ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 635
November 20, 2015
The Five Most Earth-Like Exoplanets (So Far)
Photo credit:
Gliese Cc: Artist’s impression of sunset on one of the most Earth-like exoplanets. ESO/L. Calçada/wikimedia, CC BY-ND
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read that the “first Earth-like exoplanet” has been discovered. With nearly 2000 exoplanets found to date, it is no wonder so many of them will resemble our planet in some way. But which exoplanets are similar enough to the Earth that they could actually be habitable?
The Hidden Killer In Your Home – And How To Avoid It
Photo credit:
In your living room? Radon is an invisible domestic hazard. Science Activism/flickr, CC BY-SA
Carbon Monoxide is a much-publicised invisible killer. But there’s another little-known gas that kills 27 times more people, causing the deaths of 1,100 people a year in the UK alone. Worse still, it could be seeping into your home.
Blocking Out The Sun Won’t Fix Climate Change – But It Could Buy Us Time
Photo credit:
Volcanic eruptions lead to global cooling – could we mimic them? Beawiharta Beawiharta / Reuters
The Paris climate talks hope to set out how we can reduce the amount of carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere. But emissions cuts alone may not be enough. Atmospheric CO2 is the blanket that keeps our planet warm and any further emissions will mean more global warming. Observations in recent years show that warming is accelerating, that polar ice and glaciers are all melting, that sea level is rising … it all looks rather bleak.
November 19, 2015
Top 3 Reasons Why 400 ppm CO2 Is/Is Not the End of the World, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Started Wearing Shorts to Work. Part 2: What 400 ppm Means
We will soon live in a world with an atmosphere permanently above 400 parts per million (ppm) CO2.
As I discussed in part 1, sometime in the next year the last sub-400 measurement will occur. In fact, measurements made last week may be the very last below 400 ppm. But even if a brief measurement in the high 300s sneaks in some time later, CO2 levels above 400 ppm will soon be here to stay for the rest of our lifetimes—and the lifetimes of our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren... Let’s examine what that means.
High carbon dioxide is to the Earth what diabetes is to the individual: virtually every system is affected. The inability of the body to regulate blood sugar contributes to a host of medical problems: heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, blindness. Likewise, the inability of planet Earth to regulate the quantities of carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere affects many natural systems: glacial ice, ocean circulation, migration patterns, the timing of insect hatchings. Both diabetes and rising CO2 are examples of failed regulatory systems. In the case of diabetes, the body’s glucose regulatory system cannot cope with the blood sugar created when a person eats food for energy. In the case of CO2, Earth’s regulatory systems cannot manage the carbon dioxide created when industry burns fossils fuels for energy.
What does 400 ppm mean for us? What are the consequences? It turns out we have a very good idea. Geologists know a lot about a 400-ppm world because it’s happened before.
The Mid-Pliocene, from 3.3 to 3 million years ago (Ma), is a good analog for our current conditions. Concentrations of CO2 ranged from 360 to 400 ppm. Temperatures were 2–3oC warmer globally, but 11–16oC warmer in the Arctic (and today no place on Earth is warming as dramatically as the Arctic). The Pliocene’s Arctic Ocean was probably ice-free during summer. Sea level in this 400-ppm world was also dramatically different than today, with oceans ranging 15–25 meters higher than now, but possibly spiking up to 40 meters higher.
Forty meters. (For you Yanks who measure things oddly, that translates to over 130 of what you call “feet.”) With that much sea level rise—or even with the low range of 15 meters—it’s likely (as Emily Schoerning recently mentioned) that parts of coastal cities would be so flooded they would have to be abandoned—New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Hong Kong. Such a sea level rise would transform our world; swaths of entire countries, such as Bangladesh, would disappear beneath the waves. And yet this isn’t speculative science fiction—tens of meters of sea level rise happened the last time we had a 400 ppm world. We’re at this CO2 level right now.
Sometimes climate acts like the Titanic, a big ship with a tiny rudder that turns only slowly (tragically, too slowly for Jack and Rose, though science proves there was enough room on that raft). Sea level will probably rise relatively slowly, and we’re not going to see a 25 meter rise anytime in our lifetimes. But certainly by the end of this century, sea level is going to be at a minimum 1–2 meters higher; some modeling suggests this is too conservative. In fact, a recent paper by noted climate scientist James Hansen and his colleagues suggests such estimates may be far too conservative, and we may face several meters of rise in as little as 50 years (a conclusion disputed by other scientists, it should be noted).
But climate doesn’t always turn as sluggishly as the Titanic. Geologists know of many moments in Earth’s history where changes occurred at the speed of a Plymouth Road Runner driven by Vin Diesel. For example, the Younger Dryas period, from 12.9 to 11.7 thousand years ago, saw dramatic, abrupt swings in temperature. At the end of the Younger Dryas, Greenland temperatures jolted up 10oC in a decade. By way of comparison, worldwide temperatures have gone up only 0.8oC since 1880. And these wild swings of the Younger Dryas occurred long before humans began chuffing carbon into the atmosphere in such quantities that we are disturbing the naturally unstable, non-linear climate.
So what does this new 400 ppm world mean for us? It reminds me of an apocryphal Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
Wi-Fi powering devices named one of the year’s game-changing technologies
University of Washington engineers have developed a novel technology that uses a Wi-Fi router — a source of ubiquitous but untapped energy in indoor environments — to power devices.
The Power Over Wi-Fi (PoWiFi) system is one of the most innovative and game-changing technologies of the year, according to Popular Science, which included it in the magazine’s annual “Best of What’s New 2015” awards announced Wednesday.
The technology made headlines earlier this year when researchers published an online paper showing how they harvested energy from Wi-Fi signals to power a simple temperature sensor, a low-resolution grayscale camera and a charger for a Jawbone activity tracking bracelet.
The final paper will be presented in December at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CoNEXT 2015 conference in Heidelberg, Germany, on emerging networking experiments and technologies.
Continue reading the entire article by clicking the name of the source below.
Evolution for John Doe, Part 4
Photograph courtesy of Michael Barton’s The Dispersal of Darwin blog, https://thedispersalofdarwin.wordpres....
I’m still discussing Henshaw Ward’s Evolution for John Doe (1925), a copy of which I bought over the Labor Day weekend, finding a few of its pages still unopened. In the first chapter, Ward, a teacher of English turned science popularizer, not only lists what he takes to be eight prevalent misconceptions about evolution but also explains how his book attempts to defuse them. I described the book in general in part 1, discussed the first two misconceptions—that “evolution is ‘the doctrine that man is descended from monkeys’” and that “evolution explains the origin of life”—in part 2, and discussed the next three misconceptions—that “evolution has something to do with ‘progress’; that “there is something mystical and awesome about ‘Evolution’”; and that “the theory is materialistic and tends to weaken religious faith”—in part 3. If you find it surprising that I’m going to discuss the final three misconceptions in part 4 now, again describing the misconception, Ward’s approach to it, and whether and if so how today’s popular expositions of evolution approach the misconception, what can I say?
The sixth misconception: “John Doe suspects from head-lines in his newspaper that evolution is a debatable theory, that it is being overthrown every six months, and that it may be discarded before long.” Ward might have been writing today, when Smithsonian magazine is proclaiming that Homo naledi “may change what we know about human evolution,” as if everything were up for grabs. Ward’s solution is just to explain the scientific basis of evolution so clearly that John Doe will come “to understand that evolution is here to stay; there is no more chance that the theory will be disproved than there is that men will some time give up their belief that the earth is round.” That’s the usual solution also of today’s popular expositions of evolution. Indeed, Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth (2009) says that evolution is a “theorum” (his coinage), meaning that it is treated by common sense “as a fact in the same sense as the ‘theory’ that the Earth is round and not flat is a fact.” Short of providing a discussion of media sensationalism in general, it’s hard to know how to improve on the approach.
The seventh misconception: “To the common horse-sense of John Doe evolution appears probable. ‘But,’ he says, ‘it is not to be seen at work here and now, and so it looks dubious to me.’” It isn’t clear what Ward means here, and the remainder of the paragraph—“When he has seen the ‘billion-year movie’ in Chapter XII, he will feel relieved”—isn’t helpful. Turning to the chapter, though, reveals that Ward is thinking of the challenge of understanding deep time. The “billion-year movie” is a hypothetical time-lapse film that collapses a billion years into two hours, 140,000 years into one second. “And man in this picture?” Ward asks. “He was on the globe during the last second or two; civilized man has been here a tenth of a second.” Today’s popular expositions of evolution often ring variations on the theme. In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), Stephen Jay Gould listed a few, including that of a Swedish correspondent who imagines her pet snail starting at the South Pole during the Cambrian period and steadily oozing toward Malmö—a route that flummoxed Google Maps, by the way (“outside our current coverage area for driving”).
The eighth and final misconception, at long last: “Mr. Doe supposes that evolution is extremely difficult, so that he has small chance of ever finding out about it.” Ward explains, “It is true that most scientific books are highly technical, and evolution is based on several branches at once, and that each is hard to learn about, and that the combination of several in one theory is excessively complicated.” His solution, of course, was “to read a number of the standard works of evolution,” and his book attempts to present a digest of them, “as if I were telling a friend about the knowledge that is so new and imperfect in my mind.” After ninety years of unremitting scientific progress, it’s even harder to acquire a comprehensive understanding of evolution at a professional level. Yet talented expositors of evolution, both working scientists and informed journalists, abound as never before, and have moreover colonized media outside of books and magazines—documentaries, YouTube videos, blogs, and so forth. Thanks to them, it is increasingly unlikely for Mr. Doe—and Ms. Roe—to labor under the last of Ward’s misconceptions.
No doubt any successful author of a popular exposition of evolution bears in mind the misconceptions that the general reader is likely to have and attempts to compose the text in order to defuse them. But I think that Ward deserves credit for doing so explicitly. To be sure, the eight misconceptions listed in the first chapter of Evolution for John Doe aren’t the only eight misconceptions that Ward was evidently bearing in mind. (For instance, when he is talking about acquired characteristics, he is careful to note “there is nothing aggressive in the technical meaning. A plant or an animal does not make any effort to get hold of a character.”) And I don’t agree with all of his ways of attempting to defuse the misconceptions, especially his omission of human evolution. But Evolution for John Doe is a good model, especially when the misconceptions it lists and endeavors to defuse are still prevalent today among the general public. And these aren’t the only misconceptions that are prevalent today among the general public—which is a good thing, actually, since misconceptions are the fodder for Stephanie Keep’s Misconception Monday series!
Science is Accountable. Are politicians?
Witchhunts are so 14th century
A profoundly misleading headline appeared in the November 17thWashington Post: “NOAA Climate Feud: Pursuit of Scientific Truth vs. Public Accountability.” In fact, the article printed below this dry headline involves not a feud between the pursuit of scientific truth and public accountability, but between the pursuit of open research and political harassment.
At stake is nothing less than the independence of the U.S. scientific enterprise. This case affects the ability of scientists to carry out their research without fear of persecution and retaliation.
Please don't reanalyze my favorite data set!
The backstory involves one of climate change deniers’ favorite false claims: they assert there has been no global warming since 1998. Never mind that the claim has been debunked over and over again. Never mind that measures of temperatures in the ocean, as opposed to the surface and at higher altitudes, clearly show continued warming. The deniers cling tenaciously to the one set of data that seems (if you squint, tap your heels together three times, and ignore longer term trends) consistent with what they desperately want to be true.
Then in June of this year, NOAA scientists really popped the deniers’ bubble. In the peer-reviewed journal Science, Thomas Karl et. al. published the results of their re-analysis of surface data and showed that there had been no hiatus. Surface temperatures, just like all the other temperature measurements, have been continuing to go up.
“Re-analyzed the data!” you cry, “that sounds nefarious!” But no, it simply means that the scientists made corrections for known differences among the instruments and procedures that had been used to collect surface temperatures over the years. When the corrections were made, the hiatus disappeared. It’s really not that complicated—if you switch from measuring temperature with a thermometer attached to a ship’s hull to a free-floating thermometer, you’re going to get slightly lower numbers (because of the heat of the ship). If some of your data were collected one way, and some the other, you have to systematically adjust the measurements to account for the known and predictable differences.
It could have gone the other way. Making all the necessary corrections might have shown that surface temperatures had gone down. Or stayed the same. That’s why it’s called “science”—you don’t know the result before you do the experiment. There’s another thing that makes this study “science”: all of the data, and every single adjustment made to the data, were made public. People with a beef about how the scientists made their corrections are free to weigh in with critiques, write letters to the editor, or submit for peer-review a publication detailing their own re-analysis of the data (which, if accepted, would certainly get the authors lots and lots of publicity, not to mention the eternal adoration—and probably future funding from—climate change deniers everywhere).
But absent some minor quibbles, the paper has attracted no rebuttals from the scientific community.
This really makes Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas, chair of the House Sc
Cooking data. Oh wait, I think that's shrimp....
ience Committee) mad. He is convinced that NOAA scientists conspired with NOAA officials, at the behest of the Obama administration, to cook the data in such a way as to further the climate change "agenda," whatever that is. Never mind that the scientists have testified before his committee, explaining how they arrived at their conclusions, and pointing out that the data are freely available for others to scrutinize. Smith has now upped the ante and asked through a Congressional subpoena—the King Kong of information requests—for all emails and correspondence between the papers’ authors and NOAA officials.
You might say that as taxpayers we have a right to see everything that government employees and government-funded scientists write to each other. Maybe there’s a legitimate argument in there somewhere (and that’s where the headline writer was going with that “accountability” idea), but when the only correspondence that is sought is that concerning a scientific finding that pisses off a politician, society’s collective you-know-what detector really ought to go off. Especially when the request just happens to come immediately before a major international meeting on climate change.
I’ll give the last word to the American Meteorological Society, which wrote a letter to Rep. Smith including two passages from the Society’s Statement on Freedom of Scientific Expression:
The ability of scientists to present their findings to the scientific community, policy makers, the media, and the public without censorship, intimidation, or political interference is imperative.
These principles matter most—and at the same time are most vulnerable to violation—precisely when science has its greatest bearing on society.
Well said, AMS. Scientists have enough to worry about without fear that their lives will be turned upside down if their results are politically inconvenient. Science is one of the best tools we have to understand the world around us. The people we elect to make big decisions for us should respect this powerful tool; they ignore scientific evidence to the peril of all. So, please, let’s not pretend that such congressional bullying of scientists has anything to do with meaningful accountability. The question is, will voters hold accountable politicians who waste taxpayer resources and conduct witch-hunts against scientists?
Photo credits: "Torturing and execution of witches in medieval miniature" by Anonymous - Licensed under Public Domain via Commons
Child with pacifier: Steven Robinson via Wikimedia Commons
"Wok cooking and the heat source by The Pocket in Nanjing" Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons
139 Countries Could Get All of their Power from Renewable Sources
Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi have done it again. This time they’ve spelled out how 139 countries can each generate all the energy needed for homes, businesses, industry, transportation, agriculture—everything—from wind, solar and water power technologies, by 2050. Their national blueprints, released Nov. 18, follow similar plans they have published in the past few years to run each of the 50 U.S. states on renewables, as well as the entire world. (Have a look for yourself, at your country, using the interactive map below.)
The plans, which list exact numbers of wind turbines, solar farms, hydroelectric dams and such, have been heralded as transformational, and criticized as starry eyed or even nutty.
Determined, Jacobson will take his case to leaders of the 195 nations that will meet at the U.N. climate talks, known as COP 21, which begin in Paris on Nov. 29. His point to them: Although international agreements to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are worthwhile, they would not even be needed if countries switched wholesale to renewable energy, ending the combustion of coal, natural gas and oil that creates the vast majority of those emissions, and without any nuclear power. “The people there are just not aware of what’s possible,” says Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Stanford University and director of the school’s Atmosphere and Energy Program. He is already scheduled to speak twice at the meeting, and will spend the rest of his time trying to talk one on one with national leaders and their aids.
Click here for a larger version of the visualiztion
Jacobson thinks the 139 national plans will get traction not only because they offer a path to lower emissions, but because in total, they would create 24 million construction jobs and 26.5 million operational jobs, all spanning 35 years, offsetting 28.4 million jobs lost in the fossil fuel industries. That would leave a net gain of about 22 million jobs. Going 100 percent renewable would also prevent 3.3 to 4.6 million premature deaths a year through 2050 that would have happened because of air pollution from those fossil fuels. “These numbers are what gets people’s attention,” Jacobson says.
Jacobson and Delucchi, a research scientist at the University of California at Davis, presented their “100 percent renewables” construct to the public for the first time in a 2009 feature article in Scientific American. It explained how the world could derive all of its power, including for transportation, from 1.7 billion rooftop solar systems, 40,000 photovoltaic power plants, 3.8 million wind turbines, 900 hydroelectric plants, 490,000 tidal turbines and so on. “The whole idea originated with the Scientific American article,” Jacobson says. “Now there are five or six nonprofit organizations that use ‘100 percent’ in their name. Walmart, Google and Starbucks have said they want to go to 100 percent renewable energy. So have a number of cities. The goal of our plans for U.S. states and the 139 countries is to have places set their own ‘100 percent’ goals.”
Some have. AS a first step, New York and California have both passed legislation calling for about 60 percent of their power to come from a renewable energy mix by 2030. Hillary Clinton has endorsed a 100 percent goal for the U.S. by 2050.
Energy demand across the 139 nations by 2050 would be met with a broad set of wind, water and solar technologies: 19.4 percent onshore wind farms, 12.9 percent offshore wind farms, 42.2 percent utility-scale photovoltaic arrays, 5.6 percent rooftop solar panels, 6.0 percent commercial rooftop solar panels, 7.7 percent concentrated solar power arrays, 4.8 percent hydroelectricity, and 1.47 percent geothermal, wave and tidal power. Jacobson, Delucchi and more than a dozen colleagues from around the world have posted the details, country by country, in a self-published paper they released online. Hoping to make it available for COP, they have yet to publish it in a journal, but they intend to, Jacobson says. The previous plans have all been published.
The big knock against renewables such as wind and solar is that they are intermittent; the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. That means large amounts of energy storage are needed to save up excess power generated when these technologies are going full bore, which can then be tapped when they are low. Storage adds substantial cost and complexity to a renewable energy system. But Jacobson has an answer. By using a smart mix of technologies that complement one another during different parts of the day and different weather conditions, storage can be kept to a minimum. He, Delucchi and two colleagues explain how this can work across the U.S. in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that will be published Nov. 23.
The engineering detail in all these papers and plans is staggering. The document released for the 139 countries provides an itemized mix of technologies and costs for every nation, as well as how much land and rooftop area would be required. Since 2009 the two researchers, working with many others, have honed the numbers again and again. Now what is needed most, Jacobson says, is exposure. “We have talked to hundreds of expert and politicians. Now we need to reach hundreds of millions of people,” in hopes that they will see the possibilities and begin to call for them.
That’s why Jacobson and several high-profile businesspeople and entertainers started the Solutions Project to educate the public, business owners and policy makers about the roadmaps. Support comes from the Elon Musk Foundation, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and others. “We are tying to find a way to combine business and culture and science to get the information out—to engage, to tell stories,” Jacobson says. He himself scored a spot on David Letterman’s Late Night show in 2013. He says DiCaprio is planning to visit COP 21 while he is there. “We want to translate the benefits of the plans for people everywhere,” Jacobson says. “That’s when good things will happen.”
November 18, 2015
A Skeptical Case for Climate Education
The BlackRock Investment Institute's report on climate change and investing
There are lots of good reasons to teach about climate change, amply covered elsewhere on our blog and website. But in a new report from (of all places) the BlackRock Investment Institute—“The Price of Climate Change: Global Warming’s Impact on Portfolios”—we find perhaps the simplest reason, and the hardest to dismiss. Vox’s Dave Roberts highlighted the pertinent paragraph:
You may or may not believe man-made climate change is real or dismiss the science behind it. No matter. Climate change risk has arrived as an investment issue. Governments are setting targets to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This may pave the way for policy shifts that we could see ripple across industries. The resulting regulatory risks are becoming key drivers of investment returns.
In other words, even if you personally reject climate change, you live in a nation and a world where climate change is part of every consequential conversation, and part of how consequential decisions get made. If you want to be an informed participant in those conversations, and ensure that the best decisions are made, you need to understand climate change. That includes investment decisions, but also decisions about cars, careers, family life, and even politics. No one can stop you from believing what you want, but if you want to be part of the discussions and decisions that matter, you need to know the science.
There's an even stronger case to be made for education. If we shut off every coal plant and with a snap transformed every car into an electric vehicle charged by clean electricity, children in school today would still see significant climate change for the rest of their lives. An investor might ignore these long-term trends and still get lucky on the market, but that’s not an option for today’s students. They have a lifetime of decisions to make, and a lot of new information to incorporate as the world changes. If our schools don’t prepare those children for the world they’ll live in, and give them the tools to assess how new discoveries and technologies relate to what we already know about climate change, we’re sending them into an unknown world without a map.
What Did Exxon Know?
It looks like the party is over for climate change deniers.They had a good run through the 1990s and early 2000s, gaining a lot of traction as they attempted to undermine the science on climate change, but the public is getting too savvy and the reality too severe. Climate change can no longer be dismissed as an enigmatic environmentalist ploy that may or may not play out in the future. Climate change is happening now, to us, where we live. And you just can’t deny that anymore.
Climate change denial has consequences. Inside Climate News recently reported that Exxon Mobil’s own scientists had confirmed the role fossil fuels played in climate change decades ago, and yet the company reportedly perpetuated misinformation to the public. This has gotten Exxon into a heap of trouble, as the company is now being investigated by the New York state attorney general for potentially misleading the public and its own investors.
The PBS Frontline short documentary has the highlights:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppfpF...]
So what did Exxon know about climate change?
According to a recent editorial in The New York Times:
Government and academic scientists alerted policy makers to the potential threat of human-driven climate change in the 1960s and ’70s, but at that time climate change was still a prediction. By the late 1980s it had become an observed fact.
But Exxon was sending a different message, even though its own evidence contradicted its public claim that the science was highly uncertain and no one really knew whether the climate was changing or, if it was changing, what was causing it.
Promoting claims of uncertainty about the science turned out to be an incredibly effective misinformation campaign. Just look at the confusion in the U.S. about climate change now. And even though Exxon has completely changed its messaging on climate change, there are still relics of the old message manifest in science standards, textbooks, and challenges to teachers when they try to teach the topic.
Could Exxon executives have known what the impact of their work would be? In particular, could they have realized that their actions would result in teachers being harassed for trying to talk about climate change? Could they have predicted that they would be harming the science educations of their future consumers and their future employees, and of their own children and grandchildren, for decades to come?
We don't know what Exxon’s executives contemplated when they made their decision to dismiss what their own scientists knew about climate change. But we can be sure that actions that further science denial have unwanted consequences in science education.
Photo by Psycho Delia via Flickr
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