A Change in the Wind

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). 

Reconciling religion and evolution: The Tree of life

From an unpretentious and persuasive visual essay on the most debated movie of the year, The Tree of Life, by Matt Zoller Seitz: 

There is this central notion in all of Malick's films that every individual person is just one tiny part of nature. Not too much more important in the larger scheme of things than an insect, or a blade of grass. It's really not all that radical to state, but it's one American audiences seem to have trouble accepting, because it's anathema to the way we are told we should live our lives. And in this [evolution] sequence Terence Malick has done something quite remarkable, which is that he has reconciled religion and evolution. He has reconciled religion and science. 

That's from the first part of the essay, which Seitz put together with a film editor collaborator. In the second part, which is much more beautiful, because it features the mother in the film, the most beautiful of its characters by about a country mile, he gets specific:

When we hear the mother speaking in voice-over, I think we're hearing Jack's projection of her internal voice, her overwhellming goodness, her unselfishness, her sunbeam warmth. Look at how she dotes on her infant child in this moment near the opening of the movie. She's Mother Earth, much as "The Tree of Life" itself is Mother Earth. 

 

"The Tree of Life" is the most debated movie of the year, because critics love it, by a 40-2 margin, and ordinary people often detest it.

Another bad day for climate change denial

Richard Muller, a MacArthur fellow at UC Berkeley, and a contrarian who led a group of scientists -- mostly physicists -- into the foul waters of climate change denial, funded in large part by the justly-infamous Koch brothers, has been forced to admit by the extensive resampling of data from 40,000 field stations that yes, the Earth's atmosphere is warming, as thousands upon thousands of studies by reputable scientists around the world have reported in thousands of different ways.

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK," said Prof Muller.

"This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

Well, at least Muller apologized, more or less. Don't expect the same from the closed mind of denier Anthony Watts, who is continuing to refuse comment, claiming he couldn't possibly say anything about a paper that hasn't been peer-reviewed. Right. Even though he's published thousands of misleading posts about global warming based on, um, less substantial data, such as his recent sneer at Al Gore, for having the temerity to support the Occupy Wall Street protesters.   

Watts says Gore has "lost it." Actually Watts just lost the argument he's been flogging for years.  

Translating climate science

A great table from a paper in this month's Physics Today: 

Via Richard Betts' intriguing twitter feed. More scientists should tweet -- forces them to be understandable, whether they like it or not! 

What part of that extreme was due to climate change?

Superb -- and available! -- story in this month's Nature on how researchers are beginning to parse the contribution of global warming to extreme events. Highly recommended. 

It's called "fractional attribution." Here's an easier way to grasp the concept:

To put it in English:

Inspired by the observation that intense rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere has worsened over the second half of the twentieth century, the group [of researchers in Canada] at compared actual precipitation data with simulations from six different climate models, both with and without greenhouse warming. They found that the extreme precipitation patterns observed did not match anything expected from natural climate cycles, but closely matched those expected from greenhouse warming.

As the story notes, it's much easier to quantify and predict temperature than precipitation, a far more complex phenomenon. This has been a stumbling block in climate science -- and weather prediction, for that matter -- forever, and it's a distinction the public seems unable to grasp.

Still, it's exciting to see the science going beyond the usual "it's impossible to attribute any one weather event to climate change" cliche. The public was able to grasp the idea of a percentage chance of rain on a given day; perhaps a percentage of attribution will also find its place in our thinking. 

Unlike more distant impacts of global warming such as the slowly rising sea level, the effects of local weather extremes tend to be instantly tangible and vividly remembered. Surveys suggest that people who feel they have personally experienced the effects of climate change are more likely to believe it is a real problem — and one that needs solving — than those who have not. 

Next challenge for reporters: find a "fractional attribution" expert willing to speak about this on a given extreme event. The problem (as Bill Nye recently alluded to, in a debate on Fox News) is that the analysis can take months, but even so, to talk about attribution at all is a big first step.   

The refrains of nature: Rachel Carson

If we think of Rachel Carson, we probably remember her for alerting us to the massacre of the birds by DDT in Silent Spring,  and overlook her earlier, more poetic works, such as her bestseller The Sea Around Us, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, won the National Book Award, and numerous other prizes. 

Yet in her era, Carson was criticized by some of her scientific peers for the poetry she mixed in to her science. Here's an early passage from a draft of her next bestseller, The Edge of the Sea. 

There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds; in the ebb and flow of the tides; responding to sun and moon as they have done for millions of years; in the repose of the folded bud in winter, ready within its sheath for spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature, the assurance that night after night, dawn comes, and spring after winter. 

At the time -- l951 -- Carson had need of healing: She was dealing with the discovery of a tumor in her breast. 

From Linda Lear's l997 biography, Witness to Nature, pp213.