December
2009

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The Climate Science Isn't Settled

Lord Lawson calls for public inquiry into UEA global warming data 'manipulation'
By Matthew Moore, The Telegraph.co.uk

Lord Lawson, the former chancellor, has called for an independent inquiry into claims that leading climate change scientists manipulated data to strengthen the case for man-made global warming.

Thousands of emails and documents stolen from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and posted online indicate that researchers massaged figures to mask the fact that world temperatures have been declining in recent years.

This morning Lord Lawson, who has reinvented himself as a prominent climate change sceptic since leaving front line politics, demanded that the apparent deception be fully investigated.

He claimed that the credibility of the university's world-renowned Climatic Research Unit - and British science - were under threat.

"They should set up a public inquiry under someone who is totally respected and get to the truth," he told the BBC Radio Four Today programme.

"If there's an explanation for what's going on they can make that explanation."

Around 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents were stolen from UEA computers by hackers last week and uploaded on to a Russian server before circulating on websites run by climate change sceptics.

Some of the correspondence indicates that the manipulation of data was widespread among global warming researchers.

One of the emails under scrutiny, written by Phil Jones, the centre's director, in 1999, reads: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Prof Jones has insisted that he used the word "trick" to mean a "clever thing to do", rather than to indicate deception. He has denied manipulating data.

Another scientist whose name appears in the documents accused the hackers of attempting to undermine the drive for a global consensus at next month's Copenhagen summit.

Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research accused climate change sceptics of cherry-picking the documents and taking them out of context.

Meanwhile, hopes that a legally binding treaty on cutting emissions will be agreed at Copenhagen have been boosted by the news that more than 60 world leaders plan to attend.

Last week Lord Lawson, who served as chancellor for six years under Margaret Thatcher, told The Daily Telegraph that he planned to establish a think tank to challenge the consensus that drastic action is needed to combat global warming.

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The Climate Science Isn't Settled
By Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Wall Street Journal

Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.

The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.

That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called "climate forcing."

There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.

The IPCC's Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages. It is, of course, impossible to accurately summarize the 1,000-page assessment in just 20 pages; at the very least, nuances and caveats have to be omitted. However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim.

The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.

Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.

Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.

But even if the IPCC's iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.

Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.

There is some evidence of a positive feedback effect for water vapor in cloud-free regions, but a major part of any water-vapor feedback would have to acknowledge that cloud-free areas are always changing, and this remains an unknown. At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks.

The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today's. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the "Early Faint Sun Paradox."

For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.

There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.

What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.

The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.

Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.

Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.

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As Copenhagen summit nears, ‘Climategate’ dogs global warming debate
By Patrik Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor

As major Western powers rush to break a deadlock over a new global emissions treaty ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit in 10 days, world leaders face another problem: Waning public concern over man-made global warming.

The leak of embarrassing, and in some cases troubling, emails from a major global climate center, East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), has given fuel to skeptics of human-caused global warming, putting even more pressure on leaders to get a deal (or at least the beginnings of one) in Copenhagen.

Among the ideas floated to break a deadlock: A satellite system by which nations could be monitored for their carbon dioxide emissions. Also, a $10 billion global climate fund that would subsidize efforts by poorer nations to cut carbon emissions.

On the global stage, wealthier nations like the US are loathe to damage their own economies with emissions caps while developing nations, which tend to be among the most polluting, won’t face the same curbs.

Developing countries, meanwhile, complain they don’t have the resources to implement carbon-emission cuts nor prepare for the effects of global warming, such as sea-level rise and drought.

Reduced expectations for Copenhagen

Expectations for a deal at Copenhagen have been scaled back dramatically, though British prime minister Gordon Brown said a treaty could be forthcoming within months.

Mr. Brown’s so-called “Launch Fund” would allow the globe to “get moving on climate change as quickly as possible,” he said. “Together the collective power of the Commonwealth must be brought together to tackle a new historic injustice, that of climate change.”

But even as UN climate scientists issued a report Tuesday about accelerating warming ahead of the Danish summit, the science behind sometimes apocalyptic alarms is suddenly being broadly questioned.

The Nov. 20 release of over 1,000 emails between climate scientists via an apparent hacking attack is raising questions about mentions of “tricks” by scientists to buttress the warming theory.

To be sure, the emails don’t appear to be a smoking gun that disproves global warming, or even man’s role in that warming. But they do throw new doubts on the integrity of scientists who control historic climate data, the debate and, climate change policy, critics say.

One oft-cited example: While climate scientists say skeptics shouldn’t be believed because their data isn’t published in peer-reviewed journals, some of the revealed emails show climate scientists actively lobbying to have skeptics denied publication, even threatening to boycott some publications if they don’t keep skeptical studies out.

And while many scientists disregard the lack of warming since 1998 as a predictable blip in the general trend, one scientist noted in a leaked email: “The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that we can’t.”

Skeptical lawmakers dig into ‘Climategate’

The “Climategate” documents spurred Sen. James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma, a vocal skeptic, and other congressional Republicans to begin a probe into the findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and whether contradictory data was suppressed in the research. Reports from the UN agency are the primary basis for US policy direction on climate change, including new Environmental Protection Agency rules and proposed legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the US.

“The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people,” writes the business-friendly Wall Street Journal. “The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced. The impression left … is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.

The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, stood by his panel’s 2007 findings last week. That study is the foundation for a global climate response, including carbon emission targets proposed this week by both the US and China.

So far, climate scientists say nothing in the leaked emails takes away from the fact that the climate change evidence is solid. In fact, a new study in the journal Science shows the polar ice cap melting is happening at a faster rate than predicted just a few years ago.

In a teleconference call with reporters this week, one of the scientists whose emails were leaked, Pennsylvania State University paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, said that “regardless of how cherry-picked” the emails are, there is “absolutely nothing in any of the emails that calls into the question the deep level of consensus of climate change.”

Leaked e-mails part of a ’smear campaign’

This is a “smear campaign to distract the public,” added Mann, a coauthor of the Copenhagen Diagnosis, the report on climate change released this week ahead of the Copenhagen. “Those opposed to climate action, simply don’t have the science on their side,” he added.

Professor Trevor Davies of the East Anglia CRU called the stolen data the latest example of a campaign intended “to distract from reasoned debate” about global climate change ahead of the Copenhagen summit.

But the problem for scientists and policy-makers isn’t as much as what the emails actually reveal — though some of it is certainly vexing — but how it will play in Peoria or Copenhagen.

Recent studies show that, while many Americans worry about global warming, their concerns are receding.

Researchers, including Mann, say the blame lies with skeptics trying to undermine hard science about the plight of the globe and mankind. They’ve turned “something innocent into something nefarious,” Mann said last week.

But even some climate scientists at East Anglia, the CRU that got hacked, worry that tribal and political attitudes among scientists may undermine public support for climate change legislation. Citing momentum, however, UN chief Ban Ki-moon told a summit in Trinidad and Tobago Friday that “success in Copenhagen is in sight.”

The New York Times quoted East Anglia climate scientist Mike Hulme saying the leaks hint that “some areas of climate science has become sclerotic … too partisan, too centralized.”

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White House Begins Campaign to Promote Science and Math Education

By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times

To improve science and mathematics education for American children, the White House is recruiting Elmo and Big Bird, video game programmers and thousands of scientists.

President Obama announced on Monday a campaign to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math.

“You know the success we seek is not going to be attained by government alone,” Mr. Obama said kicking off the initiatives. “It depends on the dedication of students and parents, and the commitment of private citizens, organizations and companies. It depends on all of us.”

Mr. Obama, accompanied by students and a robot that scooped up and tossed rocks, also announced an annual science fair at the White House.

“If you win the N.C.A.A. championship, you come to the White House,” he said. “Well, if you’re a young person and you’ve produced the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.

“Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models, and here at the White House, we’re going to lead by example. We’re going to show young people how cool science can be.”

The campaign, called Educate to Innovate, focuses mainly on activities outside the classroom. For example, Discovery Communications has promised to use two hours of the afternoon schedule on its Science Channel cable network for commercial-free programming geared toward middle school students.

Science and engineering societies are promising to provide volunteers to work with students in the classroom, culminating in a National Lab Day in May.

The MacArthur Foundation and technology industry organizations are giving out prizes in a contest to develop video games that teach science and math.

“The different sectors are responding to the president’s call for all hands on deck,” John P. Holdren, the White House science adviser, said in an interview last week.

The other parts of the campaign include a two-year focus on science on “Sesame Street,” the venerable public television children’s show, and a Web site, connectamillionminds.com, set up by Time Warner Cable, that provides a searchable directory of local science activities. The cable system will contribute television time and advertising to promote the site.

The White House has also recruited Sally K. Ride, the first American woman in space, and corporate executives like Craig R. Barrett, a former chairman of Intel, and Ursula M. Burns, chief executive of Xerox, to champion the cause of science and math education to corporations and philanthropists.

Dr. Ride said their role would be identifying successful programs and then connecting financing sources to spread the successes nationally. “The need is funding,” she said. “There is a lot of corporate interest and foundation interest in this issue.”

Administration officials say that the breadth of participation in Educate to Innovate is wider than in previous efforts, which have failed to produce a perceptible rise in test scores or in most students’ perceptions of math and science. In international comparison exams, American students have long lagged behind those in much of Asia and Europe.

But some education experts said the initiatives did little to address some core issues: improving the quality of teachers and the curriculum.

“I think a lot of this is good, but it is missing more than half of what needs to be done,” said Mark S. Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization in Washington. “It has nothing to do with the day-to-day teaching,” said Dr. Schneider, who was the commissioner of education statistics at the Department of Education from 2005 to 2008.

Dr. Holdren said the initiatives, which are financed almost entirely by the participating companies and foundations and not the government, complement the Race to the Top program of the Department of Education, which will dispense $4.35 billion in stimulus financing to states for innovative education programs. The Race to the Top rules give extra points to applications that emphasize science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM subjects.

“The president has made it very clear it is a big priority,” Dr. Holdren said.

In April, Mr. Obama, speaking at the National Academy of Sciences, promised a “renewed commitment” that would move the United States “from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math over the next decade.”

To achieve this goal, Mr. Obama talked of “forging partnerships.” Monday’s announcement contains the first wave of such partnerships, officials said.

David M. Zaslav, the president and chief executive of Discovery, said Mr. Obama’s words about science education inspired Discovery to come up with the idea of two hours of programming, a mix of old and new content, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays on the Science Channel. The idea is that students coming home from school will have a ready means to learn more science.

“We took that to the administration,” Mr. Zaslav said. “They loved it.”

The lack of commercials is “a big statement by us that it’s not about the money,” he said. “It’s about reinforcing the importance of science to kids and inspiring them.”

The programming is to begin next year; the date has not been set yet.

The foundation of Jack D. Hidary, an entrepreneur who earned his fortune in finance and technology, worked with the National Science Teachers Association, the MacArthur Foundation and the American Chemical Society to create a Web site, nationallabday.org, that matches scientists willing to volunteer their time and teachers describing what projects they hope to incorporate into their classes.

For example, Mr. Hidary said, a project could involve students’ recording of birdsongs and comparing them with others from elsewhere. “That’s actually scientifically useful,” he said. “Kids can actually perform useful science.”

The projects are to culminate in National Lab Day, which schools will hold the first week of May, but the projects will typically spread over several months. Mr. Hidary said students learn better with hands-on inquiries.

“We are not about one-offs,” he said. “We’re not looking for bringing in a scientist for a day.”

After the chemical society joined the effort, other scientific organizations also signed on, Mr. Hidary said, adding, “Each one is coming, upping the ante.”

For the video game challenge, the idea is to piggyback on the interest children already have in playing the games. “That’s where they are,” said Michael D. Gallagher, chief executive of the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group and one of the sponsors. “This initiative is a recognition of that.”

Sony is expected to donate 1,000 PlayStation 3 game consoles and copies of the game LittleBigPlanet to libraries and community organizations in low-income areas. Part of the competition will consist of children creating new levels in LittleBigPlanet that incorporate science and math. The other part will offer a total of $300,000 in prize money to game designers for science and math games that will be distributed free.

“We’re finding extraordinary engagement with games,” said Connie Yowell, director of education for MacArthur. If the engagement is combined with a science curriculum, she said, “then I think we have a very powerful approach.”

Some of the initiatives were already in the works and would have been rolled out regardless of the administration’s campaign. “Sesame Street” already planned to incorporate nature into this year’s season, but has now decided to add discussions of the scientific method in next year’s episodes.

“We’ve really never kind of approached it that way before,” said Gary E. Knell, president and chief executive of the Sesame Workshop.

Time Warner Cable had already decided to devote 80 percent of its philanthropy efforts to science and math education before Mr. Obama’s speech in April. But the company adjusted its project to fit in with the others.

“Being part of a bigger effort,” said Glenn A. Britt, the chief executive, “increases the chances that the effort will be successful.”

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U.S. Posts Third Coolest-Highest Precipitation for October on Record

The October 2009 average temperature for the contiguous United States was the third coolest on record for that month according to NOAA’s State of the Climate report issued today. Based on data going back to 1895, the monthly National Climatic Data Center analysis is part of the suite of climate services provided by NOAA.

The average October temperature of 50.8 degrees F was 4.0 degrees F below the 20th Century average. Preliminary data also reveals this was the wettest October on record with average precipitation across the contiguous United States reaching 4.15 inches, 2.04 inches above the 1901-2000 average.

U.S. Temperature Highlights

U.S. Precipitation Highlights

Other Highlights

NCDC’s preliminary reports, which assess the current state of the climate, are released soon after the end of each month. These analyses are based on preliminary data, which are subject to revision. Additional quality control is applied to the data when late reports are received several weeks after the end of the month and as increased scientific methods improve NCDC’s processing algorithms.

Scientists, researchers, and leaders in government and industry use NCDC’s monthly reports to help track trends and other changes in the world's climate. The data have a wide range of practical uses, from helping farmers know what to plant, to guiding resource managers with critical decisions about water, energy and other vital assets.

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NSF Dedicates Athena Supercomputer to Climate Research

Thanks to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute for Computational Sciences's (NICS's) Athena supercomputer is hosting one of the largest climate simulations in history.

"It is our goal to produce quantitative, transparent and accessible scientific knowledge to address climate change consequences, mitigation actions, and the needs for future societal adaptation," said Thomas Zacharia, deputy director for science and technology at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a professor and PI of the NICS project at UT Knoxville. "We established the Oak Ridge Climate Change Science Institute (ORCCSI) as a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary climate change research partnerships at ORNL that integrates scientific projects in modeling, observations, and experimentation with the powerful computational and informatics capabilities to answer some of the most pressing global change science questions."

Athena, the 166-teraflop Cray XT4 system which is four times as powerful as the Earth Simulator, is being utilized in a dedicated mode in an attempt to resolve the role of clouds in climate variability and change.

The effort is the result of a partnership of climate research organizations from the United States [NICS, ORCCSI, Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA)], Europe [European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)], and Japan [the University of Tokyo and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)] and funded by the National Science Foundation.

"The ultimate goal of these simulations is to explore the possibility of revolutionizing climate and weather prediction, taking advantage of a large computing resource," said Principal Investigator and COLA Director Jim Kinter. The project has been allocated the entire Athena system for at least three months, beginning its work on Oct. 1.

"Using Athena's computational might to more fully understand the interaction between the earth's weather, its land and its oceans, is a step in the right direction to addressing the vexing issues associated with climate change," said Tim Killeen, NSF's assistant director for Geosciences. "We applaud the University of Tennessee for leveraging these resources and taking leadership in this international collaboration."

According to Kinter, clouds were too complex to accurately include as a part of the global climate system in past climate models. They were treated in bulk and their behavior was largely estimated using fairly crude approximations. These approximations are the primary restraint preventing climate models from evolving from good to great, said Kinter.

Two suites of simulations, one using the ECMWF's operational weather prediction code and the other using the University of Tokyo's NICAM, a code that represents global atmosphere (which contains clouds) and a thin layer of upper ocean at "cloud system resolving scales," will be run to test one hypothesis: Approximate clouds in a climate model negatively influence the accuracy of the model--explicit clouds will enhance the accuracy. This is the first time the NICAM code has been run in production outside of the Earth Simulator.

However, resolving cloud systems means refining models to unprecedented resolutions, in this case as small as 7 kilometers. For comparison, the current model used by the United States' National Weather Service uses a grid spacing of 35 kilometers. If these scales are successfully resolved, these simulations could lead to more realistic precipitation forecasting, enhancing seasonal-scale numerical weather forecasts and more accurately simulating changes in the distribution and intensity of extremes of precipitation and tropical cyclones associated with climate projection.

In order to achieve such fine resolution, however, researchers need a big machine. "Athena makes this possible," said Kinter, adding that a dedicated, leading-edge system enables the testing of such a computationally intensive hypothesis.

"The dedicated use of Athena by a single group solving a time critical problem of societal significance is an important direction for high performance computing, and we are pleased to work with Jim Kinter and his group on this. Athena certainly represents the extraordinary strength and success of the partnership between UT and ORNL to advance scientific discovery at unprecedented scale," said Phil Andrews, NICS Project Director.

About NICS

NICS is managed by the University of Tennessee (UT) and is the result of a National Science Foundation Track 2 award of $65 million to UT to provide for next-generation high-performance computing (HPC). NICS is also home to Kraken, the world's third-fastest supercomputer and the first academic petaflop. Kraken is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world's most powerful computing complex.

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Desperate climate times call for oddball measures
By Henry Chu
LA Times

Reporting from London - If there were some kind of panic button to stop global warming, what would it look like?

How about billions of tiny mirrors, launched into orbit to deflect solar rays away from Earth? Or big, fluffy clouds, artificially whitened so they reflect more sunlight back into space? Or maybe mechanical trees, ugly but effective at sucking carbon dioxide from the air along busy highways?

Outlandish as some of these proposals may seem, scientists and engineers are paying increasing attention to such ideas amid mounting evidence that human-caused climate change is wreaking havoc in some parts of the world.

The proposals belong to a field known as geo-engineering, or manipulation of the environment on a grand scale.

As a solution to global warming, it remains a highly controversial concept, dismissed as a dangerous distraction by critics or embraced as a quick, if temporary, fix by enthusiasts such as the authors of the bestselling book "Freakonomics."

Regardless, decision-makers are beginning to take notice. The U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology held its first hearing on the topic this month.

"It's too soon to think about actually doing any of these things, but it's the right time for some serious research and for some funding from the government," said John Shepherd, a professor of Earth science at the University of Southampton in southern England, who testified at the hearing.

Shepherd is a member of the prestigious Royal Society, a fellowship of scientists that released a highly publicized report in September identifying various geo-engineering solutions and assessing their feasibility.

The ideas usually fall into either of two categories. In one, the goal is to decrease the amount of sunshine hitting and warming Earth -- one eye-popping proposal calls for unfurling a space-based gigantic shade made of a super-thin mesh of aluminum threads. A more reasonable and promising alternative, according to the Royal Society, would be to spray sulfate aerosols into clouds to make them brighter, whiter and therefore more reflective.

The other type of idea calls for removing carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, whether by trapping and storing it via artificial trees or converting it to something else -- for example, tapping the ability of the oceans' algae to convert CO2 into oxygen through photosynthesis.

In general, the "solar radiation management" techniques would offer quick, emergency relief from rising temperatures, a dose of cosmic aspirin to bring down Earth's fever. The carbon-capture methods, though taking longer to be effective, would get at the cause of the infection.

But Shepherd, along with virtually all scientists, engineers and other experts here, emphasizes that none of these solutions is a substitute for the paramount task of getting people, and countries, to slash their carbon emissions.

That's why, at next month's global summit in Denmark on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he hopes that policymakers don't pay too much attention to a talk he's scheduled to give on geo-engineering ideas.

"Geo-engineering is not a magic bullet, and it's not a viable alternative to carbon reduction," Shepherd said. "I hope that this is not going to be any serious component of the discussions in Copenhagen, because it would be premature for any of it to be taken into account."

Many of the ideas are "still at the back-of-the-envelope stage," he said, and the technologies some would require are years, if not decades, away. For instance, no one knows yet how to catapult 1 million tiny mirrors into space every minute for 30 years.

Critics worry that too much focus on geo-engineering will divert attention and resources from the immediate need to reduce carbon footprints, or could cause people to become complacent.

"A lot of this is just pie-in-the-sky compared to the clear and obvious things and most cost-effective things that we can be doing straightaway," said Doug Parr, a spokesman for the environmental organization Greenpeace.

In addition to the unproven technologies, he said, there are side effects that could be just as harmful to the environment as climate change. One proposal, pouring iron into the ocean to stimulate the growth of CO2-gobbling algae, would significantly alter the marine ecosystem. Spraying aerosol into clouds would set back the healing of the ozone layer.

This raises questions of ethics and international governance. Who gets to decide which techniques are used and at what cost? What happens if a U.S.-driven solution creates new problems for people in Asia, or vice versa?

"For example, the sulfate aerosols: The consequence of that would almost certainly be to affect rainfall patterns, and when you affect rainfall patterns, there are going to be winners and losers," Parr said. "How do the losers feel about these experiments?"

The aerosol method also comes saddled with the same problem as other sunlight-repelling proposals: the need for constant maintenance and replenishing. Moreover, if anything went wrong or maintenance stopped for any reason, all the effects of the pent-up greenhouse gases would come barreling back and Earth would quickly heat up, just as a fever returns when aspirin is taken away.

"The CO2 is still in the atmosphere, and you've got to deal with that," said Nem Vaughan, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in eastern England, which has launched an initiative specifically to study and evaluate geo-engineering.

Many experts prefer the carbon-removal idea, which attacks the source of the disease, not just the symptoms.

At its august headquarters just a stone's throw from Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Britain's Institution of Mechanical Engineers conducted its own study of various geo-engineering ideas and concluded this summer that artificial trees were the best bet.

Scientists have already developed models for mechanical trees that would trap carbon dioxide from the air for removal and storage later, perhaps in hollow seams deep underground. Though dubbed "trees," suggested models more resemble upright fly swatters or roadside cabins than actual trees.

Tim Fox, head of the institution's environment and climate-change section, estimates that 100,000 "trees," at a cost of $20,000 each, could in theory scrub Britain clean of a significant portion of its carbon emissions.

"It's very plausible. It just needs financial backing and the will to do it," Fox said.

His organization also recommends using algae on buildings to absorb carbon. Artists' impressions, perhaps rather fancifully, imagine big office towers in London ribbed with long tubes full of algae, giving "green design" a whole new meaning.

Critics of these geo-engineering proposals are unconvinced.

"Why are we speculating about whether we can construct concrete trees that may or may not effectively capture carbon from the atmosphere when we've got people's homes which aren't properly insulated? That's absurd," Parr said.

Fox insists that such measures are feasible. His institution and the Royal Society contend that governments should dedicate a small portion of funding for climate-change research to geo-engineering; at the moment, scientists have been working on such ideas at their universities or "in their spare time," Shepherd said.

Fox emphasizes that geo-engineering proposals form only part of the solution, a way to buy the planet some time while people and nations wrestle their carbon emissions under control, which they so far have not had much success in doing.

"The reality is we don't have enough time left available to us," he said.

"Rather than get halfway down the track and give up because we're exhausted from the challenge and demoralized from losing the battle, why don't we use all the tools at hand better?"

henry.chu@latimes.com

One in a series of occasional articles about the effects of climate change on people's lives around the world.

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NASA Assessing New Roles for Ailing QuikScat Satellite
Alan Buis. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

NASA mission managers are assessing options for future operations of the venerable QuikScat satellite following the age-related failure of a mechanism that spins the scatterometer antenna. This spinning antenna had been providing near-real-time ocean- surface wind speed and direction data over 90 percent of the global ocean every day.

In recent months, the QuikScat project team has been monitoring a pattern of increasing friction in the bearings that allow the antenna to spin, leading to increased resistance and strain on the motor that turns QuikScat's rotating antenna. This degradation was fully expected, as the spin mechanism was designed to last about 5 years.

After experiencing further difficulties over the weekend, the antenna stopped spinning early today, Nov. 23. The QuikScat spacecraft and scatterometer instrument themselves remain in otherwise good health. Should engineers be unable to restart the antenna, QuikScat will be unable to continue its primary science mission, as the antenna spin is necessary to estimate wind speed and direction and form the wide data swath necessary to obtain nearly global sampling.

Over the coming days, NASA managers will review contingency plans for restarting the antenna and assess options for using the mission in its present degraded state to advance Earth system science in the event the antenna cannot be restarted. For example, degraded scatterometer measurements from QuikScat can still be useful for cross-calibrating the mission's climate data record with measurements from other scatterometers, including the operational EUMETSAT ASCAT instrument, India's recently launched Oceansat-2 and a planned Chinese scatterometer. Specific operational forecasting applications such as polar ice measurements and limited hurricane observations may also be supportable.

By any measure of success, the 10-year-old QuikScat mission is a unique national resource that has achieved and far surpassed its science objectives. Designed for a two-year lifetime, QuikScat has been used around the globe by the world's operational meteorological agencies to improve weather forecasts and identify the location, size and strength of hurricanes and other storms in the open ocean. The mission has also provided critical information for monitoring, modeling, forecasting and researching our atmosphere, ocean and climate.

The tremendous success of QuikScat led the National Research Council, in its 2007 decadal survey report for Earth science, to recommend that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration develop an operational version of QuikScat, called the Extended Ocean Vector Winds Mission (XOVWM).

More information on QuikScat is online at: http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index.cfm.

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When it Comes to CO2, What Goes Up Isn’t Always Coming Down

The ocean and the land are natural sponges, or sinks, that absorb carbon dioxide, or CO2, from the atmosphere. But a group of international scientists, including two from NOAA, have found that the emissions are outpacing the ability of the sinks to soak up the excess CO2.

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Battle over the future of NASA hits home

On Oct. 22, the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee (commonly referred to as the Augustine Committee) issued its final report, "Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation." The release of this report marks the firing of the starting gun for a political battle over the future of NASA that will last through the coming second session of the 111th Congress. One can think of NASA as an agency with three missions: human space exploration, science (both space and Earth science) and aeronautics. The Augustine Committee report only examined the human space exploration mission and had no input on the other two missions. This is unfortunate because, in my view, these other two missions provide at least as much value to the nation as human exploration. While the intense political battle over NASA's human exploration mission unfolds, there is the danger that the two other missions will serve as pawns. Hampton Roads' NASA Langley Research Center will be caught up in this pawn's role, as it specializes in Earth science and aeronautics and has only a support role in the development phase of human exploration hardware.

In 2004, in the wake of the Columbia space shuttle tragedy, President George W. Bush announced a bold new set of goals for NASA that came to be known as the "Vision for Space Exploration." This vision set the goal to return man to the moon by 2020 and from there move on to Mars and beyond. The Constellation Program that enables the vision was designed as a pay-as-you-go plan that paid for new rockets and space vehicles with the savings from retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 along with a modest increase in NASA's budget. This modest increase only lasted one year, however, and by 2009 it was clear that the program was behind schedule and over budget. That is why President Barack Obama initiated the Augustine Committee this summer.

The committee's report enumerates stark choices for the nation's human exploration program. To send astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit to the moon or elsewhere would require an additional $3 billion per year in NASA's budget, adjusted for inflation each year. Without this extra cash, NASA could continue operations in low-Earth orbit if it canceled its new human launch system, ARES I rocket and Orion crew vehicle, and relied on commercial launch for cargo and humans. In this scenario, the space station could have its mission extended from 2016 to 2020. Augustine also "urged the White House to give the NASA administrator the authority to run the agency the way a CEO runs a company, with authority to downsize parts of the agency that aren't critical to the exploration strategy." Without the extra $3 billion NASA would lose thousands of jobs along the space coast from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to Houston, and the implications to Langley are totally unknown. All this in a recessionary economy with massive federal budget deficits.

So, the battle lines are drawn. Congressional delegations from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas are already fighting for the $3 billion or, failing that, some compromise that saves jobs in their states at the expense of other NASA programs and installations. These delegations have membership on key congressional committees that appropriate NASA's funds. While Langley's major roles in NASA are in those parts of the agency "that aren't critical to the exploration strategy," Virginia's congressional delegation is not well positioned in this fight as it has no membership on NASA appropriating committees. Langley is indeed a pawn in the battle.

What's at stake for Hampton Roads? NASA Langley is a high-tech laboratory with more than 3,500 civil-service and contractor jobs, many of which are high-paying technical and managerial positions, and an annual budget of $700 million. This translates into an annual economic impact on Hampton Roads of $900 million and 10,000 jobs. Losing Langley would have an impact at least as great as losing an aircraft carrier, so it is critical that Hampton Roads leadership and the Virginia congressional delegation engage fully in the battle over the future of NASA.

Dwoyer is a former assistant director at NASA Langley Research Center.

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Teach your kids how to save the planet and win 1st place at the next science fair!
 

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NASA and Microsoft Allow Earthlings to Become Martians

The Mars Exploration Program is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. To enroll as a virtual Martian citizen and start exploring, visit: http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov

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