A Change in the Wind

The sexiness of a stupid woman, according to science

In Slate, a science reporter specializing in sex, Jesse Bering, reports on a new study that finds that women who look drunk and/or stupid are especially attractive to straight men.  

The study has problems -- for one, a lack of a good control sample. For another, the hypothesis (that men find women who appear out of it more attractive because the guy thinks he's more likely to get laid, for example) surely has limits, to which the study seems blind. 

All this Bering discusses ably. He notes the flaws, but concludes: 

All else being equal, would you really have thought that the average man would subjectively perceive such women to be physically more alluring than their sober, bright-minded peers?

Actually, yes. But that's because I remember a great quote from the sexy, brainy Hedy LeMarr:

Any girl can look glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid. 

Lamarr was an extraordinary woman: a great scientist and inventor in her maturity, a movie star and sex symbol in her youth, and a woman who knew something about men. (She married six of them.)

 Here's a pic of her in her early movie star days: 

I wonder if Lamarr came to this realization because she couldn't look stupid if she tried, and maybe sometimes wished she could. 

Understanding the extreme weather/climate change link

At Dot Earth, Andy Revkin takes another whack at the link between recent extreme weather events and climate change. He begins as I did a couple of posts back, with the debate between Rahmstorf/Coumou at RealClimate and Marty Hoerling at NOAA. He doesn't put the March heat wave into the mix, but does add useful perspectives from John Wallace and Michael Tobis' great post 

Disequilibrium is Not Your Friend.  

Which uses a Calder mobile sculpture to illustrate a crucial, logical, but little-understood reality. 

It’s a general principle of complex equilibria that the more they are disturbed, the more complex the processes involved in restoring their equilibrium. 

And there's more, lots more.

It's a beautiful description, but troubling too. .

Global warming stresses bird marriages

Scientific American has been a surprisingly sexy magazine as of late, with Jesse Bering's classic ode to semen, and now a cheeky look at global warming and bird biology. The headline:

Climate Change increases mate-swapping in birds

A study by Carlos Botero et al in PLoS ONE reveals that, the mag says: .

Birds typically bond to one partner throughout a breeding season and sometimes nest with the same mate year after year. Before the 1990s, this phenomenon led scientists to believe that more than 90 percent of all species were monogamous, but thanks to improved genetic testing, we now know most birds actually stray from their partners.

Despite birds' long history of infidelity, extreme temperature fluctuations appear to be intensifying the effect. If global climates continue to grow more erratic, the affected areas could see a steady increase of promiscuity among birds, Botero says.

Translating this idea from the study:

We show that after controlling for potentially influential life history and demographic variables, there are significant positive associations between the variability and predictability of annual climatic cycles and the prevalence of infidelity and divorce within populations of a taxonomically diverse array of socially monogamous birds.

Real news may be the evolutionary logic revealed. To increase genetic variability, to better allow survival of young in a wider array of conditions, temperature stress drives infidelity in birds. 

h/t: Jess Zimmerman/Grist

Biz mag publishes climate science: Heartland burned

One of the most fascinating revelations from the internal docs leaked from the Heartland Institute is about the business journal Forbes, which recently has begun publishing real honest-to-God climate science news. Unlike the Wall Street Journal. 

Wrote Heartland in its "Climate Strategy" doc:

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high profile climate scientists (such as [Peter] Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

'Reliably anti-climate" -- truer words have rarely been spoke. It's fascinating -- but what has happened to Forbes? Today they published a long, thoughtful look at a Harvard conference that not only endorsed[pdf] the concept of cap-and-trade, but said this innovative emissions control method was much cheaper than expected, and would work even better with carbon dioxide than it did with acid rain.

Justin Gerdes wrote for the business journal: 

1) Cap and trade works:

The goal of Title IV of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, the Acid Rain Program, was to slash annual SO₂ [sulphur dioxide] emissions by 10 million tons from the 1980 baseline (26 million tons). The source of much of the SO₂ emitted in the United States was the nation’s fleet of coal-fired power plants. In a departure from convention, the legislation did not prescribe how power plants should slash SO₂; instead, beginning in 2000, the statute capped aggregate SO₂emissions at the nation’s 3,200 coal plants at 8.95 million tons annually, a reduction of nearly 50% from 1980 levels.

In other words, it's not only more effective than expected, it's cheaper too. Forbes still publishes plenty of deniers, but apparently their blacklisting of climate scientists is over. Amazing. 

A persistent La Niña leads to a long stretch of dryness

This year national weather and climate forecasters said they saw a La Niña condition developing in the Pacific, and promised dryness, as they did last year. This year, for virtually all of California, and much of the nation as well, they've been right.

Here's the drought forecast, in a graphic from NOAA [National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration]:

More drought to come, looks like...and it's already killed an estimated half-billion trees in Texas.

Yes, that's 500 million trees, as reported last week in the Houston Chronicle. 

Here's a startling image from Jeff Masters' astounding Wunderblog, showing exactly how dry it's been in the country and virtually the entirety of California this past week.. 

The forecast concludes:

The latest GFS model forecast predicts that this unusually dry pattern will persist for at least the next ten days, with the possibility of it breaking down during the last week of January.

At least Texas got some rain,  thanks to "a highly abnormal jet stream pattern that is keeping the northern polar branch of the jet stream far to the north in Canada."

Hmmmm... 

Researchers find high levels of mercury in CA coastal fog

This is the story I found at this year's fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union -- how fog off California's coastal coast may be importing mercury from the ocean on to the land. 

The team, led by chemist Peter Weiss-Penzias, reported finding "very high" levels of mercury, a neurotoxin, in the fog, according to a paper presented Thursday to a geophysical science conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

"These are unheard of levels for methylmercury," said Weiss-Penzias. "People have measured methylmercury downstream from old mercury mines, where the bugs [microbes] have to convert inorganic mercury in sediment into methylmercury, and the highest levels they found were four parts per trillion. Well, our highest levels were 10 parts per trillion."

Weiss-Penzias suggested that it's possible that there is a "wash-out" -- a sort of invisible bathtub ring of methylmercury left behind by the fog. That's where he hopes to take his research next. 

Alien abduction a myth: U.S. government

From the White House:

The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye. 

Well, that'll put the Area 51 stories to rest (not). 

The trouble with climate change: New York City

Today New York released a 600-page report on the consequences of climate change in the state, which so far (mysteriously to me) only The Guardian has covered, near as I can tell. Their opening:

Irene-like storms of the future would put a third of New York City streets under water and flood many of the tunnels leading into Manhattan in under an hour because of climate change, a new state government report warns Wednesday.

Sea level rise due to climate change would leave lower Manhattan dangerously exposed to flood surges during major storms, the report, which looks at the impact of climate change across the entire state of New York, warns.

"The risks and the impacts are huge," said Art deGaetano, a climate scientist at Cornell University and lead author of the ClimAID study. "Clearly areas of the city that are currently inhabited will be uninhabitable with the rising of the sea." 

The shocker for me so far is that this study, two years in the making, including a great deal of GCM modeling, projects a possible 2-to-4 foot rise in sea level by the end of the century, should the melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica accelerate, with big impacts in the 2020s. Haven't seen anyone reputable put a figure on that possible SLR before. One startling passage:

Sea level rise in combination with coastal storm surge has the ability to severely damage transportationsystems in New York—particularly those in New York City and the surrounding metropolitan region—since much of the systems are located at low elevations, and some in tunnels below sea level.

By the end of this century, the ClimAID projections show that sea level is expected to rise by 2 to 4 feet with significant implications for the transportation sector. Damages from a coastal storm in the New York City metropolitan area that currently occurs on averageonce every 100 years would be significant. At current sea level, economic losses from such a stormwould amount to about $58 billion. Losses under a 2-foot sea level rise scenario increase to $70 billionand to $84 billion under a 4-foot sea level rise scenario.  

All sectors of the transportation system would be affected, including roads, railways, subways, airports, and seaports.  The effects of such a flooding scenario would occur rapidly. For example, many of the tunnels lying below flood heights (including subway, highway, and rail) would fill up with water in less than 1 hour. Atthe low-lying La Guardia Airport, sea level rise would wipe out the effectiveness of existing levees, even for less severe storms. The outage times estimated for the various transportation systems range from 1to 29 days, depending on the infrastructure and sea level rise scenario

The study preaches adaptation again and again, but also talks about environmental inequality issues -- a lot. We'll be hearing more about this one. 

The Guardian story also mentions that NOAA's plans to include a climate service were blocked by Republicans in Congress. To quote the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations:

Climate Change – The conference agreement does NOT include funding to establish a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Service. The Administration requested $322 million to establish this new entity within NOAA.

That's thinking ahead. 

Not. 

Revkin unbound: Another successful satellite launch

Andrew Revkin, the leading climate reporter of our time, turns out not to have just a phenomenal (and huge) blog, the justly famous Dot Earth on the New York Times, but also a more informal and visual tumblr, Revkin.net, with which yours truly has fallen instantly in love. 

From that tumblr, here's a terrific pic of the successful launch of an exciting new satellite with a very dull name, the National Preparatory Project. 

Scientific American and Space.com report:

"NPP — which stands for National polar-orbiting operational environmental satellite system Preparatory Project — is the first probe ever designed to collect data for both short-term weather forecasting and long-term climate monitoring, researchers have said.

The spacecraft will measure more than 30 climate variables from its perch 512 miles (824 kilometers) above the Earth. Scientists will also use NPP to monitor natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, wildfires and floods.

NPP will also test out technologies for an even more advanced line of Earth-observing satellites, known as the Joint Polar Satellite System, which should start coming online in 2016 or 2017.

"We look forward to many, many years of great advancements of science and improvements of forecasts from the NPP mission," said Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division. "The measurements from NPP will be affecting everyone in this nation, and indeed perhaps in the world."

Climate change skeptic turns on deniers: some details

Eugene Robinson wraps up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project results in an op-ed for the Washington Post: 

[Richard] Muller found that skeptics are wrong when they claim that a “heat island” effect from urbanization is skewing average temperature readings; monitoring instruments in rural areas show rapid warming, too. He found that skeptics are wrong to base their arguments on the fact that records from some sites seem to indicate a cooling trend, since records from at least twice as many sites clearly indicate warming. And he found that skeptics are wrong to accuse climate scientists of cherry-picking the data, since the readings that are often omitted — because they are judged unreliable — show the same warming trend.

Kevin Drum digs a little deeper, and mentions (as no newspaper story has) the BEST figure for global warming by century, and for the last ten years: 

"The earth is indeed getting warmer. Global average land temperatures have risen 0.91 degrees Celsius over the past 50 years. This is "on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions."

"The rate of increase on land is accelerating. Warming for the entire 20th century clocks in at 0.73 degrees C per century. But over the most recent 40 years, the globe has warmed>at a rate of 2.76 degrees C per century."

Warming has not abated since 1998. "The rise in average temperature over the period 1998-2010 is 2.84 degrees C per century."

Warming is accelerating, in other words, contrary to the blind optimism of the deniers. 

Maybe what we're seeing here is a rift opening between climate change skeptics (who still can be persuaded with data) and deniers such as Anthony Watts (whose minds are forever closed).