Sir John Beddington

Sir John Beddington, the current Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government, is due to be replaced next month and he spent most of this Monday in various radio and TV studios, taking part in some of what will be his final public appearances in that role. He was on BBC Breakfast News, BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio 4 in the morning, and on ITV News and Channel 4 News in the evening.

What did he talk about? Well (not surprising, perhaps, as he’s a Professor of Applied Population Biology) he briefly mentioned the extra billion people there will be in the world at the end of the next 12 years, and he noted the fact that more and more people are living in cities.

However, what he talked mostly about was climate change, and a few of the things he said were quite remarkable.

I have transcribed Monday’s interviews, and here are the links:
BBC Breakfast News
BBC Radio 5 Live
BBC Radio 4 Today programme
ITV News
Channel 4 News

These sequences are interesting in that climate scepticism routinely gets a mention nowadays in the mainstream media. The BBC’s Bill Turnbull quoting Richard Lindzen, Radio 5 Live bringing in Benny Peiser to provide a counter-argument (also transcribed) – all this would have been highly unlikely back in the Copenhagen era, which, lest we forget, was less than four years ago.

The background to the interviews is of course the freezing weather we are experiencing in Britain right now – it is almost April and farmers are digging dead sheep out of snowdrifts. But beyond the UK and its recent string of cold winters, there also looms the great hiatus – 15 years or so with no statistically significant global warming.

With that in mind, here’s the quote I found most intriguing, from the Channel 4 News segment.

Everybody’s sort of looking out of the window and saying “God, it’s damn cold! It’s not global warming – this is nonsense”. “Climate change” is a much better descriptor of what is actually happening in the world, and just one of the symptoms of it is an increase in world temperatures.

So world temperature increase is now “just one of the symptoms” of climate change?

And not a particularly important one, he seems to be implying.

Shooting Gallery

30th June 1908: A huge explosion flattens over 800 square miles of Siberian forest in the remote region of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. In the absence of detailed information, wild theories abound – it might have been a miniature black hole, perhaps even an alien spacecraft in difficulties. However, the general view is that it was an asteroid or comet fragment entering the Earth’s atmosphere and bursting in mid air, possibly a piece of Encke’s Comet; witness accounts mention repeated sounds like artillery, which perhaps means that Siberia was under bombardment by a series of separate fragments.

13th August 1930: There are reports of three large explosions in the Brazilian rain forest near the Peruvian border – local inhabitants talk of burning trees and a widespread ash cloud. Observatory records suggest that these were caused by one or more asteroid impacts coinciding with the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

2nd February, 1932: Explorer and intelligence officer St. John Philby (father of double agent Kim Philby) discovers pieces of meteoric iron littering the remote Arabian desert in the Empty Quarter or “Rub’ al Khali”. Later, three impact craters are found in the sand at Wabar, which suggests that an asteroid exploded in mid-air over the Arabian Peninsula (with the force of a 16-kiloton nuclear weapon, approximately), maybe as recently as 1891.

16th July, 1994: The first of many fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash into Jupiter, the comet having been captured by the gas giant’s gravity in the 1960s or ’70s and fallen victim to Jupiter’s crushing tidal forces. Over the next few days, big pieces of comet slam into the planet’s atmosphere one after the other, creating vast dark spots which are clearly visible by telescope from Earth. The largest of these pieces (fragment G), impacting on 18th July, smashes with a force equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons.

15th February, 2013: A meteor explodes high over the Urals in Russia, creating a massive fireball, damaging buildings in six cities across the region and injuring over a thousand people (mainly cuts caused by shattering window glass). This happens 16 hours before asteroid 2012DA14 is due to pass by Earth; NASA tells us, however, that the two events are not related, the trajectories of the two objects being very different.

The meteor that lit up the skies over Chelyabinsk last week exploded with a force of nearly 500 kilotons and is estimated to have had a diameter of up to an estimated 56 feet. However, near-earth asteroid 2012DA14 which skimmed past us the same day has a diameter of around 160 feet and would have made a correspondingly bigger bang, had it collided with Earth instead – it would not have been in the Shoemaker-Levy class (thankfully!) but might have done considerably more than create smoke trails and smash windows.

To those who say that global warming is the greatest long-term threat to the human race, I think we might have to agree to disagree. In the Solar System’s great meteoric shooting gallery – going by a century’s worth of occasional impacts and near misses – it seems we have been relatively fortunate. So far, anyway.

Some useful links:

Wikipedia on the Tunguska Event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
Article on the Armagh Observatory website about the Brazilian meteors of 1930:
http://star.arm.ac.uk/impact-hazard/Brazil.html
Wikipedia on Wabar impact craters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabar_craters
Wikipedia on Shoemaker-Levy 9:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker-Levy_9
Wikipedia on the Russian meteor event of 2013:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Russian_meteor_event

Extinction – A guest post on Geoff Chambers’s Blog

Just to write that there’s a new post by me on the subject of extinction, not here but on Geoff Chambers’s blog. Coincidentally, there’s also a new paper on the subject published in Science magazine, which has been vigorously discussed at the Telegraph and by Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That.

In the post I look at the species-area relationship as a predictor of extinctions, some of the dissenting voices in the extinction debate, including Loehle and Eschenbach, and also go back to the 1980s (see previous post) when experts were warning of a mass extinction event by the year 2000.

Some links:

My guest post:
http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/extinction-guest-post-by-alex-cull/

Science Magazine: “Can We Name Earth’s Species Before They Go Extinct?”
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6118/413

The Telegraph: Extinction of millions of species ‘greatly exaggerated’:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9824723/Extinction-of-millions-of-species-greatly-exaggerated.html

WUWT: Willis Eschenbach: “Always Trust Your Gut Extinct”:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/25/always-trust-your-gut-extinct/

The Way of the Dodo

This is the first in a series of posts on the subject of extinction. I’m writing about it partly because the subject is fascinating in its own right (I’m a dinosaur fan, after all) and also because this is one of the strands in Stephen Emmott’s stage play Ten Billion last year and I’m interested in unpacking and critiquing the ideas expressed in the play. You can read an initial critical analysis of Ten Billion’s themes over at the Climate Resistance site (link below), written by Geoff Chambers with some input from myself, but it would also be good to take a further, more in-depth look into some of these themes.

So, extinction. During the play (which was actually more a sort of presentation or monologue on neo-Malthusian themes), Professor Emmott referred to it at least once, stating that species on Earth are becoming extinct a thousand times faster than the normal evolutionary rate, as humans consume the planet’s resources.

And if species were disappearing at a thousand times the normal rate, this would of course be highly alarming. It would look very much like the beginnings of a sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth. And Emmott is not the only one saying it – you can read about the extinction crisis in science magazines, hear it mentioned in science programmes on the TV and radio, find it bundled up with other (and equally panic-inducing) themes such as human population growth, peak oil and so forth in articles by people such as biologist Paul R Ehrlich. It’s one of those facts that are repeated so often that there’s a general tendency to assume they’re true – that is, if people don’t put too much thought into the matter.

But is this true? And if it’s true, how do we know it’s happening? When people say that species are going extinct a thousand times faster than before, how are scientists supposed to be measuring it? And when did this idea start?

There’s much to explore on this subject, and I’m going to try and do so over several posts. But first, what I wanted to attempt to find out was when this idea first appeared in the media. I ran some searches, and the earliest result in Google’s online newspaper archive came from 19th August 1989, when several newspapers ran an Associated Press article mentioning a new report that had emerged from a study by the NSF or National Science Foundation in the US.

According to the article: “One quarter or more of the Earth’s species of animals, plants, microbes and fungi will become extinct without measures to preserve them, a National Science Foundation study said Friday.”

And: ‘”Unless the international community can reverse the trend,” the report said, “the rate of extinction over the next few years is likely to rise to at least 1,000 times the normal background rate of extinction and will ultimately result in the loss of a quarter or more of the species on Earth”.’

I then searched for and downloaded the NSF report from 1989. It is called “Loss of Biological Diversity: A Global Crisis Requiring International Solutions” (link below) and describes what it calls an “an ongoing, unprecedented loss” of biodiversity (the gist of the report might be expressed somewhat like: “The biodiversity crisis is very serious and huge. We don’t even know how huge it is. We need to gather more information – send us more funding.”) In the prologue, it says:

The extinction event that we are witnessing is the most catastrophic loss of species in the last 65 million years. Most importantly, it is the first major extinction event that has been caused by a single species, one that we hope will act in its own self interest to stem the tide.

Unless the international community can, indeed, reverse the trend, the rate of extinction over the next few decades is likely to rise to at least 1000 times the normal background rate of extinction, and will ultimately result in the loss of a quarter or more of the species on earth.

So here is the first instance that I can find of the “1000 times the normal background rate” idea. But that’s just the prologue – where else does the report mention it? It doesn’t, exactly. What it does mention is the theory of island biogeography, which states that “when natural communities have been reduced to less than 10% of their original area, half of the original species are at risk”, and this is something that I will return to, later.

And it also mentions, on page 3: “Estimates of species loss rates suggest that, unless current trends are reversed, from one quarter to one half of the earth’s species will become extinct in the next 30 years (Lovejoy 1980; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1981; Norton, 1986).”

There are some good pointers here for further investigation…

A few notes, at this stage:

1) Notice how “the rate of extinction over the next few decades” in the prologue of the actual report becomes “the rate of extinction over the next few years” in the AP news item? This is something I’ve noticed quite a bit in the environmental and climate debates – information gets distorted as it is passed on. Numbers get inflated, time scales are dramatically compressed – remember the business of the Himalayan glaciers in IPCC’s AR4?

2) Also notice how in 1989 they were saying that the extinction rate “is likely to rise to at least 1000 times the normal background rate”, while now Emmott and others are saying it’s already happening. Has there been a measurable increase in the rate between then and now?

3) Also note the fact that in the 1980s, the Ehrlichs and others were suggesting that between a quarter and a half of all species would become extinct in the next 30 years. Time, needless to say, has not been kind to that prediction! There is a historical pattern, of which this is a great example, of sweeping doom-laden predictions that come to nothing; however, there are genuinely intelligent people such as Professor Emmott who appear curiously unable to acknowledge the pattern of failure.

Much more later. Stay tuned!

Some links:

Blog post “It’s a F*ct – We’re F*cked” on Climate Resistance:
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2012/08/it’s-a-fct-we’re-fcked.html

National Science Foundation report “Loss of Biological Diversity: A Global Crisis Requiring International Solutions”:
http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/1989/nsb0989.pdf

Return to the Moon

Like some huge, dusty old attic above our heads, the Moon has been unvisited by humans ever since the crew of Apollo 17 departed from the lunar surface exactly 40 years ago last Friday – 13th December 1972. You can go to see their command module (“America”) at the Lyndon B Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and if you were on the Moon now, you could also go and see their electrically-powered rover, which is still where the crew parked it at “Station 8″ in Cochise Crater four decades ago, in the spectacular Taurus-Littrow valley, which lies on the south-eastern edge of the Mare Serenitatis. Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt were the last men to walk on the Moon, and no-one’s been back since.

However, all that may be about to change. Alan Stern, CEO of new company Golden Spike, announced on 6th December that he is aiming to offer a private manned Moon expedition by 2020, at a cost of $1.5 billion. It’s a tall order, and a price tag that would better suit a national government than a wealthy individual; with that sort of sum, you could build a new airport.

Will it happen, though? The Cold War is over and developed economies are strapped for cash; few nations would have the appetite and the resources to return to the Moon a mere eight years from now. So the timeline might be unrealistic. But it is encouraging that someone is thinking about going back up there. Somebody’s going to have to, sooner or later. the Moon is not just a dusty (and dangerous!) old attic above our heads. It is – or could be – a vital resource and staging post on our journey to the bigger skies of the Solar System, with all the potential wealth that it contains. The Golden Spike company is named after the symbolic spike driven in 1869 to link the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in the United States to form the First Continental Railroad; if its namesake is successful, this may mark the next step in an equally ambitious and grand venture ending – centuries hence, who knows? – in the stars.

Another news item recently was of course the death of Sir Patrick Moore, the famous amateur astronomer, on Sunday 9th December, which was a week ago today. I have some fond memories of staying up very late in the 1970s to watch his programme “The Sky at Night”, and learn of meteor showers, the occasional comet and which constellations were prominent at the time of year – it was like a news bulletin for those interested in such arcane things. Following the programme, I’d sometimes be out in the back garden after midnight trying to identify star clusters or wander – via a heavy pair of binoculars – among the mountains of the Moon. This was when my interest in space was kindled – Patrick Moore’s enthusiasm for the subject was infectious and I’m sure played a big part – along with all the science fiction I was reading at the time – in getting me started. He will be sadly missed.

Some useful links:
An article in Wired magazine about the Golden Spike announcement:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-12/07/golden-spike-plans
Sky at Night, on the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mk7h

A Very Quick Word About Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs could apparently be 10-15 million years older than previously thought, according to a recent study in journal Biology Letters, and reported on the PopSci website. I’m a great fan of dinosaurs. Often used as a byword for something obsolete and past its time (I’m sometimes called a dinosaur myself, because of my support for fossil fuels), in my opinion they are nevertheless one of the greatest examples of both adaptability and staying power that the world has ever known. You can still find them, in the present era. Looking out of my window, it’s hard not to notice the flocks of dinosaurs that frequent this part of London. They’re rather small, these days, and have feathers rather than scales. But they’re still with us -dinosaurs are the living world’s great survivors.

Some useful links:
The study in Biology Letters: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/1/20120949
The article on PopSci: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-12/new-oldest-dinosaur-may-predate-existing-oldest-dinosaur-15-million-years

The (very small) starship Voyager

Just a brief trip to outer space, before I post links to the next lengthy climate transcript. In the news this week, the people at NASA JPL announced (actually not – see my update!) that they believe Voyager 1 is about to leave the solar system, 35 years after its launch in 1977, and after having had thrilling close encounters with Jupiter and Saturn along the way. This being the vast wilderness of space, there is no obvious frontier which marks out the limits of the solar system, but the JPL people have picked up an increase in the amount of cosmic rays hitting the probe, which suggest it is crossing the borderland or “Heliosheath”, where the solar wind pushes up against the cosmic radiation from the rest of the universe, about 16 – 18 billion kilometres away.

What will happen to it now? And how long will we be able to keep in touch with it? The answer to the second question hinges on how much electrical power Voyager has access to, as it crosses the deep, dark gulf between worlds. The probe is powered by three RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) fuelled by plutonium-238, which of course is in limited supply and must be husbanded very carefully. And what it’s doing is gradually shutting down some of its more power-intensive activities in order to maintain others for as long as possible. That will last until about 2025, after which time the spacecraft will no longer be able to power any single instrument and Voyager will be drifting, inert and basically, dead.

I was curious to find out where it is heading. Anywhere famous, perhaps? There are actually two Voyagers, as you will know, and according to NASA Voyager 2 will pass within about 4.3 light years of Sirius, which is, of course, a very prominent and bright local star, well known to us from prehistoric times. This will take place around 296,000 years from now. Voyager 1, on the other hand, is heading towards AC+79 3888, otherwise known as Gliese 445, a very dim and unremarkable red dwarf in the unfashionable constellation of Cameleopardalis. It will pass by Gliese 445 in about 40,000 years, but what also might be surprising is that Gliese 445 itself is approaching the solar system much faster than Voyager 1 is moving in the other direction – it’s 17.6 light years away, at present, but will be only about 3.45 light years away from us, 400 centuries from now. Such is the unnervingly dynamic nature of stars, as they buzz like bees around the galactic hive.

So, what will happen to Voyagers 1 and 2, after that? Maybe they will drift forever in the dark spaces of the galaxy, until the end of time. Maybe one day humans will go out and retrieve them (or, even better, send a robot) and they will be exhibited in a museum, if they still have these in the 40th century (and I hope they will, as I think museums are a very good thing in any epoch.)

In the 1979 movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager probe has been discovered by sentient machines, who transform it into a gigantic and threatening spacecraft (renamed “V’ger”), which then starts to make its way back towards Earth and is only stopped by the brave people aboard the Enterprise, armed with their superior wits and sparkly late-1970s special effects. However, Trekkies will be aware that the probe in question was actually Voyager 6, and so the events of the movie clearly take place in an alternative timeline and dimension to this one, where I am writing this blog and where Voyagers 3, 4 5 and 6 were never built.

But maybe the basic premise of the film is correct, and someone – or something – else will find our little metal emissaries to the stars. And if they do, will it be good or bad news for Earth? I wonder.

Some interesting links:
NASA JPL’s main Voyager page: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
Interstellar mission overview: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar.html
Spacecraft lifetime: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html

UPDATE

After all that, I just realised that the NASA people haven’t actually made any official announcements yet. But they will, soon. Or they might do. Or something like that.

Earth Declares War on N165

On Mars this weekend, the Curiosity rover gets a first chance to try out its ChemCam (Chemistry and Camera) imaging system, which includes a powerful laser – over a period of 10 seconds or so, it will fire off about 30 shots at a designated sitting target, which is located three metres away. This target has been given the imaginative name of N165, and is an otherwise rather unexceptional, small, roughly triangular-looking Martian rock, about 7.5 centimetres wide. The flashes of light generated by the mini laser strikes will then be analysed by Curiosity’s spectrometer, to see what N165 is composed of.

The laser is, of course, a very familiar device, and ubiquitous these days. The first one was built in the 1960s, but before then, in the 1950s, scientists had already developed its older cousin the maser – from “Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” – which amplifies microwaves rather than visible light (an early term for the laser was “optical maser”, in fact.)

One of the obvious applications of course, for this emerging technology was as a beam weapon, but – perhaps fortunately – this has not really happened yet, outside the realm of SF and James Bond. This idea can be traced back to the fiction of H.G. Wells, whose Martians wielded a horribly effective Heat Ray after they landed in Surrey, in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. Here is the moment when a group of men approach the landing site, hoping to communicate with the visitors from another world:

Beyond the pit stood the little wedge of people with the white flag at its apex, arrested by these phenomena, a little knot of small vertical black shapes upon the black ground. As the green smoke arose, their faces flashed out pallid green, and faded again as it vanished. Then slowly the hissing passed into a humming, into a long, loud, droning noise. Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it.

Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.

Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.

If there is microbial life on Mars, and if a deputation of tiny Martians have assembled today on N165, preparing to communicate with this giant visitor from another world, it would be a very odd and ironic – if highly unlikely – twist on the classic tale.

UPDATE

Well, the laser firing seems to have gone well (hopefully with no microscopic Martian pacifists being killed), and now Curiosity has gone for its first drive. We can see tyre tracks!

“And it was scientific malpractice”.

The transcript of a recent radio interview with physicist Prof. Richard Muller (leader of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project or BEST), forms the basis of an excellent article by Barry Woods on the website Watts Up With That. For fellow climate obsessives, there’s plenty to find of interest in his dialogue with radio host Betsy Rosenberg and conservative commentator D.R. Tucker.

You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on the Progressive Radio Network website.

A “Thriving Population of Polar Bears”

Monday morning on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, naturalist Chris Packham reported from an expedition called Operation Iceberg up in the Arctic:

“… this berg seems to be home to a particularly thriving population of polar bears, who regularly come as close to the ship as they dare, sniff at us and wonder what we’re up to. But we have to pay keen attention to them, of course, as they can be – if we allow them the opportunity – to be quite dangerous”.

Is it just me, or is “quite dangerous” just a little bit of an understatement? These beasts are monstrous, ravening predators and don’t seem to be getting any scarcer.

Operation Iceberg, by the way, is a 5-week scientific mission to discover more about the life and death of icebergs, and later in the report, Chris Packham goes on to say that one reason for finding out as much as we can is that “we’re living at a time when there seem to be more icebergs breaking off the glaciers here than ever before.”

Of course, just over a century ago, an iceberg famously collided with R.M.S. Titanic and sent her to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Here is an article from the New York Times of May 5th 1912, which describes conditions at the time (h/t Larry Elkin in this article):

An unprecedentedly warm Winter in the entire arctic is believed to be the cause of the vast number of icebergs adrift in the North Atlantic Ocean during the present season and for the low latitudes which many of them have reached. Navigators and scientists of the Hydrographic Office and the Revenue Cutter Service in Washington have theories tending to prove that an unusually heavy snowfall in Greenland, where all icebergs are formed, in the Winter of 1910-11 was followed by an unusually hot Summer, and by a very mild Winter in 1911-12, these conditions resulting in the creation of an enormously large crop of icebergs from the West Greenland glaciers, and of floe, or field ice. Unusual northerly and northwesterly winds have blown these bergs far to the southward.

It all begins to sound oddly familiar.