is not really surprising. What IS surprising that some United States Senators, and members of Congress, people who make our laws and run the country, are that ignorant.

These people really have no excuse. They should be ashamed to hold such a high office and be so uninformed.

No matter what party they belong to.

Later,
Dan

Antarctica image from geology.com

As you may know if you read these ramblings frequently, I am headed to the bottom of the world in three weeks. The National Science Foundation accepted an application from myself and Ann Posegate of the Nat. Env. Education Foundation to visit Antarctica to spread the word about the science and the scientists at the bottom of the world.

So once you get selected what happens next? You don’t just hop a plane to New Zealand. (That’s where you leave from). Nope, the first thing you do is read a 34 page sheet of medical forms you have to complete. I didn’t know you could test blood for that many things! I’m just hoping they can do all the tests with one sample! Then there is the dental examination. I have more crowns on display than the Tower of London. (They cost about as much too) It looks like I will be getting some dental work done.

To be sure, the tests make sense. If I survive them!

There are no hospitals in Antarctica and if you suddenly get ill, you have to be flown back to New Zealand. That’s at least a 5 hour jet ride and if no jet is available, an 8 hour ride. Most of the flights in and out of the American bases are flown by the New York Air National Guard. Fortunately for me I do not have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. That’s just for those who will be wintering over in Antarctica. (My wife says that getting to skip that exam means I get to go after all!)

It will be worth it. Oh will it!

Where I will be going in Antarctia (Red Ovals). The ice cores of interest to climate researchers are being taken in West Antarctica. Image from Geology.com ( A great site by the way!)

Very few people will ever visit Antarctica, and even fewer can say they have stood at the very bottom of the world. (Expected temp is -30C) I am not going for travel though. I am going because I want to see for myself the people and the science in the last great wilderness left on planet Earth.

It takes a rare person to work there. Everyone I have met who has done so has several things in common. They are all bright. Very bright. They all seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge. They all know just how important what they are doing is.

In an era where a loud minority of Americans are attacking science for political and or religious reasons, they persevere. In spite of the politics and in spite of the cold. In spite of people stealing their emails and then misinterpreting what they say because they never made it though high school physics. In spite of all that.

The UK Prime Minister called the shrill voices screaming about the stolen climate emails flat earthers’ last week. The news media tends to give these people more coverage than their numbers warrant and I know many climate researchers who wonder what happened to education in America!

In reality though, the numbers have changed little. These are the people that will not change their minds, no matter how many facts and peer reviewed papers you show them. 97% of the world publishing climate researchers will tell you the world is warming and we are causing it, but this small minority will believe a talk radio host who didn’t finish high school over all that!

When you get to that point, you are wasting your breath!

Most people have questions on the science and that’s one reason I spend so much time updating this blog. Most are not really fooled by all those people screaming about a hoax and cover-up. So if you are a climate researcher, take some advice from a synoptic meteorologists who has been in TV for 30 ears. Things aren’t that bad!

The majority gets it. They understand and they are worried. They want to know more and they want to know the real science. Not the politics.

So when I go to Antarctica, I am going to be asking questions about the real science. Not the junk science on web sites funded by oil interests. For the first time in human history we are experimenting with our planet on a large scale. We need to know what the results of that experiment are before it’s too late.

That’s only one reason for doing science in the harshest location on Earth.

But it’s enough don’t you think?

Later,

Dan

PS a group of Science students from the Univ. of Michigan are in Copenhagen covering the Climate conference. The greatest gathering of world leaders in history is tackling that issue right now. I know we MUST reduce the carbon we put in the atmosphere. How we do that is a political question.  The perspective of these young scientists to be should be worth reading. Go here!

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.