A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Irreversible. That’s what a new study reported by NPR says:

As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if, emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is among the world’s top climate scientists.

I’ve heard that mentioned for a long time. There were several times over the past thirty of forty years where significant changes might have made a difference. But, once we reach the tipping point there’s no turning back. Things will change and we have to adapt to those changes.

“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years,” Solomon says.

This is because the oceans are currently soaking up a lot of the planet’s excess heat — and a lot of the carbon dioxide put into the air. The carbon dioxide and heat will eventually start coming out of the ocean. And that will take place for many hundreds of years.

Do we still have to make changes to the way we pollute the environment and cut back on carbon emissions. Yes, we do. Because we can continue to make things worse. It’s about the only thing we can be sure of — we can make it worse. So, why not try to adapt, change and learn to protect our environment as much as we can.

Dr. Solomon, a scientist at NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) also said:

If we continue with business as usual for even a few more decades, she says, those emissions could be enough to create permanent dust-bowl conditions in the U.S. Southwest and around the Mediterranean.

So, we should be doing everything in our power as citizens of the planet to help contain the damage we’ve already done to our planet. It’s not like we have anywhere else to go — at least not right yet. Since this is the only planet we have to live on we can’t afford to make a worse mess of it. So, do your part to reduce the damage — recycle, reduce your carbon footprint, look for ways to live a greener life.

NASA announced that it will finally get a good look at our Sun. NASA manages to put the importance of this ability in a nutshell:

STEREO’s deployment on opposite sides of the Sun solves a problem that has vexed astronomers for centuries: At any given moment they can see only half of the stellar surface. The Sun spins on its axis once every 25 days, so over the course of a month the whole Sun does turn to face Earth, but a month is not nearly fast enough to keep track of events. Sunspots can materialize, explode, and regroup in a matter of days; coronal holes open and close; magnetic filaments stretch tight and—snap!—they explode, hurling clouds of hot gas into the solar system. Fully half of this action is hidden from view, a fact which places space weather forecasters in an awkward position. How can you anticipate storms when you can’t see them coming? Likewise researchers cannot track the long-term evolution of sunspots or the dynamics of magnetic filaments because they keep ducking over the horizon at inconvenient times. STEREO’s global view will put an end to these difficulties.

We’ve never been able to see a full 360 view of our sun and using these two STEREO spacecraft we’ll get that chance. Having the full image of the sun available is still two years away but already scientists are getting glimpses of what just over the horizon from what they could see before. You know that bit that’s hidden just a little bit further and you feel if you stretch you could see it. Well, now these spacecraft are giving them that little bit of stretch to see beyond what they had before. It’s a taste of what’s coming and has them all excited about what they could learn. Currently that peek is giving them about a three day advantage — they can see what will be coming around when the Sun spins on its axis by about three days.

Getting better information about the sun and its flares, spots, winds, and such is very important for those of us who use high-tech gadgets. The sun is moving into a very active phase and that is going to effect the Earth’s atmosphere to make some spectacular auroras. However, it’s also going to cause electrical disruptions that can badly decay high-tech gadgets ability to work as smoothly as they do now. There will probably be drop outs in communications using satellites — phones, PDAs, TV reception, internet connections. Having advanced warning of such possible disruptions and maybe some plans to ameliorate the difficulties would be very nice (especially since I have a cellular internet connection).

Wind farms are nothing new but putting them off-shore is. Cape Wind on Nantucket Sound will be the first off-shore wind farm in America.

According to an article in Tech Fragments, Cape Wind just got the official go ahead to proceed with their project. The project will have 130 turbines in the waters of Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod. From the article:

When completed, Cape Wind will be capable of supplying up to 420 megawatts of electricity, potentially offsetting as much as a million tons of carbon emissions and saving more than 100 million gallons of oil every year. But the environment wont be the sole beneficiary of Cape Wind. It will likely be a boon to out of work Massachusetts residents, as well, given that as many as 1,000 green jobs could be brought to the Bay State in addition to a significant supply of clean, renewable energy.

Just to put it in perspective that 420 megawatts of electricity would be enough to meet the needs of 420,000 homes. And unlike in other areas of the country this area is supplied by power stations that burn oil and natural gas rather than coal. So when this project is up to speed it will help offset Massachusetts’ reliance on petroleum for power.

However, the key issue is that not only will this supply power — clean power — and reduce our dependence on oil, it’s also going to produce jobs. Many times people forget that alternative energy also means alternative jobs and in these economic times jobs are important. Yes, some of the old jobs may disappear but many of the skills necessary on them can be applicable to the new jobs. Thus there is the possibility of no loss of jobs when switching to alternative power and maybe even a net gain (some new jobs will be created).

The resistance is often fear of change. Change is going to happen anyway whether we want it to or not. Things can not continue as they are — the earth is running out of oil. That’s a fact. As we deplete these resources it will become harder and harder to get the fuel we need and eventually it will gone. Not just too expensive to buy but not available, gone, all used up, nothing left. It may not happen in our lifetimes, we’ll just see prices going up and up to buy this ever shrinking resource.

The sooner we switch to clean, non-petroleum/non-carbon based, alternative energies the better for us, for our children, for our grandchildren, and oh, yes for the country. Projects such as this wind farm are a start, but we need to be doing more to move us from our dependence on oil. This is a step in the right direction.

Okay, maybe you saw this news item and maybe you didn’t — if not I’m going to talk about it for a bit. It seems that scientists have noted that there seems to be some rather large methane plumes on Mars. NASA released this information in one of their news release/feature report along with some media photos and animations.

Why is this so important a discovery? I’m so glad you asked.

Methane is usually an indication of life. You may have heard that the problem with cattle is that they create manure and thus methane gas. However, as the US EPA report on sources of methane there are a lot of other sources for methane gas. It can be created by either geologic or biologic mechanisms and the same thing applies in the case of the methane on Mars.

For many years, Mars has been considered to be a dead planet. In science fiction stories it has always been a source of possible life, sharing this solar system with us. However, no evidence of a civilization has been found in spite of all the rumors of canals and canal building since the earliest studies of Mars with telescopes as they were developed and perfected. But, things have changed as we’ve sent landers to Mars and studied the landscape much more closely. There is evidence that there may once have been water on Mars and there may be water there still. Water is a key element in developing life — at least as far as we know from our own experiences and studies on Earth.

Now NASA has found methane:

New research reveals there is hope for Mars yet. The first definitive detection of methane in the atmosphere of Mars indicates the planet is still alive, in either a biologic or geologic sense, according to a team of NASA and university scientists.

“Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,” said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif.”

However, we can’t get too excited about finding life on Mars, even in such a basic form as a biological process that could produce methane gas because the gas can also be produced via geologic processes:

“Microbes that produced methane from hydrogen and carbon dioxide were one of the earliest forms of life on Earth,” noted Dr. Carl Pilcher, Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute which partially supported the research. “If life ever existed on Mars, it’s reasonable to think that its metabolism might have involved making methane from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

However, it is possible a geologic process produced the Martian methane, either now or eons ago. On Earth, the conversion of iron oxide (rust) into the serpentine group of minerals creates methane, and on Mars this process could proceed using water, carbon dioxide, and the planet’s internal heat. Although we don’t have evidence on Mars of active volcanoes today, ancient methane trapped in ice “cages” called clathrates might now be released.

These scientists (Dr. Geronimo Villanueva of the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. and others) found the methane plumes using observatories here on Earth at NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility, run by the University of Hawaii, and the W.M. Keck telescope, both at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Further research needs to be done because while their findings are definitely exciting, they need to be matched with observations made on Mars to help identify the origins of these plumes and what makes them.

Personally, it doesn’t really matter whether the methane plumes are a result of geologic or biologic mechanisms. If they are geologic they can be of use to future colonists or visitors to the planet as a source of possible energy during the early stages of establishing a research facility. If biologic then there maybe indigenous life on the planet — perhaps just low level cellular activity but still life — that also can be of use in broadening our understanding of how the universe works and our place in it.

The fact of the matter is that currently all our eggs are in this very fragile blue basket — Earth. The case is not if the Earth gets hit with a asteroid or a stray bit of whatever, it’s when we get hit. Depending on the size of a strike, we could be eliminated completely or starting all over with the basics — back to the stone age. For the survival of our species and for the survival of our society and culture and knowledge, we need to spread out throughout this solar system so no matter what happens to our planet, some of us will survive at a level that can in turn help us to recover what we’ve lost.

It’s beginning to look like Mars just might be a really good basket for us to look to when we’re looking for a place to put a few eggs. It’s the same sort of impulse for survival that caused the people of Vietnam during the war to send a son to each side so that no matter who won the war, there was a family member who could help the family to go on. The people of Earth are now reaching the stage where we are becoming capable of seeing that no matter what happens we should be capable of survival as a species if not as individuals. Space science has given us enormous technological leaps in medicine, physics, engineering, computers, and a basic understanding of how systems work in complex environments. It may not look like it, but it will also give us a chance to reach out to a new frontier — increasing the chance that humans will continue to grow and survive in this solar system.

But then that’s just my pie in the sky hope.

Today, this article in New Scientist caught my eye. It seems that after studying the phenomena scientists believe that lightning during a snow storm, which is a very rare event (called thundersnows), indicates that a blizzard is coming. The more lightning the stronger the blizzard.

I’m originally from Maine and I think I’ve only seen/heard of thunder and lightning during a snow storm maybe twice in all the time I lived there. Both times the snow was just incredible afterward. Guess I never put the two events together. The articles says that it only gives about a short warning of the blizzard but some warning is better than the current “eye-witness” weather reports.

Predicting weather is getting better all the time but there’s still a long way to go to be totally accurate. The longer the forecast is from the day you read about it the less reliable it is — reading Saturday’s forecast on Monday is unlikely to be more than a general tendency in the weather than an actual prediction.

But to be able to accurately predict a blizzard from the lightening may help those who have to make those decisions to open or close schools, government offices, and business. If it’s snowing fairly heavily and it starts thundering and lightning — it’s probably going to get a lot worse very soon.

I’ve been interested in trying to live off the grid for many, many years.  But as our energy and economic crises get worse and worse it gets to be more important to start the process. I found this interesting article, “How to Unplug From the Grid” on New Scientist. The article seems pretty comprehensive in a general here’s what you have to consider way.

For example:

The good news is that the energy you require is likely to be a fraction of what you presently use, says Tony Brown, head engineer at the UK’s Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth in Powys. The average UK household uses around 4500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity annually, plus some 18,000 kWh of gas for cooking, hot water and domestic heating. In the US the figure varies considerably from region to region. For example, households in New York City use around 4700 kWh a year, whereas those in Dallas use 16,100 kWh: there are a lot of air conditioners in Texas. In chillier regions where people use gas for heating and cooking, on the other hand, they can burn up an extra 28,000 kWh or so per household.

We looked long and hard to find just those numbers when we first were starting to learn about the possibilities. However, just about everyone says the same thing. Before going jumping in with both feet, find out how much you can cut your consumption of power. Some of the best ways to reduce your power usage (from the article):

The biggest energy savings will come from properly insulating your home to minimise heat loss. That done, you’ll need to work out what is eating up the rest of the power you consume. The easiest way to do this is to buy an energy monitor that can provide a live display of your total energy consumption or that of individual appliances (see “What’s guzzling the juice?”). This will help you focus on reducing consumption to the bare minimum, not just by switching to low-energy light bulbs and energy-efficient white goods, but also by turning unused appliances right off rather than leaving them in standby mode. With a bit of effort and investment, you should be able to get by on a few hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.

We’ve started to do some of this. We’ve replaced as many of the light bulbs that we can reach with compact florescents or halogens (lower wattages — same brightness). We bought a door for the basement that was insulated and had insulated glass (double pane with gas between). We hope to take out the current lowest value allowed insulation in our basement and replace with the appropriate level soon — maybe this summer depending on whether we instead opt to replace our single pane windows with double or triple panes to reduce leakage.

We’ve got a long way to go before we’ve reduced what we’re currently using to reasonable levels but we’re working on it. From the article we can see that there’s more to think about and more to do.

What’s your favorite energy reduction strategies? I’m always interested in what others are doing.

And thus we see the real problem with saving energy … money. For years we’ve been able to waste energy left and right because it was cheap. Our entire infrastructure is built on the philosophy that it’s better to the burn extra power than to spend money to improve the system.  Now energy is getting more expensive, but our “cheap” infrastructure can’t just be easily made more efficient.  Then there’s the price of doing what’s right.  Gayle mentioned that we got a new door.  What she didn’t mention is that we asked about the most efficient door.  It would have been $9000 (needless to say we went with a less efficient door and a lower price we could afford).  Nine thousand for a freaking door?  It’s just a bunch of wood and glass with a bit a metal and gas tossed in.  Where does nine thousand dollars come from?  Well it comes from the fact that people that want to save the world tend to be the kind that will spend the cash to bring it about.  The others are cheap and just want a door that closes and locks.  So if people really want to save the planet, you might as well make some extra profit off of their activism.  It’s the American way, after all.  See a need, exploit a need.  Don’t stop squeezing until the pennies stop bleeding.  Okay, maybe that’s a bit pessimistic, but I’m going to be stubborn and stick with it.  So if we want to re-insulate the basement, or change out the windows, we’re going to have to be prepared to spend a good chunk of change to make it happen.  Some, but not all of these changes will pay for themselves over time with reduced energy costs.  Some won’t.  But if you don’t have the money to spare right now, you can’t save money over the long haul, and will end up spending a lot more in the end.  And meanwhile the DVD player keeps blinking 12:00 (not ours but others — but that’s a topic for another rant).

Remember my post awhile ago about the connection between Earth and the Sun that occurs every eight minutes, well looks like more can happen during that connection than scientists first thought. NASA today released an interesting article about a recent discovery by the THEMIS project. It seems that during the connection, while THEMIS was actually watching, the Earth’s magnetic field was breached and solar energy flowed though, charging our magnetosphere. This loads up the Earth’s magnetosphere with charged particles and that can mean more powerful geomagnetic storms — cell phone disruption, prettier Auroras, and other related events.

That they found this as the sun is going into Solar Cycle 24, with more frequent and stronger solar events, may add to the fun here on Earth. [Hyperion: Each Cycle is approximately 11 years long, measuring from Solar Minimum to Solar Minimum, with Solar Maximum hitting at the midway point, or 2012-2013 in this case.]

The really interesting bit is that scientists were convince this just couldn’t happen. But, it did. They have the data and it can’t be denied. It happened. So, now they have to deal with this new information and change their existing theories and check out the ones that they develop to take the place of the old one that was just proven wrong. You just got to love science — it’s so, so practical, the way that new data means throwing out the old way of thinking and start over and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and moves on. Wish that happened more often in the daily life.

It’s cold outside. Well, cold for Maryland. Yesterday there was a lot of wind as well, but today it’s just a calm, cold, cold, day.

I miss the seasons. I grew up in Maine in a small town called Mexico. Yeah, I know. It’s on the famous Maine sign at the Tourist Information Center just after you cross the bridge into Maine and get on the Turnpike. Mexico is not that far from So. Paris, Norway, and Sweden. But the point is that I grew up with seasons. There was Spring, Mud, Summer, Fall, Mud, and Winter. Yes, there were two seasons of Mud if it was rainy enough.  And if Mud season was bad enough we had an additional season of mosquitos and black flies, but we had those anyway no matter what season (except Winter).

The Christmas Holiday season always meant snow. I think that during my childhood we only had one year when it didn’t snow (to stick on the ground) until Christmas Eve. That’s become more frequent over the years. But, here in Maryland, there’s has seldom been snow during the Winter; at least during the ten+ years we’ve lived here. People tell us they used to always have snow for Christmas but not anymore, or at least in our part of the state. Last Friday, we had a few bits of white falling from the sky but it was gone the minute it touched down. Even Maine doesn’t have snow except in the mountains and ski areas — and I think they make most of their snow in the ski areas now because the winters aren’t what they used to be.

I talked to my mom, who still lives in Maine, and she said it snowed the other day but then it rained and it was all gone or mostly all gone as far as she could see. She lives in town, but still — it’s December and there’s still no snow yet back in my home town in Maine.

So, here it is sixteen days until Christmas and once again it’s still Fall here in Maryland. The leaves have fallen and piled up where we haven’t done anything to get rid of them. They’re beautiful in their own way — orange, yellow, and some reds along with the dead browns. The trees are bare against the sky which today is a clear, cold blue of water ice.

It is beautiful but I miss the white drifts of snow that always meant Christmas is coming when I was a child. My husband just says I should be very glad we don’t have to shovel six feet of the stuff off our quarter-mile driveway. He’s right but I still miss the Winter season of snow.  [Hyperion: That’s because she’s not the one that had to shovel it.  I like snow too but, I’m just saying, there needs to be priorities :-)]

Guess I’m just feeling nostalgic today. Home with the tree lights on and a mystery to read (Bones of Betrayal by Jefferson Bass) which I’ll be reviewing for Gumshoe Review’s January issue. The story takes place in the cold. So, guess I’ll just go back to sipping my warm coffee with it’s Mocha Peppermint creamer and visit the world of the body farm and stop thinking about the snow that isn’t outside my window.