Monthly Archives: February 2011

How Would Nuclear War Affect The Climate?

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"I'm drawn to extreme scenarios," said Luke Oman, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Perhaps the most extreme scenario in his portfolio is nuclear conflict. Using a NASA computer simulation, Oman and colleagues model the climate's response to the smoke from fires brought about by regional nuclear war. His work, performed with colleagues at Rutgers University prior to joining NASA, is part of a larger panel discussing the issue on Feb. 18 at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington.

NASA: How were you turned on to this line of research?

Oman: The idea was spawned at a 2005 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where I presented my research from Rutgers University on the subject of volcanoes.

Specifically, that work used computer simulations to model how sulphur dioxide gas ejected from volcanoes is converted into solid sulfate particles and then circulated in the upper atmosphere where it can impact climate.

While we were at the conference, some colleagues asked if the model could be modified to simulate black carbon aerosols emitted during a nuclear conflict, to illustrate the resulting impact on climate.

NASA: Has this been attempted before?

Oman: Yes, researchers started in the 1980s to look at the impacts from large-scale nuclear conflict scenarios.

More recently, with the emergence of smaller nuclear states, we wanted to make estimates of regional-scale conflicts. What kind of climate anomalies would we see? How would growing seasons change? My talk at the AAAS meeting, for example, is geared toward regional war and the potential impacts on global temperature and precipitation.

But it wasn't until about 10 years ago that the models became comprehensive enough to tackle these questions in a fully coupled way.

NASA: How do you go about simulating climate impacts of nuclear conflict?

Oman: With modeling we can find out some interesting aspects about the impact of aerosols on the underlying atmospheric dynamics and what's controlling their transport and removal.

We used a general circulation model, ModelE, from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. ModelE is a coupled ocean-atmosphere model that shows how various inputs — in our case black carbon — would affect global climate.

Without this model the work wouldn't be possible. That's because it was one of the very few models that had a coupled atmosphere and ocean along with interactive aerosols, to be able to more fully address this issue then ever before.

NASA: What did the model reveal?

Oman: Instead of sulfate particles, like you get from a volcanic eruption, a nuclear event produces soot, and that results in very different climate impacts. Whereas sulfate particles from a volcano might warm the air of the upper atmosphere by a couple degrees, black carbon absorbs heat from the sun and can lead to much more atmospheric warming.

Sulfate and soot also vary in their impact on temperature at Earth's surface. That's because the particles differ in the amount of solar energy that they prevent from reaching the ground.

NASA: How does surface temperature change?

Oman: We studied the scenario of using 100 Hiroshima-size bombs, the fires from which would inject upward of 5 teragrams (megatons) of black carbon particles into Earth's upper troposphere. Observations of forest fires have shown this to occur on much smaller scales.

On the ground, global temperatures would fall by a little over 1 degree Celsius (C) (1.8 Fahrenheit (F)) over first three years. In contrast, aerosols from the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo contributed to about 3/10 of a degree C (~ 0.5 F) of cooling over one year. Black carbon particles are smaller than sulfate particles and can be lofted much higher by solar heating, where their influence on climate can last up to a decade.

We also saw that two to four years after the event, rainfall would decrease globally by an average of about 10 percent.

As my colleagues Michael Mills [National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.] and Brian Toon [University of Colorado at Boulder] are discussing at AAAS, the scenario also drives global stratospheric ozone loss and influences communities far away from the conflict. Agriculture, for example, would likely be disrupted from the combination of cooler temperatures, less precipitation and decreases in solar radiation reaching the surface. This would cause widespread interruptions to growing seasons by producing more frequent frosts.

NASA: How do you think this information is relevant for decision makers?

Oman: A primary goal of this work is to get the information revealed by our study into the hands of decision makers as well as to get other groups interested in this problem and to be aware of the potential impacts. Before we did this study, we didn't know what the climate anomalies would be or how long they would last. This is critical information that needs to be known in advance along with knowledge that the consequences of such a scenario would be global.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/nuclear-climate.html

Catching Space Weather in the Act

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Close to the globe, Earth's magnetic field wraps around the planet like a gigantic spherical web, curving in to touch Earth at the poles. But this isn't true as you get further from the planet. As you move to the high altitudes where satellites fly, nothing about that field is so simple. Instead, the large region enclosed by Earth's magnetic field, known as the magnetosphere, looks like a long, sideways jellyfish with its round bulb facing the sun and a long tail extending away from the sun.

In the center of that magnetic tail lies the plasma sheet. Here, strange things can happen. Magnetic field lines pull apart and come back together, creating explosions when they release energy. Disconnected bits of the tail called "plasmoids" get ejected into space at two million miles per hour. And legions of charged particles flow back toward Earth.

Such space weather events cause auroras and, when very strong, can produce radiation events that could cause our satellites to fail. But until now no one has been able to take pictures of these fascinating processes in the plasma sheet.

"Earth’s magnetic tail and its charged particles are invisible to conventional cameras that detect light,” says Jim Slavin, a magnetotail researcher who is the Director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Events going on there have only been inferred based on other kinds of measurements."

Now, special cameras aboard the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft have snapped the first shots of this complex space environment. Instead of recording light, these two large single-pixel cameras detect energetic neutral atoms. Such fast-moving atoms are formed whenever atoms in the furthest reaches of Earth's atmosphere collide with charged particles and get sent speeding off in a new direction. Called Energetic Neutral Atom or ENA imaging, the technique captured unprecedented images of the plasma sheet.

"The image alone is remarkable and would have made a great paper in and of itself because it's the first time we’ve imaged these important regions of the magnetosphere," says Dr. David McComas, principal investigator of the IBEX mission and assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. The results appeared online in the Journal of Geophysical Research on Feb. 16, 2011.

But when they looked closely, the group realized they didn't only have a picture of a quiescent plasma sheet. The various images appear to show a piece of the plasma sheet being bitten off and ejected down the tail. They think they've caught a plasmoid in the moment it was being formed. If they're correct, this would be the first time such an event was directly seen.

"Imagine the magnetosphere as one of those balloons that people make animals out of. If you take your hands and squeeze the balloon, the pressure forces the air into another segment of the balloon," says McComas. "Similarly, the solar wind at times increases the pressure around the magnetosphere, resulting in a portion of the plasma sheet being pinched away from a larger mass and forced down the magnetotail."

Because researchers believe this phenomenon generally occurs deeper in the magnetotail, the IBEX team is considering other explanations for the event, as well. One possibility is that the plasma sheet is being squeezed by the solar wind.

While not specifically designed to observe the magnetosphere, IBEX's vantage point in space provides twice-yearly (spring and fall) seasons for viewing from outside the magnetosphere. Since its October 2008 launch, the IBEX science mission has flourished into multiple other research studies as well. In addition to supporting magnetospheric science, the spacecraft has also directly collected hydrogen and oxygen from the interstellar medium for the first time and produced the first ENA images of the outer edges of the bubble surrounding the Sun, called the heliosphere.

"Based upon the IBEX mission and its revolutionary ENA camera technology," says Slavin, "future NASA science missions may be able to make high definition videos of the development of space weather systems around the Earth to advance our scientific understanding of these phenomena and, eventually, enable space weather prediction like Earth weather prediction."

IBEX is the latest in NASA's series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers spacecraft. The Southwest Research Institute developed the IBEX mission with a team of national and international partners. Goddard manages the Explorers Program for the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/news/spaceweather.html

SEED Magazine on cognitive enhancement through ‘adaptive harnessing’

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The next giant leap in human evolution may not come from fields like genetic engineering or artificial intelligence, argues SEED's Mark Changizi, but rather from appreciating our ancient brains:

The root of these misconceptions is the radical underappreciation of the design engineered by natural selection into the powers implemented by our bodies and brains, something central to my 2009 book, The Vision Revolution. For example, optical illusions (such as the Hering) are not examples of the brain’s poor hardware design, but, rather, consequences of intricate evolutionary software for generating perceptions that correct for neural latencies in normal circumstances. And our peculiar variety of color vision, with two of our sensory cones having sensitivity to nearly the same part of the spectrum, is not an accidental mutation that merely stuck around, but, rather, appear to function with the signature of hemoglobin physiology in mind, so as to detect the color signals primates display on their faces and rumps.

These and other inborn capabilities we take for granted are not kluges, they’re not “good enough,” and they’re more than merely smart. They’re astronomically brilliant in comparison to anything humans are likely to invent for millennia.

Neuronal recycling exploits this wellspring of potent powers. If one wants to get a human brain to do task Y despite it not having evolved to efficiently carry out task Y, then a key point is not to forcefully twist the brain to do Y. Like all animal brains, human brains are not general-purpose universal learning machines, but, instead, are intricately structured suites of instincts optimized for the environments in which they evolved. To harness our brains, we want to let the brain’s brilliant mechanisms run as intended—i.e., not to be twisted. Rather, the strategy is to twist Y into a shape that the brain does know how to process.

But how do I know this is feasible? This tactic may use the immensely powerful gifts that natural selection gave us, but what if harnessing these powers is currently far beyond us? How do we find the right innate power for any given task? And how are we to know how to adapt that task so as to be just right for the human brain’s inflexible mechanisms?

I don’t want to pretend that answers to these questions are easy—they are not. Nevertheless, there is a very good reason to be optimistic that the next stage of human will come via the form of adaptive harnessing, rather than direct technological enhancement: It has already happened.

Changizi is clearly on to something. Reworking the brain to increase efficiency, boost its powers, and give it novel capacities is a sound idea. But why oh why do so many specialists like Changizi ignore the impact of converging technologies? Adaptive harnessing will most likely be done in concert with other types of cognitive enhancements, including genetic, pharmaceutical, and artificial intelligent applications. And it's not as far off as he'd have us believe.

More on "Humans, Version 3.0."


Freeman Dyson: How We Know [information theory]

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There's a great review article by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books, who provides a summary of James Gleick's new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. It's a somewhat longish article, but worth the read; information theory continues to be a particularly fascinating era of inquiry:

The explosive growth of information in our human society is a part of the slower growth of ordered structures in the evolution of life as a whole. Life has for billions of years been evolving with organisms and ecosystems embodying increasing amounts of information. The evolution of life is a part of the evolution of the universe, which also evolves with increasing amounts of information embodied in ordered structures, galaxies and stars and planetary systems. In the living and in the nonliving world, we see a growth of order, starting from the featureless and uniform gas of the early universe and producing the magnificent diversity of weird objects that we see in the sky and in the rain forest. Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information. The technology arising from Shannon’s discoveries is only a local acceleration of the natural growth of information.
..............

The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in a famous story, “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.3 Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe.


The Backwards Views of the Republicans how They Threaten Jobs and Clean Energy

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Wisconsin’s new Gov. Walker has decided that Wisconsin should not participate in the growing midwest “green renaissance”.

This cross-post discusses how Governor Walker’s backwards, Republican ideology is devoted to destroying jobs and clean energy in his state, and in the U.S. as a whole.  Why do these throwbacks keep getting elected?  There is no time to waste in moving forward on clean energy.

For more on the Koch brothers and their plan to buy and control all the power plants in Wisconsin (it’s one theory) see this story.

Gov. Walker Assaults Jobs, Innovation, and Clean Energy in Wisconsin

Newly elected Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker held an event called “Wisconsin is Open for Business” the day he was inaugurated. But every move the governor makes shows him to be an antibusiness, anti-innovation politician intent on running the state into the ground.

Let’s take clean energy. Clean energy industries offered a glimmer of hope during the past two years in the midst of a national recession that has hit the Midwest particularly hard. In Michigan, for example, total private employment dropped 5.4 percent from 2005-2008, while during the same period employment increased by 7.7 percent among the state’s 358 “green” firms. Michigan’s new governor, Rick Snyder, recognized the growth potential of these industries when he ran on a 10-point plan that emphasized the need to invest in clean energy sectors such as advanced batteries.

In Ohio, too, the green writing is on the wall. New Gov. John Kasich initially sounded off against clean energy, running on a platform that included rolling back the state’s renewable energy standard. But he reversed this position soon after his election when multiple business leaders told him how important green industries were in the Toledo area in particular. The city, which ranked in the bottom 10 by per capita income in 2000, has seen a renaissance as a hub for solar innovation and production. Over 6,000 individuals are employed in these industries in Toledo today, and the city is home to several major solar panel exporters including First Solar and Xunlight.

Gov. Walker, however, has apparently decided that Wisconsin should take a back seat to the Midwest’s green renaissance. The state has enormous potential to generate homegrown energy from renewable resources. Wisconsin has enough wind, solar, and biomass energy resources to produce power equivalent to the entire state’s electricity needs according to Environment America. But the new governor recently proposed a wind turbine siting law that would effectively shut down most wind power production. The new law, if put into effect, would require wind turbines to be set back at least 1,800 feet from any nearby property unless all affected property owners agree to the turbine in writing.

Only one-fourth of Wisconsin’s current wind turbines would ever have been built if this rule had been in place in the past. In other words, 2,250 fewer people would have construction or maintenance jobs, over a million fewer dollars would be flowing to rural communities [...]

Trapping the Skeptics

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Mark Hertsgaard is the author of the new book  “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years.”

He cornered [James] Inhofe near a bank of members-only elevators at the Dirksen Senate Office Building to ask how he could remain the Senate’s most adamant climate change denier when every noted scientific organization agrees the planet and its inhabitants are destined for a world of hurt unless heat-trapping gases are tamed.

“Yeah, are you kidding?” he told SolveClimate News when asked if it was worth it to wait 85 minutes in a windowless Dirksen hallway until Inhofe emerged from a fourth-floor committee hearing room. “For my daughter’s sake I want to know why he thinks he can do that.”

“Hot,” the most recent of his six environmental tomes, is dedicated to his 5-year-old daughter Chiara. She has inspired the 54-year-old’s fatherly concern toward what he calls Generation Hot, the two billion youngsters worldwide now forced to cope with climate disruption. . . . . Tuesday’s event to confront “climate cranks” — coordinated by partners including the Sierra Club, 350.org, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and The Nation — offered a lesson to budding activists on staking out politicians and a chance for Hertsgaard to vent.

Throughout the day, the energetic author was trailed by four young local organizers, a couple of communications specialists and three videographers.  “I think he knows his lines,” Hertsgaard said about trying to push the envelope with Inhofe. “He should. He’s been saying the same thing for 20 years.”

Frustration with Media Coverage

On Tuesday, he confronted Inhofe on each of his points about the science being “mixed,” the dire impact of carbon controls on the economy and what little difference EPA action will have on global emissions.

“It’s important to say, ‘No senator, the science is not mixed.’ But a lot of mainstream reporters don’t argue back,” Hertsgaard said in an interview, adding that a sense of false balance can be attributed to a Washington press corps not familiar with environmental issues. “But virtually every science organization tells us climate change is real and very dangerous. It’s a matter of demonstrable science not opinion. To pretend otherwise borders on journalistic malpractice.”

Read More at Solve Climate

Yearbook of International Futurism Studies – CALL FOR CONTRUBUTIONS

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It’s official! The First Yearbook of International Futurism Studies has been sent to press.

Downlaod Table of Contents, Volume 1

Download Table of Contents, Volume 2

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

YEARBOOKS 3-5:

Yearbook 3 (2013) will be dedicated to Iberian Futurisms. It will contain a mixture of studies on well-known individuals and artist of lesser renown who were inspired by Futurism. The volume will give due consideration to the regions often overlooked and examine how artists and writers from Portugal, Castile, Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country interacted with Marinetti and other Italian Futurists. This will include a discussion of the Iberian brands of Futurism (or Futurist inclined avant-garde movements) such as Ultraísmo, Creacionismo and Sensacionismo

Yearbook 4 (2014) will be an open issue and include some 16-18 essays on various aspects of the international dimensions of Futurism with a special focus on architecture, interior design, ceramics, fashion design, typography and graphic design

Yearbook 5 (2015) will be dedicated to Futurist influences on women writers and artists outside Italy. Artists currently considered include Maud Gonne, Rougena Zatkova, Aleksandra Ekster, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, Mina Loy, Valentine de Saint Point, Eva KÃŒhn, Edyth von Haynau, Alice Bailly, Siri Derkert , Agnes Cleve , Hilda Doolittle, Kate Lechmere, Jessica Dismorr , Helen Saunders, Concha Espina, Maruja Mallo, Tatiana Vechorka (Tolstaia), and Norah Borges.

For more information and offers of contributions please contact Günter Berghaus.

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