Sheril Kirshenbaum is a marine biologist at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University. She is also a Classicist. Sometimes she's a radio jock or Congressional staffer. Sometimes she plays the drums. Today finds her a writer. Never sure what's next, she continues to enjoy the journey...
This storm was recently upgraded to a Category 4--and we should all be watching it closely. Knowing the history of cyclones in this region, I am very, very concerned. My latest Daily Green update on Sidr, considering some different scenarios depending on the particular storm track, is here. Suffice it to say that we can only hope Sidr weakens considerably before landfall....
Okay, I like Rolling Stone. As a drummer, it's kind of protocol. And James Lovelock is an interesting character - the very kind of fellow that I'd probably keep in good company were we of the same generation. I like those intelligent out-of-the-box types with big ideas. That said, I'm seriously not impressed with either in the November issue. Just check out the tagline of the Lovelock article:
"One of the most eminent scientists of our time says that global warming is irreversible -- and that more than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century."
Sends a shiver down your spine and sucks you right in, no?
Now step back and say you wanna sell a couple million magazines or so... Here's a novel idea:
1) Take a controversial figure who's going to predict impending apocalypse.
2) Call him 'The Prophet.' It's mystical and a little bit scary (esp if you haven't already been keeping up with the latest from our buddy Eli).
4) Include this kicker for the ending of the opening paragraph:
..the coming of the Four Horsemen -- war, famine, pestilence and death -- seems to perk him up. "It will be a dark time," Lovelock admits. "But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting."
I just did my latest post at the Daily Green--we have a potentially very deadly storm in the Bay of Bengal right now. This is the area where hurricanes/cyclones can take the greatest toll. Let's hope for weakening and a landfall in a less populous area. Yikes.
Folks: The latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now on newsstands, and online you can also read, in PDF, my cover story. Entitled "An Inconvenient Assessment," it's about the biggest Bush administration climate science scandal that you've never heard of. Let me repaste the opening paragraphs to get you into the story:
Global warming is definitely happening. That's the easy part. But it's no cinch to dramatize the phenomenon, or to personalize it. As scientists repeatedly caution, climate change can't be cited as the direct cause of any individual weather event, no matter how extreme. Furthermore, many climate-induced changes are occurring on a relatively slow timescale. Take sea-level rise: It's one of the most certain outcomes of global warming, but at least at the moment the increase is probably about an inch per decade--not exactly something you'd notice on your beach vacation. And as for the culprits behind it all--the greenhouse gases--they're invisible in the atmosphere.
All of which raises the question: How do you make people wake up about global warming, take it seriously, and perceive it as a core component of the future they'll have to live with? How do you get them to prepare, just as they might for a terrorist attack, or a pandemic, or an intense hurricane landfall?
One idea would be a national initiative to make climate science and its implications accessible to every American, translating the science in a way that citizens cannot only understand but also begin to perceive in their backyards and communities. Sure, you'd need a rigorous scientific report, but you'd also have to go beyond mere technical jargon to engage local stakeholder communities with issues that will affect them. You'd have to bring global warming down from the atmosphere to a personal level. So you might want to talk to people living on the Gulf Coast or in Florida about how rising sea levels will impact their beaches and coastal homes and change their hurricane vulnerabilities; to Californians and Pacific Northwesterners about the consequences of declining mountain snowpack for their drinking water supplies; to those living in the heartland about projected changes to agriculture; to those in the Southwest about increasing risks of wildfire and drought; and so on.
Such a project actually did exist once, though you might not have heard of it. It went by the common name of the U.S. National Assessment, though the final product's official title--Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change--was much wordier. But industry groups, conservative think tanks, and global warming skeptics despised the National Assessment like nothing else in the world of climate science (which is really saying something). They suspected a nefarious plot by then-Vice President Al Gore to build a broader constituency for action on global warming. And after they gave the report their thumbs down, their gladiatorial champion--the Bush administration--lopped off its head. Not only did the White House undermine the first incarnation of the assessment, released in 2000, but rather than following up on this pioneering experiment in a serious way, it censored mere references to it out of subsequent government climate science documents. Then the administration tried to cover its tracks by replacing a required follow-up assessment with what amounted to a scientific sham.
In the context of repeated scandals over the relationship between the Bush government and science, the story of the National Assessment often has been overlooked. Other tales may have had more immediate flair--former industry lobbyists revising climate reports and then getting jobs with ExxonMobil, for example, or top scientists (including the former surgeon general) going public to announce they've been gagged. Yet in the words of global warming whistleblower Rick Piltz, the deepsixing of the National Assessment remains "the central climate science scandal of the administration." If we wish to grasp the true consequences of the so-called war on science--and to learn how it has rendered us, during a crucial period of six to eight years, unable to grapple with what is arguably our biggest national and global problem--learning about the National Assessment's suppression is critical. And as climate change continues apace, and may be moving much faster than expected, we need an updated assessment now more than ever.
That's just the beginning of a very long article. You can read the full piece here.
I'm undoubtedly a big proponent of changing our actions to combat global warming, but you can bet I'm more than wary of ideas to experiment with our home Terra. Namely, because I plan to stick around here for a little while. Someone my age better damn well provide representation at the table and speak up because we're the ones inheriting the mess that's being made.
I wonder whether the scientists involved understand the big picture. We can't expect to fix our global fever piecemeal when the underlying causes are being ignored. Since we don't know enough about thresholds and complex systems interacting on multiple scales, it's not good enough to start loading our environment with the 'best guess'. Instead, let's put our efforts into crafting better legislative policy. Too slow you suggest? Well, deforestation is an enormous contributing factor, so how about acting now to support efforts such as savingspecies.org which will legitimately help us move toward carbon neutrality? Life isn't like the movies and we're not going to get a do-over if we miscalculate. We must address the real problem before we begin playing doctor with our planet.
I just read this scoop from my friend Eli Kintisch in Science. Scary stuff. Seems Eli attended a high level meeting of climate scientists in Cambridge, MA on the subject of geoengineering--i.e., artificially altering the planet in some way to help stave off global warming (think Frank Herbert's Dune). And to Eli's surprise, he found the scientists pretty darn open to at least studying the idea. As he writes:
Harvard geochemist Daniel Schrag and physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary thought that geoengineering deserved a closer look (Science, 26 October, p. 551). In an opening presentation yesterday, Schrag explained that extensive, rapid melting of arctic sea ice (ScienceNOW, 2 May) and the fact that the world's 2005 and 2006 carbon emissions from fossil fuels were higher than predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are forcing the hands of climate scientists. Schrag also fears that when countries are faced with the prospect of even more drastic environmental change, they will turn to geoengineering regardless of whether the consequences are known. "We're going to be doing this if we're afraid of something really bad happening, like the Greenland ice sheet collapsing," he said.
My God, are we really this far gone already? Do we need to seriously consider geoengineering as an insurance policy, if nothing else?
A few weeks ago, I appeared for the second time on PBS KCET's "Tavis Smiley Show," this time to discuss Storm World and global warming generally. I would have given an update and told folks to watch the show live, but I didn't know when my segment was going to air.
Tavis: Let me ask you two questions about Republicans. One about the current occupant of the White House, President Bush, and the other about the Republicans running to take his place in the Oval Office in 2008. The latter first. I just read an article the other day that suggested that amongst those running now for the GOP presidential nomination, there is a divide on the issue of global warming.
There isn't this uniformity like there was some time ago, uniformity opposed to the science on global warming. Now there's a divide about global warming and what our responsibility is as humans to do something about it. What's your read on that divide amongst some of these candidates running for the GOP nomination?
Mooney: I think that's accurate. There is a divide. This is the triumph of Al Gore. The issue is shifting and it's becoming harder and harder to be a denier, to be questioning the science. It's becoming kind of embarrassing to be a denier at this point.
So you have some Republicans, the more conservative ones, the kind of Tom Tancredos who are still out there still questioning the science. But if you look at the whole field, you find you have some of the more moderates, the McCains, the Giulianis, they accept human causation.
They realize that we got to do something about it. Even somebody like Sam Brownback. Mike Huckabee is talking about how we have to find different energy solutions for powering our societies because we can't stick with fossil fuels into the indefinite future. I think the issue is turning. I think we're going to get the policy solutions we need in the next presidency.
Again, the full transcript is here. And audio is here.
Thanks to my favorite Mooney, I'm enjoying life as a writer. Well a blogger really, but that's a style of writing just the same. Open correspondence to both everyone and no one at all. Chris recently considered whether bloggers should unionize and I suspect that will come with time as our new medium evolves.
One aspect of the blogosphere that particularly appeals to me is that while prose is encouraged, there are no rules. I've always found such formalities counter productively confining for any form of self expression. Most traditional, strictly-defined protocols are much too stifling for creativity because writing is an art form after all. It allows others a rare glimpse into our private selves so rules just have a pesky habit of mucking up the process.
This weekend finds me with the unique opportunity to use a vintage Smith-Corona Super Sterling Portable Manual Typewriter. Translation: typing with no plug, connection or correction. Imagine that...
My family had a typewriter when I was a couple of decades younger, but it was nothing like this remarkable throwback to a simpler time. Round creme colored keys suspended high above the frame. Here google can't match advertisements to my text and emails do not interrupt flow of thought.
There's something absolutely genuine about what an old typewriter like this can produce. The blank page in the carriage is full of possibility and somehow in what's composed - even amid uneven spacing, missing letters, and misspelled words - I find freedom. Honesty assembled in plastic, metal, and ribbon.
And so this weekend I celebrate the typewriter and leave my laptop to the world of the wired. At least, that's the intention. I will remain a recluse to the blogosphere and allow the Smith Corona to dance beneath my fingers as I wonder how many others have explored these keys and what else has been born on this very same machine. As winter approaches, I'll write privately in the cozy confines of my warm apartment on a frosty November day. Me and a typewriter.
From Jeff Masters' blog, describing the Dutch response to a powerful North Sea storm:
While today's storm did not approach the 1953 storm in severity, it did bring the highest storm surge seen in the past 20 years to the North Sea. The massive flood gates that protect the Dutch port of Rotterdam were closed for the first time since they were constructed in the 1990s. From early media accounts, the gates did their job admirably, protecting the Netherlands from inundation. Water levels reached 3.16 meters above mean sea level in the southern Netherlands, and 3.40 meters above sea level in the northern Netherlands, with no flooding reported.
If only we'd built something similar to protect New Orleans...
P.S.: For more info on the Dutch gated structure known as the Maeslantkering, see here.
This is a subject I've been meaning to do some reporting on for some time, but with the move and all my other obligations, I just haven't gotten the chance. So I've decided simply to blog about it (even though blogging is just a "hobby," and not a real job--right?).
You may or may not be aware that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration flies regular missions into hurricanes using instrumented aircraft. Two of the planes they use are Orion WP-3Ds, or P-3s for short, and they're nicknamed "Kermit" and "Miss Piggy."
Well, it has recently come to my attention that we very nearly lost Kermit--to say nothing of his talented crew--back in February. As an internal (and to my knowledge not yet public) NOAA report (PDF) relates, the plane had been detailed to fly a research mission into a non-tropical low pressure system in the North Atlantic off of Newfoundland as part of the Ocean Winds Experiment. On February 9, something seemingly unprecedented and nearly deadly occurred.
[Kermit in flight, with all four engines firing.]
Flying at night and in unusually dry and very windy conditions, the plane suffered the failure of no less than three out of four engines. The apparent cause? Accumulation of sea salt aerosols--an obvious by-product of seawater evaporation, but never thought to be a risk at the flight's altitude level--on the engines.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like this particular combination of dryness, high winds, and night flying was a novel one even for a very experienced flight crew. And it was very nearly deadly: With only one engine running, the plane was going down, and only luck and quick thinking seems to have saved the day. Notably, Kermit flew through some precipitation just before disaster might have occurred, and this may have helped wash some of the salt off the engines--which subsequently restarted at the last minute.
It sounds like the crew performed admirably in this case, and that they simply encountered new and unknown meteorological conditions--a danger no one knew was lurking out there in the atmosphere. In any event, it's a stunning and frightening story. Indeed, when comparing it to another near-crash tale involving a P-3--see Jeff Masters' account of "Flying into Hurricane Hugo" in 1989--I note that in that case the plane only lost one engine and sustained damage to a second. In contrast, and to repeat, this latest 2007 case saw the failure of three out of four engines!
So thank goodness the plane and the crew were all right. As for more general conclusions that may be drawn--does this incident say anything about safety measures or funding levels for instrumented aircraft research, or was it simply a freak event--I leave that to those more expert in the subject matter. I don't have enough background knowledge about this highly specialized form of aviation to jump to any conclusions.
P.S.: Unbeknownst to me, there was a previous public mention of this incident, see here.
Um, seeing as I'm out in Hollywood...well, I guess this came along at the right time. I am part of the "cast" for a docu entitled (for now) Weather Movie. (I hope they keep the title, tones of Scary Movie.) I will be playing myself. This is something I do all the time--sometimes more convincingly than others. But never before, at least to my knowledge, have I gotten into the Internet Movie Database for it.
Well twice now, Sparticus Maximus the Great has taken over The Intersection with his own expert bird brain opinion. He weighed in on the passing of his hero Alex the Grey and hijacked the blog another morning to express concern over Socks and India - the notorious felines of the White House.
Readers have reacted by requesting regular commentary and lately he's even getting email - As if the little parrot didn't already have an enormous ego, now he's simply unbearable... squawking to be bathed and demanding only the best seeds and pellets for his delicate palate.
It's enough that we're finally giving in. We invite everyone to submit questions to our own 'Ask A Sun Conure.' Email the impish bird about science, politics, or anything that puzzles you at [email protected] and every now and then we'll let him crash The Intersection and teach us all a little something new.
Just please don't inflate his sense of self importance any more, because he's becoming terribly difficult to live with ever since becoming a famous guest science blogger.
In addition, the book, which has been assigned to a number of UA students, will be discussed in a seminar before the lecture with the following professors:
Dr. Lynne Adrian, professor of American studies
Dr. Fred Andrus, assistant professor of geological sciences
Dr. Walter Misiolek, professor of economics and Dwight Harrigan Fellow of Natural Resources Economics
Dr. Utz McKnight, assistant professor of political science
Dr. Jason Senkbeil, geography instructor
So it'll be a busy day in Tuscaloosa on Thursday....but it's a town I've actually never been to before. I'm really looking forward to it. Moreover, given how well my September Cornell event went, I think it will be fun to have another panel of scholars responding to my book.
Posting may be intermittent while I'm on the road Weds-Fri, but hey, that's why we have a cool coblogger here. And if you get really bored, well, go read Beowulf.
[This post is for sci-fi fantasy geeks only. If you're not a sci-fi fantasy geek, read no further.]
So anyways, there's something of a paradox in my life right now. Even as I'm supposed to be supporting the Writers' Guild strike, I'm also anxiously awaiting the November 16 release of Paramount Pictures' blockbuster version of Beowulf. I mean, sure, I may boycott some entertainment industry products as the Hollywood labor conflict rages on. But this just ain't one of them. I've been in Lord of the Rings withdrawal since...well, since 2003 or so. And now, we get the motherlode that inspired Tolkien to begin with, finally brought to film. How can I hold on to my picket sign for that?
Solemnly, to prepare for the upcoming movie, I got out Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. I had last read it something like seven years ago. So I went through it again, and this time even more than before, found it simply amazing stuff. Consider the opening, which has the single best first word of any epic, ever, in my opinion:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.
Sort of feels like this story is itself being told in a mead hall--or by an old cabbie with a strong Brooklyn accent, doesn't it? This isn't highfalutin stuff. It's colloquial--downright earthy, and powerful in its simplicity.
Soon, as I got deeper into Heaney's translation, I started finding bits and pieces everywhere that Tolkien had taken up and, in his own way, also translated in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The poem starts right off with a dead warrior being pushed out to sea in a funeral boat filled with his possessions--like what happened to Boromir. Later, there's a thief who sneaks in and steals a goblet from a dragon, enraging the beast, which then promptly begins rampaging all over the kingdom. Soon the thief becomes the guide for a gang of thirteen.
Something else that struck me is that there's a character named Eomer in Beowulf. Indeed, the whole world of Tolkien's Rohan, with its great wooden halls and (apparent) copious mead drinking, is that of the Shieldings. And here's another parallel (though don't tell PZ): The poet who wrote Beowulf was clearly a Christian, though the characters of the story just as clearly are not. In the same way, Tolkien was clearly a Christian but his characters were not. In both cases, we instead get ruminations about a pre-Christian vein of heroism from a writer who knows of something "better," but refrains from judging what had come "before."
So I guess what I'm getting at is, Beowulf is really a kind of skeleton key to The Lord of the Rings. So it's about time that Hollywood brought it out. So I can't wait--and if you're anywhere as eager as I am, you too should go pick up the Heaney translation to while the time away.
You may have been hearing all the hullabaloo over 'ocean acidification.' Sure sounds frightening [visions of a melting Wicked Witch of the West], but no CAP, the oceans are not turning to acid. Still, it is a very scary possibility nonetheless... So what's really going on just beneath the surface?
Ocean acidification means that the pH of oceans is becoming less basic because of us. Really. Now I know what you're thinking and sure... oceans are pretty big. But the truth is, yes, our actions do indeed have a real impact in the marine realm.
My post is now up over at Correlations explaining the mechanisms and potential consequences of this frightening phenomenon.
This storm was recently upgraded to a Category 4--and we should all be watching it closely. Knowing the history of cyclones in this region, I am very, very concerned. My latest Daily Green update on Sidr, considering some different scenarios depending on the particular storm track, is here. Suffice it to say that we can only hope Sidr weakens considerably before landfall....
Thanks to my favorite Mooney, I'm enjoying life as a writer. Well a blogger really, but that's a style of writing just the same. Open correspondence to both everyone and no one at all. Chris recently considered whether 
You may have noticed Science Blogs runs a regular 
