Unabashed

Models are now suggesting a cooling phase of the Earth’s environment, something I’ve been suggesting was bound to happen for a while now. It’s interesting, though, having heard the warming mantra being chanted for years now, with no talk of even the possibility of cooling, to read quotes of scientists saying:

We’ve always known that the climate varies naturally from year to year and decade to decade.

Really. Now I know that the primary chanters are representatives of media outlets who get a fat pat on the back from their bosses any time they successfully effectuate a worldwide panic, but I’ve done a lot of digging and reading about global warming in the past few years and I haven’t even sniffed at an authentic scientific opinion that the warming trend would so much as slow down until the surface of Earth resembles that of Venus and the human race is dead and gone. I’ve seen a lot of speculation about what might be done to fix it, but nothing that would suggest anything other than permanence.

You might say, “But they’re scientists, they take it for granted that the climate will fluctuate.” Sure, but why didn’t they point that out during any one of the kajillion interviews we’ve seen? Why didn’t one of them say: “the warming trend might not be permanent” or “it’s possible that a cooling trend might interrupt global warming briefly” if that’s the case? Or maybe they did, but the media outlet conducting the interview omitted that line in favor of touching off the beloved ratings-inducing panic. That’s not the Gross Scientific Failure I’m referring to in the title of this post, that’s just an irritating habit of the media (gotta love that widespread panic!). But if we read this article carefully, it also might be thought of as a collective effort of the scientific community to convince our policymakers to change their policies:

In the long term, radiative forcing (the Earth’s energy balance) dominates. But it’s important for policymakers to realise the pattern.

Reading the commentary in this article makes me seethe, though when I first saw the headline I thought I was about to read a rather self-affirming article that might clear up some of the questions I’ve been asking. Well, I’ll give them props for their carefully-crafted comments, because it’s very clear that all they’re wanting to do is keep the worlds’ eyes on the global warming ball. Essentially, that’s a good idea though, if global warming does end up being the scourge they predict it will be. But me, I’m still not convinced, even with all the scientists in the world chanting in tune with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie: “Global WARming, global WARming, global WAR-MING, global war…” As I’ve said before, all this global warming doom and gloom could have been cleared up a long time ago if, rather than a War on Drugs, the U.S. government had instituted a War on Pollution. And even then, folks, we might still be trying to figure out why the climate has been changing (answer: because it does). Which brings me to the Gross Scientific Failure bit:

For the record: I’m not saying global warming won’t have disastrous, long-term effects. I’m only saying that we little folk aren’t seeing the entire picture. The summers have been hotter, the weather more violent, and it’s really easy to accredit all that to global warming. And I can even commend them on one point, they who preach the global warming sermon with the intent of staunching the flow of garbage into our atmosphere (I like to breathe. They tell me that’s harder to do now than it was a few hundred years ago). If only it was more effective. But it seems to me that the scientists aren’t seeing the entire picture, either:

Modelling of climatic events in the oceans is difficult, simply because there is relatively little data on some of the key processes, such as the meridional overturning circulation (MOC) - sometimes erroneously known as the Gulf Stream - which carries heat northwards in the Atlantic.

Only within the last few years have researchers begun systematically deploying mobile floats and tethered buoys that will, in time, tell us how this circulation is changing.

So. There aren’t any deep-water monitoring stations in the Atlantic. To which I ask the question: “Why the hell don’t we have any deep-water monitoring stations in the Atlantic?” We’ve got a rover on Mars for cripe’s sake. We’re collecting close-up data of Venus and Saturn and all the moons we can photograph, but we don’t track the mood of the single largest environmental aggressor on our own home planet? WTF? It seems to me that the oceans impact the global climate in a way that is only exceeded by the sun itself. Billions of tons of freezing water is pouring into the oceans by melting polar ice caps and glaciers, causing ocean temperatures to drop dramatically, but the only method we have to model climate change is based on atmospheric calculations. This may well be the day that it all turned, and the threat of global warming becomes the potentially equally disastrous global cooling (which is sometimes called an ice age).

Whenever I write about something that has magnificent (or at least significant) technological promise, I often end the post with the comment: “The Singularity is near,” referring to the idea that at some point in our future the worldwide culture will fundamentally change in an alarmingly rapid fashion due to technological advancements. But when I read articles like the one linked up in this post, it makes me think that the Singularity is very, very far away, or, worse, that the Singularity won’t be affected by technological advancements, but by the world’s climate, an ecological nightmare.

This is gross scientific failure on a gargantuan scale. Correct me if I’m wrong.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: cooling, global, Ice Age, ocean, temperature, warming

I’ve expressed my displeasure of the current solar market before. Now the folks at MIT are pledging to revolutionize the technology for the very near future. For me, this is both great news, and not so great news. Supposing MIT is successful and in a few years announces a breakthrough in solar power, making it–as promised–abundant and affordable, the burning of fossil fuels, and potentially even nuclear power, will quickly go bust. That’s a lot of jobs going away, worldwide, including, potentially, mine (Though I’m not in the power generation business myself, the company I work for is owned by a Fortune 500 energy corporation.

On the other hand, it would mean that mankind’s carbon footprint would, what, half? It would shrink astronomically, regardless. And let’s face it, if we all had our own power generation resource, we would be more independent (to me that’s a good thing). If my power went out due to a storm, I’d have the materials and skill to get myself back online and wouldn’t have to wait for the power company to get to my street. Sure, I might still be down for a few days, but I’d have something to keep me busy, right?

So what will our lives be like in 20 years? Speculating that MIT’s pledge is a smashing success and cheap, renewable power is available worldwide, the world will change. Everything will change. Our lives, for better or poorer, will change. This could be the foundation for what will become the Singularity, the dawning of a new civilization. Things are happening rapidly, hold on!

Now I think of it, maybe energy companies need to think about getting into the solar panel installation market. It seems like it would be a conflict of interests, but if solar really becomes the Next Big Thing, they’re going to need something to fall back on, quickly.

Photo from Flickr.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: , electricity, Energy, grid, MIT, power, renewable, solar, sun

Titan is cool. Cassini is due to photograph the moon in the next few weeks, and I fully anticipate–in fact, I’m going to go ahead and predict–that NASA will find proof of life on Titan. Why am I so confident? Because exploration of our solar system has never had as much active effort as it does right now. Because Titan has an utterly alien environment–but it’s an environment, with rain and cryovolcanoes, hydrocarbon lakes, mountain ranges… it has potential for water, and it has a stable atmosphere. And, besides that, it would be so freaking cool. But…You wouldn’t want to live there. Forget the fact that it’s cold and that the atmosphere isn’t breathable for humans, focus instead on the fact that the smell of fart would probably pervade every waking moment of your life. Still, whatever life they do wind up finding won’t be able to breathe our atmosphere, and who knows, maybe their farts will smell like our air.

Any way, don’t be surprised when, after a couple of months or years of analyzing the data, NASA announces irrefutable evidence of life on Titan.

The Singularity is near.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Life, NASA, Saturn, Titan

Yes, the ubiquitous “they” are about to open up a black hole in France which will devour the Earth and possibly the entire solar system. Global warming doesn’t quite seem so bad now, does it? Seriously, the LHC is a pure geek thrill for those of us who love discovery and exploration. Because it is exploring; the LHC is exploring the micro-multi-uni-verse, in hopes of bringing us closer to some of the fundamental reasons for life, the universe, and everything.

In some ways the LHC is the equivalent of Deep Thought, the computer Douglas Adams created for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that was tasked with answering that same question–of life, the universe, and everything. Or, if you keep up with your science news, the answer has already been discovered–A.K.A. the “God Particle“–in which case the LHC would actually be the descendent of Deep Thought, which, you’ll know, turned out to be Planet Earth. Earth was designed to provide the actual question itself–the question of life, the universe, and everything.

When activated, it is hoped that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson — often dubbed the God Particle — the observation of which could confirm the predictions and ‘missing links’ in the Standard Model of physics, and explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory which seeks to unify three of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why the remaining force, gravitation, is so weak compared to the other three forces.

If the God Particle is the answer, then the LHC is intended to provide the proof of concept, at least, along with a few million other questions, including: 

• Are there other dimensions?
• What is Dark Matter?
• What is Dark Energy?
• Why is the universe expanding?
• What did the universe look like immediately after the Big Bang?
• I haven’t read about this any where, but I have to wonder if the LHC will be able to give us a proof of concept for fusion…
• Will a fabricated black hole suck me into it and what will it feel like to be spaghettificated?

And to surf through the billions of terabytes of data the LHC is going to churn out? (Yes, this just keeps getting better and better…) Well, they’ve built a new, better internet and called it “the Grid.”

The Grid will not only enable sharing of documents and MP3 files, but also connect PCs with sensors, telescopes and tidal-wave simulators …  focusing on a project in which resources from Pan-European research institutions will analyze data generated by a new particle collider being built at Swiss particle-physics lab CERN

And amidst all this clarifying chaos, I will only add that the Singularity is near.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: , Accelerator, CERN, collider, god particle, grid, hadron, higgs boson, LHC, Particle, Singularity, spaghettification, the grid

In response to my earlier post about Global Warming, commenter JohnnyB pointed out the obvious:

Gotta consider that the ocean is very big and very deep. The temp near the bottom of the ocean is near freezing without the help of melting ice, so there would be no net change.

In fact, Johnny, I have considered that fact, but we’re only talking about a couple of degrees of water temp which can have a tremendous impact on the world climate. And this is exactly why I asked the question in that previous post: What if climate change–Global Warming–is in fact cooling the world’s oceans by dumping massive amounts of glacial melt water into the mix? So I did a little more digging, via Google, and came up with an NPR article in which a NASA scientist who monitors ocean temperatures worldwide is confused by the fact that the oceans’ temperatures have dropped over the last five years.

“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says.

What really astounds me is that, while the article briefly speculates as to where the heat is going (out into space is one theory) nobody even considers the really obvious possibility (to me, at least): that the oceans are rising due to an influx of glacial melt water and are cooling as a result. How can that be missed, or, if it hasn’t been missed, why doesn’t any one speculate about it or even offer to debunk the theory? Are we so focused on the warming aspect of climate change that we’re totally missing the possibility that Global Warming could actually eventually result in Global Cooling?

In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it’s also possible that something more mysterious is going on.

Something mysterious indeed. He even points out that the half-inch ocean level increase can be accredited to melt water:

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

Basically, the entire article lends credence to my theory without ever speculating about it. Billions of gallons of glacial melt water floods into the ocean and–mysteriously–the ocean mean temperature cools. Stay tuned.  

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: climate, climate change, global cooling, global warming, Ice Age

Just out of curiosity, and because I’ve got RSS feeds for any headlines concerning global warming and ice age: I see plenty of science-industry panic over global warming, but nobody seems to consider the idea that the warming trend could actually result in an ice age. It might seem counter intuitive (and it may well be, since I’m the only one thinking it), but I can visualize a scenario where it’s not only possible, but probable.

Consider this: the global climate is determined by the temperature of the oceans. Global warming is triggering a worldwide thaw of glacial ice, as well as the ice shelf of Antarctica. With all that melt water blending in with seawater, and bearing in mind that melt water is very, very cold, isn’t it conceivable that the temperature of the oceans will drop? And if the oceans’ temperatures drop, the temperature of the air will drop, too. And on the topic of rising sea levels, well, that seems to set up the scenario for an impending ice age as well, because there will be a lot of water freed up to freeze into new glaciers.

This is not some doomsday prophesy, and I’m not suggesting that there’s any conspiracy, I’m just asking a simple question because I’m no scientist but this idea seems really plausible to me.

written by Matt Mitchell

Has anyone seen this? Evidently, we are all living under an ocean of air.

Alone, alone, all, all alone
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
~Rime of the Ancient Mariner

written by Matt Mitchell

Organic molecules – in the form of methane – have been detected on a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The giant planet lies too close to its parent star for the methane to signal life, but the detection offers hope that astronomers will one day be able to analyse the atmospheres of Earth-like worlds.

The authors suggest that some ill-understood chemical process might be responsible, either concentrating the methane in cooler parts of the atmosphere, or generating extra methane directly. Alternatively, the methane might simply mean that the planet happens to be very rich in carbon, Seager says.

This combination of water and organic molecules would be a promising one for life if it were found in a less hostile spot than the atmosphere of a searing gas giant.

Eventually, astronomers hope to be able to analyse the atmospheres of smaller planets more akin to the Earth, and the new study is a big step in that direction, says Seager. “The path that we’re on is towards rocky planets,” she told New Scientist. “I’m really excited about this.”

Comment: I love how they essentially rule out the possibility of life on this planet, assuming that for life to exist planetary conditions would have to fit into the Earth pattern. In a few more years, this headline will change to: Giant firebeasts discovered on planet HD189733b, now formally known as Hell.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: alien life, extra-terrestrial

Found via Warren Ellis.

Cornell University researchers have succeeded in implanting electronic circuit probes into tobacco hornworms as early pupae. The hornworms pass through the chrysalis stage to mature into long-lived moths whose muscles can be controlled with the implanted electronics.

So, they’ve invented a cybug. How long before I get my antenna implant? Anybody read any Kurt Vonnegut lately, like The Sirens of Titan? I’m just saying. I can see it now: I come home one day to find a tobacco hornworm moth in my chair, smoking cigarettes, trying to convince me that they’re really not that bad for me after all. He will be successful, of course, because I cannot and will not argue with a bug, even if they are cybernetically stronger and faster and smarter than me. It’s a matter of principle. After he convinces me to buy a carton of Marlboros we’ll hang out smoking while Dr. Screws comes to give me my antenna implant.

written by Matt Mitchell

Last night I watched a special on Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and the inability of science to see it, even though they know it’s there. Watching that show made me think of the Force in the Star Wars films, and at times made me think that sometimes the scientists were, in a way, looking for God.

Dark Matter is the force that binds the universe together (I’ve written about it before), and Dark Energy is the force that drives it apart. Science believes these Dark Forces (”dark” in this context, meaning without light, not evil) have been in existence since the Big Bang, and believe that Dark Matter began binding matter together to form galaxies, stars and planets some 5 billion years later. Some time after that, Dark Energy began the process of forcing everything away from one another, so that now we are hurtling through space toward the nothing.

Science is racing to capture a Dark Matter particle. Once they do, what will they find? And what if they find a way to tap into it, what if they find that it has something to say? Of course everything with me is fodder for fiction, and I can’t help but think it would be a great story if someone wrote that.

Furthermore, if Dark Energy is the force that is causing everything to expand, where is the center? From where are we hurtling from? Wouldn’t there have to be a centralized location for the expansion? And if so, what resides there?

The infinite has always been one of those things that’s fascinated me. It’s one of those things that I can’t really wrap my mind around. But then, I also believe that the framework of our minds isn’t capable of realizing the infinite. I’ve tried to contemplate it, and whenever I spent any amount of time meditating on it I could actually feel reality slip around me. I could feel my mind lose its footing. Space, as an entity, being infinite, is the biggest conundrum there is. Especially when you consider that our entire galaxy could be an infinitesimal atom, integral in the construct of something else entirely, and that something else could also be a simple atom, and so on and so on, to the infinite. That story’s been done before, but it’s still an amazing thought, for me.

And what if Dark Energy is sentient? Suppose when we do find a way to tap into it we find that it is the God we’ve always been searching for? I imagine, in a very Douglas Adams frame of mind, that its first words will be something like, “Boy, you guys are in trouble.”

What do you think the binding force of the universe might say to us?

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Dark, Energy, Ether, Force, God, Matter, Star, Wars

What is the Dark Matter that exists between the visible patches of space? We can't see it, and we (so far) can't prove it exists; but we've theorized its existence and we think we know what's there: beer foam. Dark Matter is a wonderfully wicked-sounding word that describes the mysterious murk of the universe.

I think it's best if we start at the beginning: “Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.” ~Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.”

Despite the assertions of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, astronomers know of no Restaurant at the End of the Universe. However, there is a very nice Bar at the Center of the Galaxy.

Scientists call this unseen mass “Dark Matter.” The Majewski team plans to sniff it out by observing its gravitational effect on stars within the Milky Way disk and on groups of stars that orbit the disk.

There are possibly entire solar systems and globlular clusters in orbit around the Milky Way that are entirely composed of Dark Matter. In fact, there may be a full third of our own Milky Way composed of the stuff. Right under our noses, but invisible to our detection. (Anybody remember Buckaroo Banzai?)

Also: “The fabric of space-time is thought to be “foamy” rather than smooth, and soon the largest telescopes could look for signs of that foam.

Mmmmm; galactic quantum beer foam.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: dark matter, douglas adams