Yearly Archives: 2013

RIP Elaine Morgan

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Elaine Morgan, who has done a many thing in her life and is also the chief proponent of the more recent version of the Aquatic Ape Theory, has died at the age of 92.

Dr Morgan only retired at the start of this year from writing a weekly column for the Western Mail after suffering ill health in 2012.

The coal miner’s daughter, who lived in Mountain Ash, Rhondda Cynon Taf, passed away on Friday morning, three weeks after suffering a stroke.

Her daughter-in-law Kim Morgan said: “She was an incredible woman and so inspirational to so many people.”
…
Her book The Descent of Woman became an international bestseller, turning her into a feminist hero who toured the US three times.

She went on to devote her attention increasingly to the subject of human origins.

She was awarded the OBE in 2009 for services to literature and education and earlier this year she was made an honorary freeman of Rhondda Cynon Taf.

What Does The George Zimmerman Not Guilty Verdict Mean?

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First, I want to say this to George Zimmerman and his lawyer. Stop whining. You are the one who chose to kill someone, and did so, then got away with it. It is not you who lost or who has had your life torn apart or taken away or anything like that. So stop being the damn victim. No one is going to hunt you down and kill you. That’s you, George. That’s you who hunts down and kills people. Other people, generally, don’t do that. No one is going to hunt you down and kill you or in any other way bother you. Having said that, it is true that much of the part of humanity that is aware of your existence will view you as a dangerous monster for the rest of your life, but I’m thinking that you view this as a good thing because you are the guy who hunts down and kills people. I think that is all I want to say to whiny George Zimmerman and hid Whiny Lawyer.

The big concern now is this: Black will riot in cities across the land and/or mainly whitish vigilantes will flood the streets and shoot anything with a hoodie.

For the most part neither of these things will happen. If there is one thing we’ve learned from the last few decades of changes in gun laws, sudden and dramatic events related to firearm use and abuse, etc. is that a) the brownish people never really go to the streets to kill all the whitish people and b) the gun nuts never really change what they do or the rate at which they do it. And, I’ll add c) criminals and miscreants don’t pay much attention to any of this stuff. Nothing is going to happen.

I’m not saying that there isn’t going to be change. The Zimmerman trial outcome has actually helped to galvanize the anti-gun lobby a little bit, and that lobby was already in action. If anything, this event may bring into the fold a few groups that were not already as engaged. It turns out that the youth are at constant risk of being killed or maimed in this country by older males with firearms, and that this risk applies across levels of privilege, variations in skin tone, regions of the country, urban vs. rural, and all of that.

For young people in the United States, your chance of being killed by a firearm-wielding adult male, in a fire arms accident, or by a self inflicted gunshot, is much higher than the chance of dying of any disease. Guns are the new polio. Guns are the new small pox. Guns are the new plague.

Two things are starting to dawn on the American population. First, we are realizing that the possession of handguns as a constitutionally protected right to stave off an oppressive government is a failed fantasy. Imagine having the right to free speech but everyone’s larynx is removed routinely at birth. Imagine having the right to free assembly and due process but we are locked in separate cages at the age of ten forever. Absurd ideas, aren’t they? We are guaranteed the right to stave off an oppressive government by having a right to own firearms. That worked great with the Patriot Act. The NSA … they never considered spying on American citizens because HANDGUNS. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies will never use Drones on US soil because …. hey, wait a minute …

The second thing we’ve come to realize is that guns are actually very very dangerous. For a couple of generations we’ve grown up with “bang bang you’re dead” style entertainment on TV and in movies, and I think a lot of people don’t realize what really happens when someone pulls the trigger. People don’t experience the temporary (or not) loss of hearing from the sound (especially in a closed space), the smell of the explosion that happens inside the gun, the smell of the blood that spills of the floor. When you ears start to hear again after the shots, there is the sound of the screaming or moaning or incredulous ranting (“You shot me, you shot me, I can’t believe you shot me”) followed by some sort of silence, the silence of a severely wounded person, the silence of a brooding son or daughter with a minor injury to the flesh but a permanent injury to their psyche having just been shot at by daddy, or the silence a person makes when they lie unconscious and bleeding out, or the silence of a corpse.

But now we have soldiers, many more soldiers, among us who know that guns are real and “bang band you’re dead” is not. We have an increasing awareness of an increasing number of incidents in which all the people in a school or all the people who went to see a movie or all the people who visited their candidate for Congress or some other thing suddenly experience the terror of the blasting, the smells, the screaming, the different kinds of deathly silence, and in many cases, personally experience the tearing and exploding flesh, with the lucky ones perhaps being those who are killed quickly by some guy who has expressed his constitutional right to bear arms by firing as many bullets as possible into a crowd.

The Zimmerman verdict moves us measurably closer to effective gun control. This is not the way we should be moving away from the Middle Ages and towards a Civilized World, but it is in fact the only way we seem to be moving. There will be more stand-your-ground shootings, more archaic laws, more unjust verdicts, more mass shootings, all against the background of something close to 3,000 firearm assisted youth suicides and a somewhat larger number of deadly gunshot wounds during crime and street fighting, and no effect on what the government or big corporations do to repress or exploit the average person and no invasions from Canada or Mexico that could only be stopped by a “well regulated militia.” And every now and then some truly good guy will shoot a truly bad guy, stopping the bad guy from doing something truly bad, and people will notice that a handful of such cases against thousands and thousands of gun related deaths a year is not worth it.

Above all, and please never lose sight of this, guns are toys. We are talking about the preservation of the right to play with specific toys, and the right to extend that play into the street and to involve people who did not want to play with these toys to begin with. Stand your ground is a game, it is boys with their toys playing cops and robbers. Boys with their toys build forts in their homes and protect them from invasion. Boys with their toys get together in groups and go out on the street to play army. Boys with their toys collect toys and take them apart and put them together and clean them until they are shiny. Boys with their toys go to big meetings with other boys and trade and sell and exchange and show off. Boys with their toys go to galleries where they can practice and raise their scores.

George Zimmerman was a boy with his toy, and he played cops and robbers, and Treyvon Martin died because he did not follow Zimmerman’s instructions to stand down. Half this country thinks it is OK for a boy like George to take his toy into the street and make other people play and kill them when they do not. The other half is appalled. That second half, it’s growing.

Time to Wake Up: What If Climate Change is Real?

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July 9, 2013 – In this speech on the Senate floor, Senator Whitehouse talked about what’s at stake in the climate change debate using a series of rhetorical questions. He concluded that “many of the answers carry stakes so high, that they plead for prudent and rational choices. The down side is so deep, that the balance has to be towards precaution, if we are indeed a rational species.”

… a young woman getting chased by her past …

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Run is a short movie being made here in the Twin Cities by up and coming film maker Josh Mruz. I know about it because a friend of mine is in the film. It is about “a young woman getting chased by her past, hurdling through new obstacles, and recollecting the jumbled elements of her situation.” I’ve tried to trick them into telling me what exactly she is running from but I’m told this would spoil the film. However, when I suggested it might be dinosaurs, NOBODY SAID NO!

Anyway, I’m showing this to you because I want you to give them ten dollars (or more!) to help with this new film. If you give $20 you can have a credit in the film. If you give them $1000, you can play one of the dinosaurs that they refuse to admit are chasing the star!

Have a look at this ..

And the CLICK HERE to find out more and donate.

Power Infrastructure and Climate Change: US Gov. Report

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The US Department of Energy has released a report about vulnerabilities of the US Power system in relation to climate change.

The report, nicely summarized in this piece at the New York Times, does not merely cover outages caused by storms. Rather, it discusses the vulnerability of the entire power system to alterations in our weather caused by anthropogenic climate change.
 

Increasing temperatures, decreasing water availability, more intense storm events, and sea level rise will each independently, and in some cases in combination, affect the ability of the United States to produce and transmit electricity from fossil, nuclear, and existing and emerging renewable energy sources. These changes are also projected to affect the nation’s demand for energy and its ability to access, produce, and distribute oil and natural gas…

 
To summarize the report: Coal and gas burning power plants will have shortages of water necessary for cooling and may suffer partial or full shutdowns. Coastal energy infrastructure will be shut down, damaged, or put out of commission for various lengths of time because of sea level rise and intense storms. As much as we love to hate fracking, we should note that fracking uses a lot of water and with water shortages natural gas and oil from that source will be curtailed. We hope we are smart enough to put large scale solar, wind, and bio fuel generation facilities where there is appropriate wind and sun. But with climate change, the sunniness and windiness patterns are shifting, so we can easily get that wrong. Electricity transmission systems ten to get blotto’ed because of big storms, and flooding and drought can affect both rail and boat transport systems. Near shore oil and gas operations in the ARctic region are being messed up by melting permafrost. As temperatures increase, electricity-hungry cooling increases demand on an already overstressed infrastructure.

720 sq km Ice Block Falls Off Antarctica

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The Pine Island Glacier, in West Antarctica, drains (as ice and water) a measurable percent of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is probably the case that glaciers in this area of the Antarctic contribute more of the ice to water transition than any other glacial region in the world, so how they melt is of great interest. And now, Pine Island Glacier has given birth!

In October 2011 a large crack started to form across the glacier, downstream from its grounding line. Over the last few days, it seems, this crack finally transected the entire glacier, causing the down-stream side of it to become a 720 square kilometer ice berg. That is nothing like the largest ice berg ever (that would be B-15, which calaved in March 2000, at 11,000 square kilometers, and still melting).

Is this important?

The calving of an ice flow like this, in and of itself, is normal. Glaciers in the interior of Antarctica grow because more snow falls than melts/evaporates. The weight of this ice pushes the glaciers downstream in giant frozen rivers. Somewhere along the way, beneath these giant rivers of ice, we often find water for a long distance, then a “grounding line” where the ice touches the surface of the earth. Beyond the grounding line there is an “ice shelf” of floating ice (not the same thing as sea ice) that can extend a pretty good distance into the sea. Every now and then a large piece of one of these shelves breaks off, like just happened in this case, and floats off into the sea.

This is important because the calving of giant ice bergs beyond grounding lines of huge glacial rivers is part of the process of the ice to sea transition that is constantly going on with glaciers. Glaciers also have smaller scale calving of ice bergs, and plain old melting especially during warm months. All these things together make up the melting half of the formula for glaciers, the other half of the formula being the formation of new ice on glacial surfaces.

We assume the worlds’ glaciers are all either melting or going to melt to some degree because of increased temperatures due to anthropogenic global warming, and this assumption is born out by the fact that so many glaciers are getting smaller. The balance of new ice and melted ice is generally, but not always, in the direction of overall reduced ice. This contributes additional water to the world’s oceans, and is a major (and growing) contributor to global sea level rise. Global sea level rise may be the most important negative outcome of anthropogenic climate change, given that so many people live near the sea, and in fact, a lot of the world’s agriculture is carried out at relatively low elevation. Also, storms that flood the coast do more flooding when the sea level rises, with storm surges taking modest (a few inches here, a few inches there) rises in sea level to create much higher levels of inundation.

One problem we have is that modeling of future glacial melt is very difficult, and many feel that we are pretty much in the dark as to how fast glaciers will melt given various warming scenarios.

So, the Pine Island Glacier calving event that just happened is an important data point to add to the other large scale events to try to understand the rate of glacier melt.

There is a serious concern when it comes to Pine Island Glacier and similar systems, like the much larger nearby Thwaites Glacier. The two of these impound about 20% of the water in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which in turn is between 8 and 9 meters of sea level rise were it all to melt. This has to do with a complex interaction between glacial geometry, movement, and the presence of water underneath the ice that provides lubrication for this movement. Some time ago one researcher called the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers the “weak underbelly” of the Antarctic glacial system. Very briefly, and I oversimplify, the shapes of these two glacial basins is such that they are more likely than other glaciers to speed up their march to the sea, to well exceed their growth from fresh precipitation. This problem is summarized in detail HERE, and recent research confirming that we should be concerned about this is to be found HERE.

So, this is an interesting event, and it might be a very important event. I’ll report back after digesting reaction and commentary by glacier experts over the next few days.

Quebec Derailment Fire/Explosion Visible from Space

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Nasa Earth Observatory has a photograph of the recent derailment of a train of Bakken Crude burning and/or exploding in a small town in Quebec.

The image "was acquired at 6:59 GMT (2:59 a.m. local time) on July 6 by the instrument’s “day-night band,” which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, auroras, fires, and reflected moonlight. The image on the left, shown for comparison, was acquired by the same instrument on July 4, before the derailment. Light sources are not as crisp in the July 6 image because of cloud cover."
The image “was acquired at 6:59 GMT (2:59 a.m. local time) on July 6 by the instrument’s “day-night band,” which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, auroras, fires, and reflected moonlight. The image on the left, shown for comparison, was acquired by the same instrument on July 4, before the derailment. Light sources are not as crisp in the July 6 image because of cloud cover.”

The death total from this event is still unknown. I believe there are about 13 known dead but several are missing and believed to have been incinerated to the point where they may not be found.

We don’t know the full story yet, but it appears that the derailment may have been caused because the break system on the train was turned off by first responders who had come to put out a small fire, and in so doing, turned off the train’s engines. The engines were idling to power the break system, necessary because the train was parked on a grade. It would appear (this is a guess so far) that the oil cars tugged down slope and detached from the engine. This track is normally used at low speeds, between 5 and 10 mph or so, but the oil cars came into town at about 30mph, derailed, smushed together and caught on fire.

We do not know if pipelines are safer than rail (or other) transport of oil and other flammable materials. My guess is that while both systems would likely have very different problems, one may well be safer than the other, and one may be more energy efficient than the other (and one would involve more labor than the other). We are starting to see arguments that since rail is more dangerous (which it may or may not be) we should therefore build the Keystone XL pipeline. But this is like saying that since trained soldiers are better at operating weapons than others, we must therefore go to war. That’s crazy talk and I hope everyone gets that.

Anyway, it’s always interesting when something happens on Earth that can be seen from space. So there you go.

Faith-Based Pseudo-Science

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A Panel at CFI’s Women in Secularism panel featuring Sarah Moglia, campus organizing communication specialist, SSA; Carrie Poppy, animal rights activist, podcast co-host of “Oh No, Ross and Carrie!”; Amy Davis Roth, artist, blogger at “Skepchick”; and Rebecca Watson, co-host of “Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe,” creator of “Skepchick“. The panel is moderated by Desiree Schell, activist, podcast host of “Skeptically Speaking”

Climate Disconnect

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Thought you might be interested in this:

On July 9, 2013, Rep. Henry A. Waxman released a report comparing the impacts of climate change in members’ districts with members’ voting records. The report found a widespread “climate disconnect” in the voting records of the Republican members representing the districts most affected by the soaring temperatures in 2012. They cast anti-climate votes 96% of the time. No similar “climate disconnect” was found in the voting records of House Democrats. The report is available here.

HERE is an interactive map that provides record temperature information for each congressional district in the country and the climate voting record of the member representing the district.

Arctic Sea Ice Melt Speeds Up

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Earlier in the northern summer, it looked like the rapid melt of Arctic Sea ice we’ve been seeing over the last several years was happening again, but rather than being a record year, it was merely tracking along the lower side of the distribution of the long term average. Last year, in contrast, the amount of sea ice hit an all time low early in the year and then broke previous records into tiny icy pieces.

One of the reasons last year’s ice melt was so dramatic is that an early storm churned up the ice and got melting going a bit early.

This year, there was no early churning up event, but over the last several days of June and beginning of July, the rate of sea ice melt has suddenly increased dramatically and this year’s track is looking like it may come close to catching up to the previous year’s unprecedented extreme.

To give you an idea, I’ve got three figures I made by taking screen shots from the Chartic Interactive Sea Ice Graph (here).

This interactive chart uses the high quality data from 1979 to the present to produce a spread (the gray area) showing the range of ice at two standard deviations. Here, I’ve plotted the first ten years of that period against the standard deviation (and mean) to show that during the first part of the period in question the sea ice was melting less each year than the entire spread.

Sea_Ice_Extent_First_Ten_Years

The second figure shows the same thing but for ten years near the end of this period, not including last year and this year:

Sea_Ice_Extent_Last_Ten_Years

This shows how the standard deviation spread is actually a bit misleading on its own because it does not show the trend of change over time, but this comparison of an earlier ten year period and a recent ten year period demonstrates it dramatically.

Now, have a look at the third graphic, showing last year’s dramatic sea ice drop and the track for the current year so far.

Sea_Ice_Extetn_Last_Year_This_Year

Holy moly.

The melting of this ice faster and more completely means there will be more warming of the Arctic sea by sunlight; the ice would reflect more sunlight back into space but open water absorbs more of it. So, the Arctic is warmer than it should be and it is getting warmer than it was, at the same time.

The warming of the Arctic in turn reduces the gradient of heat from the equatorial regions to the poles in the Northern Hemisphere. This causes the Jet Streams do do strange things, which causes Weather Weirding, the non-technical term we apply to … well, to weird weather. You can read about this link in the following two posts:

<ul>
  • Why are we having such bad weather?
    • <li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/linking-weather-extremes-to-global-warming/">Linking Weather Extremes to Global Warming</a></li></ul>