Talking about the Arctic Ice

Ice loss shifts Arctic cycles : Nature News

 A good article here about the loss of Arctic ice.  The uncertainties in the modelling are noted:

Computer models that simulate how the ice will respond to a warming climate project that the Arctic will be seasonally ‘ice free’ (definitions of this vary) some time between 2040 and the end of the century. But the observed downward trend in sea-ice cover suggests that summer sea ice could disappear completely as early as 2030, something that none of the models used for the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes close to forecasting¹.

“There’s a tremendous spread between observations and model projections,” says Serreze. “It might be that natural variability is larger than assumed, or perhaps models don’t get the change in ice thickness right.” Uncertainty also remains over the strength of various natural ‘feedbacks’. For example, an exposed ocean is darker than an ice-covered surface and so absorbs more solar heat, causing yet more warming and melting.

A lack of fine detail about circulation patterns in the Arctic Ocean could also be throwing off the models. For example, a survey carried out in 2008 revealed 20 formerly unobserved eddies, each some 15 to 20 kilometres in diameter, in waters north of Canada. “Whether these are new features, and what role they might play for ocean-mixing processes, we don’t know yet,” says Yves Gratton, an oceanographer and Arctic researcher at the National Institute of Scientific Research in Montreal, Canada.

 Ice loss could also accelerate if the ice pack’s underlying waters warm up. Unlike in most of the world’s oceans, the coldest water in the Arctic, at −1 °C to −2 °C, is at the surface; below a depth of 200–300 metres, saltier and warmer water of about 1 °C flows in from the Atlantic. The cold surface layer — called the halocline — isolates the sea ice from the warmer water below.

But the halocline is vulnerable to warming from above, says Henning Bauch, a marine geologist at the GEOMAR research centre in Kiel, Germany. A thinning halocline — something that has not yet been observed — would not only jeopardize the sea ice but could also melt the carbon-rich permafrost beneath shallow coastal waters², releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

 The article also notes that it may well mean a lot of snow this winter in the US or Europe.

This and that

Really interesting stuff seems a bit hard to find lately, so I'm going for a handful of moderately interesting things today:

*   Bryan Appleyard had an interview with poor old Clive James in August which I missed (being in the Sunday Times and all), but it is available via Appleyard's website.

Clive says (amongst various other health problems) that he had a complete stoppage of the waterworks.  How often does that happen to men who keep putting off prostate operations, I wonder.   Sounds extremely unpleasant, but surely you have plenty of warning?

Everyone seems to like his "Cultural Amnesia" book.   Maybe I should try it?

*  Can't say I know much about the Texas "bone wars" of the 19th century.  Physorg has an article about some historical letters which shed a bit of light on the intrigue, described as follows::

Jacobs describes the late 1800s as a period of intense fossil collecting. The Bone Wars were financed and driven by Cope and his archenemy, Othniel Charles Marsh. The two were giants of paleontology whose public feud brought the discovery of dinosaur fossils to the forefront of the American psyche.

Cope, from Philadelphia, and Marsh, from Yale University, began their scientific quests as a friendly endeavor to discover fossils. They each prospected the American frontier and also hired collectors to supply them with specimens. Cope and Marsh identified and named hundreds of discoveries, publishing their results in scientific journals. Over the course of nearly three decades, however, their competition evolved into a costly, self-destructive, vicious all-out war to see who could outdo the other. Despite their aggressive and sometimes unethical tactics to outwit one another and steal each other's hired collectors, Cope and Marsh made major contributions to the field of paleontology, Jacobs said.

 There's no doubt a book out there somewhere about this.

*   In climate change news, Murray Salby last year got some notoriety by giving a lecture to a skeptic friendly crowd (most of whom, I am sure, could not really make head nor tail of the detail of his argument) about how he had shown that CO2 had little to do with increasing temperatures.  He promised a paper was going to be published about it, but it has not appeared.  From what I can gather, a paper just published from some other scientists runs pretty much the same argument.  Real Climate looks at it and finds the obvious flaws (similar to those that had been pointed out after Salby outlined his idea last year.)

Back to the drawing board, skeptics.

*  The transparently misleading spin put on climate change by The Australian continues, with a subheading to a report about Kurt Lambeck winning a prize for his work in the field as follows:

CLIMATE change moves at a glacial pace, according to an Australian researcher whose work has been recognised with one of the world's richest science prizes.

 Given that Lambeck has had opinion pieces saying things like this:

The independent messages from the four academies and the geological society are consistent and urgent....

Recognising that the consequences of climate change are potentially global, serious and irreversible on human time scales, the Australian Academy of Science has published such an assessment, The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers.

I expect he might be a tad annoyed at the spin put on his cautious words about uncertainties regarding the future rate of sea level rises.

Krugman notes

Paul Krugman has a nice, clear writing style, doesn't he?   I note this passage today regarding Republicans not making sense:

Right now Mitt Romney has an advertising blitz under way in which he attacks Mr. Obama for possible cuts in defense spending — cuts, by the way, that were mandated by an agreement forced on the president by House Republicans last year. And why is Mr. Romney denouncing these cuts? Because, he says, they would cost jobs! 

This is classic “weaponized Keynesianism” — the claim that government spending can’t create jobs unless the money goes to defense contractors, in which case it’s the lifeblood of the economy. And no, it doesn’t make any sense.

What about the argument, which I hear all the time, that Mr. Obama should have fixed the economy long ago? The claim goes like this: during his first two years in office Mr. Obama had a majority in Congress that would have let him do anything he wanted, so he’s had his chance.

The short answer is, you’ve got to be kidding.

As anyone who was paying attention knows, the period during which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was marked by unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate. The filibuster, formerly a tactic reserved for rare occasions, became standard operating procedure; in practice, it became impossible to pass anything without 60 votes. And Democrats had those 60 votes for only a few months. Should they have tried to push through a major new economic program during that narrow window? In retrospect, yes — but that doesn’t change the reality that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S. fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by Republican stonewalling.

It's all connected

Climate extremes and climate change: The Russian heat wave and other climate extremes of 2010

This recent paper by Trenberth and Fasullo notes the combination of ENSO and AGW led to high sea surface temperatures which led to floods and heat waves, at least in part.   The abstract provides more detail:

Natural variability, especially ENSO, and global warming from human influences together resulted in very high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in several places that played a vital role in subsequent developments. Record high SSTs in the Northern Indian Ocean in May 2010, the Gulf of Mexico in August 2010, the Caribbean in September 2010, and north of Australia in December 2010 provided a source of unusually abundant atmospheric moisture for nearby monsoon rains and flooding in Pakistan, Colombia, and Queensland. The resulting anomalous diabatic heating in the northern Indian and tropical Atlantic Oceans altered the atmospheric circulation by forcing quasi-stationary Rossby waves and altering monsoons. The anomalous monsoonal circulations had direct links to higher latitudes: from Southeast Asia to southern Russia, and from Colombia to Brazil. Strong convection in the tropical Atlantic in northern summer 2010 was associated with a Rossby wave train that extended into Europe creating anomalous cyclonic conditions over the Mediterranean area while normal anticyclonic conditions shifted downstream where they likely interacted with an anomalously strong monsoon circulation, helping to support the persistent atmospheric anticyclonic regime over Russia. This set the stage for the “blocking” anticyclone and associated Russian heat wave and wild fires.

 But nonetheless, the last line is:

Attribution is limited by shortcomings in models in replicating monsoons, teleconnections and blocking. 

The expectation is that 2013 will be hot.  It will be "interesting" to see what knock on effects it has for the climate.

Today's biology lesson - Part 2

There's been a show running on SBS on a Sunday night called Inside Nature's Giants, which involves dead animal dissection to learn about their odd biological features. 

Last night, it was the kangaroo's turn (even though I would hardly think they count as "giants"), but in any event I was reminded about the odd feature of how female kangaroos can keep an embryo in stasis in their uterus (of which they have two, as well as three vaginas) while they have a joey in the pouch. 

I was wondering how much is known about how the biology of that works, but Googling is not showing up all that much information on the topic.  Embryonic diapause has its own Wikipedia entry, but it's pretty brief.  It does show, though, that quite a lot of mammals can do this trick.

The whole topic reminded me of a later Heinlein novel, in which the heroine turns out to have been secretly carrying an embryo, at body temperature of course, in a small genetically engineered "pouch" in her navel.  I think it must have been Friday, but even that has little information on the Web.  Anyhow, I remember thinking at the time that body temperature stasis of a human embryo seemed a bit unlikely, but I don't recall if at the time I realised that there were local mammals doing this trick. 

I wonder how much biological study this has ever received.  It would be a good trick if it could be applied to human embryos, in lieu of freezing them.

Today's biology lesson - Part 1

My seminal link with manga god Osamu Tezuka | The Japan Times Online

Well, here's a strange column about the famous creator of Astroboy (there's a photo of him looking natty in a beret) and his background in science.  Previously thought to have studied medicine, it seems he might only have done a PhD in ... snail sperm.

Which leads the writer to then note his own experience in studying silkworm sperm.  It's odd:

I was looking at another species with unusual sperm: the silkworm, an insect that has been bred for more than 5,000 years in China.

They are amazing animals. They have been bred for so long by humans that they have lost the ability to reproduce on their own: They require humans to bring them together. They have also lost the ability to fly. But they still beat their wings, and when they crawl over your hand, you feel tiny gusts of wind from their wings, like mini fans directed at your skin....

And here's why I briefly studied them: Like all butterflies and moths, silkworms have two types of sperm, produced in a roughly 50:50 ratio of ones with cell nuclei containing the DNA needed to fertilize the egg, and ones containing no DNA that are therefore unable to fertilize eggs. A sperm that can't fertilize an egg! What good is that?

That's the mystery, and while there are lots of ideas — the best among them being that the dud sperm are used as some kind of soldiers to fight off the sperm from other males in order to give their DNA-carrying brothers a chance — there is no consensus on their function.

 Yes, when you raise silkworms at home, as I have done a couple of times with the kids (involving a drive every second day to a mulberry tree in a neighbouring suburb on a vacant block of land to fetch leaves), the moths that emerge look weak and pathetic as they merely flutter a bit and don't move much.   But, in fact, this is normal.  

As you were....

You say "pomodoro", I say "tomato"

For some reason, this article from May was showing as special report on the SMH site this morning.  It's actually an interesting look at why Italian canned tomatoes are so cheap in Australia, and way outsell the home grown product.

I do sometimes buy Australian cans out of sympathy for a struggling industry, and I think it is true that their quality is now equivalent to the overseas ones.

Update:  here's a review of a book all about the history of the tomato in Italy.

Hard to disagree

Two conventions, two Americas. Seldom has the divide been greater | Michael Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer

This column begins with this:

Over the past two weeks, both major American political parties held their nominating conventions – and that's pretty much where the similarities end. After interminable speeches, cloying videos and occasional moments of rhetorical eloquence, the philosophical and tonal divide between them has never felt broader. Quite simply, Democrats and Republicans operate in two completely distinct realms, one that is defined by an attachment to reality and one that is increasingly detached from it.

If their three-day convention in Tampa is any indication, Republicans reside in a fantasy world where government plays no role but that of malevolence, where the free market is the salvation to all that ails this nation and where the country is locked in a Manichaean struggle between the forces of freedom and a failed, socialist interloper named Barack Obama.

It was a point driven home to me in Tampa when I overheard a Republican delegate declare in a sweet voice, reflecting more pity than anger: "There's a communist living in the White House."

 I find it hard to disagree (with Cohen, not the nutty Republican).

The bits of the conferences that I saw are reflected pretty accurately in this part of Cohen's piece:

Moreover, a party once derided for playing interest-group politics showed no hesitancy about going down that road in Charlotte. The convention was full of obvious appeals to women, gays, blacks, Hispanics, young people and, in the constant references to the successful bailout of the US car industry, organised labour. These are the groups that form the backbone of the Democratic coalition and are essential to the party's long-term success. Democrats far better than Republicans appreciate the destiny of demographics and they have done a far more effective job of cultivating these voters. Indeed, the contrast between the hues in Charlotte and Tampa was remarkable. The Democratic party is a party that looks like the palette of the American experience, not just in skin colour, but in class level. The Republican party (the one in the Tampa convention hall) is one that looks like Sunday brunch at a country club.

 And yet, you have right wing commentators like John Hinderaker scratching their heads over why the polling between Obama and Romney is close.  It should, according to JH, be an obvious walkover for Romney.

Funny, isn't it, how it doesn't seem to occur to those currently to the forefront of the Right in America that, you know, voters might actually be smart enough to realise that Republican policies such as:

a.   at a time of serious government budget deficits, the first step should be to reduce taxes, especially for the rich;

b.  at a time when both sides of politics agree that America is right to get out of Afghanistan, and defence spending should accordingly be able to be reduced,  a permanent and substantial increase in the defence budget is the right thing to do

don't make any sense at all.

Honestly, I can't recall the Right of politics in the US ever looking as stupidly ideologically driven as it does now. 

It surely cannot go on this way.

More HH amusement

On this week's episode of Horrible Histories, the kids and I were most taken by this segment:



And that was even before I Googled it to find what it was parodying:




All very amusing...

In further defence of Obama

I see that Charles Johnson has had a series of posts called "The Myth of Obama the Socialist", which argue that he is not the "big spending socialist" that Republicans claim.

Part III, which summarise his argument, and looks specifically at the debt he inherited, is here.   Interestingly, it's full of graphs and figures, some from what people would say are "suspect" sites (such as Think Progress), but also the Cato Institute (!) and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (!!).  

Johnson,  now loathed by the Right for his abandonment of them, seems to me to make a pretty good looking case.

Googling around, I also found this column by Ezra Klein in February this year, looking at the question of the Obama deficits.  He starts:

When Obama took office, the national debt was about $10.5 trillion. Today, it’s about $15.2 trillion. Simple subtraction gets you the answer preferred by most of Obama’s opponents: $4.7 trillion.

But ask yourself: Which of Obama’s policies added $4.7 trillion to the debt? The stimulus? That was just a bit more than $800 billion. TARP? That passed under George W. Bush, and most of it has been repaid.

There is a way to tally the effects Obama has had on the deficit. Look at every piece of legislation he has signed into law. Every time Congress passes a bill, either the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the effect it will have on the budget over the next 10 years. And then they continue to estimate changes to those bills. If you know how to read their numbers, you can come up with an estimate that zeros in on the laws Obama has had a hand in.

 It turns out to be a bit of a complicated question as to who to assign responsibility to for various things that affect the deficit, but the conclusion he reaches is this (my bold):

In total, the policies Obama has signed into law can be expected to add almost a trillion dollars to deficits. But behind that total are policies that point in very different directions. The stimulus, for instance, cost more than $800 billion. So did the 2010 tax deal, which included more than $600 billion to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years, and hundreds of billions more in unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut. Obama’s first budget increased domestic discretionary spending by quite a bit, but more recent legislation has cut it substantially. On the other hand, the Budget Control Act — the legislation that resolved August’s debt-ceiling standoff — saves more than $1 trillion. And the health-care reform law saves more than $100 billion.

For comparison’s sake, using the same method, beginning in 2001 and ending in 2009, George W. Bush added more than $5 trillion to the deficit.

 My feeling that Obama has been relatively competent, as far as Presidents go, seems better justified than I realised.  

Mary and the Romans

I've been meaning to note that I quite enjoyed the 3 part doco series "Meet the Romans" on SBS the last 3 weeks.

Mary Beard wrote and hosted the series, and as I liked reading her Times columns, at least until they went behind a paywall, I was looking forward to seeing this.

That said, she did take a bit of getting used to as a host.  She was a bit repetitive, particularly in the first episode, and a bit, um, over enthusiastic at times; but by the last episode tonight I had become  accustomed to her style.

The theme of the series was to look at ancient Rome from the point of view of the day to day life of the ordinary folk:  the goings on in politics and emperors was definitely not the subject of the show.   Given that the Romans had a habit of writing their life story on their tombs, many of which are recorded or still standing, their stories are still very readily accessible.

Episodes 2 and 3 can still be viewed on line at SBS (for now), and I think large chunks of it may also be permanently on Youtube.  (This clip from tonight's episode showing a baby's cradle was touching.)

UPDATE:  soon after posting this last night, I checked my email account via which I get notice of comments left on posts, and found this:

 I'm not behind the paywall... easiest way to access is through the TLS website, totally free (glad you got to like the series) 

But it hasn't (at time of writing this) appeared in comments on the post, and I can't see why.    

In any event, thanks Mary.   Yes, her blog is here.  Silly me.

Taking plastic seriously

Catalyst: Plastic Oceans - ABC TV Science

I was quite surprised by this story on Catalyst earlier this week.  The link contains the video and transcript.

The first surprise:  that the shearwater birds that live on Lord Howe Island appear to frequently die of stomachs absolutely loaded with plastic - which they apparently mistake for fish in the ocean. 

Lord Howe Island is in the middle of the South Pacific and has a tiny population - it's about the last place you would expect serious problems from marine plastic rubbish to arise.

The second surprise:  this part of the story, where they start talking about plastics that eventually break up into tiny pieces are still a major concern for their toxic effect:

Dr Jennifer Lavers
They have what I call the invisible toxic effect. It, it's less easy to detect but equally as scary.
The plastic itself inherently contains a wide array of chemicals that are used during the manufacturing and processes. When the plastic is put out into the marine environment and it floats around in the ocean for let's say ten or forty years it really does last forever, it basically acts like a little magnet or a sponge and it takes all the contaminates that are out there in the ocean environment that are really diluted in the ocean water and it concentrates it up, onto the surface.
Plastic itself has up to a thousand times a higher concentration of containments on its surface than the surrounding seawater from which it came. And when the animal, whether it's a turtle or a seabird takes that into their body those contaminants leach out into the blood stream and is incorporated into the tissues.

NARRATION
Jennifer Lavers collects and weighs plastic from dead birds and sends the feathers off for lab analysis. They reveal what contaminants are in the body.

Dr Jennifer Lavers
The flesh footed shearwater on Lord Howe Island is officially the world's most heavily contaminated seabird just from mercury alone. So the toxic threshold that's widely regarded around the world for birds is four point three parts per million. Anything above that four point three PPM is considered toxic to the birds. Well flesh footed shearwaters on Lord Howe Island are between one thousand and three thousand parts per million.

 The story indicates that the problems with broken down plastics getting into the food chain (right from the plankton level!) is just starting to be widely recognized in research.

It's a cause for concern, by the sounds... 

Things you learn

I've just found something useful.

When you use a pc to try to watch Colbert or the Daily Show from their Comedy Central websites, you get blocked from watching the videos in Australia. You can use an overseas proxy server to get around this, I suppose, but I haven't bothered trying.

Mediate sometimes puts up some of the videos from those shows on their site, and they aren't region blocked, but they don't put up much.

I have just now learned that if you use an iPad, even just via a browser (ie, without loading the shows' apps), you can get an iPad digest version of the shows which contains videos you can watch from Australia.

It's a lot less content than from the normal website, but it's a lot more than I have been able to watch over the last year or so.

Fellow iPad users of Australia who did not realize this, you can thank me later....

A bad, bad look

Twitter Reveals an Ugly Underbelly of Misogyny | The Moderate Voice

Is it any wonder that women are leery of voting Republican?

The Clinton speech

The Bill Clinton speech at the Democrat convention is getting some rave reviews, and rightly so.

I have never thought Clinton a particularly gifted speaker, and I have quite neutral feelings about his presidency, but this speech really was something. He was articulate; gave detail where it was needed to counter Republican memes (and in particular, to summarise perfectly the problem with the Romney tax plan); and made several well deserved calls for the Right to come back to the centre for the good of the nation.

Former Bush aide Matt Latimer, clearly no fan of Clinton's style, still reached this conclusion, with which I thoroughly agree:

Here’s why I think Bill Clinton’s speech was successful. For all of his tortured arguments and wonky, ponderous asides, Bill Clinton made a substantive case. He dealt with facts and statistics. He made points and then explained why he made them. He had details. Boy, did he have details. In short, he did what almost no one at the Republican convention tried to do, what few conventions bother to do anymore. He treated the American people like thinking human beings.

The only problem I see with the speech was that it was so effective, where does it leave Obama to go in his acceptance?  I guess a nomination acceptance speech is not the place to be doing the sort of detail that Clinton managed anyway, but I think there is still a bit of danger in Obama sounding too full of mere "hope and change-y" rhetoric again.   In fact, I wouldn't think it a bad idea if Obama appeared somewhat contrite about not being able to live up to expectations that people had built up around him.   

One other point:  while I guess there are still ways for this convention to go sour for the Democrats, who can credibly argue that in both appearance and content it is not putting the Republican one to shame?  And this is driving the Right wing bloggers nuts, I reckon.   Unbelievably, Andrew Bolt  thought the Clint Eastwood empty chair routine was devastating (well it was, but not in the way Andrew thought):

Clint Eastwood didn’t just hit the ball out of the park at the Republican convention. He smashed it through the White House windows.

One of the most effective political speeches I’ve ever heard, although most of its power came simply from the man who delivered it.

Bolt hasn't commented on the Clinton speech yet, and as I say, it remains possible that the Democrats could try something that backfires on the last day as well.  But from this point in time, it's looking like the lingering impressions from the conventions are going to be from Clint and Clinton.

Andrew, if there is any faint glimmer of objectivity left in your head, which do you think is going to play well in history?

Update:  for some pretty funny stuff from Jon Stewart on the convention, you can see a 10 minutes clip here at Mediaite.

Significant biology news

Breakthrough study overturns theory of 'junk DNA' in genome | Science | The Guardian

Seems a decent explanation is given in this quite long report.

Unexpected goings on in the tea plantation

Deadly witch hunts targeted by grassroots women's groups

An odd story from India, where (apparently) life amongst the poor village tea pickers can be dangerous:

In 2003, at a tea plantation in Jalpaiguri, five women were tied up, tortured and killed after being falsely accused of witchcraft in the death of a male villager who had suffered from a stomach illness. Chaudhuri interviewed the villagers at length and found that such attacks are often impulsive and that the "witch" is often killed immediately. Widespread alcoholism is also a factor, she found.

But the study also documents examples of the women's groups stopping potential attacks. In one case, a woman was accused of causing disease in livestock and an attack was planned. Members of the self-help groups gathered in a vigil around the woman's home and surrounded the accuser's home as well, stating their case to the accuser's wife. Eventually the wife intervened and her husband recanted and "begged for forgiveness." 

Through the loan program, each woman is issued a low-interest, collateral-free "microcredit" loan of about 750 rupees ($18) to start her own business such as basket weaving, tailoring or selling chicken eggs. Participants meet in groups of about eight to 10 to support one another.

That's an odd side benefit of microfinance...

The melt in history

Climate change skeptics are deploying the old "this [record] Arctic melt is not so unusual when you go back in history" ploy, so Skeptical Science has a long and detailed look at studies that show this is not true. Good job.

Jet stream is on the move

 Measurements of the movement of the jet streams at mid-latitudes, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 1979 to 2010

Interesting paper which says the jet streams, and weather systems, have been on the move  for the last 30 years, and the predominant reason appears to be the direct radiative forcing from greenhouse gases.

Stewart on the empty chair

I am not his biggest fan, but Jon Stewart's take on the Eastwood empty chair routine is pretty much exactly what I expected: pretty funny, and insightful about the politics of it too. Here it is: