Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

This wall of ice is over 20 stories tall. Dan's picture from Greenland. (2007)

I have linked to some of the excellent TED talks before in this space. This one is perhaps the best I have seen. There is an old saying that perception is reality. That seems to be the problem in regard to climate science. Many people think that scientists are still arguing over it.

They are not.

Getting that message out is one reason I started writing these ramblings about the Earth and Science.

It’s hard to explain in words just what is happening in the far north of planet Earth. I know that I am one of the few people to have witnessed a 25 story wall of ice collapse into the ocean. 95% of the glaciers on the planet outside of Antarctica are retreating rapidly. Antarctica itself has now begun to show changes across the continent.

So if a picture paints a thousand words, then spend twenty minutes and look at these:

Astronomy and Meteorology are two sciences that have legions of non scientist helpers. Thousands of people across the world record weather data each day in places that governments cannot afford to locate “official” stations. In the USA, COCORAHS members record rainfall with high quality, and very accurate rain gauges in thousands of locations. They do it because it matters. This data is invaluable to forecasters like myself, and to future and present researchers in weather and climate. It is very likely that this weather data will be looked at over 100 years from now by researchers not even born yet.

In Astronomy, it’s much the same. Backyard observers are usually the ones who spot a new comet or gamma ray burst. As thanks, a comet finder gets it named after him!

This brings me to the WOW images I talked about.

Thierry Legault is an Engineer in Paris. He is one of these backyard Astronomers who is very familiar to professionals who work in the large telescopes. Thierry specializes in astrophotography and even has an asteroid named after him. (Many asteroids are found by backyard sky watchers.)

A couple of days ago, Thierry took a photo of the sun. The image was taken with his 13 cm wide telescope.

Here it is:

Photo by Thierry Legault Paris

I know what you are thinking. I’ve seen it before you say. I can just go outside.

Well Thierry took this photo at just the right moment. I mean JUST the right moment. Look in the lower left quadrant of the image above. You see a speck? It’s not your monitor.

Here is a blown up image of that speck:

Space Shuttle Atlantis and Hubble Space Telescope Passing in front of Sun by Thierry Legault in Paris.

You see it??

It’s what you think it is.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis, and just below it is the Hubble Space Telescope. He had to time it to the second, and he got it!

He has some other INCREDIBLE images on his website. You MUST see them!

The other image is from NOAA. The National Climate Data Center (NCDC to us wx geeks) has released the April global temperature anomalies.

Here it is:

Ctsy. NOAA NCDC

The red dots indicate areas that were warmer than normal, and the blue dots are areas colder than normal. The bigger the dot, the greater the departure from normal. Notice how many of the red dots are in the far North.

Now look at the global temps for ALL of 2008.

From NCDC NOAA

You see the same thing.
Now here is one more piece of information.

Climate models have improved dramatically over the last twenty years. The early models were crude, but all of the models have been very consistent, in forecasting the greatest warming (from increasing Carbon Dioxide levels) to be in the far North. In Science, a prediction that verifies adds weight to a theory. A theory that makes prediction, after prediction, and keeps verifying, soon comes to have a high level of acceptance among scientists. The images above are just one of hundreds of verifications, seen around the world over the last twenty years.

Climate model forecast of global temps. at end of this century. Compare the warming at the top of the globe, with the previous anomaly images.

This is why there is such a high consensus among climate scientists, that we may be running out of time, to deal with greenhouse gases. I showed the April image on air Friday night. When I show anything to do with climate, I get emails like the one I received tonight:

Subject: GW lunacy

interesting that you make a big deal about the april climate, but i don’t remember you doing so on a cooler month. Your global warming hysteria has become political.

Just to be clear, I don’t do politics. You will see nothing here on the current climate legislation. Yes, I am very much in favour of doing something to srop greenhouse gas emissions globally. We have no choice. REALLY- WE HAVE NO CHOICE. I will leave the political arguments to others. The Science is much more interesting. I just hope  something that works is done, because my kids, and grand kids will have to live with the consequences if we do not. So will yours.

Oh, if you are wondering about those other months that I supposedly am not mentioning. If we get a major volcanic eruption, or a very strong La Nina, we might get one.

It will be temporary though. The CO2 is still increasing, and it will overwhelm the temportary cooling of such events fairly quickly. Dr. James Hansen of NASA says, even a quiet sun with no sunspots (A new Maunder Minimum) would only stop the temp. rise for about 7 years. The CO2 would rise so much, that we would start warming again within a decade.

We tend to think of the atmosphere over us as a gigantic entity. Only astronauts can escape it, but they don’t have to go very high. You might be surprised to know, that by the time the solid rocket boosters burn out , two minutes after launch, the Astronauts in the Shuttle are looking at a nearly black sky. They are already above 95% of the atmosphere. Just two to three minutes from a sunny, and blue Florida sky to the black of space.

I offer in evidence the image below, taken yesterday from Atlantis:

From Space Shuttle Atlantis - 500km above Earth. Click for full res.

Look at the thin blue line around Earth, behind the Hubble Telescope. That’s our atmosphere. Basically the “whole shootin match” as we would say in Oklahoma!

Go Atlantis!

Later,

Dan

When I was young, if you were an Astronaut, you were famous. Everyone knew what you looked like. Not so anymore. The public fascination with space waned after the Moon landing and it has not recovered. These days, the only way an Astronaut gets famous, is if he dies or gets caught in a sordid love triangle. Astronauts are not household names anymore.

Some of the reasons for this may be the general lack of Science education in this country. Some have called it a war on Science. Based on some emails  I get from this journal, I tend to agree with them. It extends beyond climate change, and Biology to almost every facet of Earth Science. Some of the statements I hear political leaders make on Science, are stunningly ignorant of the very basics.

The Astronauts flying on the next Shuttle mission deserve some REAL public recognition. This mission is going to be one of the most difficult and dangerous missions ever attempted by NASA. The previous administrator of NASA (Sean O’Keefe) cancelled it for just that reason, but the public and (especially) the scientific community pushed hard for it to be flown. A new NASA Administrator put it back on the schedule. An article in SCIENCE this week suggests that it was his reluctance to approve the mission led to him being replaced.

I’ve had the privilege of talking with two Apollo Astronauts and even strapped into some simulators. (Zero G movement is easy, as long as you don’t care where you go. Try a task and it’s much more difficult than you can imagine). These Astronauts have trained very hard for these 5 days. The risk of death is about 2% for each Shuttle mission. Would you drive to work tomorrow if you had a 2% chance of dying? I wouldn’t.

They will.

NASA picture of the Hubble Telescope.

You probably know already the task ahead for these Astronauts. They are going to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. No telescope has done more to answer the fundamental questions of Physics since Galileo’s (Which is still working in Italy, but good luck getting to look through it!).

Two new cameras will be added along with fresh batteries and new gyroscopes. The new Wide Field Camera will be 10-30 times more sensitive than the previous one! If it all goes well, Hubble will be astoundingly better than before. It’s hoped that it will last until 2014.

It might still be working when the new James Webb telescope sees it’s first star light. The JWT will be the most advanced telescope ever made and will no doubt make profound discoveries. Testing for this telescope is going on only 9 miles away from where I sit writing this, at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

From NASA web.

This mission will use dozens of tools made especially for the mission. It will indeed be dangerous. Remember that satellite collision awhile back? Well some of that debris is orbiting at around 500km. Where Hubble is. When this flight launches, a rescue Shuttle will be on the pad at KSC, just in case. (Addition May 9th: Former Mission Control Scientist James Oberg wrote more about the rescue possibilities and orbital mechanics on MSNBC’s web site.

It will take multiple space walks to do the job, and NASA has collected the best and the brightest of the “Right Stuff” to do it. Two members of the crew have repaired Hubble before. It will be the last repair mission on Hubble. The Shuttle is about to be retired and when the computers and the gyros fail in about 5 years, Hubble will see no more light from across an unimaginable distance of Space and time.

Just 100 years ago, astronomers thought that the Universe and the Galaxy we inhabit, were one and the same. Those fuzzy spiral “nebula” visible in the best telescopes were thought to be relatively nearby. We really had no idea of just how far away they were and how big the galaxy was. It was Astronomer Edwin Hubble who figured out a way to measure the distance to these galaxies. He used a type of star called Cepheid Variable. He realized that these gave him what astronomers now call a standard candle.

In 1998 Hubble stared at what looked like an empty spot in the sky near the Big Dipper. The 10 day exposure showed millions of galaxies at distances too great to fathom.

Think of  it this way. Look at a street light in the far distance. You can tell if it’s near or far, because you know from experience how bright street lights are. If you had some good scientific equipment, you could measure the light from a nearby street light and assuming the distant one is about as bright, you could with some fairly simple math, get a very good estimate of the distance to the far one.

This is exactly what Edwin Hubble did! He found out that these so called nebula were galaxies like our own, but at incredible distances of 250 million light years, and even further. We have now made measurements of galaxies nearly 13 billion light years away. We can only see 13.5 billion light years, because the universe is that old. Light from farther away, could not have reached us yet! (See my previous post on this).

From NASA web site. Click image to go there.

Now we know that we truly are, a grain of sand, in a vast cosmos. There are, however, still fundamental questions to be answered. Most of the universe is invisible to we humans. It’s full of what Cosmologists call dark matter.

What is it?

NOBODY knows. The newly improved Hubble Telescope just might answer that question.

For 7 NASA Astronauts. That’s worth the 2%.

On behalf of Scientists, and Science lovers world wide.

THANK YOU.

I have received two really neat pictures illustrating atmospheric phenomena this week. One is local from Ralph Koepsel of Ider. The other was taken from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.

The first shot was taken Tuesday afternoon and is a great image of Snow Virga falling from high based clouds over Dekalb County. The snow evaporated long before it reached the ground, but it was clearly visible from below.

The other shot one an award as the science shot of the year. A jet, breaking the sound barrier just above the Pacific ocean. The shock waves produced as the plane flew at supersonic speeds caused the air around it to expand and contract. When it expands, the air suddenly cools, and moisture condenses to form a cloud! The picture was taken by John Gay from the top of an aircraft carrier.

Enjoy!

Virga