The Terra satellite is designed to study our planet from space, examining the environment over large scales and in high resolution. While passing over south Africa it took this seemingly normal — if still very beautiful — image:

I rotated it, so north is to the left. You can see land to the left, the southernmost tip of Africa, called Cape Agulhas. To the top is the Indian ocean, with the Atlantic to the right. A weather system is forming there, and all looks as it should… until your gaze settles all the way to the right (south). Wait… what’s the blue swirly thing?

Holy otology! Is that a giant ear?

Nope. It’s an eddy, a vortex, in the ocean, probably spun off the ocean current that flows around the southern cape of Africa. These eddies can dredge up material from deeper waters, including nutrients. Phytoplankton in the water feeds of those nutrients, and bang! Plankton bloom.

The plankton flows along with the water, coloring it blue, making it stand out eerily against the water. As I pointed out in an earlier post about these blooms, we can learn a lot about the environment from them. Plankton are sensitive to climate change, for example, and can act as indicators of the water’s physical characteristics.

When I see an image like this I think of all the funding cutbacks NASA is facing right now — and yeah, I’ll be writing about that soon. Our planet is on a cusp right now, and I can’t help but fret about the opportunities we might miss if we step back from space. Exploring space, even just being in space, has given us a perspective on our home world we couldn’t possibly have achieved otherwise. Some things, once begun, shouldn’t be stopped. Try as they might, some politicians can’t make us unsee what we’ve seen, and unlearn what we’ve learned.

Unless we let them, of course. I won’t, and I hope you won’t either. Let the picture above serve as a reminder: when it comes to keeping track of the Earth, we have to keep our eyes and ears open.

Sometimes, the images from the Cassini Saturn probe are so cool it’s tempting just to post them and say, "Look at THAT!"

See what I mean? [Click to gigantesenate.]

But of course, I can’t just leave it at that. This image, taken on January 4, 2012, is a bit different than most. Sure, we see Saturn’s magnificent rings, nearly edge on from this perspective. And we’ve seen this icy moon Enceladus many, many times (see Related Posts below for tons more pictures). Look at the bottom of the moon: see those fuzzy streaks? Those are geysers of water spewing from cracks in the moon’s south pole! Cassini has been studying them intently ever since they were discovered; they are proof that liquid water exists under the surface of Enceladus, though it’s still being argued over whether it’s in pockets, like lakes, or the whole moon has an ocean of water under the surface.

Despite all that, I keep getting drawn to the crescent shape itself. We can never see that from Earth. Saturn is much farther out from the Sun than we are, and geometry demands that from home we always see these worlds nearly fully lit by the Sun. The only way to see them like this is to go there.

But also, that giant circular feature is really interesting. It’s big, maybe 200 km (over 100 miles) across, and a bit darker than the surrounding surface. I tried locating it on an atlas of Enceladus, but it wasn’t obvious at all. I thought it might be an impact basin, but a little scrounging online led me to a paper by Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco, which says there are no large impact basins on Enceladus! So what is it?

Well, why not go to Dr. Porco herself? I sent her a note, and she kindly replied. That region is called Diyar Planitia, and it stands out among the surrounding terrain because it’s much smoother. It does have narrow surface features, but they’re too small to be seen at this resolution. At the low angle at which we’re seeing it here, it looks a little bit darker than the rougher terrain around it, so it’s easier to see (which is why on an atlas it’s harder to find). It is roughly circular, but that may simply be coincidence. Enceladus has been massively resurfaced, with some areas much older than others, due to various forces under the surface — looking this all up I learned a new one, called diapirism, where lower density material underneath higher density material can rise up and break through. That’s one process that’s helped change the surface of Enceladus over the eons.

That’s pretty nifty. And think about that! Today I learned of what is to me a new region of the solar system, one that has an interesting and complicated history, molded by vast forces over long-stretched times, one of which was also new to me. How wonderful to get all that from what’s otherwise just a pretty picture!

But of course, in science, there’s no such thing as just a pretty picture. Science is a tapestry, a vast complex fabric interwoven with countless threads. Each of those threads is amazing, each important, and each leads to another. And that’s where the true beauty of science lies.

I love the idea of returning to the Moon, and the idea of going back there to stay I love even more. Having said that, I want to stress it must be done the right way. This has been back in the news lately because Newt Gingrich made a speech about it before his doomed Florida Republican presidential primary run.

What bugs me is that we’re talking about it in context of what Gingrich said; I’d rather we were talking about this on its own merits. There are reasons to go to the Moon, and reasons not to do it Newt’s way… all of which I went over in an interview on CBC radio’s Day 6 show with Brent Bambury that aired Saturday. The interview is archived on their site, and you can listen to it there. I was unusually lucid, IMO, and I think the points made were valid.

I was also interviewed on The Alonya Show, a TV news/opinion program on Russia TV:

[UPDATE: I also did an interview with Globo TV in Brazil that's online as well. The show is in Portugese, but I'm in English with subtitles.]

I want to add to what I said on these two shows. In all this discussion, I wasn’t thinking about the idea of fuel depots. Instead of lobbing big heavy payloads all the way to the Moon with gigantic Saturn V-like rockets, you use smaller rockets to loft tanks of propellant into Earth orbit. Then you can use that smaller rocket to lift the astronauts to orbit, meet up with the tanks, install them, and off to the Moon they go! I don’t know if this saves in money, since it means lots of launches, but it does mean you can get to the Moon without having a huge rocket — one that as yet does not exist.

Anyway, the point is: it’s not fantasy, it’s not (haha) moonbat stuff, and it’s not even science fiction.

Well, check that: it is science fiction. For now. But realistically, we can do this. We have the ability. All we need is the will to do it.

Over the years I have pointed out the fallacious arguments of climate change deniers when they attack legitimate climatologists like James Hansen and Michael Mann. This is, of course, like kicking at a bee hive, and whenever I do the comments section of my posts fill with lots of angry buzzing.

But now, for what I think is the first time, I find myself the target of an attack. And I have to admit, I welcome it: it’s a textbook case of denialist sleight of hand, of distraction, distortion, error, and misdirection.

Stick around for all of this. It’ll be… interesting.

Our story so far

OK, first, here’s the scoop: a few days ago, I wrote a blog post taking apart two intellectually bankrupt climate change denial articles, one in the Wall Street Journal, and the other in the UK’s Daily Mail. Both were claiming that global warming appears to have stopped in the past few years, a claim which is trivially easy to show wrong. In fact, I linked to two articles doing just that: one at Skeptical Science, and another I myself wrote. Finding actual scientists destroying that claim is not hard at all; those two links have many more links therein.

In my post about the WSJ and DM, I included a graph. It pretty clearly shows temperatures rising from 1973 to the present. And this is where the fun begins.

That’s the plot. It’s from a recent, independent study done at Berkeley, and represents actual, measured, data. Just to be clear, those points are from weather stations across the globe, and the method used to collect and analyze those measurements is described by the Berkeley team themselves (PDF). With me so far?

Apparently, William Briggs is not with me. He takes very vigorous exception to the graph in an article he wrote which he titled "Bad Astronomer Does Bad Statistics: That Wall Street Journal Editorial." I encourage you to read it, so that you can assure yourself I am not misrepresenting his arguments in any way.

I found out about this article when I saw a tweet by Dr. Briggs himself. My first thought was: Uh oh. I sure hope I didn’t make a math mistake somewhere in my WSJ post! I better read Briggs’ article and see… So I read it.

My next thought after reading his arguments was then: Ho-hum. So?

The mismeasure of an argument

Basically, Briggs accuses me of not understanding statistics, of not including error bars, of misrepresenting that points in that plot, of not displaying the plot correctly, and so on ad nauseum. His biggest claim: that those points aren’t measurements at all, but estimates.

Here’s the thing: he’s wrong. Those point are in fact measurements, though they are not raw measurements right off the thermometers. They have been processed, averaged, in a scientifically rigorous way to make sure that the statistics derived from them are in fact solid. The Berkeley team describes in detail how that was done (PDF), and does actually call them estimates, but not because they are just guessing, or using some arcane computer model. They are technically estimates, in the sense that any measurement is an estimate, but they are really, really good ones. Greg Laden tears this use of words apart, as well as pretty much everything else Briggs wrote.

Oddly, Briggs then goes on to call them "predictions" for some reason, and that they came from "models", which is just weird. It’s as if he’s trying to use a word choice that raises doubt about the measurements. But again he’s wrong. They really are measurements, not model predictions. At Open Mind, Brigg’s word choice once again is ripped apart. [Note: Briggs has left a comment there, further verifying the fact that his use of words is incorrect.]

This reminds me of one of my favorite skeptic jokes. Question: How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?

Answer: Four. It doesn’t matter what you call a tail, it’s not a leg.

There are many other places where Briggs makes mistakes that render his arguments null; for example, the error bars (what statisticians usually call "uncertainty") are in fact made available by the Berkeley team, and are small compared to the long-term rise in temperature. For another, Briggs says I should’ve shown the plot going farther into the past, because 1973 was actually a low point. However, that’s completely wrong: it’s actually a high point! As Deep Climate points out here, this actually makes the warming trend lower. So in true contrarian fashion, Briggs is contrary even to himself. It’s bizarre.

So really, there goes Briggs’ argument. His main point is wrong, so we’re done, right?

Well, no. There’s more fun to be had here.

Beside the point

If you read Briggs’ article, you certainly get the impression that because the graph I use is statistically meaningless (so he incorrectly claims), then my whole argument about global warming is wrong.

And this is where I found myself greatly amused, though in a schadenfreude sort of way.

Think of it this way: if my argument hinged on that graph, and I removed it, my argument would have no foundation, correct? It would change the tenor of the entire blog post.

Go look at my article. If you remove that graph from it, what changes? Nothing. My main point — that the WSJ and DM articles are wrong, that we have lots of evidence the Earth is warming up, that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record occurred since the year 2000, that the DM article specifically uses scientific studies and presents them as if they say the exact opposite of what they actually say — still stands.

So even if that graph is wrong and misrepresents what I’m saying — which it does not — it doesn’t matter. In fact, I used that graph as an illustration, to show how we’re warming up. I never intended it to be the basis for the argument I was making, just a way of further showing it. If you read the actual words I wrote, including the links to many, many articles backing up my position, you’ll see that Briggs has not refuted a single actual point I made.

So even if he’s right about that graph, it doesn’t matter. And he’s not right.

But notice what he’s done. He’s taken what is clearly a minor point and blown it up as if it’s my main point. He’s used shady words (predictions, models) to cast aspersions, and to make someone (me!) look bad. Then, by "refuting" this minor issue he can then poison the well, strongly implying that all my arguments are wrong. That’s kind of a big no-no when trying to argue a point.

But it packages well. Watts Up With That, another denialist blog, has run with Briggs’ claims about me as well. He also makes the false claim that warming has stalled, and so on. Note WUWT also says the signers of the WSJ OpEd are "16 scientists", which isn’t true: not all are scientists, and only four have actually published climate science research. And don’t forget about the article the WSJ refused to print talking about the reality of global warming, signed by 255 actual scientists.

Oops.

Denialism’s dark mirror

I will admit the irony of this attack amuses me greatly; Briggs accuses me of many things he himself is doing. That is standard fare from antiscience group: creationists, global warming deniers, and alt-medders, for example, all seem to project their own tactics on the scientists with whom they disagree. Don’t like real medicine? Accuse scientists of being in the pocket of Big Pharma (and forget about the millions being made by quacks on useless "remedies"). Don’t believe in evolution? Accuse scientists of being too dogmatic. Don’t think global warming is real? Accuse scientists of misrepresenting the data.

My favorite irony is that a lot of these global warming denialists take money from fossil fuel interests, but then routinely say to "follow the money", as if it’s the climatologists who are raking in the big bucks from shady think tanks with undisclosed bankrollers. While Briggs points out he gets no money from them, he asks where my money comes from. Think on this, Dr. Briggs; how much money would I make if I suddenly turned coat and said global warming wasn’t real? I’ll guarantee you it would be a lot more than I make now, probably with a couple of zeroes added to the end. So that argument falls a wee bit flat here.

Like all the others.

Of course, given the comments I’ve seen on my blog, on Briggs’ blog, on Watts Up With That, or in any other blog discussing global warming, I know how this will go. You can bring up the major pieces of evidence supporting reality again and again, but the denialists will ignore them and go after phantoms instead. Because if they do acknowledge the actual evidence, they lose.

Over the course of several hundred years – most notably in the 17th and 18th centuries — winter temperatures in western Europe were much lower than normal. Glaciers came much farther south than they had before, and a famous painting shows people ice skating on the Thames river — which hasn’t been frozen since. The period is known as the Little Ice Age, and its cause has always been something of a mystery.

However, new research by scientists at the University of Colorado-Boulder (yay team!) may have pegged it: the LIA appears to have started abruptly in the late 13th century, between the years 1275 and 1300. Radiocarbon dating of plants from Baffin Island (north of the Hudson Bay in Canada) and sediment samples from a lake in Iceland indicate that there was a rapid onset of severe cooling at that time. It’s been thought that the cooling started around then, but it’s been hard to pin down until now.

More importantly, this narrows down the cause of the LIA: four tropical volcanoes erupted violently in that period. The ash would have darkened the atmosphere, letting slightly less sunlight down. Some of the gases emitted by volcanoes also cool the air. It seems clear these volcanoes are what triggered the Little Ice Age. But why did it last so long?

That may be due to what happened after the volcanoes erupted. Most likely, the warmer temperatures would have melted the north polar sea ice. This fresh water is less dense than salty water, so it would flow on top of the oceans, and wouldn’t have mixed well with the deeper water. This would have slowed the transport of heat from the equatorial waters back up north, cooling them further. That system is what maintained colder temperatures for so long. There were variations — the Ice Age was more of as series of pulses of temperature drops than one long period — but for centuries the heating of the Earth was disrupted in that region.

For a long time it’s been suspected that the Sun played a role here, too. During the period of 1645 to 1715 there were few or no sunspots, a time called the Maunder Minimum. Sunspots are dark, but they’re surrounded by a region, a rim, that emits strongly in the UV. These faculae, as they’re called, actually more than make up for the darker regions of the spots, so in reality sunspots add to the amount of light and heat the Earth receives, by a fraction of a percent. So an active Sun, it’s thought, may warm the Earth a teeny bit more.

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A few years ago, I started doing a weekly video question-and-answer session I called "Q & BA". It was a series of short videos that were a lot of fun to make. Unfortunately, the overhead got to be too high — it took all day to edit them! — and I had to stop.

But now, Google+ has changed that: Hangouts On Air is a feature that allows me to go on camera and broadcast a live video chat session to an unlimited audience. I take questions via Twitter and G+, and it’s a lot of fun. It lasts about an hour, and I put the whole session on YouTube. But some of the answers stand alone, and it’s easy to extract them out, package ‘em up, and post ‘em by themselves.

So I’m very pleased to announce I’m starting the series again! The first Q&BA is a great question: "What’s the best way to get kids into science and skepticism?" — what better way to get the series going again? Enjoy.

I’ll be posting more of these, maybe even one per day as time allows. If you like them, please give them a thumbs-up on YouTube, and drop by the Q&BA Hangout when I do them live! I announce them on Twitter and G+, so follow me there and stay up-to-date. Also, I have an archive with links to all the videos. Thanks!

Over the weekend, two amazingly bad articles were published about climate change. Both were loaded with mistakes, misinterpretations, and outright misinformation, and are simply so factually wrong that they almost read like parodies.

Just so we’re clear here.

The first was in the Wall Street Journal. The article, called No Need to Panic About Global Warming, is a textbook example of misleading prose. It’s laden to bursting with factual errors, but the one that stood out to me most was this whopper: "Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now."

What the what?

That statement, to put it bluntly, is dead wrong. It relies on blatantly misinterpreting long term trends, instead wearing blinders and only looking at year-to-year variations in temperature. The Skeptical Science website destroyed this argument in November 2011, in fact. The OpEd also ignores the fact that nine of the ten hottest years on record all occurred since the year 2000.

The WSJ OpEd makes a lot of hay from having 16 scientists sign it, but of those only 4 are actually climate scientists. And that bragging right is crushed to dust when you find out that the WSJ turned down an article about the reality of global warming that was signed by 255 actual climate scientists. In fact, as Media Matters reports, more of the signers of the WSJ OpEd have ties to oil interests than actually publish peer-reviewed climate research.

Shame on the WSJ for publishing that nonsense.

When I read it, I thought that OpEd was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. But then the Daily Mail chimed in and I discovered that barrel gets a lot deeper. They printed an article by David Rose called Forget global warming — it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again).

By "Cycle 25" he’s referring to the solar activity cycle — which I’ll get to in a moment. But first, the most egregiously awful thing about the Mail article is the angle it takes on new results released by The Met Office, the National Weather Service for the UK. The subheadline for the Mail article is "Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years", which is a bit odd given that the very first two paragraphs of the Met’s press release say:

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