ADAMANT

This Is Your Planet On Asteroids

100 years ago today, a rather small asteroid of the frozen gas rich, rock poor sort whacked into Siberia Nobody much lived there,in the taiga north of the the Stony Tunguska river,which is just as well , considering that the blast from the object's hypersonic disintegration turned a thousand square miles of forest into a landscape only  Stalin could love :

Yellow Journalism's Scientific Compass

There is a certain novelty to trying to exorcise climate hype by denying the philosophical existence of climate science.

Citing a speech by a retired TV weatherman who could no more construct a climate model than a television camera , and the philosophical authority of one  "Thomas Eddington " ( the inventor of the supernova light bulb, perhaps --surely not the Sir Arthur who  astronomically confirmed  relativity) James Kerian, scion of the North Dakota potato, fruit and nut-sorting machine dynasty, and mechanical engineering graduate of Gonzaga University, has authored a Wall Street Journal online oped entitled "Yellow Science", equating global warming warnings with  the "Yellow Journalism " the Hearst papers used to spawn the Spanish American War. In it . Kerian baldly ,and bizarrely, asserts that no hard scientific evidence links human activity and climate change. None. Nada. Zip.

Sad as it is to see the venerable Journal  jaundiced by its editors failure to exercise the intellectual courage to expose this dweebery, the op-ed betrays a deeper malaise. The responsible member of the  WSJ editorial board, James Taranto, has made it a point of  anti-elitist honor to declare his disinclination "to delve deeply" into matters presented as scientific in his section, instead  censoring comments critical of the errors of fact it all too often features-- Taranto is  Opinion Journal's electronic gatekeeper  as well as its editor.

I last encountered him at a Harvard science journalism seminar, where he insisted the Opinion Journal section  was open to critical feedback , an assertion his subsequent actions and omissions has betrayed. Hoping to provide him a means of fact checking now that the WSJ has dispensed with its science editor, I went so far as to present him with a  hard copy of  Nature.

He'd never laid eyes on that journal before, and given the appearance of Kerian's piece,it appears he has not seen it since. As Nature's Science And Business section contains much of profound interest to readers of so otherwise astute a financial paper as The Wall Street Journal, it's odd the publishers should spare Taranto the inconvenience of contradiction by providing a link or two to such  scientific journals of record.

Though Taranto is free to ignore them, such links would provide readers with the option of refusing to think about science themselves, instead of having their unthinking done for them at Rupert Murdoch's expense. The WSJ  is after all a business , not a charitable foundation for Junk Science challenged purveyors of  prose from First Things--  the  journal  in which Keran's piecw debuted is long on dogma as it is short on scientific peer review. While Kerian seems never to have  published a science or  engineering paper,  his maiden publication bodes well for his career as a philosopher of science-- few Bob Jones or Maharishi University  graduates aspire to such metaphysical heights. Perhaps he should start a think tank with the other culture hero of the week, Doctor Tom Chalko

Elsewhere  in Never Never land, National Review is ballyhooing a submarine volcano  that erupted in the arctic in 1999,  inviting its readers to believe in  the event's connection to the retreat of polar ice in the years since. Never mind that the Mount Saint Helen's sized blowout failed  to punch a hole in the sea ice directly above it- the  two mile water column evidently providing ample quenching of the heat.

A cubic mile or more of incandescent lava may seem a lot , but there are millions of cubic miles of ice-water in the Arctic seas , and  one part per million of   incandescent rock  can only raise the temperature of the whole of it by -- do the arithmetic , it's not even math--  a  couple of milli-degrees C--  Bloody Freezing plus .002 C  still equals Bloody Freezing.

While the Dittohead blogs coo over the latest  factoid  delivered by  their scientific tooth fairy , the website of the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institution features a lucid account of the  Gakkel Ridge eruptions' aftermath , as surveyed in 200, that underwater landscape:

"Appear to have been chemically transformed by hydrothermal venting. Sensors on their dredging lines also detected whispers of warmer water, chemicals, and particles that are present in plumes of vent fluids that billow out  ”

Since the murmurs of warmth are muffled by two thousand fathoms of ice water, Kerian and Taranto's  fairy tales might benefit from delving more deeply into The Princess and the Pea

The Third Blanket

At this time of year , many coastal New Englanders' last waking thought is of  their air conditioners, the comfortable  ballpark thickness of bedclothes having declined since January  from a much a possible to less than a cotton blanket's one-third-inch loft.

This is in part because we have , since our forebears day , added a similar thickness of insulation outside our windows. Carbon dioxide  is as effective in trapping  radiant body warmth as eiderdown is in isolating us from  the cold,, and while, brought to earth as a layer ,  the  260 parts per million of the gas in the air the Founders breathed would have been just two blankets thick , today  with 380 parts per million in the air  we are closing in on three- at this rate, by 2028, a full inch of CO2 will lay between us and the deep cold of  outer space.

Since air pressure is roughly a kilogram per square centimeter , and there are a million milligrams in a kilogram, CO2's  concentration  ( 380  millionths by volume  ) divided by its molecular weight (44)  tell us how thick a layer it would form if separated from the air above us to form a blanket on the ground . Right now that thickness stands at 19.5 millimeters -- there  are 25.4 to an inch,and as the blanket is thickening as fossil fuel is  burned.At the present rate of CO2 growth some parts per million per year, in a few decades the absolute thickness of  the cozy stuff will pass the one inch mark.

Some will hail this  as a boon to chilly mankind , a sentiment easily defended on a cold winter's night, but come a Fourth Of July  power brown out, cause for  some to change their minds.

Climate Wars

The National Interest
       Summer 1990

A War Against Fire

By Russell Seitz

The most savage controversies are those as to which there is no good evidence either way.  -Bertrand Russell

AT THE TURN of the century, a Swedish Nobel  Laureate, Svante Arrhenius, laid the cornerstone  of what is popularly called "the greenhouse  effect"-that one of the principal gaseous products of fire, carbon dioxide, can absorb radiant warmth and trap it in the earth's atmosphere. In the hothouse environment of the popular media, this observation has blossomed into the most fiercely debated, and perhaps most widely feared, scientific phenomenon of the day.

As Science magazine observed in a March 30, 1990, editorial: "Virtually everyone, children included, is  concerned about global climate change and especially about the greenhouse effect. They have learned of increases in carbon dioxide. They have been told repeatedly that temperatures will increase 9'F. Political pressure is mounting to take action regardless of cost, and to take action now."

This much is familiar to any observer within  reach of the popular media. But what follows is not : "But how good is the evidence, and how likely is substantial global warming? When might it happen? Applying the customary standards of scientific inquiry, one must conclude that there has been more hype than solid facts ... Modeling of global climate is largely concentrated on examining effects of  doubling the atmospheric content of greenhouse gases. As might he expected, the answers they get are functions of the models they employ. The spread is from 1. 5' to 5'C; that is, there is great uncertainty. If one examines the subject, one finds virtually unanimous agreement that the models are deficient....What have been the warming effects, if any, of anthropogenic gases? The typical answer is 0.5'C.

But the answer depends on what time interval is chosen. There was substantial increase in temperature from 1880 to 1940. However, from 1940 until the 1960s, temperatures dropped so much as to lead to predictions of a coming ice age. New, precise satellite data raise further questions about warming. From 1979 to 1988 large temperature variability was recorded, but no obvious temperature trend was noted during the 10-year period.' ...A fashionable estimate of the time when doubling of atmospheric CO, will occur is the middle of the next century. But past predictions of energy usage have been notoriously inaccurate.. What should he the national response to the above uncertainties? ... Whatever we do should he based on well-thought-out long-range goals. It should not result from a half-baked political response. '

--R.W. Spencer and J. R. Christy, "Precise Monitoring of Global Temperature Trends from Satellites , "Science 247 (March 30, 1990): 1558

Almost everything about this statement sits oddly with representations of the greenhouse effect in the popular media. Where Science speaks of conflicting studies and ambiguous results, the popularizers of the greenhouse effect deliver dire warnings with the utmost certitude. Where the one counsels a cautious political response, the other urges instant, even draconian intervention. In the name of the greenhouse effect, some environmentalists are demanding a 30 percent rollback in C02 emissions by the year 2000. They seem oblivious to the enormity of what they are demanding: a war on that most elemental of human discoveries-fire itself.

Why this enormous gap between what is known and what is urged? Why do most scientists lack conviction, where many laymen are full of passionate intensity? To answer, we might begin by way of reviewing a most important aspect of the greenhouse effect-the extent of our ignorance.

Why It's Not So Simple

THE ATMOSPHERE is among the earth's most complex dynamic systems: subtle in its chemistry, chaotic in its flow. It interacts with everything from the solar wind to the deep oceans. It is subject to insults great and small, brief and enduring, from men and meteorites, volcanoes and termites, wildfires and algal blooms-a list without end.

The scale of all this dynamism is more daunting still. Despite the burgeoning population of the earth, there's still a million tons of air per capita. That's a lot of inertia to work against, at least down here in the lower tier of the atmosphere, the troposphere (where it gets colder as you go up). But further upstairs, far above Everest, in the tenuous reaches of the stratosphere (where higher is hotter), lies only a thousandth part of that atmosphere's mass. Our individual "share" of the stratosphere weighs about as much as a ten-yard cube of water and is laced with just a bathtub full of ozone. Hence the dichotomy between concern for an ozone layer that, liquefied, would he no thicker than the ink that you're reading, and the authentic scientific confusion about our capacity rapidly to derange a lower ocean of air that's comparatively as massive as a stack of bibles, the Apocrypha included.

The atmospheric sciences presently lie in limbo between the Newtonian rigor of classical physics and the realm of the un decidible. It is an uncomfortable time. The range of sincere expert opinion broadens with the complexity of the subject at issue. And at the interdisciplinary extreme--global climate expertise itself dissolves in that most universal of solvents, the theory of complexity.

Just as mathematicians found Kurt Gödel's rigorous proof of the undecidibility of some formal propositions dismaying, there is presently no joy for atmospheric scientists in having to testify that the answers policy-makers seek are beyond the scope of the available data or the present limits of computational power. Nor is there consolation in the grim realization that their computerized global circulation models have but an ephemeral capacity to predict the future.

They can jump forward to model the climate of the distant future on a "what if" basis, but they can at best conjure up a coarsely realistic picture of global weather that lasts for a few weeks before beginning to disintegrate into gibberish. Even modeling the evolution of a single thunderhead's birth and death is an absolute tour de force of today's computer modeling.

By contrast, in reckoning what the whole ensemble of greenhouse gases is up to, we need to know about their transport and interaction with the atmosphere, sunlight, and each other over a range of time scales from microseconds to millennia. We need to measure reaction rates by the score and to ponder the quantitative meaning of feedbacks both positive and negative.

If there were world enough and time, individual atmospheric scientists might achieve a combination of physical and geometric intuition approaching certain knowledge of how the earth will respond in the long run to human intervention. But in practice such polymathy scarcely exists- scientists are reeling in shock at the information explosion they've touched off. Some causes are linked uncontroversially to eventual  effects, but many phenomena, like the ozone hole, still get discovered, not predicted.

We have as well another major problem. While we have indeed driven carbon dioxide above the historical (hundred-thousand-year) range of its recorded natural fluctuation by about 20 percent (70 parts per million), we have a rather feeble understanding of the paramount greenhouse gas: water vapor. Its clouds fill a tenth of the sky. ts atmospheric concentration is so vastly greater than that of C02 as to obscure its effect. And in turn the rest of our significant effluvia-methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's), and nitrogen oxides--are dwarfed by the concentration of C02 itself.

It is one thing to understand a "straight-forward" issue like the destruction of stratospheric ozone by chlorine atoms that, being atoms, just don't wear out. They can take decades to wander back to earth; and in the course of its prolonged residence in the stratosphere, each chlorine atom can slay a long succession of ozone molecules.

This is a scientific commonplace--given a pageful of photochemical reactions, and a few reams of hard data from the Antarctic, the conclusion that emerged was an uncontroversial one. High-flying U-2 and balloon-borne Instrumentation has already caught the culprit chlorine in flagrante reacting with some ultracold aerosols to bleach a hole in the polar sky.

So out of a growing scientific consensus, the 1987 Montreal Convention on the Reduction of Chemical Emissions was convened, and from it came an international protocol on reducing the release of chemicals that can loft long-lived chlorine into the sky. Ameliorating the problem of CFCs was relatively easy-the bill will come to only a few tens of billions of dollars, and the uncertainty factor was resolved to the point of sensible political engagement by" only' a decade of research.  Had CFC emissions continued unabated into he next century, they might have grown into a global problem. The existing local one will likely last for generations. But the Greenhouse Effect is a much rougher customer.

Tracking the Invisible Man

T0 BEGIN WITH, we're wrestling with not just a dilemma, but the Invisible Man. The temperature records of the last century and a half are by no means geographically uniform and meticulous in their accuracy. Even today's dense grid of meteorological observations is generally biased toward the land and troubled by the self-heating nature of urban areas. Science cannot offer a firm consensus without uncontroversial data, and the half-degree rise of the last century is neither continuous in its course nor a subject of unquestioned belief.

In recent years, three separate and significantly different scientific accounts of the same century-long record of "average" global temperatures, each peer-reviewed and each with its own set of statistical arguments in justification, have been published. They point up, down, and sideways. This is not the dismissal of a century of data, but rather a caution-the warming trend can only he proved by the data, not by a show of hands. The C02 is there, but has the atmosphere begun to notice?

Some say they are 99 percent sure they can perceive it in the data; some say those who say that are completely out of scientific bounds. Others say they see nothing, and many more that they just can't tell-both nature's static-ridden transmission and science's still-crude receivers make the message far from plain. "What bothers a lot of us is, " one modeler remarked, "telling Congress things we are reluctant to say ourselves."  Wittgenstein put it better: "Whereof we do not know, thereof we cannot speak."

As a window for laymen to peer through, Global Change and Our Common Future, published in 1989 by National Academy Press, affords a startling contrast. At one end of the spectrum lies the rhetoric of uncertainty that dominates the hard sciences in the study of global change.

It is exemplified by the admission that it will take decades for a clear greenhouse signal to emerge from the noise of climatic variation-witness the dust-bowl drought of the 1930s and the abnormally high Great Lakes water levels of the 1980s-and by the confession that it will take 500 times more computer power to realistically model the course of the quarter-century to come. As one participant in the forum, which produced Global Change, J.D. Mahlman, noted, "Until such decadal-scale fluctuations are understood or are predictable, it will remain difficult to diagnose the specific signals of permanent climate change as they evolve. "

At the other end of the spectrum lies the rhetoric of extinction- life scientists confidently predicting the climate-driven disappearance of species over the next fifty years. But the objects of their acute concern are the Norwegian mugwort, the Tibetan dung beetle (Aphodius hoderi), and other struggling refugees from the last Ice Age.

By the volume's end, it is clear on which side Senator Albert Gore has enlisted: "My purpose is to sound an alarm, loudly and clearly, of imminent and grave danger, and to describe a strategy for confronting this crisis ...  the horrendous prospect of an ecological collapse. " He delivered himself of this fine sermon on May Day 1989-the day before the forum started. So much for uncertainty.

No one doubts the existence of a dual trend-CO2 is surely rising. And so must its effect on the trapping and transfer of solar warmth between earth and sky. But global surface temperatures have not risen in lock-step with that rise. Given the ubiquity of water vapor, deciding this issue is rather like asking a panel of tasters to savor the difference between two big urns full of cafe au lait. One urn contains five lumps of sugar, the other six-not an easy matter, except to a diabetic.

Neither sugar's sweetness nor its palpable metabolic effect is at issue. But it's not an easy call. So too, scientific perceptions of both where the world is, and the timing of its rendezvous with climatic change, are still in part very much a matter of taste . As is the question of whether scientists from disciplines unrelated to the atmosphere should lend their authority to the promotion of policies that might not prevail on the objective strength-or empirical weakness--of the available evidence. It is a prerogative of the manifesto-writing classes to dragoon as many members as they can of the National Academy of Sciences into signing them (a task too often easier than getting them read).

But the resulting embarras de richesses can he a problem when the signatories outnumber the real experts in the field. The Union of Concerned Scientists got a majority of the membership to sign a declaration calling for a substantial reduction in global C02 emissions by the year 2000. Some members (notably MIT atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen) were appalled and said so, but they failed to make it onto prime-time television.

Vexation and Videotape

THE MOST important arbiters of the environmental policy debate have accordingly become the public television producers whose products bear the Academy's imprimatur when the credits roll. They have tools at their disposal to amplify and mute at will the discordant voices within the Academy. In a fair fight, a satellite or a supercomputer doesn't stand a chance against the editing and special effects studios of New York and Hollywood.

So in terms of political clout, the real centers of power have moved from the locales  of computer climate modeling, to the public television stations of Pittsburgh and Boston. We are being shown the planet's future by design, in color and in stereo. Yet the production designers seldom condescend to listen to scientists arguing, calculating, and changing their minds. Intelligibility, not content, is the criterion the producers value most. Their goal is to fossilize a script on videotape, not to question the agenda it may compel, when it is reiterated like a commercial on good gray public television.

I have yet to see a computer climate model whose screen is framed by a proscenium, with a data display set to Vivaldi's Four Seasons and an explanatory voice-over worthy of a network anchor. Yet in watching some of the most bizarre examples of video hype on climate change (e.g., "The Atmosphere in Crisis" episode of PBS' The Infinite Voyage), even as my mind is repelled by what is being said, the hair on my head rises together with the rest of the audience's when the clouds part and the music blares. This is semantic aggression run riot-sucking the audience into an hallucinatory Charybdis of swirling images of Gaia profaned.

Mere facts cannot prevail over the raw semiotic power of so excellent a medium, even when its masters may be leading us into a future that may be beyond economic repair-a future in which facts don't count and perceptions of scientific authority can take precedence over mere evidence. I often find myself exhorting atmospheric scientists to concern themselves with this phenomenal mastery, horn of nature television of National Geographic caliber mated with prose worthy of Jonathan Schell. But they just smile ruefully-once was enough-they've seen the genre. In it, computer animated conceptions of Venus's infernal surface vie with stark visions of all-but-airless Mars as alien stand-ins for earthly greenhouse warming and ozone depiction.

Television has little room for doubting scientists. They accordingly know the score. Who, for the sake of skepticism or the honor of the scientific profession, wants to go down in flames like Ceaucescu-locked in the sights of a hostile videocam? The TV crew has got the Maxim gun, and we do not.

So, riding on a wave of videotape, the usage "global warming" is entering the vernacular in the present tense as a mock synonym for "climate change." If only the public read and knew more, and heard and saw less; if only more scientists (and fewer organizations purporting to represent them) endeavored to inform the electorate's considerable curiosity-then we might face better odds in protecting objectivity from the heat of the greenhouse debate.

A DISTURBING reality confronts us: A the deliberate creation of a double standard, with one set of facts for internal scientific discourse and another for public consumption. Many who have contributed to it justify their actions by referring to their past diffidence which may have delayed action on ozone depiction. And agonized by the possibility of history repeating itself On C02, some have cast objectivity aside and openly made common cause with the eco-politicians. But this pathology of the sociology of science is not without a remedy. For the power of television to project unchallengeable images of environmental quality, real or imagined, is utterly undone when the public achieves even a minimal level of quantitative understanding; numeracy and skepticism go hand in hand.

In the absence of numbers candidly conveyed, it is all too easy to transmute supposedly quantitative scientific "facts" about the present into a qualitative legal fiction about the future. Popular coverage of the atmospheric sciences tends to neglect the enormous range of concentration (or dilution) of the various gases involved. That concentration ranges from almost 1 percent by volume in the case of water vapor, to hundreds of parts per million carbon dioxide, to 1 part per million methane, to parts per billion-total chlorine. And, finally, down to hundreds of parts per trillion-the individual CFCs.

This eight-order-of-magnitude range lends itself to rhetorical abuse on both sides of the debate. So beware equally of headlines proclaiming a fourfold increase in stratospheric chlorine (it has-from 1 part per billion in 1960 to nearly 4 parts per billion in 1990) or dismissing carbon dioxide with a blasé "Greenhouse a Humbug-C02 up by less than 1/100th of 1 percent!"

This, like "Stratosphere in Crisis--Chlorine Quadruples," may respectively amuse energy lobbyists and substitute  refrigerant salesmen, but it profoundly misrepresents the central problem posed by the interaction of climate and technical civilization.

That problem is deep time--deep not on a geological scale, but relative to the time-scale of politics. It has taken humanity ten generations to push C02 up by a bare 70 parts per million. The previous million years of using fire failed to budge it from its ambient range of fluctuation. The fossil record speaks plainly; as deep as we can drill into ancient ice, there is a clear (but how causal?) linkage of C02 and global climate. What wildfires failed to accomplish in the eons before human evolution, the Industrial Revolution has delivered-the acceleration of the history of our interaction with the very air-a bona fide change in the second most important greenhouse gas. And equally disturbing, it has delivered that fearsome engine of change, the chainsaw.

The drying effect of not-so-rapid deforestation on the climate of islands was noted by Columbus half a millennium ago.  So there is nothing subtle or uncertain about regional climate change in Brazil-strip the land of a rainforest that literally makes rain, and suffer sunstroke in the dust .I wish C02-induced climate change were as simple. Clearly, a sharp-toothed carnivore is on the prowl. But we've yet to see a full-grown specimen.  Are we dealing with Snoopy or Cerberus?

It's hard to tell- it's only just a foundling pup, and the question of its diet remains to he wrestled with-it might grow into either. But grow it will-slowly, and for a long while undetectably. One of these centuries, we're going to have a real dog in our front yard. But what kind?  And when?  An interdisciplinary consensus on the magnitude of the "greenhouse effect" and its impact on sea levels in the next century won't come cheap-or soon.

Nobody knows if the synergy of all the ill-defined feedbacks will coincide with high-side outcomes of the many inputs that global systems models require. So some will invoke the presumed prudence of assuming the worst. For others, there is Murphy's Second Law: if everything must go wrong, don't bet on it.

Changing the weather on a local scale is categorically a different matter than transforming the climate of the globe. The vast reservoir of CO, locked up in limestone dwarfs the atmosphere's burden by many, many thousandfold. The geological unleashing of a fraction of it in the days of the dinosaurs created an atmosphere far richer in C02 (and some 5 C warmer) than that of today. The tricky question-how much fossil fuel must be burned to do likewise--has a brief answer: all of it.

The immensity of the world's reservoirs of coal (like limestone) teaches the disparity of scale between what humanity can do in a single generation and what goes on in the course of geological time. We are but builders of pyramids and hewers of wood, not architects of mountains or choreographers of continental drift. For all the leverage our technology affords us, we are a species that fits into a single cubic kilometer, 
with room to spare. In light of the minimalism its editors advocate, the motto of the Whole Earth Catalogue-

"We are as gods, so we'd better get good at it!"-

is stunningly hubristic. But what of the lamentations of those who decry what mischief we can and do see?

Turning Up the Heat

THEREIN LIES the political paradox: what we can perceive, we can endeavor to put right. That scar on the Soviet landscape, the vanishing Aral Sea, bears witness to the deranged power of central planning like the mark of Cain. Yet, the diverted rivers that caused it can he swiftly returned to their courses. But the action of the invisible hand of energy economics upon the world is imperceptibly slow.

Bear in mind the beaver. Without benefit of godhood, its mindless industry acting over eons has transformed the Canadian landscape into a wilderness of lakes. Likewise ,creating a brave new world with an atmosphere transformed by the total depiction of fossil fuel is a labor of generations yet unborn.

We cannot govern the actions of posterity, but we can teach by our example. We can plant trees and stay the hand of mindless deforestation. We can value the richness of biological diversity and recognize the intellectual poverty of sullen indifference to the majesty of nature. But any pretension to oracular foreknowledge of how, over the next quarter century, the earth will respond to our presence lies in the realm not of science but of intuition.

And just as surely, any denial that unrestrained C02 injection can transform the world within five generations lies beyond the pale of both-especially if China's vast coal reserves are exploited at a per capita rate approaching that of the U. S. today.

Politically, I counsel constant vigilance. The salvation of the world affords an enchanting pretext for those predisposed to societal intervention . They have already raised the abolitionist banner, pointing to the prospect of Bangladesh awash and water  skiing down the Mall to the Capitol-a prospect no more likely in my lifetime than nothing happening.

My personal expectation-and I reserve the right to change my mind if the evidence does-runs more to centimeter-per-year rises in sea level and a lot more climatic variability than actual temperature rise in that lifetime.

There is a precedent of sorts, at the periphery of human history, of a temperature change fully as large (5 to 6'C) as even the most pessimistic estimates for the century to come. It happened an eon ago, and its onset was so sudden as to raise the contemporary question of climate responding in an abruptly nonlinear way to humanity's growth. Yet mankind muddled through the last Ice Age's death throes and has done rather well since, despite a 100-meter rise in sea levels!

But unlike the regression of the glaciers, a reversal of the course of the Industrial Revolution is not to be meekly borne. An examination of the history of energy policy over the last two decades reveals some unexpected and paradoxical trends in the relationship between environmental awareness and actual emissions of the greenhouse gases.

In the aftermath of the Arab oil shock of the early 1970s, computer models not of climate, but of resource depiction and energy costs, played a major role in determining energy policies. The most egregious projections, immortalized in textbooks by neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich, had the United States running out of natural gas in 1989. Yet they inspired the National Academy of Sciences to commission a massive study with conclusions (promote energy efficiencies and develop coal and oil shale resources) reflecting a belief in continuous energy cost inflation.

At the turn of the century, a coal-fired electrical station that was 8 percent efficient was a state-of-the-art wonder. A solid half-century of progress followed, at a rate of better than a half-percent a year. By the 1960s, such facilities had achieved new-plant efficiencies of over 40 percent. Back then, coal was literally dirt-cheap. But with the coming of the 1974 oil shock, it was assumed that as energy costs soared into the 1980s, market forces would compel heroic efforts to raise the thermodynamic efficiency of such plants to the limits of high technology-a process fuel cost savings would amply justify. 

But the cost projections were wrong, and we got the Oil Glut instead. And, courtesy of Earth Day and its aftermath, a draconian regime of sulfur emission control. The enforcement of that regime did two things quite unrelated to acid rain. Installing the control systems reduced the efficiency of existing plants by five whole percentage points, and defunded the development of the next generation of more efficient combustion technology and power-generation systems.

So we are entering the 1990s about 15 % worse off in terms of C02 emission per kilowatt-hour than we were a generation ago. This is pretty close to a worst-case scenario whatever one's view on the near-term effect of greenhouse emissions: the largest single term in America's fuel equation-coal-fired electricity-has been running retrograde to progress in materials science and combustion technology for twenty years. Yet both here and in Japan, science has lately begun to deliver the Right Stuff for raising  its efficiency-materials able to withstand higher temperatures and stresses for longer times. But they are being applied more to aircraft engines than to power stations.

Together with the realization that energy costs do show a shallow but steady inflationary trend, this suggests that we need not he idle while awaiting newer and more elegant generations of climate models and nuclear technology-or that Holy Grail of applied physics, hot fusion that truly emulates the power of the sun.

So there may indeed be a solution to the profound uncertainty that engenders reluctance when we are offered insurance against C02 bracket creep-at a trillion-dollar premium. Consider a double Scots Verdict: even if the verdict on global warming is not proven, we could still save a bundle of hard cash if a canny enough energy policy can be found.

Rather than mandating reduced consumption of fuel and its Luddite consequences here and in the growing industrial sector of the Third World, let us consider getting more Kilowatt-hours by literally turning up the heat. A policy that promotes raising the minimum thermodynamic efficiency of hotter-running fuel-burning power stations by say 8 percent (to around 44 percent) by the year 2000 might be paid for by the very fuel it saves. Neither we nor our posterity can object to saving ourselves some cash-thrift has as few enemies as prodigality in fuel consumption has friends outside OPEC. And should the presently hung scientific jury reach a Scots Verdict in the interminable trial of Earth v. The Greenhouse Gases, little macro-economic mischief will have been done.

But should nature follow art, and oblige the environmental televangelists with an unambiguously toasty third millennium -- when I have spoken of uncertainty in this essay, I have meant what I said-- the retrospective imposition of such a policy regime will he a source of some satisfaction to all, save hardened libertarians. But how will stewardship be redefined in the longer term-the century or so it would take to double C02 at the present pace?

OPTIONS DO exist. Given alternatives to power derived from fossil fuels, the whole fuel cycle can he redefined, with hydrogen replacing carbon. There is another major (and revolutionary) technical fix: we can liquefy air and burn fuels in pure oxygen, and condense the resulting C02 with the frigid liquid nitrogen that is the by-product of that liquefaction. But both hydrogen fuels and systems that recaptureCO2 are (like solar and wind power) dauntingly expensive.

So even today, in the midst of climatic ambiguity, even the most chlorophyllic environmentalists are having stirrings of conscience about their adamant refusal to acknowledge an unambiguous fact of physics.

As surely as C02 can absorb the warming infrared, the strong nuclear force is millions of times stronger than the chemical bonds that are burst in unleashing heat from coal. Rather than embarking down the soft energy path that leads back beyond the Industrial Revolution's roots into a future dark age, the Greens should pause to consider the effect on the environment of renewing and perfecting our mastery of the atom's pale fire. 

The prospect of nuclear power's second coming presents environmental millenarians with a real source of cognitive dissonance: it is they who are the problem. It is their delaying tactics that wasted years and squandered billions at Seabrook and elsewhere. And it is their past indifference to the environmental consequences of the fossil fuel that the reactor might have saved that makes a mockery of their present rhetoric.

The sooner their paranoia about nuclear waste disposal is laid to rest alongside that waste itself-deep in the and badlands, well secured, and as soon as the criminal mischief of Chernobyl is buried under the foundations of a reactor both safe and sanely contained, the sooner will civilization cease to he obliged to make a chemical waste repository of the sky.

So let all summon the courage to be kind to our environment. For if the bulk of the arsenals of Armageddon are indeed fading into historical irrelevancy, what better fate for them than  to disappear as smokeless fuel into newer and more tractable nuclear furnaces? Better they light  the world for a generation than heat it for a baleful instant.

And better too that cooler heads than  those that dominate the hot media prevail in informing the Congress and the electorate. For this much is certain: science needs to see the illumination of today's hot-tempered environmental policy debates. If  light is to prevail over heat, many will have to simmer down and reflect they have lately been doing or counseling.

If candor  prevails, climate professionals will realize once again that  laymen too can recognize cant when they hear it and  cartoons when they see them. Scientists would do well to recall that  insight's inevitable corollary-the neutrality of scientific institutions must first  exist if it is to he respected.

For as  the thaw continues in the Eastern bloc, we see emerging  from beneath the glacial recent facade  of science in the  Soviet Union grim evidence of  what happened when science  was last   subordinated to the true believer's agendas for changing the world.

Whether the  trial of Galileo or the tyranny of Lysenko, at all times and in all polities, science politicized is science betrayed.

Russell Seitz, from 1985 to 1989, was a visiting  scholar and associate of Harvard University's  Center for International Affairs. His writings have appeared in Science, Nature, and Technology  Review as well as the Economist, Foreign Affairs,  the New York Times, and The National Interest

FOOTNOTES

'Professor Alan Robock, University of Maryland, quoted in Science 244 June 2, 1989): 1041-43.]

'To add to the confusion, the CFCs are roughly 1000 times more efficient than carbon dioxide as absorbers of infrared, making them significant greenhouse gases and major agents of stratospheric cooling: some scientists fear the Invisible Man might he hiding in his Doppelganger's shadow! While stratospheric cooling is perhaps the least controversial of the effects at issue, it is conspicuously  unpublicized.

'I am indebted for both Columbus's observation  about  Caribbean deforestation and the opening quote to a speech delivered by Presidential Science Adviser D. Allan Bromley before the National Press Club in April 1990.

Crystal Skullduggery

 

The Fall and Rise of The New Atlantis

 I can scarcely  argue with Yuval Levin, now that the The New Atlantis editor   former Associate Director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House and  President's Council on Bioethics stalwart  has called on National Review  to do what two of my recent pieces in Taki's Magazine ,The Right's Science Problem,and Climate Of  Here   counsel--

To put ideology aside and get real on science policy .

Were it not for the fact that that journal ,along with the usual beltway policy magazines of a conservative or neoconservative bent , rejected  the opportunity to run  the substance of these two pieces  when offered them, repeatedly, between 2005 and 2007, all would be copacetic. The fact remains that  though such writers as Chris Mooney have written whole books about the beast, it took a paleocon editor to unveil the elephant in the Neocon's vestibule. Still,better late in the election cycle than never: an elephant is a terrible thing to waste.

Here is Yuval's plank from today's National Review  Online:

"The conservatives who are working to resist or to answer global-warming denialism (much of which was based on very genuine concerns about the accuracy of climate science and the policy implications its advocates were drawing from it) are not adopting the script of Al Gore’s movie, which is the epitome of the reckless hysteria school of climate change. They’re not talking about Manhattan under water, but about the apparent probability of a very modest increase in average temperatures over the course of the coming century and a half to which human activity appears to contribute some and which may have detrimental effects particularly on low-lying areas in the middle latitudes. There is plenty of time and space to improve our modeling and understanding, to seek some ways to mitigate and adapt, and find some creative solutions to both our energy and our environmental problems — as Jim Manzi has well argued in the pages of NR. These begin from seeing these problems realistically. Neither the right nor the left has done that squarely in the recent past, but the genuine abuses of science have been (and frankly continue to be — just listen to “rolling back the waters” Obama lately) more serious on the left in this debate than on the right. Global warming hysterics, at least as much as denialists, need to get a real grip on the science.

To take this as an instance of some kind of conservative anti-science agenda, and even to equate this with the evolution debate, is surely wrong-headed. In the evolution debate, for instance, some are inclined to deny scientific claims because they accept the notion that certain moral implications must follow from those claims, and they resist those implications. Rather than question the idea that the implications must in fact follow from the science, they dispute the science. (The evolution debate is much more complicated than that, I know, so no need for millions of e-mails, but it does exhibit this general dynamic among others.) In the global warming debate, on the other hand, we have seen a reaction (which sometimes has run to excess) against extreme and irresponsible hyping of scientific claims. Both debates are complex, but they are very very different; and the relationships between the right, the left, and science are very far from simple, as revealed in both instances and many others.

I might take the opportunity to mention that the relationship between the right, the left, and science, is one of the main subjects of a forthcoming book of mine, due out in September — Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. A chapter of that book (on science and the left) ran in the last issue of the New Atlantis. It is followed in the book by a chapter on science and the right, and the book takes up more generally the question of what all these science debates can teach us about American political life. (End of shameless plug)." -- Yuval Levin   NRO 06/20 12:39 PM

Spaghetti Archaeology

Architectural Conservation , Software Division

" Software is the heart and soul of today's array of gadgets—and, the way it is written is crucial to their operation. The problem is, however, there is no one manual dictating how it should be written. In essence, programmers now simply string together commands to make devices do what consumers expect them to do. There are no rules for software developers to follow, such as those that guide most engineering disciplines, and there is no historical frame of reference code writers can study to determine which approaches work and which do not." notes Scientific American.

It  relates that IBM fellow Grady Booch,a self-styled 'Software Archaeologist' ,

"approached the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum [in Mountain View, Calif.] and told them they should also have a museum of software. It would be a sad thing…[for]…future generations if we didn't have access to the original source code for, say, Word. I can't find the original source code for [IBM's mainframe operating system]; not even IBM has it. It's hard to get access to some of this software because it's proprietary and businesses don't want their competitors to see it. We're conducting an archaeological dig for software so that future generations can study it and improve upon it.

How will the software define and use the different data it encounters? These are questions that must be answered before the software is written in the first place. In civil engineering, if you ask someone to build a Victorian house, there is an inherent understanding of what that looks like. If you ask different programmers to design software for a high-throughput system [such as one that processes financial transactions], there's no general agreement of how that software should be built."

The Iron Snowman

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L07201, doi:10.1029/2008GL033311, 2008

Non-ideal liquidus curve in the Fe-S system and Mercury's snowing core

Bin Chen Department of Geology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA. Jie Li

Department of Geology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA.Steven A. Hauck II

Department of Geological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Abstract

We conducted multi-anvil experiments to investigate the melting behavior of the iron-sulfur system at moderate pressures. Our data reveal a positive departure from ideal solution behavior at 14 GPa, as indicated by the presence of two inflection points on the liquidus curve of iron-rich compositions. In contrast, the shape of the liquidus curve at 10 GPa is consistent with nearly ideal mixing between end-member components. Combined with existing data at lower pressures and above 20 GPa, our results suggest a negative liquidus temperature gradient under conditions found at shallow depths in Mercury's core. At the present time, the core is most likely precipitating solid iron in the form of snow, at a single depth or in two distinct zones. Formation and segregation of iron snow would alter the thermal and chemical state of the core and influence the origin and surface expression of the planet's magnetic field.>
published 3 April 2008.

The Plurality Of Worlds

Lots Of Them

Scientists often see farther by standing on the shoulders of  their tallest colleagues , but the latest extension of  astronomical insight comes from an arid but remarkably un-dusty mountaintop in Chile called La Silla ,which hosts what can only described as a telescope theme park, sporting glass giants that are outliers of the world's great observatories

In recent years, a Swiss group headed by  Michel Mayor of the University Of Geneva  has used the 3.6 meter instrument of  The European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere  to gather light for 'HARPS.'  The  High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher detects the small wobbles in star motion that signal orbiting planets

At a conference in Nantes ,France, the group has announced finding a triple system of super-Earths  - planets intermediate in mass between ours and Neptune-  orbiting the star HD 40307.

Looking at HARPS scans to date  , they count a total of 45  such objects with orbital periods shorter than 50 days, implying s that one sun-like star  star out of three harbors such planets.

"Does every single star harbor planets and, if yes, how many?" wonders Mayor "We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress towards it."

Since the discovery  of a planet around the star 51 Pegasi in 1995, more than 270 exoplanets have been found,  the majority around solar-like stars. Most are hot , Jupiter sized giants of a sort current statistics suggest can be found orbiting  1 out of 14 stars. "With the advent of much more precise instruments such as the HARPS spectrograph on ESO's 3.6-m telescope at La Silla, we can now discover smaller planets, with masses between 2 and 10 times the Earth's mass," says  Stéphane Udry,adding  that "“Detection of planets with masses of about 2 Earth-masses --maybe less-- is possible,”

To do much better, astronomers will have to look through the next generation of NASA  deep  space telescopes- the first of which, the Webb Telescope,  should be orbited  within a decade.

There is a  double  irony in where the Swiss group announced its confirmation of the once-heretical doctrine of the Plurality Of Worlds. At  Nantes in 1598 was declared the Edict granting  freedom of religion to  the French Protestant followers of John Calvin of Geneva. Two years later, putting too much faith in freedom of conscience , Giordano Bruno  foolishly voiced the belief that ours might not be the only world  riven by wars of religion, and was burnt at the stake for his trouble.This  had a chilling effect on  further speculation, despite  the rapid advance of astronomical instruments in the decades that followed.

in 1624, Gallileo died under house arrest , his persecution by The Inquisition  preceding by several decades the excommunication from his synagogue of Dutch lens grinder,  Benedictus Spinoza, purveyor of telescope objectives to Christian Huygens and  the Royal Society and author of the explicit phrase ' the plurality of worlds.'  Thirteen years after he died in poverty,the Edict Of Nantes was revoked, and St Augustine's condemnation of scientific curiousity was restored to the reverence it still enjoys in some quarters to this day.

Dinosaur Rally

In 1983, I watched as  the New York Yacht Club's 132 year winning streak was terminated by an invasion of gibbering australopithicines , who carried the America's Cup off in triumph from Newport to their antipodean lair. It was quickly recovered by Dennis Connor, who lost it  but in 1988 , it became necessary to defend it on short notice against a New Zealand challenge. This precipitated a return to the original spirit of the race, ,perhaps best summed up as "Who can built the fastest yacht in the world?" ( within the rules,which we reserve the right to rewrite if we feel like it)

 

 In the 1988 case this precipitated the design and deployment in under a year of a 60 foot catamaran , a Burt Rutan carbon fiber wingsail creation which , though of exhilarating performance, - - I spent some hair raising hours helping keep it from becoming fully airborne,  I was obliged to describe as  ' Resembling a pterodactyl on steroids.'

Now the landlocked Admiralty court that interprets the arcana of the 19th century Deed Of Gift ruling the racing rulemakers has decreed another catfight. Scuttlebut has it that 90 foot catamarans will determine if the cup stays in Geneva, home to the Alinghi syndicate that last won it off New Zealand , or ends up back here- the current victim of America's Cup fever being the head of Oracle, who seems to prefer power boats, since, well,  he likes power.

Fortunately ,paleonology has been keeping up with radical yacht design, and an even weirder Big Bird has been dug up to contend for  the mascot slot  in a giant wingsail catamaran challenge. Clear the deck, ptereodactyl and Quetzalosaurus fans. I'm nominating an Azharkid  as the flying marine dinosaur du jour  for this Americas Cup:  it sure looks the part , with strong  bilateral symmetry , lotsa gnarly wing and the fashion sense of a Siberian Gulag Commodore's first wife. In short,  like the boats, it's built for the job, which is scaring away the competition and affording a minimum of windage for a maximum of advertising area.

But fast-- this is going to be a lot more fun than watching the grass grow.

LIBERAL VAMPIRISM

  Is  National Review's Jonah Goldberg putting out feelers for the theme of his next book ?

 “Do Vampires have rights ?”  , he asks  in NRO.:” it seems to me that the founding fathers would unequivocally say that vampires do not have rights because rights come from God (or our creator). Vampires are undead and exist solely thanks to satanic or other demonic forces. They shy from God and God's love and therefore do not deserve the protections all of God's creatures are entitled to. ... I think I'm safe assuming that most atheists ground their understanding of rights and citizenship as stemming from sentience, consciousness, etc.

 Well, vampires have all of those things in their favor. Presumably, an atheist would reject the premise of the question. They would argue that vampires either do not exist... or that vampirism is a biological state, a disease of some kind.... In which case, I assume they would argue that vampires do have rights because having a disease does not amount to a surrender of your humanity or rights.

Interestingly, if you could prove that vampires are real and that their vampiric status derives from supernatural forces, you would have done yeoman work in proving the existence of God. After all, if there are demons, there are probably devils and if there are devils, it seems awfully silly to reject the idea that there might be angels and, ultimately God. If I were more up to speed on my Chesterton, I'm sure there's an appropriate quote here...”.

The Bosnian Islamovampists are not going to like this at all.

KICKING THE BUCKET

Cut and paste data splicing is a scientific norm in palaeoclimatology, where temperatures antedating the development of the thermometer  must be inferred from proxies as various as tree rings ,coral. and wine vintages. The lack of an ancient instrumental temperature  record has led to much recrimination,  like the Hockey Stick fracas, but  it is often assumed that the modern record stands in contrast as a sterling example of the hard data  science prefers as the basis for theory.

Not quite. One of the most conspicuous glitches in the slow-changing record of global climate is the .3 degree downturn in the record of global warming that the literature records for 1945. It has been unconvincingly attributed to everything from the Hiroshima bomb to postwar chaos in Pacific weather reporting, homeward bound fleets having somehow missed an El Nino event en route.

A new paper by David Thompson and othe NOAA atmospheric scientists in  Nature reports a different explanation .Most of the wartime measurements of sea temperatures factored int the global average  came from US warships, which unlike the British navy tended to log engine room  water intake thermometer readings  as representing the temperature of the sea. 

The hardy jack tars who returned to meteorological duty as the war wound down instead relied as always on the time honored method of throwing a bucket over the side ,hauling it in , and putting it on deck for  a  thermometer wielding chief or officer to measure . The  late Victorian change from  oaken buckets to galvanized steel   was  compounded before World War II,  when not just British, but Dutch and Japanese hydrographers were issued porous and hence cooling-prone canvas seawater scoops , a Bad Idea since the wind is generally brisk on a moving vesse.  Inevitably,  the seawater sampled tended to cool - evidently measurably, in the time it took to present it on deck  for measurement.

Between this newly detected  bias and  the already known disparity between  modern ships ' intakes ( warm)  and ocean measurement buoys (cold)  expect a lot of  dithering as the record is massaged in the year to come.As  to the Royal Navy,  it ultimately solved the problem- behold the wondrous evolution of  the New Model Navy Insulated Thermometer Bucket --