Show this to your local climate denialist when they get confused about the distinction between “climate” and “weather.” Not that it will change their minds, but the dog is cute.

The complacency was broken Sunday afternoon when another wildfire erupted just west of Los Alamos. Within 24 hours the Las Conchas fire had grown to 50,000 acres, and was lapping at the boundary of Los Alamos National Lab (where I work). The fire momentarily crossed into lab property, and burned roughly an acre before being extinguished. It is to be noted that the lab is vast, covering an area of 36 square miles (93 square km). The fire was in one of the more remote parts of lab property, and burned less than 100th of one percent of the lab, with no buildings affected. The lab has been closed since Monday, and nobody knows when it’ll reopen. The town of Los Alamos was abruptly evacuated yesterday afternoon. Residents scrambled to put everything of value into their cars, and then drove off the hill with a huge plume of smoke at their backs. A decade ago a similar fire burned over 200 homes in Los Alamos, and incinerated much of the surrounding forest. Back then over 400 families returned to find their homes, and everything in them, reduced to ash. The memories of the previous fire weigh heavy.

As if the evacuation of almost 20,000 people weren’t enough to focus the mind, an additional concern is that the fire might sweep through the laboratory. Los Alamos has radioactive material on site, and although there are only modest quantities of truly dangerous material, it would nonetheless be disastrous to have this material compromised.

With Fukushima still unfolding there is a temptation to dwell on the impossibility of defending against mother nature’s wrath, and the attendant dangers of generating nuclear material. Although there is an interesting discussion to be had on this topic, the question of the moment is the status of the wildfire near Los Alamos. As usual, it is incomprehensibly difficult to get up-to-date information. Presumably the fire crews have a clear idea of the location of the fire line, and where the fire is headed, but none of this data appears to be publicly available. The best resources I’ve found are inciweb (Pacheco and Las Conchas), NMFire, and SWCC.

The lab has had years to prepare for this eventuality, and thus far there does not appear to be any significant source of concern. I am told that the Los Alamos lab perimeter is secure, that the fire is not presently threatening Los Alamos townsite, and that the immediate threat has been mitigated. But until the summer “monsoon” rains start in earnest (we had our first few drops of the summer yesterday afternoon), the progress of the fire is dictated just as much by the weather and wind as it is by human intervention. At present the Los Alamos fire is 0% contained.

For the moment an eerie calm has settled. It is a beautiful day here. The winds have subsided. The temperature has dropped to a comfortable 85F (29C). Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and the lab all seem to be out of danger for the time being. Besides the thousands of Los Alamos refugees, and the blaring headlines atop the local newspapers (“Los Alamos Under Siege“), day-to-day life continues as if nothing is amiss.

Republicans are alone among major parties in Western democracies in denying the reality of climate change, a phenomenon that even puzzles many American conservatives. Denialism is growing among the rank and file, and the phenomenon is especially strong among those with college degrees. So it doesn’t seem to be a matter of lack of information, so much as active disinformation. Republican politicians are going along willingly, as they increasingly promote anti-scientific views on the environment. After the recent elections, GOP leaders are disbanding the House Select Committee on Global Warming.

What makes American conservatives different from other right-wing parties around the world? Note that it wasn’t always this way — there was a time when Republicans wouldn’t have attacked science so openly. I have a theory: it’s Al Gore’s fault.

Actually it’s not my theory, it comes from Randy Olson. For a while now Randy has been vocally skeptical about An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s critically-acclaimed documentary about global warming. I was initially unconvinced. Surely the positive effects of informing so many people about the dangers of climate change outweigh the political damage of annoying some conservatives? But Randy’s point, which I’m coming around to, was that for all the good the movie did at spreading information about climate change, it did equal or greater harm by politicizing it.

By most measures, Al Gore has had a pretty successful career. Vice-President during an administration characterized by peace and prosperity, winner of the popular vote total during his Presidential run, co-founder of Current TV, winner of an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Nobel Prize. But to Republicans, he’s a punchline. It’s an inevitable outcome of the current system: Al Gore was the Democratic nominee for President; therefore, he must be demonized. It’s not enough that their candidate is preferable; the other candidate must be humiliated, made into a laughingstock. (Ask John Kerry, whose service in Vietnam was somehow used as evidence of his cowardice.) The conclusion is inevitable: if Al Gore becomes attached to some cause, that cause must be fought against.

Here is some evidence. You may think of Jay Leno as a completely vanilla and inoffensive late-night talk-show host. But he’s a savvy guy, and he knows his audience. Which is mostly older, white, suburban middle-class folks. Which political party does that sound like? Between January and September of 2010, Jay Leno made more jokes about Al Gore than about Sarah Palin. You read that right. This is while Palin was promoting books, making TV specials, stumping for candidates, and basically in the news every day, while Gore was — doing what exactly?

Once Al Gore became the unofficial spokesperson for concern about climate change, it was increasingly inevitable that Republicans would deny it on principle. This isn’t the only reason, not by a long shot (there’s something in there about vested interests willing to pour money into resisting energy policies that are unfriendly to fossil fuels), but it’s a big part. Too many Republicans have reached a point where devotion to “the truth” takes a distant back seat to a devotion to “pissing off liberals.” With often nasty implications.

What the United States does about climate change will be very important to the world. And what the U.S. does will be heavily affected by what Republicans permit. And Republicans’ views on climate change are largely colored by its association with Al Gore. As much as I hate to admit it, the net real impact of An Inconvenient Truth could turn out to be very negative.

Gore himself doesn’t deserve blame here. Using one’s celebrity to bring attention to an issue of pressing concern, and running for office in order to implement good policies, are two legitimate ways a person can help try to make the world a better place. In a healthy culture of discussion, they shouldn’t necessarily interfere; if any issue qualifies as “bipartisan,” saving the planet should be it. But in our current climate, no discussion of political import can take place without first passing through the lens of partisan advantage. Too bad for us.

So I went to Wikipedia. There, you can find a reference to a New York Times article from the beginning of August, where the total volume of the leak was estimated to be 780,000 cubic meters of oil. Now, that’s clearly in the category of “reasonable guess” – no one knows for sure. But it is very unlikely to be a factor of two larger or smaller than that, so let’s just use that for now. There are a lot of other uncertainties, for example the amount of natural gas (methane) that came out with the oil, how the flow rate changed with time, and so on. But again, let’s just ignore those.

How big is 780,000 cubic meters? Simply taking the cube root of this number, this is the volume of a cube 92 meters on a side. It would look something like this next to the Pentagon:

I can imagine two reactions to this comparison: 1) Damn, that’s a lot of oil! 2) That’s tiny compared to the volume of the Gulf of Mexico! (I bet one’s political views might play a role in which reaction comes first…)

If we were to take this volume and spread it out in a layer 1 millimeter thick, it would cover an area of 780 million square meters, which is a square about 28 kilometers on a side. The satellite images of the oil slick showed affected regions much larger than that, from which I conclude that the thickness of the surface layer must have been much less than 1 millimeter at those times. (But check my math, somebody!)

If all the oil were dissolved uniformly into the Gulf, which has a total volume three million billion times the size of the leak, the concentration would be about one third of one part per billion. That’s an interesting number all by itself, and not at all as small as it seems. But not all the oil leaked is in the Gulf – much of it evaporated and a good deal has been consumed by bacteria. But the rest of it went somewhere, right?

Now to the underwater plume. In the abstract of the Science Magazine paper that led to all the news stories, the authors said “Our findings indicate the presence of a continuous plume over 35 km in length, at approximately 1100 m depth that persisted for months without substantial biodegradation.” I cannot find the word “Manhattan” anywhere in their article, and so I have to conclude this was some mainstream media (WSJ?) person’s rather inept attempt at putting the size of the plume into perspective. It was parroted endlessly in the media as if it had meaning. In fact it’s quite misleading – clearly the term “Manhattan-sized” conjures up images of the whole island of Manhattan along with all the tall buildings…but as we have seen the total volume of oil leaked into the Gulf is about the size of one of those buildings.

So what is this plume? The authors define it as “a discrete spatial interval with hydrocarbon signals or signal surrogates (i.e., colored dissolved organic matter or aromatic hydrocarbon fluorescence) more than two standard deviations above the root-mean-square baseline variability.” That is, a place in the water where there is clearly oil present at detectable levels. It can be at quite low concentrations and still be detectable. One of the article’s main findings was that “Gas chromatographic analyses for only monoaromatic hydrocarbons of several water samples gathered using survey guidance confirm benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and total xylenes (BTEX) concentrations in excess of 50 μg L^–1 within the plume at 16 km downrange from the well site.” This is all bad stuff we don’t want in the water or getting into the food we eat.

I assume a lot more scientific research will need to be done to know the actual damage that the presence of these oil components will do to marine life, the fisheries, and the food chain. The authors took a stab at making an estimate of how much oxygen depletion was occurring due to biodegradation of the oil, concluding that “it may require many months before microbes significantly attenuate the hydrocarbon plume to the point that oxygen minimum zones develop that are intense enough…to threaten Gulf fisheries.” That’s good news for marine life, I assume, but means that the subsurface oil will take quite some time to be bioegraded, which is bad in the longer term. So why hasn’t the media talked about that aspect of the article?

There is no question that this was a huge amount of oil leaked into the Gulf and that the impacts will be felt for many years to come. It is an epic disaster by any measure and may have consequences no one has considered yet. But we have to be rational about the real impacts of the disaster, and rational about the real risks involved in deep water drilling. The only way is to continue vigorously the kind of research we saw in the Science Magazine article, and debate the findings openly. BP needs to release publicly everything it knows about the spill.

With that in mind: check out this story by Sharon Begley from Newsweek, on how media are slowly backing away from the Climategate hysteria. (Via PZ.) She very rightly highlights the real damage: the backing-away won’t undo all the misimpressions of scientific malfeasance that people absorbed when the story was at its height.

So what does the bill say? Here’s the very short version, from our sister blog 80 Beats:

The carbon emissions targets are: 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. That’s made to match the goals in the House bill that passed in 2009. In addition, the bill proposes putting a price on carbon.

Somewhat longer version from Think Progress here. Or of course you could just read the bill yourself (pdf). Only 987 pages! Most of which read like this:

23 ‘‘(B) WITHHOLDING ALLOWANCES.—
24 ‘‘(i) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding
25 subparagraph (A), subject to the condition
1 described in clause (ii), the Administrator
2 shall withhold from distribution under this
3 paragraph a quantity of emission allow-
4 ances equal to the lesser of—
5 ‘‘(I) 14.3 percent of the quantity
6 of emission allowances allocated under
7 section 781(a)(1) for the relevant vin-
8 tage year; and
9 ‘‘(II) 105 percent of the emission
10 allowances of the relevant vintage year
11 that the Administrator anticipates will
12 be distributed to merchant coal units
13 and long-term contract generators
14 under subsections (c) and (d).

There are good reasons why bills are written in turgid legal language; but it means that very few concerned citizens are going to be curling up with a good piece of legislation in the evening. That’s okay; we have multiple high-profile media outlets that are here to help us understand the complexities of these important changes to how our country does its business. I mean, right?

Sadly, no, as a wise person once said. CNN had a sit-down interview with Kerry and Lieberman last night, and here’s what we get:

Last night, John Kerry and Joe Lieberman appeared on John King’s CNN program to promote their climate bill, the American Power Act. The transcript is fairly lengthy, but at no point does King ask them to explain the provisions of their bill. Instead, he begins by asking whether they have 60 votes, tries to get them to explain why John McCain isn’t on the legislation, and then asks them to comment on the Sestak-Specter race in Pennsylvania. In fact, the clip the John King show posted online (which I embedded above) doesn’t even mention the climate bill.

Isn’t there room in the media landscape for just one TV news channel that would take seriously the responsibility of actually providing their viewers with useful information? It might be a small, niche market, but if the Golf Channel can thrive, surely it’s an experiment worth trying? I refuse to believe that providing useful information is of necessity such a tedious and boring activity that it can’t be made interesting, no matter how hard we try. We need to get Stephen Spielberg and Jay Rosen in a room together to figure out how to make a news channel that would honestly inform people in an entertaining way. Have them call me.

This thing is going to need a name. The Exxon Valdez incident was a spill – there was a finite amount of oil aboard the ship. A lot of oil: 11 million gallons (40 million liters). The new one in the Gulf of Mexico could blow past that, depending on whether present efforts to close the valve or drill a relief well work.

The fact that we called it the “Exxon Valdez” incident clearly indicates the responsible (if not guilty) party involved. So, though I like the moniker “Spill, Baby, Spill” from a political point of view, it doesn’t lay any blame and this thing is not a spill. It’s a leak, and BP leased the rig from Transocean LTD, the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor. I think the responsibility has yet to be determined. If you rent a car, and wipe out a family in an accident because the steering was faulty, is it your fault or the car manufacturer’s? It may take some time, or even never be known, what happened a week ago to cause this tragedy.

The name of the rig was the Deepwater Horizon, but that doesn’t convey ownership or responsibility. Will this become known as the “BP Deepwater Horizon Spill”? The “Transocean/BP Leak”? The media seem to be stuck on “spill” and so I bet that will be in the name long term…and it will take a very long time to assess responsibility here.

My heart goes out to the families of the 11 lost on the rig, and to the thousands of fishermen and others whose livelihoods are in peril.

We’ve suspended new offshore drilling until we have understood this incident better. And no doubt a new debate about offshore drilling will ensue. This has certainly put the lie to those who claim that new modern drilling rigs are far safer than in the past, something even President Obama was saying as recently as April 2. Sigh.

Of course, there is no such thing as a purely objective and judgment-free presentation of data, no matter how scrupulously the data itself may be collected; if nothing else, we make choices about what data to present. And a side-by-side comparison chart like this can’t help but give a slightly misleading impression of the relative merits of the arguments, by putting the conclusions of an overwhelming majority of honest scientists up against the arguments of a fringe collection of politically-motivated activists. But it’s certainly good to see the actual issues arrayed in point-counterpoint format.

Still, there remains a somewhat intractable problem: when people are arguing about issues that necessarily require expert knowledge that not everyone can possibly take the time to acquire for themselves, how do we make judgments about who to believe?

This problem has been brought home by the incredibly depressing news that James Randi has come out in favor of global-warming denialism (via PZ Myers). Randi is generally a hero among fans of reason and skepticism, so it’s especially embarrassing to see how incredibly weak his reasoning is here. It basically amounts to: “The climate is complicated. And scientists don’t know everything. And I admit I don’t know much about the field. Therefore … we have good reason to distrust the overwhelming majority of experts!” Why Randi chose not to apply his vaunted powers of skepticism to the motivations behind the denialists remains a mystery.

This gets to the heart of why I’ve always been skeptical of the valorization of “skepticism.” I don’t want to be skeptical for the sake of being skeptical — I want to be right. To maximize my chances of being right, I will try to collect what information I can and evaluate it rationally. But part of that information has to include the nature of the people making arguments on either side of a debate. If one side consists of scientists who have spent years trying to understand a complicated system, and the other is a ragtag collection of individuals with perfectly obvious vested interests in the outcome, it makes sense to evaluate their claims accordingly.

By all means, we should apply our own powers of reason to every interesting problem. But when our reasoning leads to some conclusion at odds with the apparent consensus of a lot of smart people who seem to know what they’re talking about — whether it’s on the nature of dark energy, the best way to quantize gravity, the most effective route to health care reform, or the state of the environment — the burden is on us to understand the nature of that difference and try to reconcile it, not to take refuge in “experts don’t know everything” and related anti-intellectual piffle.

Scientists are people too. Amazingly enough, we get frustrated and annoyed. We have fights with colleagues. We let our emotions get in the way of dispassionate peer review. We send emails we probably shouldn’t. This should be no surprise to anyone. There are immense pressures on scientists working on “hot button” issues like climate change. They’re constantly being assaulted and questioned (mostly by people with no particular background or training). And, on occasion, individuals end up saying things and doing things they shouldn’t. Looking over the stolen emails, there are certainly some unfortunate revelations. But there is nothing even remotely indicating widespread fabrication of results. As far as I know, not a single scientific finding is now in doubt because of these emails. No papers will be withdrawn. Nature has a summary of the [lack of] content of the emails. A lot more detail can be found here. And the IPCC weighs in here.

I am not an expert on climate change. If the lives of our children and grandchildren depended on questions having to do with cosmology or general relativity, I would most certainly have a direct, informed opinion. And I would hope that my opinion, and those of my colleagues, would be solicited and respected, given that we’ve dedicated our lives to studying the relevant subject matter. Likewise, I respect the conclusions of my esteemed colleagues in the fields of climate research. And there is absolute and clear consensus on one fundamental point: the actions of human beings are altering our climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), composed of thousands of scientists from all over the world, made this startlingly clear. I highly encourage you to read the report (or at least the executive summary). As if that isn’t enough, the World Meteorological Organization just released a report indicating that the last decade was the warmest on record, and that the warming trend shows every sign of continuing.

Now, there are certainly researchers in the field that dissent. This is part of the nature of the scientific enterprise. We’re all trained to be skeptical and contrary. Be leery of received wisdom. Question everything, and try to build your own understanding from first principles. Along the way, on any topic whatsoever, you find some scientists that wander down some misbegotten path and get stuck. Sometimes the individual is Einstein, and they’re about to blow open entire fields. But the vast majority of the time, these radically contrary scientists are simply misguided and wrong. Which is okay. It’s part of the process. And it keeps everyone on their toes.

You can find scientists that believe the Universe is not expanding. They are wrong. You can find scientists that believe there is no evidence for evolution. They are wrong. And you can find scientists that believe there is no evidence for anthropogenic global warming. They are wrong.

This is not to say that there aren’t open questions or issues in these fields, nor that we understand everything perfectly. It’s simply a statement that the evidence is compelling and overwhelming, and the basic findings are no longer in doubt. Any future theories will incorporate and subsume what we already know. Just like General Relativity subsumed Newtonian gravity, without nullifying the inverse square law. Global warming is happening. We are (at least part of) the cause. Perhaps the details of what will happen in the next few decades are unclear. Perhaps the worst-case scenario won’t come to pass. It’s a very complicated, interconnected, non-linear system. All we know for sure is that human activities are introducing a new forcing term into our climate, and that this term is already having measurable effects. The Earth is really big. Go outside and look out across the mountains or the oceans or the sky. There’s a lot of room out there. It’s amazing that we can have a serious, global impact on this massive chunk of rock. For reference, I calculate that the entire biomass of humanity is 6.8 billion x 68 kg (150 lbs) = 5 x 10¹¹ kg. This is one hundred million millionth the mass of the Earth. And yet, we’re having an effect on the entire planet.

Since this issue has profound consequences for centuries to come, I would claim it is the responsibility of every citizen of the world to educate themselves on the topic. It seems to me that each of us has three straightforward choices:
1. go back to school, get a PhD in climate sciences, and form one’s own informed opinions about what’s going on.
2. trust the experts.
3. trust the fringe.

Note that the fringe consists almost entirely of non-experts. And believing the fringe requires you to be convinced there’s a vast scientific conspiracy, with the willing collusion of thousands of experts around the world. With no obvious motive or agenda. As a practicing scientist, I find it farcical that people imagine scientists capable of such a wide-ranging, organized conspiracy. We’re much too eager to prove each other wrong. And we’re much too stubborn and iconoclastic to just go along with the consensus, if we pick up any whiff of doubt. On the other hand, it is easy to see why some are interested in questioning global warming. It is indeed an inconvenient truth, after all.

We are altering our planet’s climate. This is not in doubt. How can anyone not be disturbed by the knowledge that we are fundamentally changing macroscopic properties of the Earth, our only home?

[NOTE: Sean just posted on the same topic. This just goes to show that even fellow bloggers have trouble coordinating. Much less thousands of scientists engaging in vast, motiveless conspiracies.]

My own take is: what in the world is the big deal? Indeed, I would go so far as to ask: what could possibly be the big deal? Most of the noise has simply been nonsensical, focusing on misunderstandings of what scientists mean by the word “trick” and similar deep issues. And some people got upset when a dodgy paper was accepted by a journal, and they discussed giving the journal a cold shoulder. Cry me a river.

But I don’t really want to defend the scientists involved, because I’m not informed enough about who they are and what they did. For all I know, they may be very nasty and unethical human beings. (Actually that’s not true; I know Michael Mann, and he’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet.) And I see no reason not to do a thorough investigation, and hand out appropriate sanctions if there’s real evidence of wrongdoing.

What baffles me is the idea that this changes the conversation about climate change in any way. This isn’t a case like Jan Hendrik Schon, the rogue physicist who rose to prominence on the basis of falsified data, and was later exposed. The job of monitoring the climate is one that has been taken up by more than just one or two groups of people. There have been thousands of peer-reviewed papers that have provided evidence of global warming. Not to mention common sense; when the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has shot up dramatically over the last century, and the temperature has done the same thing, it takes some willful stubbornness to avoid the obvious conclusion. All of the noise we’re hearing about “Climategate” is based on politics, not on science.

And that’s what really puzzles me. I understand the non-scientific motivations of certain climate denialists; in the abstract, they don’t want to accept that the unfettered actions of capitalism can ever have any deleterious effects, and in the concrete, many of them are paid by oil companies. (See this charming “letter to the American Physical Society,” whose handful of signatories includes “Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil.”) Those are powerful incentives to ignore the evidence.

But what is the incentive on the other side supposed to be? What exactly is the motivation for the nefarious conspiracy of people who are supposedly plotting to mislead the world about global warming? What do the people counting oysters get out of this?

Are there a lot of people out there who think that scientists as a group (since the vast majority of scientists appreciate the problems of global warming) have knee-jerk reactions against technology and industry? Let me propose another motivation for whatever corners the East Anglia group might have contemplated cutting: they’ve seen the data, they know what’s happening to the planet, and they’re terrified of what the consequences might be. They know that the other side is motivated by non-scientific concerns, and they want to fight back as hard as they can, both for the good of humanity and for the integrity of science. There’s no question that scientists can go overboard, pulling the occasional shenanigans in the pursuit of their less lofty goals. (Like, you know, other human beings.) But nobody wants to believe that we’re facing a looming global ecological catastrophe. They believe it because that’s what the data imply.

The fire is now threatening this historic observatory. A live webcam (more commonly used to provide astronomers sky conditions [is it snowing?]) shows the view from the top (it occasionally goes down due to heavy traffic; if it doesn’t load for an extended period it may be a bad sign). Lots of smoke, but no flames at the moment. This is, of course, a chilling reminder of the 2003 fire at Mount Stromlo. You can follow the progress of the fire here. Perhaps our man on the ground will chime in with some live-blogging? Note: Phil is keeping us informed.

As it happens, many communication towers are also found on Mount Wilson. Should the fire sweep across the peak, communications for much of the Los Angeles area may be compromised. No cellphones. No TV. No LAX. Back to the stone age.

Although this looks like a still from a Hollywood disaster movie, it is much scarier. This is really happening. It is a sobering reminder that, despite our best efforts, Nature still trumps Man.

Exciting Maps With Lots Of Colors

Play around with maps at the H&T Affordability Site. Not very surprisingly, people who live (for example) in the city of Philadelphia drive less and have lower vehicle carbon emissions per household. Though not surprising, there is a weird tendency to equate environmentalism with being near nature when in fact the enviornmentalist thing to do is LEAVE NATURE ALOOOOONE and live a modestly-sized place in an urban hellhole with decent mass transit.

(via the overhead wire)

Though I live car free in my urban hellhole because I don’t need a car and like my urban hellhole, not because of environmental concerns.

Sadly my own carbon footprint is presumably enormous, even though I live in an urban hellhole, because I drive an aspirational vehicle and fly around the world a lot. If I were prone to feeling guilty about things, I’d definitely feel guilty for that. But I make up for it by giving talks in Second Life, so I’m pretty sure everything is balanced.

But, did you know that ships apparently do the same thing? (I sure didn’t!)

UW professor of Atmospheric Sciences Cliff Mass (author, and weather blogger) has a nice post up discussing the phenomena. Both contrails and “ship trails” are produced when microparticulates released by combustion serve as seeds for condensation. Over the ocean, the typical droplet size is much smaller in ship exhaust than in the natural cloud cover, producing different reflectivity, leading to high contrast white ship trails. As Cliff discusses, you can imagine the interest that national security agencies might have in this effect….

(EDIT: Actually, it turns out that contrails are primarily due to vapor released during combustion, not nucleation, so the processes are somewhat different.)

Freeman spent two weeks at our department at UC Davis last year, gave a public lecture, a colloquium, and was available for a number of very stimulating conversations. We had lunch with him one day, and pressed him on his taste for smaller, lighter, faster experiments in particle physics, as opposed to the dominant large collider experiments such as those at the LHC, the Tevatron, and LEP. In his kind way, Freeman said it was all fine with him that such things took place, but that he simply preferred the more table-top variety, where the individual experimenter could control the variables and the measurement at hand. I do too, but as the NYT article quoted Weinberg as saying, “get over it!”

Anyway, about global warming. I have to say that my own skeptical streak doesn’t simply cave to the present dominant stream of thought on this issue either. As scientists we need to continue to question all of it. It seems to me that the dominant paradigm can be summarized in a number of straightforward notions:

• The earth’s climate is in an overall warming trend. The average global surface temperature, and the average surface temperature of the oceans, is increasing.
• The root cause of the increase in global surface temperature is in large part, or even dominantly, due to the increase of the level of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane in the atmosphere.
• The dominant source of the excess greenhouse gases is human activity: industry, transportation, agriculture and the like.
• If the global surface temperature continues to increase, then drastic and devastating consequences will ensue due to the melting of polar ice and the rising of sea levels, desertification of huge swaths of land, increased frequency and intensity of devastating storms, and other effects.
• By changing our means of energy production and ceasing the use of fossil carbon fuels as soon as possible, there is still a chance that we can evade the above ill effects.

My own skepticism increases linearly as we go down this list. The first two items, that the global surface temperature is increasing, and that it is due to greenhouse gases, seems to be incontrovertible. The extensive measurements and correlations reported by the IPCC are rather hard to refute at this stage. (It is a very great setback for this science that NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory crashed on launch last month, or we would have gotten the mother lode of data on these questions.)

That the dominant source of excess greenhouse gases seems incontrovertible as well, though here the climate models start to differ about the sources and sinks of global CO2, methane, and other gases. And, as the climate changes, not all the models can possibly predict all the outcomes. An example: in 2005, the Amazon experienced a drought which turned the region, with over half the world’s rainforest, from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source.
Was the drought predicted by any (or all) of the models? Was the net effect on carbon predicted?

The best models must combine physics, oceanography, chemistry, and biology all at once. Has it really been done yet? (Enlighten us all, gentle readers, if you know!)

Then the last two: the negative effects. We dwell on these. Clearly ocean levels will rise rapidly in our lifetime if Greenland melts, and it appears to be melting faster than expected by the models.
That would be a bad thing, especially here in the Central Valley of California. My house is 15 meters above sea level, and a lot of the roads around here are lower than that. If Greenland melts, sea level will rise over 7 meters. Well, the Central Valley used to be a sea, and it will be again some day, no doubt. And with so much of the world’s population living so close to the sea, this is a serious, serious concern.

I am less convinced about the severity and frequency of storms with global warming, but my mind is open to being convinced by good science.

Lastly, can we do anything about it? The whole question of whether we’ve reached a “tipping point” seems to be hot right now. The answer lies in the climate models, so let’s keep our skepticism alive here. We don’t understand what causes ice age cold and warm spells. When those are in the models, and we can post-dict the previous glaciations, I’ll start to believe the models. The oceanic thermohaline circulation seems to be key here, but how? What about the Milankovich cycle? Chaotic perturbations in the solar system? Dust lanes in the Milky Way? No one said this would be easy…

And how soon could we wean ourselves from carbon, even if we wanted to? Oil may run out, but there is a crapload of natural gas and coal left to burn. Remember, “drill, baby, drill!” is the same as “burn, baby, burn!” And we have a lot left to burn.

I am not convinced at all that in 10 years we can “Repower America” and eliminate fossil fuels. And the rest of the world certainly won’t. That doesn’t mean we should not try, should not do research into new, non-carbon-based energy sources, expand our use of renewable, clean energy. We should! I am just very skeptical that it could be done even if it became the #1 national priority. It seems to me to violate physics itself, not to mention basic economic facts. Twenty years? Thirty? Eventually it will be clear to every one that we don’t really have a choice.

Sigh…Freeman, what’s the answer?

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NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE JACKSON KY
1145 PM EST FRI FEB 13 2009

…POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN JACKSON HAS RECEIVED CALLS THIS EVENING FROM THE PUBLIC CONCERNING POSSIBLE EXPLOSIONS AND…OR EARTHQUAKES ACROSS THE AREA. THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION HAS REPORTED TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT THESE EVENTS ARE BEING CAUSED BY FALLING SATELLITE DEBRIS. THESE PIECES OF DEBRIS HAVE BEEN CAUSING SONIC BOOMS…RESULTING IN THE VIBRATIONS BEING FELT BY SOME RESIDENTS…AS WELL AS FLASHES OF LIGHT ACROSS THE SKY. THE CLOUD OF DEBRIS IS LIKELY THE RESULT OF THE RECENT IN ORBIT COLLISION OF TWO SATELLITES ON TUESDAY…FEBRUARY 10TH WHEN KOSMOS 2251 CRASHED INTO IRIDIUM 33.

(h/t Slog)

And I can’t believe I beat Phil “Death from the Skies” Plait to this! Actual Death from the Skies!

Meanwhile, the Senate unveiled its version of the stimulus package, with a much more terse summary. Oddly, the section specifically mentioning science only talks about NSF and NASA:

Science:

National Science Foundation (NSF) Research: $1.4 billion in funding for scientific research, infrastructure and competitive grants.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA): $1.5 Billion for NASA, including $500 million for Earth science missions to provide critical data about the Earth’s resources and climate.

What about the DOE Office of Science? NIH? NIST? NOAA? I surely hope that the next summary will call out items to the level the House summary did. But, further down, under Energy, we find

$40 billion to the Department of Energy for development of clean, efficient, American
energy.

Whoa. Suddenly, the DOE is not your daddy’s Atomic Energy Commission any more! (Or your grand-dad’s Office of Naval Research…) In fact, I winder just how many congresscritters really know the history of the DOE, that its 2008 $24.6 billion budget included

• - $8.7 billion for energy programs, of which $4.4 billion is for science, and most of the rest is for actual energy projects, and
• - $15.5 billion for weapons activities, of which $5.4 billion is for nuclear cleanup.

By my calculation, therefore, the non-weapons, non-basic-research part of DOE’s budget is less than 20% of the whole DOE program.

So what will this mysterious $40 billion for in the Senate plan be for? Do they seriously envision giving ten times the present budget to that portion of the DOE and say, “here, invent clean, efficient American energy”. I am going to guess that the “$40 billion” is going to augment the DOE Office of Science programs in basic research by something like the $1.9 billion in the House bill (of which $400 million was specifically tagged for energy research). But what about the other $38 billion?

Anyway it all boggles the mind. No doubt the so-called “Clean Coal” people will be all over this, as will the T. Boone Pickens compressed natural gas types, those who want enormous (and I mean freakin’ enormous – do the math) wind farms and the supporters of first- (ick) and second-generation biofuels. (I say “ick” because corn-based methanol is simply a big waste of resources). To me it seems that that “energy” is clearly the buzzword these days. (It will certainly be in the title of my next proposal, but with “high” in front of it.)

Two main areas of debate and discussion spring to my mind here. Firstly, I think that it is high time to merge the disparate funding agencies which support basic research into a cabinet-level Department of Science, rather than a dozen little agencies. This was discussed (and eventually dismissed) in the early Clinton years, the argument essentially being that “the more spigots the better.”

Secondly, we have the much more difficult question: Where will all this new, efficient, clean American energy actually come from? Presently we have in place systems for nuclear, hydro, solar, fossil, wind, and geothermal. Fossil fuels dominate by far in the US. It is interesting, in fact, to look at the DOE’s Energy Information Agency’s chart of where it all comes from and where it goes (as of 2007):

As you can see we are rather heavily dependent on coal, oil, and gas. I wonder if the average person on the street quite realizes just how deep we are into carbon based energy…

I am all for research into new approaches to energy, but we are going to have to be realistic about the basic underlying physics. And we had better fund basic research in physics in our universities if a new generation of physicists is going to emerge to develop new energy sources, and spend all these taxpayer dollars effectively.

We live in amazing times.

• Energy is the defining issue of our time.
• Addressing the environment is the major reason Chu took on this job.
• These problems provide a tremendous opportunity for the DOE, but it comes with a burden: we can not fail.
• The DOE is the principal supporter of physical sciences in the US, and the physical sciences are the conernstone of prosperity for the US future.
• This was part of the message of the “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report.
• The DOE should endeavor to replace the great industrial labs that no longer exist as they once did.
• The DOE will be the “go to” organization for a multitude of key problems — will depend on all labs to help.
• The DOE can quite literally “save the world” by developing a sound energy policy going forward, and invent new science that will provide new technologies.
• Our current use of energy not sustainable — have to move forward.
• We are facing something society has never been asked to do before: to deal with ominous problems with climate change. If half of the things climate science tells us are half true, we have a huge problem on our hands and the DOE has to work to provide those solutions.
• The Obama administration is creating a new Energy and Climate Change Council which will serve as a coordinating body including all stake holders in this arena. DOE is first and formost in this but Interior, Agriculture, Treasury and Defense etc. all play a role.
• The DOE is the science and technology “arm of energy”.
• There is a core of truly oustanding scientists at the national labs, and these labs have trained many successful scientists.
• The national labs are “crown jewels that the US doesn’t want to lose”.
• Restimulation of the economy is #1 on the priority list. DOE will get considerable funds in the stimulus package, not just to get the economy going but to provide a long term path for the US.
• We can’t be completely overwhelmed by the short term economic woes; we need to still find a path to solve our long term problems. The DOE has to invent transformative technologies that will allow us to get to the next level of energy independence.
• Chu sees a lot of young and middle age scientists shifting careers to deal with energy, and the DOE is optimistic to capture the best and brightest to work on these issues.

I am truly awed by the vision presented by Chu here, and so hopeful that we can get our country back on a path to long term prosperity by supporting research in the physical sciences. At least half of our present economy relies on the knowledge gained in the 20th century about our physical world…one can only imagine the revolutions to come.

The miniature power plant  is truck-sized and buried underground for the five years it operates.  HPG says it has no internal moving parts, needs no maintenance, and emits no pollution (though I am guessing there amy be a few neutrons and gamma rays flying around, which is a good reason to bury it; HPG doesn’t talk about this).   After five years, you replace it, like a battery.   

It may be a while before one of these is literally in your back yard, since you probably don’t need 25 megawatts of power, and also because one of the units purportedly costs 25 million dollars.  But for, say, a university like mine which already has its own power substation, it might be quite feasible to install one of these babies underground, and enjoy much cheaper power, selling any excess back to the power company.

But all this kind of set off my inner skeptic…let’s do the math. Present commercial rates for power are about about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. These mini-nukes last five years, putting out 25 MW. My trusty HP-15c tells me that this represents 219 million kilowatt-hours per year, or just over 2 cents per kilowatt hour!  That would be a nice savings. (Note – original post was in error here!)

Then, on the company’s own web site FAQ it ways that each module puts out 25 MW electric power, but 70 MW thermal!  Definitely don’t want that in my back yard – and so does one need a 70 MW cooling tower? Or use the waste heat somehow? This kind of ruins the nice picture of the thing sitting quietly underground while a couple strolls on the surface…70 megawatts is like 30 sticks of dynamite exploding per second.

In addition, of course, anti-nuclear activists will howl in protest: there are the obvious issues of nuclear waste storage (we won’t open Yucca Mountain until at least 2017), uranium mining, terrorism during transport, and more.  

But there may be plenty of applications where this would seem to be a great solution, like remote locations or already secure places with big power needs. In the long run we will need more nuclear power plants to offset carbon emissions.   Maybe this solution is better than giant multi-gigawatt installations?

It’s a cute idea, though they should have chosen dark blue and gone for “Bloogle”.

The graph is originally from this paper (pdf) by Margaret Taylor, Edward Rubin, and David Hounshell. It illustrates a crucial point that both liberals and conservatives should be able to come together behind: the engines of free-market creativity can be brought to bear on global problems whose costs are all in the externalities. But it doesn’t just happen, if the short-term profitable course of action in the absence of massive government intervention is to keep despoiling the commons. Rather than legislating specific responses to complicated problems, change the incentive structure so that (for example) not polluting is more directly profitable than polluting. Right now, it’s much cheaper to drag oil out of the ground and belch greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than to think hard about alternatives. It’s far past time that we put our fingers on the scales to reward the hard thinking.