5G Caveat Emptor...

New 5G antennas (left) are smaller than 4G ones (right). Upcoming 5G networks will use higher-frequency radio spectrum, which will provide more bandwidth and enable the faster data-transfer rates that new technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, smart energy grids, and internet-of-things devices, will demand. (Photos by KPhrom/Shutterstock.com.)

Topics: Electromagnetic Radiation, Mathematics, Stochastic Modeling, Research, Satellite, Weather

The fight is on over 5G. Telecommunication companies and the US government promote the latest mobile broadband because it will provide faster data-transfer rates than the current broadband communication standard. Faster, more reliable digital communication is needed for the newest technologies—autonomous vehicles, internet-of-things devices, and smart energy grids, among others. But meteorologists, US science agencies, and other countries worry that strong 5G signals, if not properly regulated, may interfere with satellites that are crucial to weather forecasting.

Today’s 4G network, nearly a decade old, moves data by bouncing radio waves between cell towers and devices such as smartphones. A 5G network would operate similarly but use a wider frequency range and more bandwidth, which would increase data-transfer rates by an order of magnitude. The higher-frequency signals proposed for 5G can’t travel through buildings like their lower-frequency 4G counterparts, but specialized antenna arrays would transmit the 5G signal across long distances. Earlier this year, two telecom companies in South Korea launched small 5G networks using busy lower-frequency bands, and Verizon deployed a 5G test in Chicago at the higher-frequency 28 GHz band.

Widespread 5G deployment will depend on building a new infrastructure of antennas that operate in high-frequency radio bands. Telecom companies and US regulators support 24 GHz for 5G networks because of its greater bandwidth and because the 1–6 GHz radio spectrum is already crowded with 4G, digital TV, radar, and other applications. (The 24 GHz band spans 24.25–24.45 GHz and 24.75–25.25 GHz.)

Fifth-generation broadband wireless threatens weather forecasting
Alex Lopatka, Physics Today

Florence...

At 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 UTC) on Sept. 11, the MODIS instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite looked at Hurricane Florence in infrared light. MODIS found coldest cloud top temperatures around the eye, as cold as or colder than minus 80 degrees (yellow) Fahrenheit (minus 112 degrees Celsius). Surrounding the eye were thick rings of powerful storms with cloud tops as cold as or colder than minus 70 degrees (red) Fahrenheit (minus 56.6 degrees Celsius). Credit: NASA/NRL

Topics: Climate Change, Global Warming, NASA, Stochastic Modeling, Research, Weather

Predictive Modeling: Another good reason why science is important.

Sep. 11, 2018 – NASA Satellite Finds Hurricane Florence Undergoing Eyewall Replacement

NASA’s Aqua satellite provided an infrared look at powerful Hurricane Florence early on Sept. 11 that indicated it was likely undergoing eyewall replacement.

Intense hurricanes can and often undergo an eyewall replacement cycle. That happens when a new eyewall or ring of thunderstorms within the outer rain bands forms further out from the storm’s center, outside of the original eye wall. That ring of thunderstorms then begins to choke off the original eye wall, starving it of moisture and momentum. Eventually, if the cycle is completed, the original eye wall of thunderstorms dissipates and the new outer eye wall of thunderstorms contracts and replace the old eye wall. The storm’s intensity can fluctuate over this period, initially weakening as the inner eye wall dies before again strengthening as the outer eye wall contracts.

Florence (was Potential Tropical Cyclone 6) 2018, NASA

A Creeping Reaper...

The 100th meridian west (solid line) coincides with the climate divide between the relatively moist eastern U.S. and the more arid West. Climate change may already be pushing the divide eastward (dotted line).
Credit: Richard Seager Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Topics: Climate Change, Greenhouse Gases, Weather

I used to live in Central Texas where an average summer temperature is 110 degrees Fahrenheit and a "cold front" is 90 degrees in comparison. I also suffered mightily from "Cedar Fever," a pollen from a popular local genus of tree. I also remember it being particularly lethal for senior and younger citizens as temperatures climbed. My wife has had her bouts with pine in New York and now North Carolina.

So CBS News reported in March that the intensity of allergy seasons may be extended by climate change as well as associated health risks from malaria to kidney stones and waterborne parasites. It makes it personal; denial hard to do when you're on an antibiotic more than you'd like to be.

The unfortunate part is, I think through denial and selfishness, we've waited beyond a window where we could do anything about it.

*****

To travel westward across the U.S. is to experience a striking landscape metamorphosis. Stately hardwood trees give way to squat shrubs, verdant cornfields to brown wheat and lush grasslands to cacti and creosote bush. The air dries out and the land is often parched. This rather abrupt shift from the humid east to arid west occurs along a border that slices neatly through the Canadian province of Manitoba, then the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and into eastern Mexico. The divide is so stark airline passengers can see it—a patchwork quilt of green farms on one side, a vast expanse of brown and gold on the other.

And now this boundary is on the move, creeping east as global temperatures rise, according to new research published last month in Earth Interactions. Given the line’s historical role in shaping U.S. westward expansion, its shift could alter the agriculture that plays a crucial role in the economy of the Great Plains states. [1]

Methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas that is roughly 30 times more harmful to the climate than carbon dioxide (CO2). Both gases are produced in thawing permafrost as dead animal and plant remains are decomposed. However, methane is only formed if no oxygen is available. Until now, it was assumed that larger amounts of greenhouse gases are formed when the ground was dry and well aerated—when oxygen was available. Christian Knoblauch and his colleagues have now demonstrated that water-saturated permafrost soils without oxygen can be twice as harmful to the climate as dry soils—which means the role of methane has been greatly underestimated.

Knoblauch has, for the first time, measured and quantified in the laboratory the long-term production of methane in thawing permafrost. The team had to wait for three years before the approximately 40,000 year-old samples from the Siberian Arctic finally produced methane. The team observed the permafrost for a total of seven years, an unprecedented long-term study.

They found that without oxygen, equal amounts of methane and CO2 are produced. But since methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas, it is more significant. Because methane production couldn't be measured, it was assumed that in the absence of oxygen only very small amounts of it can be formed. "It takes an extremely long time until stable methane-producing microorganisms develop in thawing permafrost," explains Knoblauch. "That's why it was so difficult to demonstrate methane production until now." [2]

1. A Nation Divided: Arid/Humid Climate Boundary in U.S. Creeps Eastward, Shannon Hall, Scientific American
2. Thawing permafrost produces more methane than expected, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, Phys.org

A Slight Chance of Antimatter...

A Kyoto University-based team has unraveled the mystery of gamma-ray emission cascades caused by lightning strikes. Credit: Kyoto University/Teruaki Enoto

Topics: Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Research, Weather

A storm system approaches: the sky darkens, and the low rumble of thunder echoes from the horizon. Then without warning... Flash! Crash!—lightning has struck.

This scene, while familiar to anyone and repeated constantly across the planet, is not without a feeling of mystery. But now that mystery has deepened, with the discovery that lightning can result in matter-antimatter annihilation.

In a collaborative study appearing in Nature, researchers from Japan describe how gamma rays from lightning react with the air to produce radioisotopes and even positrons—the antimatter equivalent of electrons.

"We already knew that thunderclouds and lightning emit gamma rays, and hypothesized that they would react in some way with the nuclei of environmental elements in the atmosphere," explains Teruaki Enoto from Kyoto University, who leads the project.

Lightning, with a chance of antimatter, Kyoto University, Japan, Phys.org

Snapped...

Image Source: NYT

Topics: Climate Change, Environment, Geophysics, Weather

Note: The climate that has changed is that of Antarctica, at least in the physical sense.

"Antarctica Animals -South Polar. Antarctic animals - The most abundant and best known animals from the southern continent. Penguins, whales seals, albatrosses, other seabirds and a range of invertebrates you may have not heard of such as krill which form the basis of the Antarctic food web." Source: Cool Antarctica.

As in the Arctic, the loss of essentially land mass cannot be good for hunting and spawning patterns, thus the normal continuation of species that would inevitably affect the food chain, that we are inexorably a part of. The nominal excuse of using the warmed climate as "good sea lanes" for shipping fossil fuels doesn't hold water here, as far as I know. A Native American proverb (attributed to many Nations) comes to mind:

"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."

Alanis Obomsawin (born 31 August 1932) is a Canadian filmmaker of Abenaki descent born in New Hampshire, and raised primarily in Quebec; she has produced and directed many National Film Board of Canada documentaries on First Nations culture and history. Source: Wikiquote

A chunk of floating ice that weighs more than a trillion metric tons broke away from the Antarctic Peninsula, producing one of the largest icebergs ever recorded and providing a glimpse of how the Antarctic ice sheet might ultimately start to fall apart.

A crack more than 120 miles long had developed over several years in a floating ice shelf called Larsen C, and scientists who have been monitoring it confirmed on Wednesday that the huge iceberg had finally broken free.

There is no scientific consensus over whether global warming is to blame. But the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula has been fundamentally changed, according to Project Midas, a research team from Swansea University and Aberystwyth University in Britain that had been monitoring the rift since 2014.

“The remaining shelf will be at its smallest ever known size,” said Adrian Luckman, a lead researcher for Project Midas. “This is a big change. Maps will need to be redrawn.”

An Iceberg the Size of Delaware Just Broke Away From Antarctica, Jugal K. Patel and Justin Gillis, New York Times

California...

An animation of satellite images taken about a year apart shows a huge difference in the amount of water flowing through waterways in California’s Sacramento River Delta. (Images: NASA Worldview. Animation: Tom Yulsman)

Topics: Civil Engineering, Politics, Weather

Look at California (Look at California)
Look at California (Look at California)

The rollin' hills seem to do something for you
It seems there meant to be looked on by you
And when the sunshine is doing it's thing
Then you know that all you see is true
Every day every night the same old groovy feelin
People that live a lot love a lot
And everything there is so good

Look at California
Look at California

All the flowers are bloomin' all about
Every kind you and I could think of
And if you see anything that's missin'
Then they make it up to you with love
Whether up or whether down
It don't even mean a thing
Look at the things around
The peace you've found
And all that you feel is so real

Look at California
Look at California
Look at California
Look at California

Maze, Featuring Frankie Beverly

Civil Engineering is often derided as "baby engineering" (by some engineering types) because they don't take many math courses past Ordinary Differential Equations and advanced science classes.

However, in defense of my youngest son's major, I prefer to call it "Civilization Engineering," as the all-important need supplied by a STEM field is not longer battery life, laptops or smart phones and their associated apps.

Infrastructure (noun) is defined as "the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g., buildings, roads, and power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise."

That's not necessarily "tree-hugging." But I'm pretty sure you need one most importantly before you can fire up your smart phone.

"Basic physical and organizational structures and facilities" have to have representatives vote on appropriating funds to repair, replace and upgrade them. No amount of market forces and magical thinking "trickle-down" economics will repair a pothole or a sinkhole. It's "Civilization Engineering," and we'd better stress that to our representatives if we want one to continue.

After five years of drought, could California really have so much rain and snow there’s no room to store all the water?

The answer – as the state’s water picture careens from bust to boom – is yes.

The Oroville Dam north of Sacramento actually overflowed today, with water topping the emergency spillway.

Nonetheless, this is pretty dramatic:

UPDATE Feb. 12: Less than a day after the DWR said there was no risk to the emergency spillway and everything was under control, everything has, in fact, changed. Today, Sunday, the earthen spillway suffered extreme erosion and became at risk of total failure. This prompted the evacuation of 130,000 people downstream to protect them from the potential for catastrophic flooding.

Discovery Magazine:
California rivers are so swollen from runoff that the impact is easily seen in these before and after satellite images
Tom Yulsman

Snowzilla...

Image source: Slate.com - Bad Astronomy

Topics: Climate Change, Global Warming, Weather

I'm grateful for the many who called or text messaged to see how my wife and I were doing. We've learned from Texas to New York the fine art of "hunkering down," whether tornado or winter storm.

I'm loathe to express every weather event as climate change. However, the point of making a fuss about it - climate scientists, the Department of Defense et al - is the time to engage is not when the Earth has become the Sahara Desert: the next step at that point is illustrated quite well by Venus.

The following is a Scientific American article written in future tense for the then pending storm. Thankfully, it didn't quite impact upstate New York like it did say, Yonkers. The full term technical is Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, meaning don't expect to get what you've grown used to.

In case you haven’t heard, Washington, D.C., and other parts of the Mid-Atlantic region, are about to get walloped by a major storm that could bury the city in a record-breaking amount of snow.

The storm is expected to bring snows that could top 2 feet in the D.C. area and has already resulted in thousands of cancelled flights. While snows may not be quite as impressive further north, the storm’s fierce winds could whip up significant coastal flooding.

Part of the reason this Snowzilla storm is expected to dump so much snow is because it is pulling abundant moisture. As the planet warms because of excess heat trapped by human-emitted greenhouse gases, the atmosphere can hold more moisture. Scientists already expect heavy downpours to increase because of that. But there’s been little research into what that means for “epic blizzards” like this one.

Scientific American: The Future of Epic Blizzards in a Warming World
Andrea Thompson

Dr. Warren M. Washington...

Image Source: NOBCChE (below)

Topics: Climate Change, Global Warming, Meteorology, Nobel Prize

Following the rousing opening luncheon at the 2011 NOBCChE National Meeting, Dr. Warren M. Washington, a renowned climate-change scientist who received a National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama in 2010 and who was one of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winners, gave the Henry A. Hill Lecture, entitled, “Present and Future Climate Change: Grand Challenges for the Science, Engineering, and Society.” The Henry A. Hill Lecture honors the first black president of the American Chemical Society, and was co-sponsored by the ACS Northeast Section and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Chemistry Department.

Dr. Washington is a senior scientist and Chief Scientist of the DOE/UCAR Cooperative Agreement at National Center for Atmospheric Research in the Climate Change Research Section of the center's Climate and Global Dynamics Division. The Climate Change Research Section (CCR) is part of the Climate and Global Dynamics (CGD) Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Dr. Washington became one of the first developers of groundbreaking atmospheric computer models in collaboration with Akira Kasahara when he joined NCAR in the early 1960s. These models, which use fundamental laws of physics to predict future states of the atmosphere, have helped scientists understand climate change. As his research developed, Dr. Washington worked to incorporate the oceans and sea ice into climate models. Such models now include components that depict surface hydrology and vegetation as well as the atmosphere, oceans, and sea ice. His current research involves using the Community Earth System Model (CESM) to study the impacts of climate change in the 21st century. His models were used extensively in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment, for which NCAR scientists, including Washington, and colleagues around the world shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. *

As the second African-American to earn a doctorate in the atmospheric sciences, Washington has served as a role model for generations of young researchers from many backgrounds. He has mentored dozens of graduate students, as well as undergraduates in the UCAR-based SOARS program (Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science).

National Organization for the Professional Advancement of
Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE): Dr. Warren M. Washington

* Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"

"The Nobel Peace Prize 2007". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 8 Feb 2015. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/

The Weather...

Source: International Business Times

Topics: Commentary, Carl Sagan, Climate Change, Cosmos, Weather

This winter has been quite amusing lately.

I've watched the armchair meteorologists inveigh that politicians have seen their "Napoleonic Waterloo" with regards to how they respond (or, don't respond) to storms predicted to be dangerous to the public.

Also dangerous to the public is the sensationalism storms have taken for the Neanderthal Nielsen Ratings - created when we only had ABC, CBS, NBC and a few UHF channels, not Amazon, Netflix and Hulu. We are all taking in information - some of it, vital to our survival - in myriad ways via the Internet and the aforementioned technologies it empowers, plus the thousand of distracting channels, many of which you can listen to music exclusively.

Case in point: last week's Blizzard Juno, that turned out thankfully to be a bust. Comparisons to Katrina were abundant prior to the nor'easter landfall. It was also amusing that the very pundits that suggested under-reaction to the storm would be disastrous were disappointed when the storm bypassed New York, but did considerable damage to Connecticut and Massachusetts. The streets across the state of New York were sufficiently empty enough for the snow plows to do their work, and we were back up and traveling fine in about a day. I for one, was very happy with the overreaction.  It's really bad when it comes down to this: http://on.msnbc.com/1Lj4zgy

Here's the career page of the American Meteorological Society as well as National Geographic's Education Page on Meteorology. That is related to, but completely different from climate science. It seems antithetical that you'd have devastating storms with a warming globe. The key to understanding is what would our weather be if this moisture was instead of being in the warming air, it was where it originated at the poles (Arctic and Antarctic in this case)?

Science is always trying to make itself accessible to the general public. Carl Sagan opined it is imperative to the whole enterprise of a democratic republic. The reboot of COSMOS was another modern attempt and many other popular shows attempt to "crack this nut." However, the US is increasingly hostile to all science, not just climate science, but the very kind that makes us a superpower in a global society that is dependent on quickly assessing information and acting on it accordingly, decisively and correctly. Our very futures could be balanced on this narrow precipice between prosperity and poverty.

We may sadly find ourselves behind in twenty to fifty years in a technological "race to the bottom" - back to the dark ages of authoritarianism, crack pots, pixie dust, rabbits' feet, snake oil salesmen,  voodoo and root workers.

"We The People": it was a good idea while it lasted.

Climate and Gravity...

Source: ESA GOCE

GOCE stands for "Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer." It's not an acronym I know off the top of my head, either.

The physics definition: "the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass. For most purposes Newton's laws of gravity apply, with minor modifications to take the general theory of relativity into account."

Penguins are not flying off into orbit, and I hope the news doesn't do its usual bit of sensationalism for ratings - why, for the most part I've given up looking too much at the news and prefer to read summaries off the Internet - from other countries.

This IS a data point, and an important one. It means climate change can be measured not just in temperature or change in weather patterns.

From one of the articles (GOCE):

Scientists are now armed with the most accurate gravity model ever produced. This is leading to a much better understanding of many facets of our planet – from the boundary between Earth’s crust and upper mantle to the density of the upper atmosphere.

The strength of gravity at Earth’s surface varies subtly from place to place owing to factors such as the planet’s rotation and the position of mountains and ocean trenches.

Changes in the mass of large ice sheets can also cause small local variations in gravity. [1]

It will be useful information we can use in the exploration of other worlds, some in our own solar system's backyard.

Discovery ended on a somber note:

The news doesn't get much better for Antarctica. Earlier this year, two studies were released that indicated the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is headed for an irreversible collapse in roughly 200 years. Should the ice sheet completely collapse, scientists believe it could raise sea level by more than 10 feet. [2]

Bye-bye Florida in the 23rd century. Considering it's where we have traditionally launched space vehicles, that would be fairly unfortunate, especially for the Floridians!

1. GOCE: GOCE reveals gravity dip from ice loss
2. Discover: Antarctic Ice Melt is Changing Earth’s Gravity, Carl Engelking

Rivers and GRACE...

Source: Science Magazine; US Army Corp of Engineers

When ground water saturates a river basin, the risk for flooding goes up. So does the strength of Earth’s gravity in that region, ever so slightly, because of the extra mass of the underground water. By using tiny variations in gravity detected from space, researchers report online today in Nature Geoscience that they can identify basins that are primed for flooding if additional rains come—sometimes with several months' warning. As a test case, the scientists looked at the gravity signals leading up to catastrophic floods in 2011 on the Missouri River (pictured above). They used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a pair of orbiting satellites that get tugged around the Earth faster in places where gravity is slightly stronger.

Science Magazine: Gravity measurements can predict river flooding, Eric Hand
UT Austin Climate Science Research: GRACE
NASA: GRACE - Earth Missions

El Niño...

Source: NOAA's El Niño Page

The El Niño / La Niña climate pattern that alternately warms and cools the eastern tropical Pacific is the 800-pound gorilla of Earth’s climate system. On a global scale, no other single phenomenon has a greater influence on whether a year will be warmer, cooler, wetter, or drier than average. Naturally, then, the ears of seasonal forecasters and natural resource managers around the world perked up back in early March when NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued an “El Niño Watch.”

The “watch” means that oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean are favorable for the development of El Niño within the next six months. These maps reveal one of the most significant of those favorable signs: a deep pool of warm water sliding eastward along the equator since late January.

As the warm surface water is pushed westward by the prevailing winds, cool water from deeper in the ocean rises to the surface near South America. This temperature gradient—warm waters around Indonesia and cooler waters off South America—lasts only as long as the easterly winds are blowing.

If those winds go slack or reverse direction in the western Pacific, the warm pool of water around Indonesia is released and begins a slow slosh back toward South America. The slosh is called a Kelvin wave. If the Kelvin wave has a strong impact on the surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific, then it can help change the atmospheric circulation and trigger a cascade of climatic side effects that reverberate across the globe.

Climate.gov: Slow slosh of warm water across Pacific hints El Niño is brewing
Huffington Post: Climate Change Is Already Here
NOAA's El Niño Page

Costly Denial...

The difficulty of predicting local effects of climate change makes a compelling case for preventing it.

This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a major report focused on what actions might or could be taken to adapt to climate change. It attempts to describe who and what is especially vulnerable to climate change, and gives an overview of ways some are adapting.

The report makes clear that specific estimates of how climate change will affect places, people, and things are very uncertain. Brought down to a local level, climate change could go in either direction—there are risks that a given area could get drier or wetter, or suffer floods or droughts, or both. This uncertainty makes efforts to prevent climate change even more important.

Specific risks to natural systems are well documented by the report. It finds, for example, the greatest risks are to those ecosystems, people, and things in low-lying coastal areas, because expected sea-level changes are in only one direction, up. This is also the case in the Arctic, where the temperature rise is expected to be much greater than the global average. There is good science and unanimous agreement among climate models behind these assertions.

But a frustrating aspect of the report—and a reflection of the difficulty of working in this line of research—is that very few specific risks to humans are quantified in a meaningful way. For example, one might ask: has my risk of death increased because of more hot days? The report says, “Local changes in temperature and rainfall have altered the distribution of some water-borne illnesses and disease vectors (medium confidence).” This seems to state the obvious, while giving no indication of whether the alterations may have increased or decreased risk or what the magnitude of the alteration might be. Given that the statement seems to say little, it is hard to imagine there is not high confidence.

MIT Technology Review (the report):
Why We Can't Just Adapt to Climate Change, John Reilly
MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change
NOLA Times Picayune: Hurricane Katrina
FEMA: Hurricane Sandy Recovery
World Bank:
What Climate Change Means for Africa, Asia and the Coastal Poor

Five Minute to Midnight...

Reuters

My departure from physics I reserve for Sundays. Somewhat a double entendre most days; I am aware from the stats these are my least viewed postings; I call them my "sermons slightly left of the mount." As much as I'd like to focus on science and physics exclusively, public inanity from public officials drives my rants, and unfortunately, they decide the purse strings for scientific research. That thought alone is quite scary.

I grew up in the era of the doomsday clock and inane "duck and cover" drills of an ever-pending nuclear apocalypse. Recently, climate change has been counted in our path towards self-immolation.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released its most decisive report, and it's not good. However, what also is not good is our lack of trust of science, the convolution of pseudo controversies, of which there is a litany, but essentially: anything that threatens a bottom-line of power, profit and influence must be obfuscated.

I tend to agree with Bill Nye. I selfishly want to save the planet...for myself and my children, and their children. The planet will be here: it is arrogance to believe that we will always be.

The link to the report is below. I will most likely as I'm apt to do, print it out, highlight it and consume what the report says to be informed on its findings.

Challenge: will you?

In the US at least, our media is consolidated into six corporate behemoths, everything we see in news and entertainment. During "duck and cover" days, that was greater than 150. Profit, ratings...and control are the primacy of goals in this arrangement. Now: The stock market is almost a 70's mood ring; talk radio flourished after repeal of the Fairness Doctrine; media can legally lie to us; thus "water cooler conversations" are always orchestrated in a kind of larger hive hierarchy, and we are not at the level of Horus' eye. "Ditto head" was not meant a compliment, nor evidence of deep contemplation. "Dumb and Dumber" and "Idiocracy" were box office hits; I didn't think they'd become the operative outline for our congress. A humorous urban myth tries to define congress as a "gathering of baboons" (it literally is not, but life imitates rumored art). It was a slow road to get here, but we are here. When "Green Eggs and Ham" become part of the record on in the Senate for a "silly buster," our decent; our devolution is apparent and quite public indeed. My childhood memories are henceforth ruined.

In my challenge, I'm trying to inform your water cooler conversations beyond the Borg collective. Your emancipation is in knowledge; and that is not what the six behemoths desire for you.

I simply don't want "once upon a time" to apply to Earth in nursery rhymes for children on distant worlds...as an intergalactic proverb.

The Atlantic: Leading Scientists Weigh-In on the Mother-of-All Climate Reports
IPCC: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Report: Climate Change 2013

Representative Reality...

A Tel Aviv Univ. researcher has developed surprising tool to measure our changing climate.

Detailed in the Journal of Geophysical Research, this simple, cost-effective measurement can be a valuable contribution to the ongoing effort to track climate change, says Price, adding to measurements of ground and lower atmospheric temperatures to create a more holistic picture.

On the Earth's surface and in the lower atmosphere, an increase of greenhouse gases has a warming effect, the gases acting as a "blanket" and keeping heat from escaping from the Earth into space. But these gases, including carbon dioxide, are increasing in the upper atmosphere as well, where they have a cooling effect.

When cooled, the ionosphere contracts and descends into the atmosphere to where air is denser—leading to a higher absorption of radio waves, Price explains. By examining satellite-gathered data on the temperature in the upper atmosphere and comparing results to measurements of radio wave amplitudes collected on the ground, the researchers were able to uncover a clear correlation, consistent over time. As the upper atmosphere gets colder, radio signals lose their strength.

According to Prof. Price, this new technique will be a valuable addition to current methods of monitoring climate change, such as the measurement of ground temperatures. Without the need for expensive equipment like satellites, monitoring the upper atmosphere can be done inexpensively and continuously.

R&D Mag: Radio waves carry news of climate change

Don't Blame the Meteorologist...

Lorenz Attractor - the never-repeating trajectory of a single chaotic orbit, figure 2 (see link)

With undergraduate and master’s degrees in mathematics, Lorenz had served as a meteorologist in World War II before completing his doctoral studies in meteorology at MIT and joining the MIT faculty in 1955.

At the time, most meteorologists predicted weather using linear procedures, which were based on the premise that tomorrow’s weather is a well-defined linear combination of features of today’s weather. By contrast, an emerging school of dynamic meteorologists believed that weather could be more accurately predicted by simulating the fluid dynamical equations underlying atmospheric flows. Lorenz, who had just purchased his first computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30 with an internal memory of 4096 32-bit words, decided to compare the two approaches by pitting the linear procedures against a simplified 12-variable dynamical model. (Lorenz’s computer, though a thousand times faster than his desk calculator, was still a million times slower than a current laptop.)

In classical physics, one is taught that given the initial state of a system, all of its future states can be calculated. In the celebrated words of Pierre Simon Laplace, “An intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis . . . for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”1 Or, put another way, the clockwork universe holds true.

Herein lies the rub: Exact knowledge of a real-world initial state is never possible—the adviser can always demand a few more digits of experimental precision from the student, but the result will never be exact. Still, until the 19th century, the tacit assumption had always been that approximate knowledge of the initial state implies approximate knowledge of the final state. Given their success describing the motion of the planets, comets, and stars and the dynamics of countless other systems, physicists had little reason to assume otherwise.

Starting in the 19th century, however, and culminating with a 1963 paper by MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz, a series of developments revealed that the notion of deterministic predictability, although appealingly intuitive, is in practice false for most systems. Small uncertainties in an initial state can indeed become large errors in a final one. Even simple systems for which all forces are known can behave unpredictably. Determinism, surprisingly enough, does not preclude chaos.

Physics Today: Chaos at Fifty

When Questioning is Controversy...

The FIRST statement will cause controversy:

Technology Review

Many climate models suggest that heat waves and droughts will increase as greenhouse-gas levels increase in the atmosphere (see "Planning for a Climate-Changed World" and "How Coders Can Help Fight Climate Change" ). But are the current conditions—and other extreme weather like the drought in Texas last year—related to climate change?

Technology Review asked the prominent climate scientist, Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, to weigh in.

1. What's causing the recent heat waves and droughts?

This heat wave has a contribution from human activities, and you can expect these kinds of things to become even more extreme during both your and my lifetimes as we continue to increase greenhouse gases. As temperatures warm, they affect extreme weather events. It's quite clear that we're seeing, not only here in the U.S., but across the globe, events that we've never before witnessed in our instrumental record, and it's quite apparent there's a human contribution.

Technology Review: Is Climate Change to Blame for the Current US Drought?

A Tragic Dearth...

NOAA

"Hurricane prediction is by no means a perfect science. Supercomputers crunch vast amounts of data to model a hurricane’s path, taking information from sensors around the world, including balloons, aircraft, ships, and satellites, but it’s a patchwork collection at best. And there’s a practical limit to how much data the models can consider—a simulation that takes more time to calculate than the storm takes to advance isn’t very practical.

"That’s why hurricane forecasts aren’t perfect. But they keep getting better. Five years ago the two-to-three-day forecast of Hurricane Rita’s path showed it hitting Houston; hundreds of thousands of people fled in a chaotic evacuation that turned out not to be necessary—Rita missed Houston entirely.

"But today, the 48-hour forecast of a hurricane’s track is as good as the 24-hour forecast was 10 years ago—and that’s pretty good. Researchers are also starting to get a handle on predicting the intensity of hurricanes—that’s something they had very little skill at ten years ago. Operational models, the ones used for day-to-day weather forecasting have gotten better; research models are taking in data they’ve heretofore only dreamed of getting. And all this prediction capability is being thrown at Hurricane Irene."

To quote the holographic doctor in Star Trek Voyager: "Divine intervention is highly unlikely."

Not that I'm against any additional Divine help, but unrelated earthquakes and hurricanes should not be joke material. The deaths of 21 people and millions without power is not comedic. There are real-world problems to solve, one of which is our national power grid, aged and in need of redesign with climate change at the forefront in consideration. It can understandably, create needed jobs in infrastructure projects.

My father used to say: "It's better to have and not need, than to need and not have."

Even though the predictive models have gotten better, nothing beats preparation and good old, "common sense." The dearth of it is a tragicomedy.

IEEE Spectrum: Predicting Irene

Inherit the Wind...

NASA Satelite Photo

"This year's Atlantic hurricane season will be "above normal," with 12 to 18 storms, thanks in part to unusually warm ocean temperatures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday.

"Six to 10 of those storms are likely to reach hurricane strength, the agency said in its initial forecast for the 2011 storm season, which begins June 1 and ends Nov. 1. NOAA forecasters expect three to six of those storms to become major hurricanes with winds reaching 111 miles per hour or greater.

"Because we have insufficient funds in the [fiscal] '11 budget, we are likely looking at a period of time a few years down the road where we will not be able to do the severe storm warnings and long-term weather forecasts that people have come to expect today," Lubchenco said in remarks at NOAA's Satellite Operations Center in Suitland, Md."

Part of the lacking funds in the '11 balance sheet is the Real Politick played out during the recent budget negotiations on "The Hill" in full spectacle of the world to our folly.

I sincerely hope, now living in New York, that the worst-case models from the US Army Corp of Engineers are uncharacteristically off-the-mark.

In this case, ignorance is [not] strength, nor is it bliss.

Scientific American: As Big Hurricane Season Looms, NOAA Chief Calls Satellite Cuts a "Disaster"
NOAA: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Thomas Gray: Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College

What Science Can't Solve...

Image Credit: Vogel Talks RVing

Michio Kaku, asked about the tsunami affecting the nuclear plants at Fukashima Daiichi, commented that a century ago the settlements affected had been fishing villages.

The same could be said about New Orleans: building a settlement below sea level and "punting" on the best case scenario always being the case is at best a gamble.

Not only that: the politicized debates on science have to end if we are to take account of weather warnings from the experts, and heed them when they are announced.

Nature was here long before man came on the scene. It's time we respected it in terms of where we develop settlements and even if such are feasible or safe:

"Scientists see a variety of factors that helped make this year's twisters deadlier - from La Nina to public complacency, from global warming to urban sprawl."


Associated Press Science Writer Randolph E. Schmid: Science can't design away tornadoes' deadly threat