ADAMANT

Captain Squideo

It had to happen sooner or later- the video capture of a live giant squid. This time ,its just a baby- scarcely 12 feet of Architeuthys , snagged  2,000 down on a hook baited with, what else ,a squid of normal dimensions. After a little sushi sampling, the scary calamari was consigned to a museum tank full of formaldehyde. Expect to see its big brother on Japanese TV  sometime soon.

One Hundred Score and Seven years ago.

One Hundred Score and Seven years ago, more or less , the forefathers of our legislators ,  Rome's the conscript fathers of the Senate , were arguing as usual about calendar reform. They had reached an impasse, because they had nothing to say about what year it was .

Sure, Rome had been founded DCCLIII years previously, everybody knew that , but what  year was it elsewhere in a burgeoning Empire that was acquiring  other peoples calendars as fast as allies ?

Some  of those year counts were considerably younger than Rome's, others a Hades of a lot older . A lot of the dates the older ones  commemorated fell before there were any Romans to remember them by -  Romans didn't speak of years as  numbers , referring to them instead  in terms of who was on deck at the time - " When Plancus was Counsel" or  "When  Tarquin was King "  So trying to set ancient history straight was a major headache - as with the Y2K crisis , confusion often arises when you  have to start counting over. 

The' Nuclear Winter ' Meltdown

  Photoshopping the Apocalypse 

The recent winter solstice witnessed a 'Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon' .
So in celebration of Al Gore's pal, the late author of The Cold And The Dark there follows The Wall Street Journal's warmly cautionary Cold War reminder of how a campaign for the Nobel Peace prize on the Nuclear Freeze ticket devolved into a joke played at the expense of climate modeling's street cred on the eve of the global warming debate :The Melting of 'Nuclear Winter' 
All that remains of Sagan's Big Chill  are curves such as this , but history is full of prophets of doom who fail to deliver, not all are without honor in their own land.  The 1983  'Nuclear Winter " papers in Science were so politicized that  even the eminently liberal  President of The Council for a Liveable World called  "The worst example ofthe misrepesentation of science to the public in my memory."  Among the authors was Stanford  President  Donald Kennedy. Today he edits Science , the nation's major arbiter of climate science--and policy.

Below, a case illustrating  the mid-range of the ~.7 to ~1.6 degree C maximum cooling  the 2006 studies suggest  is  superimposed in color on the Blackly Apocalyptic predictions published in Science  Vol. 222, 1983 . They're worth  comparing, because the range of soot concentrations in the new models   overlaps with cases assumed to have dire climatic consequences in the  widely publicized 1983  scenarios --

"Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously,higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other matters where the stakes are not as great." wrote Sagan in Foreign Affairs , Winter 1983 -84. But that "evidence" was never forthcoming.'Nuclear Winter' never existed outside of a computer  except as air-brushed animation commissioned by the a  PR firm - Porter Novelli Inc. Yet Sagan predicted "the extinction of the human species " as temperatures plummeted 35 degrees C and  the world froze in the aftermath of  a nuclear holocaust.  Last year, Sagan's cohort tried  to reanimate the ghost in a machine anti-nuclear activists invoked in the depths of the Cold War, by re-running equally arbitrary scenarios on a modern  interactive Global Circulation Model. But the Cold War is history in more ways than one. It is a credit to post-modern computer climate simulations that they do not reproduce the apocalyptic  results of what Sagan oxymoronically termed "a sophisticated one dimensional model."

The subzero 'baseline case'  has melted down into a tepid 1.3 degrees of average cooling- grey skies do not a Ragnarok make . What remains is just not the stuff that  End of the World myths are made of.

It is hard to exaggerate  how seriously " nuclear winter "was once taken by policy analysts who  ought to  have known better. Many were taken aback by the sheer force of Sagan's rhetoric
Remarkably, Science's news coverage of the new results  fails to  graphically compare them with the old ones Editor Kennedy  and other recent executives of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, once proudly co-authored and helped to publicize.

Not A Two Pipe Problem

The New York Times , always willing to cater to paranoia where radiation is concerned , spies a propaganda opportunity in Death by Polonium. Yet victims of Gotham mayor Bloomberg's sadistic desire to leave smokers out in the cold should take comfort - The Times has emphasized his campaign's lamentable innumeracy with a paranoid puff piece by Stanford historian Robert Proctor, crusading " witness in litigation against the tobacco industry."

Tying to equate smoking with the asassination toolkit of the KGB,the ingenious Doctor  Proctor notes that " A fraction of a trillionth of a curie (a unit of radiation named for polonium's discoverers, Marie and Pierre Curie) may not sound like much,"

You can say that again. " A fraction of a trillionth of " one amounts to just atoms per hour-  it takes 37 billion of the radiation units called Becquerels to equal one Curie. Named after the Curies' mentor,the Becquerel basicly designates how fast a Geiger counter clicks. That  background count never stops , but it seems lost on Inspector Proctor that everything in our environment , from the human body to Times newsprint ,organic tofu and springwater clicks just as ominously. Everyday objects naturally and ubiquitously contain trillions of atoms of dozens of elementary radioisotopes ranging from potassium 40 and carbon 14 to , of course , uranium, radium, and polonium.

As there are fewer grams of air in the Earths  atmosphere ( <10exp22) than there are molecules in a single  mole of any chemical compound (6 x 10exp23) , every one gram breath of air we draw may contain a molecule or more of every know carcinogen , so long as man or nature has produced it by the kilogram.

Tobacco is a plant of wide distribution- tons of the weed grow wild. So as suely as  lightning strikes ignite forest fires in the state of nature , no human has ever drawn a breath without inhaling first-hand smoke and or lungs constantly contain  not one, but many molecules of the carcinogens it contains .