Friday, September 4, 2009
A major study published in today's Science marks a seminal advance in
climate change research. Sediments from Arctic lakes were used to compile
proxy temperature records for the last 2000 years. Arctic summer
temperature declined for thousands of years due to a shift in Earth's
orbit. Although the orbital shift has been going on for 8000 years and
will continue, an increase in greenhouse gases produced by the Industrial
Revolution overpowered the cooling trend. The warming has been more rapid
since about 1950. Moreover, thawing permafrost will release methane into
the atmosphere, accelerating warming. The latest study comes just months
after scientists at NOAA warned that within the next 30 years Arctic sea
ice could vanish completely during the summer; that will further accelerate
warming due to decline in reflective ice cover.
Even as the study on Arctic warming was making its way into print, a group
at the controversial Copenhagen Consensus Center proposed a quick geo-
engineered solution to global warming. The group is headed by statistician
Bjorn Lomborg, a follower of the late Julian Simon, the libertarian
economist at the University of Maryland, who believed there are no limits.
Lomborg proposes puffing lots of white clouds into the atmosphere to
reflect sunlight. It would be the perfect job for Lomborg, who has been
puffing clouds of obscurantism since he wrote The Skeptical
Environmentalist (Cambridge, 2001). Presumably we should just keep puffing
out bigger white clouds to compensate for the ever growing population.
According to Denis Le Bihan at the CEA-Saclay Centre, a European directive
to prevent workers from being exposed to high magnetic fields could
severely impact research into Ultrahigh-Field MRI which shows great promise
particularly in neurological applications. It is particularly frustrating
that limits on static magnetic fields resulted from the paranoia
surrounding EMF, which was associated with everything from power lines to
cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other wireless devices. As I pointed
out in an editorial in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute eight
years ago, "there will always be some who will argue that the issue has not
been completely settled. In science, few things ever are."
A portion of a European Arianne 5 rocket passed within a mile of the ISS
and the shuttle Discovery. There are about 19,000 objects larger than 10 cm
that are known to be in low-Earth orbit. This piece was much larger, but
even a 10 cm piece of junk is big enough to bring down the ISS. As serious
as the space junk problem is, the ISS is far more likely to be brought down
by a piece of paper bearing the report of the Augustine panel. The panel
has presumably delivered its report to the White House. Norm Augustine is
scheduled to testify on the group’s findings in back-to-back hearings
before the House and Senate on Sep 15-16.
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