In February 2011 I did a live web video interview with Andrew Shaner of the Lunar and Planetary Institute where we talked about the Moon Hoax. It was a lot of fun!

Andrew just did something great for kids: he took some of the better moments of the interview, along with those from Paul Spudis, a lunar expert, and created a web page called Conspiracy Showdown. It takes some of the more widely-known claims of hoaxery and sets up short clips debunking them. Here’s an example with me, talking about why the Soviets didn’t blow the whistle:

Yes, for some reason he has a guy in a squirrel costume introducing the clips. It’s for kids, so don’t ask. If a quadrilateral sponge can live in a pineapple under the sea, a squirrel can wonder about the Moon Hoax.

Anyway, I think this is a fun thing for schoolkids, if the question of the reality of Apollo ever comes up in the classroom. And who knows? You might like it too.

Over the past 10 years at least, sea levels have been rising relatively steadily. This is mostly due to melting glaciers and ice sheets, and is a natural — if detrimental — consequence of global warming. The rate of ocean level rise has been a little over 3 millimeters per year (about 1/8th of an inch per year)… until last year. The rate of increase suddenly reversed itself in 2010, and the sea levels actually dropped a bit, by about 6 mm. What happened?

La Niña happened. Equatorial ocean temperatures fluctuate on a cycle; when they are warmer it’s called an El Niño, and when they’re cooler it’s La Niña. As you might expect, this affects how water evaporates off the ocean surface, and therefore rainfall across the world as well. Right now we’re in a La Niña, characterized by drought conditions in the southern US (like in Texas), and heavier than usual rainfall in Australia, northern South America, and other locations:

That map is from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which map where water is on the Earth and how it moves around. This change in rainfall is the culprit for the lowering sea level:

So where does all that extra water in Brazil and Australia come from? You guessed it–the ocean. Each year, huge amounts of water are evaporated from the ocean. While most of it falls right back into the ocean as rain, some of it falls over land. "This year, the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year," says Carmen Boening, a JPL oceanographer and climate scientist. Boening and colleagues presented these results recently at the annual Grace Science Team Meeting in Austin, Texas.

That’s pretty interesting! I didn’t realize it could rain so much that sea levels could be affected, but there you go. Doing the math, I find that a 6 mm drop is equivalent to a volume of very roughly 700 billion cubic meters of water, or 700 cubic kilometers (about 180 cubic miles). That is a lot of water! (more…)

The Earth is trembling.

A magnitude 5.9 earthquake hit Virginia on August 23 at 17:51 UTC. Twelve hours earlier, a magnitude 5.3 quake shook southern Colorado (I slept through it; it was 360 km away). On August 20, a magnitude 7.0 hit off the coast of eastern Australia, and another magnitude 7.0 earthquake took place in northern Peru on August 24 at 17:46 UTC, just a few hours ago as I write this.

What gives? Are we seeing a swarm of related events? Is the Earth shaking itself apart?

It’s easy enough to think so. But our brains are wired in a way that makes them easily fooled (proof). What we need to do is not panic — always a good start — and think this through. Happily, we have an exceptionally good tool for this sort of problem: science. Well, science and a tiny touch of math.

Get me some stats, stat!

You need to look at the statistics, and not by coincidence the United States Geological Survey provides them. When you look at the chart, you see that there is 1 quake per year somewhere on Earth that’s magnitude 8 or more. There are 15 between 7.0 and 7.9 every year, or on average about one every three weeks. Mag 6? 134 per year, or 2-3 per week. Mag 5: 1300 per year, or about 4 per day.

Right away, you can see that there are going to be decent-sized earthquakes somewhere on Earth all the time. And while on average you get mag 7 quake every few weeks, in reality the distribution is random. Getting two of them within a few days of each other is not only not surprising, statistically speaking it’s expected!

It’s unusual to get a quake centered in Virginia, but it’s not that odd. They’re rare for sure, but there was a bigger one in 1897. Colorado has had its share, too. Every state in the union has quakes; I remember one in Michigan when I was an undergrad at Ann Arbor. So in and of itself, having an earthquake anywhere in the US is not necessarily suspicious. Again, a chart on that USGS page shows that we should expect 50-70 mag 5 quakes a year in the U.S., so having two even on the same day is not all that unusual.

It came from outer space

So right away, the math is telling us that these quakes are probably not really clustered, and it’s a simple coincidence. Still, maybe it’s better to be sure. Could there be some other, unearthly cause?

(more…)

It’s not often you can actually say "case closed", but in this case it’s literally true: climatologist Michael Mann has been cleared of all wrongdoing by the Inspector General of the National Science Foundation.

Did I say "has been cleared"? I meant has been cleared once again, since there have been several investigations into his research and Dr. Mann has been cleared of all charges every single time (like here and here). All of this stemmed from the "ClimateGate" nonsense of the past couple of years, where leaked emails were taken hugely out of context by the press and climate change deniers, and used to smear scientists. Dr. Mann was at the center of the whole manufactured controversy, being the biggest target of the people who want to deny the Earth is warming up.

This latest, and hopefully last, investigation into Dr. Mann’s research (PDF) again shows he is not guilty of misconduct. A couple of the report conclusions are worth pointing out:

We found no basis to conclude that the [Climategate] emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence.

That’s clear enough, I think. They also said:

There is no specific evidence that [Mann] falsified or fabricated any data and no evidence that his actions amounted to research misconduct.

A big claim by the deniers is that researchers were using "tricks" to falsify conclusions about global warming, but the NSF report is pretty clear that’s not true. The most damning thing the investigators could muster was that there was "some concern" over the statistical methods used, but that’s not scandalous at all; there’s always some argument in science over methodology. The vague language of the report there indicates to me this isn’t a big deal, or else they would’ve been specific. The big point is that the data were not faked.

What does this mean for global warming? A lot of these attacks can be traced back to the famous "hockey stick" diagram, showing how Earth’s temperatures have been increasing rapidly in recent times. This graph is what really clinches the idea of man-made global warming, and so has been the epicenter of the manufactroversy. The fact that Dr. Mann has been cleared again, and that his data are good, shows that this graph is even more solid — or at least is not as weak as so many would lead you to believe.

And what does this mean about "ClimateGate"? That’s clear enough: all the outrage, all the claims of fraud and fakery, were just — haha — hot air.

Not that this will stop or even slow down the denial machine. Politicians from the Virginia State Attorney General to members of the House of Representatives have been on what I would characterize as witch hunts. Dr. Mann has been vocal in his opposition, and I applaud him. Still, needless to say, the attacks will continue.

Here are the facts: the Earth is warming up. The rate of warming has increased in the past century or so. This corresponds to the time of the Industrial Revolution, when we started dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases warm the planet (hence the name) — if they didn’t we’d have an average temperature below the freezing point of water. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which is dumped into the atmosphere by humans to the tune of 30 billion tons per year, 100 times the amount from volcanoes. And finally, approximately 97% of climatologists who actually study climate agree that global warming is real, and caused by humans.

Those are simply the facts. It’s not hard to connect them, as long as you stick to reality and don’t let ideology sway you.

Tip o’ the thermometer to DeSmogBlog.

I see a lot of amateur rap videos made to support one cause or another, some good, and some, um, not so good.

This one, though, is really good: I’m A Climate Scientist [one or two moments may be NSFW]:

I LOLed a few times at this, and it makes a good point. We need more climate scientists speaking up, especially if they can do it in a way that connects to people.

Yo.

Tip o’ the thermometer to Ellen Ward.

As I sit, I squint at my computer LCD monitor, so I put on my prescription glasses to see better. I should’ve put them on earlier, because now I have a headache, so I take a couple of ibuprofens with a glass of fresh clean water from my tap.

I stretch my back a bit because it’s sore. I have a herniated disk — I found out last week when I got an MRI — and I’ll be going to the doctor in a few days to see if I need surgery, or perhaps just a cortisone injection to reduce the swelling. A friend said stuff like that hurts more when it rains, but I looked online and found out that’s a myth. I checked the weather anyway and the satellite view shows it’s pretty clear.

But man, that reminds me. I need a new computer — the latest models are so fast, and use so much less energy — and it sure would make browsing easier. That weather page took forever to download! At least five or six seconds.

The news page is even worse. And when it finally downloads, what do I see? Some scientist complaining that their budget is going to get cut. Well boohoo. I mean, seriously? Scientists?! What have they ever done for me?

To say I am not a fan of Rick Perry, Republican Presidential candidate, is to seriously underestimate my antipathy toward him. He is anti-science in almost every sense of the word, and his stance on nearly every issue on which I’ve heard him speak is the exact opposite of where I stand.

But then something like this comes along, and shows just how far outside of reality he is. In this video, a little boy asks him how old the Earth is, and Perry then gives an astonishing answer:

After equivocating about the age of the Earth, Perry — a man who, if elected President, will swear to uphold the U. S. Constitution — says, "In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools."

This is a jaw-dropping assertion. I find it difficult to interpret this as other than him saying he supports blatantly violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by teaching religion in public schools. Gawker does take a different tack saying, " Texas does not, in fact, teach creationism, or anything like it." But even if that’s true, it means Perry is — at the very least — woefully out of touch with his own state’s school system, and — at the worst, which is where I think we stand — he is unfamiliar with the very first amendment of the document upon which all the laws of the United States of America are based.

I could go on and on — though apropos of this it’s worth reminding you that Perry appointed creationists to be the head of the Texas State Board of Education three times in a row. It’s very clear that this man has no concern at all for science (like, say, global warming, about which the Washington Post strongly implies he’s a liar) or for doing and saying whatever it takes to push his religious agenda.

Every day, it seems, Perry says something similar to this, and it’s very early yet in the campaign process. Yet, incredibly, he’s leading in the Presidential candidate pool among likely Republican voters in the primary next year. We have a long, painful election journey ahead of us.

Tip o’ the Burgess Shale to Ken Plume.

- Update: reality wins for sure in Texas!
- Sorry Texas, you’re still doomed
- Texas creationist McLeroy spins the educational disaster he created
- Texas State Board of Education confirms irony is dead
- Michele Bachmann needs to check her ID