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Post by swamprat on Nov 23, 2018 16:56:00 GMT -6
Inside the plans for Chinese mega-collider that will dwarf the LHCPhysicist Wang Yifang, the mastermind behind the project, gives Nature an update on the ambitious project.
Elizabeth Gibney 23 November 2018
Wang Yifang directs the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing.Credit: Tim Kramer/Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Physicists at Beijing’s Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) are are designing the world's biggest particle smasher. If built, the 100-kilometre-circumference facility would dwarf the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland — and would cost around half the price.
The ambitious 30-billion-yuan (US$4.3-billion) facility, known as the Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC), is the brainchild of IHEP’s director, Wang Yifang. He has spearheaded the project since the discovery of the elementary particle called the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012.
The CEPC will produce Higgs bosons by smashing together electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. Because these are fundamental particles, their collisions are cleaner and easier to decipher than the LHC’s proton–proton collisions, so once the Chinese facility opens, in about 2030, it will allow physicists to study the mysterious particle and its decay in exquisite detail.
Last week, IHEP published a milestone report outlining the blueprint for the collider. Initial funding for research and development has come from the Chinese government, but the design is the work of an international collaboration of physicists and the team hopes to garner funding from around the world. (Researchers behind a long-planned rival ‘Higgs factory’ known as the International Linear Collider expect to learn by the end of this year whether Japan will stump up the cash to host it.)
The blueprints reveal that the Chinese collider would run in a circle 100 metres underground, at a location yet to be decided, and host two detectors. At the end of its ten-year lifespan, the electron–positron machine could be upgraded to collide protons at energies seven times those of the LHC at its peak. Ahead of the report’s publication, Naturespoke to Wang about the project.
After six years of design work, an international board of experts says the collider is ready to proceed. Construction could begin as early as 2022. What happens now?
We are working on the technology research and development (R&D) at the moment. No one has ever built a machine this large before, and we want to minimize the cost. Its specifications are different from those of any other machine in the world in the past, and we have to prove that it is feasible.
Two years ago, the collider’s international advisory committee said the project lacked international involvement. Has there been progress on that front?
It has not significantly changed, because international participation is still limited by the financial commitment of the international partners. They are all interested, but they need to get endorsement from their funding agencies. They are waiting to hear the Chinese government’s position on whether to fund it, and that decision depends on the outcome of the R&D. But CERN is working on a new European strategy for particle physics, so we hope that this time the CEPC can be included. A similar process will happen in the United States, probably in the next year or 2020. We hope it will be included in both.
A Chinese collider operating in the 2030s would be in direct competition with CERN’s own plans to build a successor to the LHC. Do you think there is a need for more than one mega-collider?
It’s too early to say this is a competition. I think it’s good to have different proposals and to explore the advantages and disadvantages of each proposal thoroughly. Then we can see which one is more feasible, and the community will decide.
Do you think the international community would accept China becoming the global centre of high-energy physics, given that the country lacks free access to the Internet and has significant government controls?
Such a centre would help China to become more internationalized, more open towards the world. And it is going to bring more resources to the scientific community. People at the very beginning may feel that it is not as convenient compared to Switzerland. But we hope that the collider would be a good thing, at least for the Chinese. Also, I don’t think this is going to be the only centre in the world. Historically, we always have had many particle-physics centres, although now we have fewer and fewer. But I really hope we’re not going to be the only one. If you have no competition in a field, at some point you’re going to die.
China is undergoing something of a boom in accelerator facilities at the moment. Tell me about some of those plans.
The spallation neutron source in Dongguan is now operating. It is small but good enough. IHEP is also planning a 1.4-kilometre-circumference light source to be built in Huairou, northern Beijing, at a cost of 4.8 billion yuan. This is a circular electron accelerator that can generate synchrotron radiation — X-rays with extremely high intensity. These are useful for almost every research discipline, including materials science, chemistry, biology, environmental science, geology and medicine. We believe the government is going to give its final approval for the project by the beginning of next year, and then we can start construction. We think it would be a world-leading machine. Most light sources are upgrades from existing machines, so they are limited. We can use the best configurations, the best technologies, without constraints.
The institute is also pitching to fly an experiment — a detector measuring highly energetic particles known as cosmic rays — on China’s crewed space station, set to launch in 2020. What will it do and how will it improve on existing experiments?
We want to know where cosmic rays come from, and how they get such high energy. Answers to these questions will help us to understand the Universe. We would also like to use it to search for new particles, such as dark matter, which cannot yet be generated by accelerators on Earth. One of today’s best experiments for studying this is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the International Space Station, which has not yet seen clear evidence of dark matter. That means we need experiments that can detect more particles, and at higher energies. The High Energy Cosmic Radiation Detection experiment will be able to study particles roughly ten times the energy of the AMS, and measure their energies with better resolution. We’ve almost finished our design and we’re now trying to get support from the Chinese government. We’re probably talking about US$200 million to $300 million for the detector. It’s on the list of candidates for possible projects for the future Chinese space station. We have to wait, but I am optimistic.
Do you think high levels of science funding in China will continue?
The government is certainly interested in supporting science. They hope every penny they invest is worth something, and sometimes we in high-energy physics disappoint them — we’re not able to immediately generate results.
Has the political situation between the United States and China affected the relationship between the two countries’ scientists?
It’s difficult at the moment. If we organize a conference in China, people from US universities can come freely, but people working at US national laboratories say they can’t get permission. Also, going the other way, it’s very hard for Chinese scientists to get an invitation letter to those laboratories in the United States. I really hope this is just temporary and politicians can realize that the exchange of science and collaboration in science is mutually beneficial.
doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-07492-w This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07492-w
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Post by swamprat on Nov 22, 2018 11:10:11 GMT -6
Tron, you and your wife are in my prayers, my friend. Life can be so tough! You may not wish to, but it sounds to me like you could take legal action relative to the way you were initially treated.
Swamp
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Post by swamprat on Nov 22, 2018 9:20:03 GMT -6
Climate of small star TRAPPIST 1's seven intriguing worldsDate: November 21, 2018 Source: University of Washington
Summary: New research from astronomers gives updated climate models for the seven planets around the star TRAPPIST-1. The work also could help astronomers more effectively study planets around stars unlike our sun, and better use the resources of the James Webb Space Telescope.
The small, cool M dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 and its seven worlds. New research from the University of Washington speculates on possible climates of these worlds and how they may have evolved. Credit: NASA
Not all stars are like the sun, so not all planetary systems can be studied with the same expectations. New research from a University of Washington-led team of astronomers gives updated climate models for the seven planets around the star TRAPPIST-1.
The work also could help astronomers more effectively study planets around stars unlike our sun, and better use the limited, expensive resources of the James Webb Space Telescope, now expected to launch in 2021.
"We are modeling unfamiliar atmospheres, not just assuming that the things we see in the solar system will look the same way around another star," said Andrew Lincowski, UW doctoral student and lead author of a paper published Nov. 1 in Astrophysical Journal. "We conducted this research to show what these different types of atmospheres could look like."
The team found, briefly put, that due to an extremely hot, bright early stellar phase, all seven of the star's worlds may have evolved like Venus, with any early oceans they may have had evaporating and leaving dense, uninhabitable atmospheres. However, one planet, TRAPPIST-1 e, could be an Earthlike ocean world worth further study, as previous research also has indicated.
TRAPPIST-1, 39 light-years or about 235 trillion miles away, is about as small as a star can be and still be a star. A relatively cool "M dwarf" star -- the most common type in the universe -- it has about 9 percent the mass of the sun and about 12 percent its radius. TRAPPIST-1 has a radius only a little bigger than the planet Jupiter, though it is much greater in mass.
All seven of TRAPPIST-1's planets are about the size of Earth and three of them -- planets labeled e, f and g -- are believed to be in its habitable zone, that swath of space around a star where a rocky planet could have liquid water on its surface, thus giving life a chance. TRAPPIST-1 d rides the inner edge of the habitable zone, while farther out, TRAPPIST-1 h, orbits just past that zone's outer edge.
"This is a whole sequence of planets that can give us insight into the evolution of planets, in particular around a star that's very different from ours, with different light coming off of it," said Lincowski. "It's just a gold mine."
Previous papers have modeled TRAPPIST-1 worlds, Lincowski said, but he and this research team "tried to do the most rigorous physical modeling that we could in terms of radiation and chemistry -- trying to get the physics and chemistry as right as possible."
The team's radiation and chemistry models create spectral, or wavelength, signatures for each possible atmospheric gas, enabling observers to better predict where to look for such gases in exoplanet atmospheres. Lincowski said when traces of gases are actually detected by the Webb telescope, or others, some day, "astronomers will use the observed bumps and wiggles in the spectra to infer which gases are present -- and compare that to work like ours to say something about the planet's composition, environment and perhaps its evolutionary history."
He said people are used to thinking about the habitability of a planet around stars similar to the sun. "But M dwarf stars are very different, so you really have to think about the chemical effects on the atmosphere(s) and how that chemistry affects the climate."
Combining terrestrial climate modeling with photochemistry models, the researchers simulated environmental states for each of TRAPPIST-1's worlds.
Their modeling indicates that:
• TRAPPIST-1 b, the closest to the star, is a blazing world too hot even for clouds of sulfuric acid, as on Venus, to form.
• Planets c and d receive slightly more energy from their star than Venus and Earth do from the sun and could be Venus-like, with a dense, uninhabitable atmosphere.
• TRAPPIST-1 e is the most likely of the seven to host liquid water on a temperate surface, and would be an excellent choice for further study with habitability in mind.
• The outer planets f, g and h could be Venus-like or could be frozen, depending on how much water formed on the planet during its evolution.
Lincowski said that in actuality, any or all of TRAPPIST-1's planets could be Venus-like, with any water or oceans long burned away. He explained that when water evaporates from a planet's surface, ultraviolet light from the star breaks apart the water molecules, releasing hydrogen, which is the lightest element and can escape a planet's gravity. This could leave behind a lot of oxygen, which could remain in the atmosphere and irreversibly remove water from the planet. Such a planet may have a thick oxygen atmosphere -- but not one generated by life, and different from anything yet observed.
"This may be possible if these planets had more water initially than Earth, Venus or Mars," he said. "If planet TRAPPIST-1 e did not lose all of its water during this phase, today it could be a water world, completely covered by a global ocean. In this case, it could have a climate similar to Earth."
Lincowski said this research was done more with an eye on climate evolution than to judge the planets' habitability. He plans future research focusing more directly on modeling water planets and their chances for life.
"Before we knew of this planetary system, estimates for the detectability of atmospheres for Earth-sized planets were looking much more difficult," said co-author Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, a UW astronomy doctoral student.
The star being so small, he said, will make the signatures of gases (like carbon dioxide) in the planet's atmospheres more pronounced in telescope data.
"Our work informs the scientific community of what we might expect to see for the TRAPPIST-1 planets with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope."
Lincowski's other UW co-author is Victoria Meadows, professor of astronomy and director of the UW's Astrobiology Program. Meadows is also principal investigator for the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory, based at the UW. All of the authors were affiliates of that research laboratory.
"The processes that shape the evolution of a terrestrial planet are critical to whether or not it can be habitable, as well as our ability to interpret possible signs of life," Meadows said. "This paper suggests that we may soon be able to search for potentially detectable signs of these processes on alien worlds."
TRAPPIST-1, in the Aquarius constellation, is named after the ground-based Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, the facility that first found evidence of planets around it in 2015.
Story Source: Materials provided by University of Washington. Original written by Peter Kelley. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference: 1. Andrew P. Lincowski, Victoria S. Meadows, David Crisp, Tyler D. Robinson, Rodrigo Luger, Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, Giada N. Arney. Evolved Climates and Observational Discriminants for the TRAPPIST-1 Planetary System. The Astrophysical Journal, 2018; 867 (1): 76 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aae36a
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Post by swamprat on Nov 22, 2018 8:54:56 GMT -6
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MARS
Nov 21, 2018 9:11:58 GMT -6
Post by swamprat on Nov 21, 2018 9:11:58 GMT -6
How to watch Mars Insight landing November 26By Eleanor Imster in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | November 20, 2018
On November 26, 2018, NASA’s InSight lander will make its daring descent to Mars’ surface. The spacecraft is scheduled to touch down Monday at approximately 20:00 UTC (3 p.m. EST), with live landing commentary starting about an hour before.
Artist’s concept shows a simulated view of NASA’s InSight lander firing retrorockets to slow down as it descends toward the surface of Mars. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
On Monday, November 26, 2018, NASA’s Mars Insight is scheduled to land on Mars. The spacecraft will touch down at approximately 20:00 UTC (3 p.m. EST). Watch coverage of the event on NASA TV. Live landing commentary runs from 19:00-20:30 UTC (2-3:30 p.m. EST). Translate UTC to your time.
Ways to watch: Watch on NASA TV. Watch NASA TV on USTREAM Follow the mission and watch the landing on Twitter and Facebook.
Launched on May 5, 2018, InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) marks NASA’s first Mars landing since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The landing will kick off a two-year mission in which InSight will become the first spacecraft to study Mars’ deep interior. Its data also will help scientists understand the formation of all rocky worlds, including our own.
InSight is being followed to Mars by two mini-spacecraft comprising NASA’s Mars Cube One (MarCO), the first deep-space mission for CubeSats. If MarCO makes its planned Mars flyby, it will attempt to relay data from InSight as it enters the planet’s atmosphere and lands. Here’s where Insight will touch down: earthsky.org/space/site-mars-insight-spacecraft-landing
So far, there are about 80 live viewing events around the world scheduled for the public to watch the InSight landing. For a complete list of landing event watch parties, go here: mars.nasa.gov/insight/timeline/landing/watch-in-person/
For a full list of websites broadcasting InSight landing events, go here: mars.nasa.gov/insight/timeline/landing/watch-online/
Bottom line: How to watch the landing of NASA’s Mars Insight spacecraft on November 26, 2018.
earthsky.org/space/how-to-watch-insight-mars-landing-nov26-2018
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Post by swamprat on Nov 20, 2018 17:20:33 GMT -6
Prince Philip embroiled in 'close encounter with UFO' EventPrince Philip personally congratulated a military pilot who claimed he chased a UFO out of Britain, according to the veteran involved some 40 years ago.
By Callum Hoare Published: Mon, Nov 19, 2018
Major George A. Giller was an Air Force intelligence officer for the USAF, who claims to have encountered a UFO over England. He says his jet got a call from London Air Traffic Control about an aircraft that had failed to identify itself near Stonehenge, Salisbury. However, when George got there to inspect, the "floating cruise ship" darted from the scene.
"We were up at 33,000ft and the UFO was down at about 1,000ft," he said on Netflix film "Unacknowledged".
"We dove down on it and eventually we got close and it looked like a cruise ship at sea with all the bright lights.
"We got about a mile from it and it went up into space.
"London control just said 'you can continue with your mission' now."
However, that was not the end of the story for George, as he recalls meeting with Prince Philip as a result of his close encounter.
He added: "Apparently Prince Philip thought it was very important and invited us to dinner.
"He knew all about the fact we had chased the UFO and made me a believer in it since.
"When someone of his stature indicates they are real and from another planet, it's very convincing."
George gave his testimony as part of the Disclosure Project, which claims UFOs and aliens have been covered up by government agencies for years.
Dr. Steven Greer, who heads up the project, has spoken to CIA Directors, top Pentagon Generals and many military individuals about their experiences over the years.
A former traumatologist, Steven turned his interests to ufology and opened the Centre for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1047337/royal-shock-claim-prince-philip-congratulated-pilot-chasing-ufo-spt
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Post by swamprat on Nov 20, 2018 14:09:27 GMT -6
Watch Iceland's banned commercial:
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Post by swamprat on Nov 20, 2018 14:00:52 GMT -6
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MARS
Nov 20, 2018 11:33:48 GMT -6
Post by swamprat on Nov 20, 2018 11:33:48 GMT -6
Mars 2020 Rover Will Land at Ancient Lakebed to Search for Signs of LifeBy Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer | November 20, 2018
temporary picture upload This crater on Mars, named Jezero, was once a lake — and on the right-hand side of this image, a flood long ago burst through its edge, creating a canyon. Credit: Tim Goudge/NASA
Scientists have identified 24 ancient lakes on Mars that once overflowed and burst through their walls, forming steep-sided canyons — and NASA's Mars 2020 rover will explore the neighborhood of one of these paleolakes, looking for traces of ancient life.
Jezero Crater is one of two dozen sites that a team of geologists examined for signs of how canyons formed: by massive individual flooding events or by slower flows over longer periods of time. Their findings suggest that for the chosen canyons, the former occurred, with a sudden flood rapidly carving canyons across the Martian surface.
"These breached lakes are fairly common and some of them are quite large, some as large as the Caspian Sea," lead author Tim Goudge, a geoscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. "So we think this style of catastrophic overflow flooding and rapid incision of outlet canyons was probably quite important on early Mars' surface."
The team came to that conclusion by looking at the relationship between the canyon measurements and the crater rims that once enclosed all that water. Because the canyon size increased in proportion to the size of the nearby lake, the team believes that all 24 lakes violently burst through their walls, carving the canyons in perhaps just a few weeks. If they hadn't seen such a correlation, they would have instead suspected that the canyons formed gradually from more gentle water flow.
And unlike geologic features here on Earth, lake beds and canyons remain etched on the surface of Mars, since there are no modern plate tectonics to shuffle crust around and destroy them.
"The landscape on Earth doesn't preserve large lakes for a very long time," co-author Caleb Fassett, a planetary scientist at NASA, said in the same statement. "But on Mars ... these canyons have been there for 3.7 billion years, a very long time, and it gives us insight into what the deep time surface water was like on Mars."
That long-lived Martian surface offers scientists hope that they might be able to access ancient sediments that may hold the remains of any life that once existed on Mars. That's part of why NASA chose to send its Mars 2020 rover, due to touch down on the Red Planet in 2021, to Jezero Crater, where it can study five different types of rock and hunt for any remains of ancient life that could be hiding in such a formerly wet environment.
The new research is described in a paper published on Nov. 16 in the journal Geology.
www.space.com/42489-lakes-on-mars-burst-formed-canyons.html
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MARS
Nov 20, 2018 11:19:01 GMT -6
Post by swamprat on Nov 20, 2018 11:19:01 GMT -6
Bill Nye says Mars colonies won't happen: 'Are you guys high?'By Christopher Carbone | Fox News November 20, 2018
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk can forget about their dreams of colonizing and transforming Mars for human settlement, at least according to Bill Nye.
The popular science commentator told USA Today that the entire idea of making the Red Planet more Earth-like is purely the stuff of "science fiction."
"This whole idea of terraforming Mars, as respectful as I can be, are you guys high?" Nye said. "We can't even take care of this planet where we live, and we're perfectly suited for it, let alone another planet."
The science educator also ruled out the idea of living on Mars permanently.
"Nobody's gonna go settle on Mars to raise a family and have generations of Martians," Nye, who appears on National Geographic Channel's series "MARS," explained. "It's not reasonable because it's so cold. And there is hardly any water. There's absolutely no food, and the big thing, I just remind these guys, there's nothing to breathe."
Although the National Geographic Channel series depicts humans living on Mars, Nye doesn't agree with it.
"People disagree with me on this, and the reason they disagree is because they're wrong," he added, noting that while scientists are even stationed on Antarctica during the cold winter months, no one lives there permanently.
Scientists have long dreamed of setting up research bases on the Red Planet. NASA even held a competition to see what such infrastructure could look like. Bezos has been a longtime proponent of space tourism and colonizing Mars via his efforts with his space exploration company, Blue Origins. Musk, who runs SpaceX in addition to Tesla, called for a colony on Mars at South By Southwest last year as a way to prevent a new dark age.
Nye said living in a dome just isn't feasible.
"When you leave your dome, you're gonna put on another dome, and I think that will get old pretty quick," he said. "Especially the smell in the spacesuit – all the Febreze you can pack, I think it will really help you up there."
The Red Planet does share some similarities with Earth, such as ice caps and seasons, and has captured the imagination of humanity since the dawn of the space age.
But as for the exploration of Mars, Nye is on board.
"I want to find evidence of life on another world in my lifetime, so Mars in the next logical place to look," he said. "People say what are you gonna find there? We don't know, and that's why we go and explore the unknown horizon."
www.foxnews.com/science/bill-nye-says-mars-colonies-wont-happen-are-you-guys-high
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Post by swamprat on Nov 19, 2018 14:37:51 GMT -6
Page 4
“When you look at the beach, it’s like eighteen-seventies Florida—the longest undisturbed stretch on the Atlantic Coast,” Dankert said. “We launch people into space from the middle of a wildlife refuge. That’s amazing.”
The two men talked for a long time about their favorite local species—the brown pelicans that were skimming the ocean, the Florida scrub jays. While rebuilding the dunes, they carefully bucket-trapped and relocated dozens of gopher tortoises. Before I left, they drove me half an hour across the swamp to a pond near the Space Center’s headquarters building, just to show me some alligators. Menacing snouts were visible beneath the water, but I was more interested in the sign that had been posted at each corner of the pond explaining that the alligators were native species, not pets. “Putting any food in the water for any reason will cause them to become accustomed to people and possibly dangerous,” it went on, adding that, if that should happen, “they must be removed and destroyed.”
Something about the sign moved me tremendously. It would have been easy enough to poison the pond, just as it would have been easy enough to bulldoze the dunes without a thought for the tortoises. But nasa hadn’t done so, because of a long series of laws that draw on an emerging understanding of who we are. In 1867, John Muir, one of the first Western environmentalists, walked from Louisville, Kentucky, to Florida, a trip that inspired his first heretical thoughts about the meaning of being human. “The world, we are told, was made especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the facts,” Muir wrote in his diary. “A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.” Muir’s proof that this self-centeredness was misguided was the alligator, which he could hear roaring in the Florida swamp as he camped nearby, and which clearly caused man mostly trouble. But these animals were wonderful nonetheless, Muir decided—remarkable creatures perfectly adapted to their landscape. “I have better thoughts of those alligators now that I’ve seen them at home,” he wrote. In his diary, he addressed the creatures directly: “Hoannable representatives of the great saurian of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty.”
That evening, Harland and Dankert drew a crude map to help me find the beach, north of Patrick Air Force Base and south of the spot where, in 1965, Barbara Eden emerged from her bottle to greet her astronaut at the start of the TV series “I Dream of Jeannie.” There, they said, I could wait out the hours until the pre-dawn rocket launch and perhaps spot a loggerhead sea turtle coming ashore to lay her eggs. And so I sat on the sand. The beach was deserted, and under a near-full moon I watched as a turtle trundled from the sea and lumbered deliberately to a spot near the dune, where she used her powerful legs to excavate a pit. She spent an hour laying eggs, and even from thirty yards away you could hear her heavy breathing in between the whispers of the waves. And then, having covered her clutch, she tracked back to the ocean, in the fashion of others like her for the past hundred and twenty million years.
This article appears in the print edition of the November 26, 2018, issue, with the headline “Life on a Shrinking Planet.”
Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. His new book “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?” will be out in the spring.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet
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Post by swamprat on Nov 19, 2018 14:36:31 GMT -6
Page 3
He was right. On January 29, 2001, nine days after George W. Bush was inaugurated, Lee Raymond visited his old friend Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had just stepped down as the C.E.O. of the oil-drilling giant Halliburton. Cheney helped persuade Bush to abandon his campaign promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Within the year, Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant for Bush, had produced an internal memo that made a doctrine of the strategy that the G.C.C. had hit on a decade earlier. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community,” Luntz wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based organization. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”
The strategy of muddling the public’s impression of climate science has proved to be highly effective. In 2017, polls found that almost ninety per cent of Americans did not know that there was a scientific consensus on global warming. Raymond retired in 2006, after the company posted the biggest corporate profits in history, and his final annual salary was four hundred million dollars. His successor, Rex Tillerson, signed a five-hundred-billion-dollar deal to explore for oil in the rapidly thawing Russian Arctic, and in 2012 was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship. In 2016, Tillerson, at his last shareholder meeting before he briefly joined the Trump Administration as Secretary of State, said, “The world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.”
It’s by no means clear whether Exxon’s deception and obfuscation are illegal. The company has long maintained that it “has tracked the scientific consensus on climate change, and its research on the issue has been published in publicly available peer-reviewed journals.” The First Amendment preserves one’s right to lie, although, in October, New York State Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood filed suit against Exxon for lying to investors, which is a crime. What is certain is that the industry’s campaign cost us the efforts of the human generation that might have made the crucial difference in the climate fight.
Exxon’s behavior is shocking, but not entirely surprising. Philip Morris lied about the effects of cigarette smoking before the government stood up to Big Tobacco. The mystery that historians will have to unravel is what went so wrong in our governance and our culture that we have done, essentially, nothing to stand up to the fossil-fuel industry.
There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a role. Rand’s disquisitions on the “virtue of selfishness” and unbridled capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economists—Paul Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among them. Trump, who has called “The Fountainhead” his favorite book, said that the novel “relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions. That book relates to . . . everything.” Long after Rand’s death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. The Koch brothers, whose enormous fortune derives in large part from the mining and refining of oil and gas, have peddled a similar message, broadening the efforts that Exxon-funded groups like the Global Climate Coalition spearheaded in the late nineteen-eighties.
Fossil-fuel companies and electric utilities, often led by Koch-linked groups, have put up fierce resistance to change. In Kansas, Koch allies helped turn mandated targets for renewable energy into voluntary commitments. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker’s administration prohibited state land officials from talking about climate change. In North Carolina, the state legislature, in conjunction with real-estate interests, effectively banned policymakers from using scientific estimates of sea-level rise in the coastal-planning process. Earlier this year, Americans for Prosperity, the most important Koch front group, waged a campaign against new bus routes and light-rail service in Tennessee, invoking human liberty. “If someone has the freedom to go where they want, do what they want, they’re not going to choose public transit,” a spokeswoman for the group explained. In Florida, an anti-renewable-subsidy ballot measure invoked the “Rights of Electricity Consumers Regarding Solar Energy Choice.”
Such efforts help explain why, in 2017, the growth of American residential solar installations came to a halt even before March, 2018, when President Trump imposed a thirty-per-cent tariff on solar panels, and why the number of solar jobs fell in the U.S. for the first time since the industry’s great expansion began, a decade earlier. In February, at the Department of Energy, Rick Perry—who once skipped his own arraignment on two felony charges, which were eventually dismissed, in order to attend a Koch brothers event—issued a new projection in which he announced that the U.S. would go on emitting carbon at current levels through 2050; this means that our nation would use up all the planet’s remaining carbon budget if we plan on meeting the 1.5-degree target. Skepticism about the scientific consensus, Perry told the media in 2017, is a sign of a “wise, intellectually engaged person.”
Of all the environmental reversals made by the Trump Administration, the most devastating was its decision, last year, to withdraw from the Paris accords, making the U.S., the largest single historical source of carbon, the only nation not engaged in international efforts to control it. As the Washington Postreported, the withdrawal was the result of a collaborative venture. Among the anti-government ideologues and fossil-fuel lobbyists responsible was Myron Ebell, who was at Trump’s side in the Rose Garden during the withdrawal announcement, and who, at Frontiers of Freedom, had helped run a “complex influence campaign” in support of the tobacco industry. Ebell is a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was founded in 1984 to advance “the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty,” and which funds the Cooler Heads Coalition, “an informal and ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming,” of which Ebell is the chairman. Also instrumental were the Heartland Institute and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. After Trump’s election, these groups sent a letter reminding him of his campaign pledge to pull America out. The C.E.I. ran a TV spot: “Mr. President, don’t listen to the swamp. Keep your promise.” And, despite the objections of most of his advisers, he did. The coalition had used its power to slow us down precisely at the moment when we needed to speed up. As a result, the particular politics of one country for one half-century will have changed the geological history of the earth.
We are on a path to self-destruction, and yet there is nothing inevitable about our fate. Solar panels and wind turbines are now among the least expensive ways to produce energy. Storage batteries are cheaper and more efficient than ever. We could move quickly if we chose to, but we’d need to opt for solidarity and coördination on a global scale. The chances of that look slim. In Russia, the second-largest petrostate after the U.S., Vladimir Putin believes that “climate change could be tied to some global cycles on Earth or even of planetary significance.” Saudi Arabia, the third-largest petrostate, tried to water down the recent I.P.C.C. report. Jair Bolsonaro, the newly elected President of Brazil, has vowed to institute policies that would dramatically accelerate the deforestation of the Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest. Meanwhile, Exxon recently announced a plan to spend a million dollars—about a hundredth of what the company spends each month in search of new oil and gas—to back the fight for a carbon tax of forty dollars a ton. At a press conference, some of the I.P.C.C.’s authors laughed out loud at the idea that such a tax would, this late in the game, have sufficient impact.
The possibility of swift change lies in people coming together in movements large enough to shift the Zeitgeist. In recent years, despairing at the slow progress, I’ve been one of many to protest pipelines and to call attention to Big Oil’s deceptions. The movement is growing. Since 2015, when four hundred thousand people marched in the streets of New York before the Paris climate talks, activists—often led by indigenous groups and communities living on the front lines of climate change—have blocked pipelines, forced the cancellation of new coal mines, helped keep the major oil companies out of the American Arctic, and persuaded dozens of cities to commit to one-hundred-per-cent renewable energy.
Each of these efforts has played out in the shadow of the industry’s unflagging campaign to maximize profits and prevent change. Voters in Washington State were initially supportive of a measure on last month’s ballot which would have imposed the nation’s first carbon tax—a modest fee that won support from such figures as Bill Gates. But the major oil companies spent record sums to defeat it. In Colorado, a similarly modest referendum that would have forced frackers to move their rigs away from houses and schools went down after the oil industry outspent citizen groups forty to one. This fall, California’s legislators committed to using only renewable energy by 2045, which was a great victory in the world’s fifth-largest economy. But the governor refused to stop signing new permits for oil wells, even in the middle of the state’s largest cities, where asthma rates are high.
New kinds of activism keep springing up. In Sweden this fall, a one-person school boycott by a fifteen-year-old girl named Greta Thunberg helped galvanize attention across Scandinavia. At the end of October, a new British group, Extinction Rebellion—its name both a reflection of the dire science and a potentially feisty response—announced plans for a campaign of civil disobedience. Last week, fifty-one young people were arrested in Nancy Pelosi’s office for staging a sit-in, demanding that the Democrats embrace a “Green New Deal” that would address the global climate crisis with policies to create jobs in renewable energy. They may have picked a winning issue: several polls have shown that even Republicans favor more government support for solar panels. This battle is epic and undecided. If we miss the two-degree target, we will fight to prevent a rise of three degrees, and then four. It’s a long escalator down to Hell.
Last June, I went to Cape Canaveral to watch Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket lift off. When the moment came, it was as I’d always imagined: the clouds of steam venting in the minutes before launch, the immensely bright column of flame erupting. With remarkable slowness, the rocket began to rise, the grip of gravity yielding to the force of its engines. It is the most awesome technological spectacle human beings have produced.
Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson are among the billionaires who have spent some of their fortunes on space travel—a last-ditch effort to expand the human zone of habitability. In November, 2016, Stephen Hawking gave humanity a deadline of a thousand years to leave Earth. Six months later, he revised the timetable to a century. In June, 2017, he told an audience that “spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.” He continued, “Earth is under threat from so many areas that it is difficult for me to be positive.”
But escaping the wreckage is, almost certainly, a fantasy. Even if astronauts did cross the thirty-four million miles to Mars, they’d need to go underground to survive there. To what end? The multimillion-dollar attempts at building a “biosphere” in the Southwestern desert in 1991 ended in abject failure. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of a trilogy of novels about the colonization of Mars, recently called such projects a “moral hazard.” “People think if we f*ck up here on Earth we can always go to Mars or the stars,” he said. “It’s pernicious.”
The dream of interplanetary colonization also distracts us from acknowledging the unbearable beauty of the planet we already inhabit. The day before the launch, I went on a tour of the vast grounds of the Kennedy Space Center with nasa’s public-affairs officer, Greg Harland, and the biologist Don Dankert. I’d been warned beforehand by other nasa officials not to broach the topic of global warming; in any event, nasa’s predicament became obvious as soon as we climbed up on a dune overlooking Launch Complex 39, from which the Apollo missions left for the moon, and where any future Mars mission would likely begin. The launchpad is a quarter of a mile from the ocean—a perfect location, in the sense that, if something goes wrong, the rockets will fall into the sea, but not so perfect, since that sea is now rising. nasa started worrying about this sometime after the turn of the century, and formed a Dune Vulnerability Team.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy, even at a distance of a couple of hundred miles, churned up waves strong enough to break through the barrier of dunes along the Atlantic shoreline of the Space Center and very nearly swamped the launch complexes. Dankert had millions of cubic yards of sand excavated from a nearby Air Force base, and saw to it that a hundred and eighty thousand native shrubs were planted to hold the sand in place. So far, the new dunes have yielded little ground to storms and hurricanes. But what impressed me more than the dunes was the men’s deep appreciation of their landscape. “Kennedy Space Center shares real estate with the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge,” Harland said. “We use less than ten per cent for our industrial purposes.”
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Post by swamprat on Nov 19, 2018 14:35:04 GMT -6
Page 2
But it’s not clear where to go. As with the rising seas, rising temperatures have begun to narrow the margins of our inhabitation, this time in the hot continental interiors. Nine of the ten deadliest heat waves in human history have occurred since 2000. In India, the rise in temperature since 1960 (about one degree Fahrenheit) has increased the chance of mass heat-related deaths by a hundred and fifty per cent. The summer of 2018 was the hottest ever measured in certain areas. For a couple of days in June, temperatures in cities in Pakistan and Iran peaked at slightly above a hundred and twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, the highest reliably recorded temperatures ever measured. The same heat wave, nearer the shore of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, combined triple-digit temperatures with soaring humidity levels to produce a heat index of more than a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit. June 26th was the warmest night in history, with the mercury in one Omani city remaining above a hundred and nine degrees Fahrenheit until morning. In July, a heat wave in Montreal killed more than seventy people, and Death Valley, which often sets American records, registered the hottest month ever seen on our planet. Africa recorded its highest temperature in June, the Korean Peninsula in July, and Europe in August. The Times reported that, in Algeria, employees at a petroleum plant walked off the job as the temperature neared a hundred and twenty-four degrees. “We couldn’t keep up,” one worker told the reporter. “It was impossible to do the work.”
This was no illusion; some of the world is becoming too hot for humans. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, increased heat and humidity have reduced the amount of work people can do outdoors by ten per cent, a figure that is predicted to double by 2050. About a decade ago, Australian and American researchers, setting out to determine the highest survivable so-called “wet-bulb” temperature, concluded that when temperatures passed thirty-five degrees Celsius (ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity was higher than ninety per cent, even in “well-ventilated shaded conditions,” sweating slows down, and humans can survive only “for a few hours, the exact length of time being determined by individual physiology.”
As the planet warms, a crescent-shaped area encompassing parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the North China Plain, where about 1.5 billion people (a fifth of humanity) live, is at high risk of such temperatures in the next half century. Across this belt, extreme heat waves that currently happen once every generation could, by the end of the century, become “annual events with temperatures close to the threshold for several weeks each year, which could lead to famine and mass migration.” By 2070, tropical regions that now get one day of truly oppressive humid heat a year can expect between a hundred and two hundred and fifty days, if the current levels of greenhouse-gas emissions continue. According to Radley Horton, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, most people would “run into terrible problems” before then. The effects, he added, will be “transformative for all areas of human endeavor—economy, agriculture, military, recreation.”
Humans share the planet with many other creatures, of course. We have already managed to kill off sixty per cent of the world’s wildlife since 1970 by destroying their habitats, and now higher temperatures are starting to take their toll. A new study found that peak-dwelling birds were going extinct; as temperatures climb, the birds can no longer find relief on higher terrain. Coral reefs, rich in biodiversity, may soon be a tenth of their current size.
As some people flee humidity and rising sea levels, others will be forced to relocate in order to find enough water to survive. In late 2017, a study led by Manoj Joshi, of the University of East Anglia, found that, by 2050, if temperatures rise by two degrees a quarter of the earth will experience serious drought and desertification. The early signs are clear: São Paulo came within days of running out of water last year, as did Cape Town this spring. In the fall, a record drought in Germany lowered the level of the Elbe to below twenty inches and reduced the corn harvest by forty per cent. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research concluded in a recent study that, as the number of days that reach eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit or higher increases, corn and soybean yields across the U.S. grain belt could fall by between twenty-two and forty-nine per cent. We’ve already overpumped the aquifers that lie beneath most of the world’s breadbaskets; without the means to irrigate, we may encounter a repeat of the nineteen-thirties, when droughts and deep plowing led to the Dust Bowl—this time with no way of fixing the problem. Back then, the Okies fled to California, but California is no longer a green oasis. A hundred million trees died in the record drought that gripped the Golden State for much of this decade. The dead limbs helped spread the waves of fire, as scientists earlier this year warned that they could.
Thirty years ago, some believed that warmer temperatures would expand the field of play, turning the Arctic into the new Midwest. As Rex Tillerson, then the C.E.O. of Exxon, cheerfully put it in 2012, “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that.” But there is no rich topsoil in the far North; instead, the ground is underlaid with permafrost, which can be found beneath a fifth of the Northern Hemisphere. As the permafrost melts, it releases more carbon into the atmosphere. The thawing layer cracks roads, tilts houses, and uproots trees to create what scientists call “drunken forests.” Ninety scientists who released a joint report in 2017 concluded that economic losses from a warming Arctic could approach ninety trillion dollars in the course of the century, considerably outweighing whatever savings may have resulted from shorter shipping routes as the Northwest Passage unfreezes.
Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of the Hudson Bay, in Canada, is connected to the rest of the country by a single rail line. In the spring of 2017, record floods washed away much of the track. OmniTrax, which owns the line, tried to cancel its contract with the government, declaring what lawyers call a “force majeure,” an unforeseen event beyond its responsibility. “To fix things in this era of climate change—well, it’s fixed, but you don’t count on it being the fix forever,” an engineer for the company explained at a media briefing in July. This summer, the Canadian government reopened the rail at a cost of a hundred and seventeen million dollars—about a hundred and ninety thousand dollars per Churchill resident. There is no reason to think the fix will last, and every reason to believe that our world will keep contracting.
All this has played out more or less as scientists warned, albeit faster. What has defied expectations is the slowness of the response. The climatologist James Hansen testified before Congress about the dangers of human-caused climate change thirty years ago. Since then, carbon emissions have increased with each year except 2009 (the height of the global recession) and the newest data show that 2018 will set another record. Simple inertia and the human tendency to prioritize short-term gains have played a role, but the fossil-fuel industry’s contribution has been by far the most damaging. Alex Steffen, an environmental writer, coined the term “predatory delay” to describe “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The behavior of the oil companies, which have pulled off perhaps the most consequential deception in mankind’s history, is a prime example.
As journalists at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times have revealed since 2015, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, understood that its product was contributing to climate change a decade before Hansen testified. In July, 1977, James F. Black, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, addressed many of the company’s top leaders in New York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse effect. “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” he said, according to a written version of the speech which was later recorded, and which was obtained by InsideClimate News. In 1978, speaking to the company’s executives, Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by between two and three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as ten degrees Celsius (eighteen degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.
Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO2 detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982, they had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global warming and “potentially catastrophic events” would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”
An investigation by the L.A. Times revealed that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior researcher for the company’s Canadian subsidiary, led a team that investigated the positive and negative effects of warming on Exxon’s Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he said. The following year, he wrote that “global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea. Drilling season in the Arctic, he correctly predicted, would increase from two months to as many as five months. At the same time, he said, the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.
The implications of the exposés were startling. Not only did Exxon and other companies know that scientists like Hansen were right; they used his nasaclimate models to figure out how low their drilling costs in the Arctic would eventually fall. Had Exxon and its peers passed on what they knew to the public, geological history would look very different today. The problem of climate change would not be solved, but the crisis would, most likely, now be receding. In 1989, an international ban on chlorine-containing man-made chemicals that had been eroding the earth’s ozone layer went into effect. Last month, researchers reported that the ozone layer was on track to fully heal by 2060. But that was a relatively easy fight, because the chemicals in question were not central to the world’s economy, and the manufacturers had readily available substitutes to sell. In the case of global warming, the culprit is fossil fuel, the most lucrative commodity on earth, and so the companies responsible took a different tack.
A document uncovered by the L.A. Times showed that, a month after Hansen’s testimony, in 1988, an unnamed Exxon “public affairs manager” issued an internal memo recommending that the company “emphasize the uncertainty” in the scientific data about climate change. Within a few years, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Amoco, and others had joined the Global Climate Coalition, “to coordinate business participation in the international policy debate” on global warming. The G.C.C. coördinated with the National Coal Association and the American Petroleum Institute on a campaign, via letters and telephone calls, to prevent a tax on fossil fuels, and produced a video in which the agency insisted that more carbon dioxide would “end world hunger” by promoting plant growth. With such efforts, it ginned up opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the first global initiative to address climate change.
In October, 1997, two months before the Kyoto meeting, Lee Raymond, Exxon’s president and C.E.O., who had overseen the science department that in the nineteen-eighties produced the findings about climate change, gave a speech in Beijing to the World Petroleum Congress, in which he maintained that the earth was actually cooling. The idea that cutting fossil-fuel emissions could have an effect on the climate, he said, defied common sense. “It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are enacted now, or twenty years from now,” he went on. Exxon’s own scientists had already shown each of these premises to be wrong.
On a December morning in 1997 at the Kyoto Convention Center, after a long night of negotiation, the developed nations reached a tentative accord on climate change. Exhausted delegates lay slumped on couches in the corridor, or on the floor in their suits, but most of them were grinning. Imperfect and limited though the agreement was, it seemed that momentum had gathered behind fighting climate change. But as I watched the delegates cheering and clapping, an American lobbyist, who had been coördinating much of the opposition to the accord, turned to me and said, “I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we’ve got this under control.”
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Post by swamprat on Nov 19, 2018 14:33:21 GMT -6
Life on a Shrinking Planetby Bill McKibben, Former New Yorker Staff Writer November 18, 2018
California is currently ablaze, after a record hot summer and a dry fall set the stage for the most destructive fires in the state’s history. Above: The Woolsey fire, near Los Angeles, seen from the West Hills. Photograph by Kevin Cooley for The New Yorker
Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.
I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.
For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in 2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started to grow again—by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling, was growing, “driven in part by an increase in conflicts and climate-induced disasters.”
In 2015, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris, the world’s governments, noting that the earth has so far warmed a little more than one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, set a goal of holding the increase this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), with a fallback target of two degrees (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). This past October, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a special report stating that global warming “is likely to reach 1.5 C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.” We will have drawn a line in the sand and then watched a rising tide erase it. The report did not mention that, in Paris, countries’ initial pledges would cut emissions only enough to limit warming to 3.5 degrees Celsius (about 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, a scale and pace of change so profound as to call into question whether our current societies could survive it.
Scientists have warned for decades that climate change would lead to extreme weather. Shortly before the I.P.C.C. report was published, Hurricane Michael, the strongest hurricane ever to hit the Florida Panhandle, inflicted thirty billion dollars’ worth of material damage and killed forty-five people. President Trump, who has argued that global warming is “a total, and very expensive, hoax,” visited Florida to survey the wreckage, but told reporters that the storm had not caused him to rethink his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accords. He expressed no interest in the I.P. C.C. report beyond asking “who drew it.” (The answer is ninety-one researchers from forty countries.) He later claimed that his “natural instinct” for science made him confident that the climate would soon “change back.” A month later, Trump blamed the fires in California on “gross mismanagement of forests.”
Human beings have always experienced wars and truces, crashes and recoveries, famines and terrorism. We’ve endured tyrants and outlasted perverse ideologies. Climate change is different. As a team of scientists recently pointed out in the journal Nature Climate Change, the physical shifts we’re inflicting on the planet will “extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”
The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. But already, even in the most affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because of the proliferation of ticks bearing Lyme disease which have come with the hot weather; we have found ourselves unable to swim off beaches, because jellyfish, which thrive as warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the water. The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.
“Climate change,” like “urban sprawl” or “gun violence,” has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it. But exactly what we’ve been up to should fill us with awe. During the past two hundred years, we have burned immense quantities of coal and gas and oil—in car motors, basement furnaces, power plants, steel mills—and, as we have done so, carbon atoms have combined with oxygen atoms in the air to produce carbon dioxide. This, along with other gases like methane, has trapped heat that would otherwise have radiated back out to space.
There are at least four other episodes in the earth’s half-billion-year history of animal life when CO2 has poured into the atmosphere in greater volumes, but perhaps never at greater speeds. Even at the end of the Permian Age, when huge injections of CO2 from volcanoes burning through coal deposits culminated in “The Great Dying,” the CO2 content of the atmosphere grew at perhaps a tenth of the current pace. Two centuries ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was two hundred and seventy-five parts per million; it has now topped four hundred parts per million and is rising more than two parts per million each year. The extra heat that we trap near the planet every day is equivalent to the heat from four hundred thousand bombs the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.
As a result, in the past thirty years we’ve seen all twenty of the hottest years ever recorded. The melting of ice caps and glaciers and the rising levels of our oceans and seas, initially predicted for the end of the century, have occurred decades early. “I’ve never been at . . . a climate conference where people say ‘that happened slower than I thought it would,’ ” Christina Hulbe, a New Zealand climatologist, told a reporter for Grist last year. This past May, a team of scientists from the University of Illinois reported that there was a thirty-five-per-cent chance that, because of unexpectedly high economic growth rates, the U.N.’s “worst-case scenario” for global warming was too optimistic. “We are now truly in uncharted territory,” David Carlson, the former director of the World Meteorological Organization’s climate-research division, said in the spring of 2017, after data showed that the previous year had broken global heat records.
We are off the literal charts as well. In August, I visited Greenland, where, one day, with a small group of scientists and activists, I took a boat from the village of Narsaq to a glacier on a nearby fjord. As we made our way across a broad bay, I glanced up at the electronic chart above the captain’s wheel, where a blinking icon showed that we were a mile inland. The captain explained that the chart was from five years ago, when the water around us was still ice. The American glaciologist Jason Box, who organized the trip, chose our landing site. “We called this place the Eagle Glacier because of its shape,” he said. The name, too, was five years old. “The head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.”
There were two poets among the crew, Aka Niviana, who is Greenlandic, and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, from the low-lying Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, where “king tides” recently washed through living rooms and unearthed graveyards. A small lens of fresh water has supported life on the Marshall Islands’ atolls for millennia, but, as salt water intrudes, breadfruit trees and banana palms wilt and die. As the Greenlandic ice we were gazing at continues to melt, the water will drown Jetnil-Kijiner’s homeland. About a third of the carbon responsible for these changes has come from the United States.
A few days after the boat trip, the two poets and I accompanied the scientists to another fjord, where they needed to change the memory card on a camera that tracks the retreat of the ice sheet. As we took off for the flight home over the snout of a giant glacier, an eight-story chunk calved off the face and crashed into the ocean. I’d never seen anything quite like it for sheer power—the waves rose twenty feet as it plunged into the dark water. You could imagine the same waves washing through the Marshalls. You could almost sense the ice elevating the ocean by a sliver—along the seafront in Mumbai, which already floods on a stormy day, and at the Battery in Manhattan, where the seawall rises just a few feet above the water.
When I say the world has begun to shrink, this is what I mean. Until now, human beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, out across the globe—slowly at first, and then much faster. But a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable earth. Sometimes our retreat will be hasty and violent; the effort to evacuate the blazing California towns along narrow roads was so chaotic that many people died in their cars. But most of the pullback will be slower, starting along the world’s coastlines. Each year, another twenty-four thousand people abandon Vietnam’s sublimely fertile Mekong Delta as crop fields are polluted with salt. As sea ice melts along the Alaskan coast, there is nothing to protect towns, cities, and native villages from the waves. In Mexico Beach, Florida, which was all but eradicated by Hurricane Michael, a resident told the Washington Post, “The older people can’t rebuild; it’s too late in their lives. Who is going to be left? Who is going to care?”
In one week at the end of last year, I read accounts from Louisiana, where government officials were finalizing a plan to relocate thousands of people threatened by the rising Gulf (“Not everybody is going to live where they are now and continue their way of life, and that is a terrible, and emotional, reality to face,” one state official said); from Hawaii, where, according to a new study, thirty-eight miles of coastal roads will become impassable in the next few decades; and from Jakarta, a city with a population of ten million, where a rising Java Sea had flooded the streets. In the first days of 2018, a nor’easter flooded downtown Boston; dumpsters and cars floated through the financial district. “If anyone wants to question global warming, just see where the flood zones are,” Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston, told reporters. “Some of those zones did not flood thirty years ago.”
According to a study from the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre last summer, the damage caused by rising sea levels will cost the world as much as fourteen trillion dollars a year by 2100, if the U.N. targets aren’t met. “Like it or not, we will retreat from most of the world’s non-urban shorelines in the not very distant future,” Orrin Pilkey, an expert on sea levels at Duke University, wrote in his book “Retreat from a Rising Sea.” “We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.”
See next post for page 2
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NASA
Nov 19, 2018 10:59:09 GMT -6
Post by swamprat on Nov 19, 2018 10:59:09 GMT -6
Amidst all of the "political turmoil", NASA tries to focus on moving forward.New NASA video calls for return to moon and MarsBy Deborah Byrd in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | November 18, 2018
“We’re returning to the moon, preparing to go beyond to Mars. We are going. We are NASA.”
NASA released the video above on YouTube on Friday (November 16, 2018) and released it via Twitter Saturday. It’s a teaser, essentially a trailer, read by voiceover actor Mike Rowe, for the space agency’s plan to establish a permanent human presence on the moon and then venture beyond, to Mars. As of Sunday morning, the video had 732,295 views; we predict it’ll pick up speed and go viral this week because – although it doesn’t say much – what it does say is so inspiring. For example:
"This is about sustainable science and feeding forward the advance of the human spirit … because we are the pioneers, the thinkers, the star-sailors, the visionaries, the do-ers … and because we stand on the shoulders of giants to go farther than humanity has ever been."
How long have we space fans waited for words like these from NASA? A long time.
And if the words echo the style of American politics in recent years, they should. NASA’s current focus on establishing a sustainable presence on the moon and Mars are, in part, an answer to the Space Policy Directive 1, signed by Donald Trump at the end of 2017. The directive:
"… calls for the NASA administrator to ‘lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities.
The effort will more effectively organize government, private industry, and international efforts toward returning humans on the moon, and will lay the foundation that will eventually enable human exploration of Mars."
Elsewhere on EarthSky today, we’re reporting on a related effort, centered around a return to the moon, describing the role a Colorado-based private company – called Lunar Outpost – might play in this effort, by creating and building small, exploratory moon rovers. See article: earthsky.org/space/lunar-outpost-rovers-aka-lunar-resource-prospector
But back to the new video. In a speech read during it, NASA said:
"We’ve taken giant leaps and left our mark in the heavens.
Now we’re building the next chapter, returning to the moon to stay, and preparing to go beyond. We are NASA – and after 60 years, we’re just getting started."
Bottom line: A new NASA video – posted to YouTube on November 16, 2018 – is a teaser for NASA’s shifted focus on establishing a human presence on the moon, and venturing outward to Mars.
earthsky.org/space/nasa-video-nov-2018-return-to-moon-mars
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Post by swamprat on Nov 18, 2018 10:24:42 GMT -6
A vital relationship. Destroy nature, we're dead.
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Post by swamprat on Nov 18, 2018 10:22:02 GMT -6
Narwhal adopted by belugasEarthSky Voices in EARTH | November 18, 2018 by Erin Siracusa, University of Guelph
Scientists are trying to solve the mystery of why a narwhal was adopted by a group of beluga whales in Canada’s St. Lawrence River.
Since the age of the Roman Empire and the story of how the twins Romulus and Remus were raised by a wolf, tales of interspecies adoptions have captivated the human imagination. The story that emerged from Canada’s St. Lawrence River in July of 2018 was no exception. While researching belugas, a group of scientists captured drone footage of a young male narwhal, more than 1,000 kilometers south of his Arctic home, swimming with a pod of belugas.
It sounds like something straight out of Disney’s “Finding Nemo.” But in the three years since the narwhal was first spotted with his adopted family, this real-life drama has been playing out in the waters of the St. Lawrence estuary. And the unlikely alliance has researchers scratching their heads.
The cause of this consternation? A funny word called adoption.
In the human realm, adoption is seen as a benevolent act, but in the wild it poses a real evolutionary dilemma. This is because the goal of every organism in the natural world is to reproduce and transfer its genes to future generations. Adoption is puzzling because it requires an individual to invest resources into another’s offspring, with no guarantee of passing on its own genetic material. Despite this, adoption is well-documented across the animal kingdom.
The question is, why? Understanding when and where we see cases of adoption often comes down to understanding how adoption can provide a benefit to the foster parents or adoptive group members. In other words, how can investing in another’s offspring actually increase the potential for adoptive parents to contribute genes to future generations?
A family matter One possibility is through the adoption of kin.
Since related individuals share genes, by raising family, animals can help to ensure the survival of their own DNA. This is the most widely documented explanation for foster care in the wild. Many social species, including lions, primates and elephants have been known to care for or raise the offspring of a mother, sister, aunt or other relative.
But scientists from the Kluane Red Squirrel Project have found that social species aren’t the only animals that adopt kin. In the icy north of Canada’s Yukon, red squirrel mothers preferentially adopt orphaned relatives. This is intriguing because red squirrels are territorial rodents that live in isolation. Even so, red squirrels were able to identify relatives and actively chose to foster pups to which they were related. Out of thousands of litters, researchers only identified five cases of adoption, all of which were orphaned kin.
You scratch my back, I scratch yours But adopting individuals with shared genes isn’t the only way that potential foster parents can benefit. Reciprocity, or an “exchange of favors,” might also motivate shared parenting. Under certain circumstances unrelated females will swap “babysitting” duties. This has the benefit of allowing the mother to forage more efficiently without youngsters tagging along.
Alternatively, mothers might nurse each other’s offspring, providing temporary relief from maternal duties. Scientists are still uncertain, however, how important reciprocity might be for facilitating allonursing – non-maternal milk provisioning – or other forms of foster care provided by non-relatives.
Practice makes perfect Even more puzzling are circumstances in which adoptions occur between members of different species. Such cases can’t be explained either by shared genes or reciprocity among group members, and while interspecies adoptions are rare in the wild, they aren’t unheard of. For instance, in 2004, researchers in Brazil observed an infant marmoset being cared for by two female capuchin monkeys.
Since interspecies adoptions are so uncommon, it’s challenging to understand why they occur. One possibility is that adoption provides an opportunity for young females to practice their mothering skills. Scientists believe that proficiency in parenting is based on learned as well as innate behaviors.
In elephant seals, experienced mothers are more successful in raising offspring. Researchers think that these benefits of maternal experience may be one reason adoption occurs so frequently in this species. By practicing with adopted young, females can ensure that they are competent mothers when it comes time to raise their own offspring.
Mistakes do happen Of course, not every instance of adoption is likely to be beneficial for the adoptive parent. One simple cause of mistaken foster care is reproductive error.
Breeding females that have recently lost their young are often still behaviorally and physiologically ready to provide maternal care. In such cases, a female’s motherly instinct may be so strong that it leads her to mistakenly redirect her care toward unrelated young.
Alternatively, parents may simply be bamboozled into raising another species’ young. Brown-headed cowbirds lay their eggs in the nest of an unsuspecting host who, unable to distinguish the cowbird’s offspring, will raise the young as their own.
All for one and one for all? But in the chilly waters of the St. Lawrence River, a different sort of adoption story is unfolding. The welcoming of a young narwhal into a pod of juvenile male belugas cannot be explained by kin selection, reciprocity or maternal instinct … leaving what?
It’s a good question, and frankly, scientists are still uncertain. One possibility is that adopting a lone individual might provide a benefit for the entire group. For instance, having a larger pod might offer protection from predators.
This “safety in numbers” benefit has been suggested as an explanation for adoption in other species. Alternatively, both narwhals and belugas are highly social animals and the benefits of social companionship alone might lead to this unlikely alliance.
This is particularly true given that narwhals and belugas do not directly compete for food. Narwhals feed on deepwater fish, while belugas prefer surface-dwelling salmon and capelin. The costs of adoption are therefore likely to be low.
In the end, the narwhal’s adoption might be one of the many natural mysteries that scientists have yet to solve. Nevertheless, footage of this long-tusked, gray-skinned cetacean frolicking with its fellow belugas is offering people worldwide a rare glimpse into an animal behavior almost never seen in the wild.
Bottom line: Scientists are trying to learn why a narwhal was adopted by a group of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River.
earthsky.org/earth/narwhal-adopted-by-beluga-whales
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Post by swamprat on Nov 17, 2018 14:19:17 GMT -6
Just a little, Sky!
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Post by swamprat on Nov 17, 2018 14:17:03 GMT -6
"Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of Our Universe"
WOW! Mesmerizing! Thank you, Hubble! Where do you suppose the James Webb will take us?! (If it ever gets launched!)
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Post by swamprat on Nov 17, 2018 11:08:31 GMT -6
Imagine that. The man who threatened to deprive Big Pharma of billion$ in profits is found dead of an "apparent suicide." Death of HHS official Daniel Best is ruled a suicideBy Sabrina Eaton, cleveland.com Posted Nov 15
free pic upload Daniel Best, a pharmaceutical executive from Bay Village who was tapped to oversee government efforts to reduce prescription drug costs, died on Nov. 1. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Nov. 1 death of Daniel Best, a pharmaceutical executive from Bay Village who led U.S. Department of Health and Human Services efforts to lower prescription drug prices, has been ruled a suicide, officials in Washington, D.C., said Thursday.
Police say Best was found "unresponsive" near the garage door exit of an apartment building in Washington, D.C.'s Navy Yard neighborhood at 5:25 a.m. on Nov. 1, and was pronounced dead by medical personnel who responded to the scene.
The city's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on Thursday said Best died from "multiple blunt force injuries" and it ruled his death a suicide. It would not release further information.
In announcing his death, HHS Secretary Alex Azar said the 49-year-old former CVSHealth and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals executive agreed to work at HHS "out of a desire to serve the American people by making health care more affordable."
"He brought his deep expertise and passion to this task with great humility and collegiality," Azar's statement said. "All of us who served with Dan at HHS and in the administration mourn his passing and extend our thoughts and prayers to his wife Lisa and the entire Best family at this difficult time."
www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/11/death_of_hhs_official_daniel_b.html?fbclid=IwAR2OocaKpHCC_0g6inQIHAl4udEKRWYQGwJygKmBhT3CN4Cvnc47iYxBcRk
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Post by swamprat on Nov 16, 2018 15:05:10 GMT -6
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Post by swamprat on Nov 16, 2018 15:00:16 GMT -6
Most scientific minds say life on Earth stemmed from certain chemical elements existing/combining in particular environmental conditions.
What are the chances of those elements being present amid similar environmental conditions in some star system other than ours?
Do the math.
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Post by swamprat on Nov 16, 2018 14:45:46 GMT -6
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Post by swamprat on Nov 16, 2018 10:19:38 GMT -6
The night the stars fellBy Eleanor Imster and Deborah Byrd in TODAY'S IMAGE | November 16, 2018
Check out this old engraving of the November 1833 Leonid meteor shower. It’s one reason this shower – due to peak this weekend – is so famous.
This famous engraving of the 1833 Leonid meteor shower was produced for the Adventist book Bible Readings for the Home Circle by Adolf Vollmy. It’s based on a painting by Swiss artist Karl Jauslin, which, in turn, was based on a first-person account of the 1833 storm by a minister, Joseph Harvey Waggoner, who saw the 1833 shower on his way from Florida to New Orleans.
In that famous shower, hundreds of thousands of meteors per hour were seen! It was the first recorded meteor storm of modern times. The parent comet – Tempel-Tuttle – completes a single orbit around the sun about once every 33 years. It releases fresh material every time it enters the inner solar system and approaches the sun. Since the 19th century, skywatchers have watched for Leonid meteor storms about every 33 years, beginning with that meteor storm of 1833.
This year’s Leonids peak on the mornings of November 17 and 18. Your sky won’t look like this, but the Leonids are a reliable annual shower, plus the moon is out of the way, and bright Venus is in the morning sky, rising shortly before sunup, ready to lighten your day no matter how many meteors you’ve seen. Try watching between midnight and dawn on November 17 and 18, and do get away from city lights.
Expect to see about 10 to 15 Leonid meteors per hour.
Bottom line: Famous engraving of the 1833 Leonid meteor shower.
earthsky.org/todays-image/leonid-meteor-shower-1833
All you need to know about the 2018’s Leonid meteor shower:
earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-leonid-meteor-shower
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Post by swamprat on Nov 16, 2018 10:15:47 GMT -6
Aerial Support Key to Fighting Southern California Fires
Raging winds created major challenges for dedicated firefighters.
By Pia Bergqvist November 13, 2018
As a resident of Agoura Hills, one of the communities evacuated as a result of the devastating Woolsey Fire, I was closely watching the progression of the fire as it quickly ravaged the hillsides surrounding our neighborhood. The fire flared up on Thursday afternoon and within less than 30 hours had burned through 70,000 acres, fueled by raging Santa Ana winds topping 50 mph.
The strong winds prevented aerial firefighters from attacking the flames. The only reason few homes in Oak Park, Agoura Hills, Westlake Village and Calabasas burned on Thursday and Friday was because of the heroic efforts of firefighters on the ground. I watched with my family in horror as the flames came right up against the streets of our home and that of friends in the neighborhood.
The fire spread from the edge of Simi Valley all the way to the beach, where owners of large livestock such as horses and llamas kept their animals away from the flames as there was no way to evacuate them in trailers. The smoke clouds over Malibu were eerily similar to those of a massive thunderstorm. It was hard to believe that the clouds were not created by moisture, but by smoke from flames burning the hillsides and multi-million-dollar homes along with them.
The winds finally settled enough on Friday that the fires could be attacked from the skies and firefighters got a good hold on the devastation. A variety of firefighting aircraft, such as Skycranes, Superscoopers, Cobras, and a massive DC-10 (above video), could be seen dropping their loads on the flames. The precision was impressive and, as a result, the fires were slowly brought in check.
However, Santa Ana winds kicked up once again on Sunday and Monday, stoking hot spots in the burned areas. By Monday afternoon, 91,000 acres and more than 370 homes had burned in the Woolsey Fire alone. Another fire in northern California, the Camp Fired, burned 11,300 acres along with more than 6,400 buildings, the most devastating loss of structures in California history. 42 people died in the Camp Fire and two lost their lives in the Woolsey Fire. Those numbers are likely to rise. But I can’t imagine how much more devastating the loss would have been without the outstanding firefighters and pilots risking their lives to keep our neighborhoods safe.
www.flyingmag.com/aerial-support-key-to-fighting-southern-california-fires
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Post by swamprat on Nov 15, 2018 10:31:21 GMT -6
Researchers walk back major ocean warming resultBy Deborah Byrd in EARTH | November 14, 2018
Late last month, a team of researchers said Earth’s oceans had warmed 60% more than anyone had realized. Now that result appears unlikely, since a mathematician and climate contrarian has uncovered a scientific error.
This is good news. It is less certain today that Earth’s oceans are 60 percent warmer than we thought (although they may still be that warm). As reported in the Los Angeles Times on November 14, 2018, researchers with University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Princeton University have had to walk back a widely reported scientific result – based on a paper published in Nature last month – that showed Earth’s oceans were heating up dramatically faster than previously thought as a result of climate change.
The October 31 paper in Nature stated the oceans had warmed 60 percent more than outlined by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On November 6, mathematician Nic Lewis posted his criticisms of the paper at Judith Curry’s blog. Both Lewis and Curry are critics of the scientific consensus that global warming is ongoing and human-caused.
In his November 6 blog post, Lewis pointed out flaws in the October 31 paper. The authors of the October 31 paper now say they’ve redone their calculations, and – although they find the ocean is still likely warmer than the estimate used by the IPCC – they agree that they “muffed” the range of probability. They can no longer support the earlier statement of a heat increase 60 percent greater than indicated. They now say there is a larger range of probability, between 10 percent and 70 percent, as other studies have already found.
A correction has been submitted to Nature.
The Los Angeles Times reported that one of the co-author’s on the paper – Ralph Keeling at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – “took full blame” and thanked Lewis for alerting him to the mistake. Keeling told the Los Angeles Times: "When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there. We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly."
In the meantime, the Twitter-verse today has done the expected in a situation like this, where a widely reported and dramatic climate result has had to be walked back. Many are making comments like this one:
Chuck Patriot Santa Dude Nellis "We always knew it was garbage but will the globalists agree with reality or deny it once more? ** 'We Really Muffed The Error Margins': Global Warming Report Rendered Worthless After Scientists Point Out Flaw In Ocean-Warming Survey."
But cooler heads on Twitter and elsewhere in the media are also weighing in, pointing out – as has been necessary to point out time and again – that science is not a “body of facts.” Science is a process. Part of the reason scientists publish is so that other scientists can find errors in their work, so that the errors can be corrected.
All scientists know this. The Los Angeles Times explained it this way: "While papers are peer-reviewed before they’re published, new findings must always be reproduced before gaining widespread acceptance throughout the scientific community…"
The Times quoted Gerald Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, as saying: "This is how the process works. Every paper that comes out is not bulletproof or infallible. If it doesn’t stand up under scrutiny, you review the findings."
Scott Anderson "Climate contrarian uncovers scientific error, upends major ocean warming study. Scientists don't cry "fake news", they accept the blame, fix the problem and move on..."
Bottom line: An error has been found in the October 31, 2018 paper published in Nature – showing an increase in ocean warming 60 percent greater than that estimated by the IPCC. The authors have acknowledged the error, and a correction has been submitted to Nature.
earthsky.org/earth/ocean-warming-60-greater-error-correction
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Post by swamprat on Nov 14, 2018 15:30:00 GMT -6
"A few weeks ago, the Voyager 2 spacecraft beamed back the first hints that it might soon be leaving the heliosphere — the giant bubble around the Sun filled with its constant outpouring of particles, the solar wind."
"To go, where no one, has gone before."
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Post by swamprat on Nov 14, 2018 15:21:04 GMT -6
UFO SIGHTING REPORTS OCTOBER 2018
Sightings by Country
Country Number of Reports UNITED STATES 515 UNITED KINGDOM 51 CANADA 49 CHILE 26 AUSTRALIA 17 FRANCE 11 BRAZIL 8 TURKEY 5 PHILIPPINES 4 AFGHANISTAN 4 MEXICO 4 IRELAND 3 INDIA 3 ARGENTINA 3 HUNGARY 3 ITALY 2 SLOVENIA 2 NORWAY 2 SOUTH AFRICA 2 GERMANY 2 PORTUGAL 2 PUERTO RICO 2 CROATIA 2 SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO 2 GUATEMALA 2 NEW ZEALAND 2 JAPAN 2 NETHERLANDS 2 KOREA, (South) 1 SWITZERLAND 1 BELGIUM 1 COSTA RICA 1 ROMANIA 1 FRENCH SOUTHERN TERRITORIES 1 COLOMBIA 1 SWEDEN 1 GREENLAND 1 VENEZUELA 1 DENMARK 1 POLAND 1 TUNISIA 1 GREECE 1 SPAIN 1 AUSTRIA 1 FINLAND 1 ISRAEL 1 TOTAL: 750 Distribution by State
State Number of Reports California 83 Florida 44 Texas 34 Arizona 24 Ohio 23 Pennsylvania 16 Washington 15 Michigan 15 New York 15 North Carolina 14 New Jersey 14 Georgia 13 Missouri 12 Virginia 12 Colorado 12 Oregon 10 New Mexico 10 Minnesota 10 Illinois 9 Alabama 8 Oklahoma 8 Nevada 8 Maryland 8 South Carolina 8 Louisiana 7 Indiana 7 Wisconsin 6 Kentucky 5 Utah 5 Alaska 5 Montana 5 Arkansas 5 Idaho 5 West Virginia 5 Massachusetts 5 Tennessee 5 Mississippi 4 Maine 4 New Hampshire 4 Iowa 4 Kansas 3 Connecticut 3 Hawaii 2 Wyoming 2 Delaware 1 South Dakota 1 District of Columbia 1
UFO Shape Reported
Shape of Object Number of Reports Sphere 132 N/A 77 Circle 65 Triangle 64 Other 56 Disc 54 Star-like 47 Unknown 40 Cylinder 38 Oval 22 Egg 19 Blimp 18 Square/Rectangular 17 Boomerang 17 Cigar 14 Diamond 14 Saturn-like 12 Fireball 11 Bullet/Missile 7 Teardrop 7 Chevron 6 Flash 6 Cone 4 Cross 2 Dumbbell 1
Distance from Witness
Distance from Witness Number of Reports < 100 ft 112 101-500 ft 88 501 ft - 1 Mile 188 Over 1 Mile 165 Unknown 236 NO VALUE 36
SOURCE: Mufon
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Post by swamprat on Nov 14, 2018 9:15:39 GMT -6
What is space weather?By Eleanor Imster in EARTH | SPACE | November 15, 2018
Activity on the sun’s surface creates the conditions known as space weather, that can, at its worst, damage Earth satellites and cause electrical blackouts.
The sun has made life on the innermost planets, Mercury and Venus, impossible, due to the intense radiation and colossal amounts of energetic material it blasts in every direction, creating the ever-changing conditions in space known as space weather.
Considering all of this, how did life come to thrive on Earth? Our magnetic field protects us from the solar wind — the constant stream of electrons, protons and heavier ions from the sun — and from coronal mass ejections (CMEs), the sun’s occasional outbursts of billion-ton clouds of solar plasma into space.
But the most extreme space weather events, arrivals of fast CMEs or high-speed solar-wind streams, disturb our protective magnetic shield, creating geomagnetic storms at Earth.
These storms have the potential to cause serious problems for modern technological systems, disrupting or damaging satellites in space and the multitude of services – like navigation and telecoms – that rely on them, blacking out power grids and radio communication and creating a radiation hazard for astronauts in space, even serving potentially harmful doses of radiation to astronauts on future missions to the moon or Mars.
BOTTOM LINE: Video explains space weather, especially solar wind and CMEs.
earthsky.org/space/what-is-space-weather-video?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=31140f2af9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-31140f2af9-394368745
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Post by swamprat on Nov 10, 2018 10:01:07 GMT -6
Give me 40 acres and I'll turn this thing around.
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