Comet PANSTARRS Update

This coming week observers in the northern hemisphere will finally get a chance to see comet PANSTARRS, which has been brightening steadily over the month of February. Follow the link above for maps, but here in Grand Portage one of the best places to look for it is to go out to the end of Hat Point by the water pumping station around sunset and look west across the bay. I will set up my big telescope and my camera tripod and attempt to get some photos so if anyone wants a look come on out to Hat Point on clear evenings next week. Binoculars will help in finding the comet but hopefully it should be visible to the naked eye. Start looking around March 8th and keep looking all week as the comet will fade in brightness as the month passes.

Here's to clear skies!

2013: Year Of The Comet?

2013 is looking like it will be a notable year for comets, with two predicted to become bright enough to see with the naked eye and one of them may be spectacular.

Photo: Comet McNaught
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/121228-coslog-mcnaught-1015a.photoblog600.jpg

First up is the appetizer, comet PANSTARRS (an acronym of the telescope that found it) which will be visible in the western sky soon after sunset in mid-March. Hopefully it will brighten enough to be seen without binoculars, but comets are notoriously unpredictable. Follow the link for sky charts and more information.

 This is only a teaser, though, because the big show coming in the fall is the huge sungrazing comet ISON. This comet is thought to be making its first trip into the inner solar system, so it may give off a spectacular tail as it rounds the sun in November. If it survives its close encounter with the sun intact it should shine as bright as the full moon and be visible in daylight. Northern hemisphere viewers will be well-placed for seeing the show as the projected path through the sky takes it near the north celestial pole meaning you will be able to see it all night long here in Grand Portage.

Astronomers around the world are crossing their fingers that this one is sizzle not fizzle, but being that it is already showing a tail and it is still outside the orbit of Jupiter I hope the optimists are right and ISON will become known in history as the Great Comet of 2013.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Calls Out Climate Change Deniers

I am just going to post this in its entirety - we need more politicians like this:

Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Mr. President, last week I spoke about our nation’s military and intelligence leaders acknowledging, along with our nation’s scientific leaders, the clear evidence that carbon pollution is changing our climate. Unfortunately, there is confusion among many Americans regarding this scientific consensus, confusion caused by deliberate and coordinated attempts to mislead the American people.

For more than two decades the climate denial movement has been well organized and funded by the fossil fuel industry and conservative ideologues and foundations. The mission of these paid-for deniers is to “manufacture uncertainty,” to manufacture doubt, so the polluters can keep polluting.

This isn’t new. We’ve seen self-serving strategies like this one before: they questioned the merits of requiring seatbelts; they questioned CFCs causing the deterioration of the ozone layer; they questioned the toxic effects of lead exposure; and they questioned whether tobacco was bad for you—same strategy to manufacture doubt; often the same cast of characters. While the Congress of the United State has been distracted and deceived by these ploys, climate change marches on. Precious time is wasting. In the balance hang lives and jobs. This nonsense has gone on long enough.

The public is being misled. Special interest dollars pull the strings of sophisticated campaigns to give the public the impression that there is a real scientific debate regarding whether or not climate change is happening. There isn’t. The scientific debate is about how bad the changes will be. To manufacture the doubt, skeptics with little training in climate science are promoted as “experts.” Front groups such as the Global Climate Coalition, Information Council for the Environment, Heartland Institute, Annapolis Center, and Cooler Heads Coalition are created or enlisted to propagate the message of doubt. They question the motives and engage in harassment of the real, credentialed climate scientists.

For the record, there has been scientific debate regarding climate change. Ideas have been tested, theories have been ventured, and the evidence keeps coming back to the same conclusion: increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human-related sources is strengthening the greenhouse effect, adding to recent warming, and acidifying the oceans. Actually, the evidence coming in tends to confirm the worst and most dangerous projections.
Claims that solar activity is causing recent global warming, and about whether the atmosphere is really warming, have been settled.

When the scientific research doesn’t work out for the skeptics, they turn to straw man arguments. One straw man is that extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and droughts, aren’t proof of climate change. Let’s be clear. No credible source is arguing that extreme events are proof that our climate is changing. But they are associated with what has been staring us in the face for years: the average global temperature is increasing; average sea level is rising; and average ocean acidity is increasing. When averages change extremes usually change with them; the warming climate “loads the dice” for extreme weather.

One gimmick they have reverted to is the observation that there has been no warming trend in the last ten years. In 2010 a Republican Senator said “I don’t think that anyone disagrees with the fact that we actually are in a cold period that started about nine years ago.” Let’s look at the facts. [Show chart with fitted trend] The green line is the global surface temperature data. The red line shows the trend. The trend line is the product of basic and undeniable mathematics, by the way. [Show chart with stepped line] But here’s how the deniers manipulate the same data: the last step is the cold period my Republican colleague mentioned.

This is only a recent portion of the temperature record. When skeptics look deeper into the past, they find even more straw men: the earth’s climate always changes; it’s been warmer in the past. Yes, the earth has seen different climates in the past, not ones we’d want to live in necessarily! The reason we know about these climates is because of the excellent work done by scientists, the same scientists who tell us recent climate change can only be explained by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And then there is this classic: more carbon in the atmosphere is good because it provides more food for plants. Ah, the Plant Food Theory. The fact is that we have changed the composition of our atmosphere, pushing the concentration of carbon dioxide beyond where it has been for 8000 centuries. To give you a timescale of 8000 centuries: the practice of agriculture has been around for 100 centuries; modern humans began to migrate out of Africa about 600 centuries ago; Homo sapiens have been around about 2000 centuries. 8000 centuries. For all that time, we never reached carbon dioxide concentrations like what we’ve caused now, through human activity.

Deniers tend to ignore facts they can’t explain away. For example, the increasing acidification of the oceans is simple to measure and undeniably, chemically linked to carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. So we hear nothing about ocean acidification from the deniers. Ocean acidification is possibly the most disastrous consequence of carbon pollution. The rate of change in acidity of our oceans is already thought to be faster than any time in the past 50 million years. A paper published this March in Science concluded that the current rate of carbon dioxide emissions could drive chemical changes in the ocean unparalleled in the last 300 million years. When you consider the implications for food security, biodiversity, and ocean-based industries, we cannot ignore these changes in our oceans. Just last Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed listing 66 species of coral as endangered or threatened -- and cited climate change as driving three key threats: disease, warmer seas and more acidic seas.

Here’s what I think is worth reminding the deniers, in the words of NASA:
On global temperature rise: “All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years. Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.”
On ocean temperature and sea level rise: “The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 2,300 feet… showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969. Global sea level rose about 6.7 inches in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.”
On ocean acidification: “Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent. This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere... The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.”
NASA scientists put a man on moon and a rover on Mars. They’re not the quacks. Our nation’s best and brightest minds accept the evidence of climate change, and are urging us to act. Yet still for some in this body, the deniers carry the day.

Why? Well, in a weekend editorial titled Flight from Facts, my home-state Providence Journal said: “[The] GOP is winning the race to avoid evidence – some of this escapism based on a desire to hold on to what had been comforting, if error-based, traditional beliefs, and some of it to avoid policies that might be economically and otherwise inconvenient.” And the price of our folly will be very, very high for future generations.
When it is a question of putting the cost on our children and grandchildren of taking care of their grandparents, how the Republican crocodile tears of intergenerational equity flow! In one of their attacks on Medicare and Social Security, which the Republicans like to call “entitlements,” we heard this: “We have got a serious spending problem here… And we need to have an impact on entitlements...If we're going to have entitlements for our children and grandchildren when they reach retirement age, we have got to change the trajectory.”

The Minority Leader has also spoken about what appears to be the health care bill, and worried about it “creating a more precarious future for our children.”
He’s said about the stimulus effort to get our economy back on its feet: “This needs to stop for the future of our country and for our children and for our grandchildren.”
When it’s the deficit, he’s urged us “to make sure that we have the same kind of country for our children and our grandchildren that our parents left for us.” He’s even talked about, and I quote, “the Europeanization of America,” and as a result of that Europeanization of America “our children and grandchildren could no longer expect to have the same opportunities that we’ve had.”
On virtually every traditional anti-Obama Republican Tea Party bugbear – Medicare, Obamacare, the stimulus, the deficit – even this Europeanization of America – out come the children and grandchildren. Let’s assume they are sincere; let’s assume they have a sincere concern for what is left for our children and grandchildren.
So, when it comes to big corporate polluters of today leaving our children and grandchildren a damaged and more dangerous world, where then is the concern for those children and grandchildren? To have children and grandchildren pay for the care of their grandparents through Medicare and Social Security is a sin and an outrage. To force on them the untold costs and consequences of the harms done by today’s corporate polluters? For that, the future generations’ interests receive nothing from the Republicans but stony silence, or phony and calculated denial.

But the cost will be on them; and the shame will be on us.

I yield the floor.

from: http://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/sheldon-calls-out-climate-deniers-in-senate-speech

Must Read: Climate Change And The Integrity Of Science

I will post the text of the letter below with the link to it and the signatures here. Signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, this is the lead letter in the journal Science, one of the most prestigious journals in the world. By using words like; "lies", "dogma", and "McCarthy-like", Scientists are finally showing they are tired of being smeared by politicians who don't like the results of certain research, and it's about time.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE INTEGRITY OF SCIENCE
Lead Letter Published in Science magazine, May 7, 2010
From 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences:

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.

Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial— scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-established theories" and are often spoken of as "facts."

For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5bn years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14bn years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today's organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: there is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected.
But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business- as-usual practices. We urge our policymakers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels.

We also call for an end to McCarthy- like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.

Iceland Volcanic Ash Plume Snarls Air Traffic Over Europe

The continuing eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland is sending a plume of ash 4 to 5km (13 - 16,000ft) high that is drifting northwest over northern Europe and has halted air traffic in the region. Volcanic ash can destroy jet engines, and unfortunately for thousands of stranded passengers this particular eruption is right in the flight path for hundreds of air routes.

There is already speculation on how much this plume of ash and gas will affect global climate this year, but from what I have read about the relative size of this eruption such speculation is premature. Much depends on how much ash is released and how high in the atmosphere it stays. Despite the chaos it is causing for Europe this eruption is still rather small by historical standards and doesn't seem to be pushing ash into the high stratosphere where it can spread globally.

Unless this eruption continues for months like this I doubt there will be much cooling effect on global temperatures, but it may give our European friends some spectacular sunsets for the rest of the summer.

Forty Years Ago Today...

Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.

Even though I was only six years old I still remember being glued to our old black-and-white TV set watching the mission unfold (narrated by Walter Cronkite - R.I.P.). The space race was one of the main catalysts for my continuing love of science, particularly astronomy. Seeing the live footage of our astronauts and knowing we were witnessing history in the making impacted me even then, because I can still clearly picture the scene in our living room as we watched. We must continue to instill the wonder of science to our future generations by reaching out and showing them how science works so that they can also develop a thirst for knowledge.

Keeping on the astronomical theme there is breaking news from Jupiter. A black spot has formed near Jupiter's south pole and some astronomers are speculating it may have been caused by an impact similar to the 1994 impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 . More observations will be needed to determine if it is indeed an impact scar, so this story will continue to develop over the coming weeks.

South is inverted in this photo and the spot is near the top. It looks small but remember how big Jupiter is - at this scale the spot is probably larger than North America.

Update: Definitely an impact.

How You Can Do Science In Your Own Back Yard

Project BudBurst 2009 is a way for all of us to contribute data to a serious study on climate change. The National Phenology Network is reaching out to people around the country to record the growth stages of their local flora and report it online.

The advent of technology such as digital cameras, GIS, Google Earth and social networking sites like Facebook have allowed ordinary citizens to be amateur naturalists and take photos of the first flowering of different species and upload them to a database. This will allow scientists to track changes over time of when flowers bloom in different locations and cover a far larger area than the scientists could possibly do by themselves.

So dig out your cameras and join me in searching out the local flora. Together we can make a unique contribution to the science of climate change.

Climate Change - Some Good News, Some Bad News

I saw a couple of news items on climate change today.

First, the good news - scientists have found a type of rock that can soak up carbon dioxide.
From the link:

When carbon dioxide comes in contact with the rock, peridotite, the gas is converted into solid minerals such as calcite.

Geologist Peter Kelemen and geochemist Juerg Matter said the naturally occurring process can be supercharged 1 million times to grow underground minerals that can permanently store 2 billion or more of the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity every year.

Their study will appear in the November 11 edition of the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.

Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth's mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. It also appears on the surface, particularly in Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that produces substantial amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of fossil fuels.

Now for the bad news - the warming we are now experiencing is the sharpest increase in the last 5000 years , so we had better hope they can scale up that carbon sequestering rock in a hurry.

Oops! forgot to close the blockquote - the last part in bold is from me, not the link.

Great New Climate Website From JPL

There is an excellent new website on climate change from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This website puts the relevant science in one easy to use place, and it is a great place to refer someone who wants to learn the basics of climate science as well as a good reference to bookmark even if you are well versed in climatology.

Thanks to Climate Progress

Northern Lights Dancing Explained

NASA satellites have explained why the northern lights dance.