arguendo

The role of stratospheric water vapor in global warming

http://www.skepticalscience.com/role-of-stratospheric-water-vapor-in-global-warming.html

There’s been a number of queries regarding a new paper examining the role of stratospheric water vapor in global warming. The paper is Contributions of Stratospheric Water Vapor to Decadal Changes in the Rate of Global Warming (Solomon 2010). There are a few overly excited interpretations of the paper’s results circulating around the blogosphere. This is presumably from readings of media clippings, not the actual paper. To accurately determine the significance ofSolomon 2010, the best course is to see what the paper actually says.

(Skeptical science, February 1, 2010)

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Becoming Human

http://www.becominghuman.org/

The Institute of Human Origins provides this site dedicated to human evolution.

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Understanding Evolution

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

This is a large and thorough site presented by the University of California Museum of Paleontology with special tools for teachers and students.

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PBS: Evolution

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/

This is a collection of Nova programs and many other special programs developed by the Public Broadcast System. It has some special sections for teachers and sections for students. A pretty sound and very well produced treatment of a broad range of evolution-related subjects.

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The wisdom of Solomon

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/the-wisdom-of-solomon/

Stand back a little folks. This will be your next great controversy. You’ll probably hear all about how it destroys all the climate models on Fox News tonight– Jimalakirti

A quick post for commentary on the new Solomon et al paper in Science express. We’ll try and get around to discussing this over the weekend, but in the meantime I’ve moved some comments over. There is some commentary on this at DotEarth, and some media reports on the story –some good, some not so good. It seems like a topic that is ripe for confusion, and so here are a few quick clarifications that are worth making.

(RealClimate, January 29, 2010)

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Moss makeup

http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/1/1/45/2/

Here is a wonderful example of a technical brief. All the information that is needed, clearly stated. – Jimalakirti.

The paper:

S. Rensing et al., “ThePhyscomitrella genome reveals evolutionary insights into the conquest of land by plants,”Science, 319: 64–69, 2008. (Cited in 126 papers).

(TheScientist.com, Volume 24, Issue 1, p.45)

The finding:

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Terminally ill ants choose to die alone

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/01/terminally_ill_ants_choose_to_die_alone.php

In 1912, Antarctic explorer Captain Lawrence Oates willingly walked to his death so that his failing health would not jeopardise his friends’ odds of survival. Stepping from his tent into a raging blizzard, he left his men with the immortal words, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” It was a legendary act of heroism but one that is mirrored by far tinier altruists on a regular basis – ants.

Like Captain Oates, workers of the ant species Temnothorax unifasciatus will also walk off to die in solitude, if they’re carrying a fungal infection. In fact, Jurgen Heinze and Bartosz Walter found that workers, regardless of the reason for their demise, take their last breaths in a self-imposed quarantine. ATemnothorax worker may spend its life in the company of millions, but it dies alone.

(Not Exactly Rocket Science, January 28, 2010)

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“Nature’s” editorial on climate science communications

Nature‘s recent editorial “Climate of suspicion”  is a very important article—not just because it is a lead editorial in Nature, one of the leading voices of science throughout the world, but because of its nature. It is an intelligent and well-reasoned plea not for a change in the way climate scientists do their work but for a change in the way they communicate their results to the world.

The concern about communication arose from two directions: admitted errors in some reported results, and the fact that the tiniest debate in the science of climate change are declared by a small group of deniers sufficient to reject the whole area of climate science. (I use the term “deniers” to describe either those parties who deny that the warming is important, or those who deny that human activity has any significant influence on climate. It is not a pejorative term.) Indeed,  since the article appeared, some deniers have already started trumpeting that Nature has capitulated and admitted that climate science is seriously flawed. The deniers see blood on the snow.

The editors at Nature appear to have been fully aware of the risk that their statements would be branded as a capitulation by the deniers. So, wisely, the editorial handles the two most important of the deniers’ issues of late: climategate and Himalayagate. It simply concedes that mistakes were made. But their carefully worded concession is not a capitulation. In fact, the journal originally made a very strong move to attack the problems with climate research directly. It also published “The real holes in climate science,” an article expressing concerns about gaps in much climate related information.

The major gaps in climate science are identified there as being concerned with local predictions (small-scale matters), difficulties with precipitation (especially winter precipitation), aerosols, and paleoclimatology (tree ring controversy). The very first sentence of the editorial included a link to the “Holes” article. Rhetorically, this was a smart move. It seized control of these subjects, defined the direction that any further discussion must take, and made it more difficult for the opposition to spring embarrassing surprises in the popular press.

When I first encountered the Nature editorial I was able to read the entire “Real holes in climate science” article, and I posted it as a necessary extension of this the editorial. Unfortunately, Nature has chosen to fly in the face of what seemed to be its own advice, and has locked this critical article under the cost of a subscription. Thereby does it illustrate the problem it urges us to solve. It is reasonable for a journal to charge for articles on scientific research. It seems silly for a reputable journal to make an impassioned plea for better communications and then withdraw from circulation the best weapon it has so far produced.

Rather than drive on to a positive conclusion and exhortation to action, the editorial goes on to admit an entirely different problem: the fact that many of the deniers distrust or dislike science in general and see climate change not as a scientific issue but as a political or even religious issue.

The editorial’s last paragraph, then, rather than being a call to arms and an exhortation to go out and communicate as openly as possible, suggests that perhaps we ought to have more research about how to shape public policy. A nice idea, indeed, but perhaps a few years or decades down the road.

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Termite Battles May Explain Evolution of Social Insects

http://tr.im/M3He

Natural selection argues for small biological changes that yield greater chances of survival and successful reproduction. Yet, that process does not square well with the evolution of social insects, particularly when their colonies can have over a million non-reproductive members.

A new study of termites may have the answer for such an evolutionary question, first posed by Charles Darwin nearly 150 years ago: How does natural selection support insect “worker” and “soldier” offspring who never reproduce, find mates or start their own colonies?

Apparently, the answer may be because the workers and soldiers stay home.

(Live Science, January 21, 2010)

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New Tyrannosaur Species Discovered

http://tr.im/M3zo

T. rex‘s family tree just got one member larger. Scientists unearthed bones from a new dinosaur species, including an adult specimen and bones from a “teenager” that lived some 75 million years ago.

Called Bistahieversor sealeyi, the dinosaur lived about 10 million years before Tyrannosaurus rexappeared on the scene. Even so, B. sealeyi belongs to the same dinosaur linage as the famous T. rex.

(Live Science, January 28, 2010)

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New large-clawed Jurassic dinosaur sheds light on elusive lineage

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=new-large-clawed-jurassic-dinosaur-2010-01-28

The dinosaur group that over the eons has brought usTyrannosaurus rex and modern birds just got a new member in one of its more perplexing, birdlike families, the alvarezsauridae.

This new 160-million-year-old alvarezsauroid, namedHaplocheirus sollers (or “simple, skillful hand”), is described in a new study, which will be published January 29 in the journal Science.

(Scientific American Observations, January 28, 2010)

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Colorizing Dinosaurs: Feather Pigments Reveal Appearance of Extinct Animals

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=colorizing-dinosaur-feathers

Long the range of the imagination, the coloration–and origin–of feathered dinosaurs and ancient birds has begun to be revealed through fossilized organelles.

For nearly two centuries, people have struggled to imagine what the great extinctdinosaurs looked like. Thanks to modern paleontology and physiology, their shapes, masses and even how they might have moved and interacted have been deduced. But one of the most basic questions about their appearance, their coloring, seemed unanswerable.

(Scientific American, January 22, 2010)

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Creation: The good, the bad, and the ugly

http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57125/

A new movie about Charles Darwin’s life and work struggles for distribution in the US, where many refuse to subscribe to the theory of evolution

It’s a given: we’re diehard Charles Darwin fans. So how can we resist a film that projects his life onto the big screen — his study filled with flasks and beakers, stuffed birds, fountain pens, giant beetles, and a locked treasure chest with the beginnings of On the Origin of Species?

At center of the new movie, Creation, is a 50-year-old Darwin at his peak creativity, in 1859, the year Origin is published. The conspicuously beardless Darwin (Paul Bettany) is sickly, from his travels on the HMS Beagle, from the death of his beloved daughter Annie, and from the burden of disavowing God. As Darwin grapples with the implications of publicizing the full breadth of his research, the memory of his recently departed 10-year-old daughter haunts him, literally, with psychotic visions of her ghost.

(The Scientist.com, January 29, 2010)

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UN climate chief plays down scandals

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100129/ap_on_bi_ge/davos_forum_climate_change

DAVOS, Switzerland – U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer says recent scandals over climate data are unfortunate but don’t discredit the view that the earth is warming and humans must act.

De Boer, in an interview with The Associated Press at the World Economic Forum, said, “what’s happened, it’s unfortunate, it’s bad, it’s wrong, but I don’t think it has damaged the basic science.”

Global warming skeptics have been reinvigorated since a report warning Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035 turned out to be off by hundreds of years, and by leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s climate science unit.

De Boer said Friday he was “depressed” after climate talks in Copenhagen but it was “feasible” to get all countries on board before talks in Mexico.

(Yahoo News!, January 29, 2010)

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L&C, GRL, comments on peer review and peer-reviewed comments

http://tr.im/LZDB

I said on Friday that I didn’t think that Lindzen and Choi (2009) was obviously nonsense. Well, anumber of people have disagreed with me, and in doing so, have presented some of the back story on the how the response was handled. I think this deserves to be more widely known in the hope that it will generate some discussion in the community for how such situations might be dealt with in the future.

(Real Climate, January 10, 2010)

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Lessons from the Monckton/Plimer debate

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Lessons-from-Monckton-Plimer-debate.html

Earlier today, I attended a climate debate between Ian Plimer and Christopher Monckton versus Barry Brooks and Graham Readfern at the Hilton Hotel in Brisbane (many thanks to Graham for the ticket). The debate made for good entertainment, and surprisingly, I even learnt a thing or two about the climate debate. Even more surprisingly, the most enlightening aspects came from Monckton and Plimer.

Monckton kicked off the debate, warming up with a few disarming jokes. The man sure does know how to work a crowd. He then informed us that he was to focus on the most important aspect of climate discussion which is climate sensitivity.

(Skeptical Science, January 29, 2010)

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On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record

http://tr.im/LWZq

The website surfacestations.org enlisted an army of volunteers, travelling across the U.S. photographing weather stations. The point of this effort was to document cases of microsite influence – weather stations located near car parks, air conditioners and airport tarmacs and anything else that might impose a warming bias. While photos can be compelling, the only way to quantify any microsite influence is through analysis of the data.This has been done in On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record (Menne 2010), published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The trends from poorly sited weather stations are compared to well-sited stations. The results indicate that yes, there is a bias associated with poor exposure sites. However, the bias is not what you expect.

(Skeptical Science, January 22, 2010)

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The Ancestor Hunter

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science_environment/the-ancestor-hunter-1372

The University of Arizona’s Michael Hammer is using advanced DNA techniques to figure out where we came from. Which, apparently, is not just one place, or even one species.

Maybe it’s the scooter propped in the corner of his office, or the fact that he’s wearing a T-shirt and denim cargo shorts while sporting a gold hoop in his left ear, but Michael Hammer definitely looks more like a surfer than one of the world’s leading gene detectives. The maps are a giveaway, though.

(Miller – McCune, August 31, 2009)

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Three Mile Island Generator Finds New Home at Plant in North Carolina

http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100128/three-mile-island-generator-finds-new-home-plant-north-carolina

The generator from the unit at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant that suffered a meltdown in March 1979 has found a new home at a nuclear plant in North Carolina — a move that’s sparking concerns among nuclear industry watchdogs.

FirstEnergy, the Ohio-based company that owns TMI, sold the Unit 2 generator to Siemens Power Generation, a division of the German conglomerate Siemens AG. Siemens in turn sold it to North Carolina-based Progress Energy, which plans to install the equipment at its Shearon Harris nuclear plant near Raleigh, N.C. to boost power capacity. Progress is selling the generator that’s currently at the Raleigh plant to Siemens for resale to the nuclear industry.

(Solve Climate, January 28, 2010)

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Journal “Nature” makes plea for new kind of communication

(temporarily withdrawn)

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The real holes in climate science

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html

Like any other field, research on climate change has some fundamental gaps, although not the ones typically claimed by sceptics. Quirin Schiermeier takes a hard look at some of the biggest problem areas.

The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November presented an early Christmas present to climate-change denialists. Amid the more than 1,000 messages were several controversial comments that — taken out of context — seemingly indicate that climate scientists have been hiding a mound of dirty laundry from the public.

To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).

(Nature News, January 20, 2010)

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Climate of suspicion

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/463269a.html

With climate-change sceptics waiting to pounce on any scientific uncertainties, researchers need a sophisticated strategy for communication.

Climate science, like any active field of research, has some major gaps in understanding (see page 284). Yet the political stakes have grown so high in this field, and the public discourse has become so heated, that climate researchers find it hard to talk openly about those gaps. The small coterie of individuals who deny humanity’s influence on climate will try to use any perceived flaw in the evidence to discredit the entire picture. So how can researchers honestly describe the uncertainty in their work without it being misconstrued?

(Nature, January 21, 2010)

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Gorillas ‘ape humans’ over games

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8474358.stm

Gorillas play competitive games just like humans, according to scientists at the University of St Andrews.

The gorillas at San Francisco Zoo were observed over a period of five years playing with a variety of equipment.

The study found that gorillas like to keep games going and even give younger apes a fair chance to play.

The psychologists said the research would help trace the evolutionary origins of how humans understand each other.

(BBC News, January 22, 2010)

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Using religious language to fight global warming

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8468233.stm

If the case for tackling climate change is backed by science, why do so many green campaigners rely on the language of religion?

I am looking at a clock that is counting down the months, days, hours and minutes until planet Earth reaches “the point of no return”.

As I type, we have 83 months to go. The end of the world, if not exactly nigh, certainly seems to be on its way.

(BBC News, January 25, 2010)

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Science must end climate confusion

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8451756.stm

Climate scientists need to take more responsibility about how their work is presented to the public, suggests the Met Office’s Richard Betts. In this week’s Green Room, he says it is vital to prevent climate science being misunderstood or misused.

Individual weather events, from heatwaves to big freezes, cannot be used either to prove or disprove climate change

Recently, I gave a talk on climate change in my local village hall in Devon, and not surprisingly I was given a hard time.

In fact, it started two days before that. Cut off from work by the snow (which, incidentally, had been forecast with almost pinpoint accuracy), I was out with the kids and being teased by the other dads.

(BBC News, January 11, 2010)

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