As was discussed earlier on the Earth Forum, NASA has cut back important climate monitoring missions while directing funds towards developing a manned lunar laboratory and a program to send humans to Mars. Now the Associated Press has obtained a confidential report to the White House which warns that U.S. scientists will soon lose much of their ability to monitor warming from space using a costly and problem-plagued satellite initiative begun more than a decade ago.

“Unfortunately, the recent loss of climate sensors … places the overall climate program in serious jeopardy,” NOAA and NASA scientists told the White House in the Dec. 11 report obtained by the AP.

Several scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Research Council have concluded that U.S. global observations of the environment are “at great risk,” and that the next generation of Earth-observing satellites will be “generally less capable” than the current ones due to the cutbacks or elimination of several satellite climate observing platforms and programs.

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“Understanding the complex, changing planet on which we live, how it supports life, and how human activities affect its ability to do so in the future is one of the greatest intellectual challenges facing humanity. It is also one of the most important challenges for society as it seeks to achieve prosperity, health, and sustainability.”

The above declarations, first made in the interim report in 2005 by the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space, are the foundation for a new report currently in prepublication by NAS entitled “Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond.”

It therefore seems pretty clear where America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should be focusing its priorities. But as Gregg Easterbrook points out in an article in WIRED magazine this month, “How NASA Screwed Up (And Four Ways to Fix It),” NASA’s actual priorities are surprisingly off base from what any rational policymaker, scientist, or even lay person would propose. In fact, because NASA’s priorities are so utterly unrelated to any kind of rational research and/or societal needs, the agency has recently as recently been canceling or postponing “Earth observation” missions intended to generate environmental critical information about our Earth and Earth processes.

In his WIRED article, Easterbrook sums up NASA’s priorities rankings as being the following:

1. Maintain a pointless space station.
2. Build a pointless Motel 6 on the moon.
3. Increase humanity’s store of knowledge by studying the distant universe.
4. Keep money flowing to favored aerospace contractors and congressional districts.

In an interview on National Public Radio, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin characterized Easterbrook’s use of the term “pointless Motel 6″ as overly derogative of the agency’s designs for establishing a lunar research station. Perhaps that is derogative. But NASA’s answer to is self-imposed question “Why the Moon? seems entirely inadequate. Download “NASA’s Why the Moon?” poster and you will find that the agency’s primary justification for this multi-billion dollar effort is “BECAUSE HUMANS EXPLORE.” Given a rationale such as this it is no wonder that Americans have become jaded whenever politicians and government bureaucrats call for increased spending on research.

In his piece in WIRED, Easterbrook proposes a far more reasonable list of priorities for the Space Agency (below). During an interview on National Public Radio, Easterbrook was asked if it was “NASA’s fault” for maintaining these odd priorities since the Agency was simply embracing priorities that President Bush has delineated and the American Congress has supported. Easterbrook’s response was that NASA and the Administrator should stand up to these crazy priorities and not simply “carry water” for the politicians.

It would seem to only make sense that if, as the NAS says, one of the greatest intellectual challenges facing humanity is understanding our planet and how human activities are affecting the Earth’s ability to support life in the future, that researching this challenge should at least be on NASA’s priorities list and perhaps have a little more weight than the goal of spending billions of dollars to establish a lunar research station “BECAUSE HUMANS EXPLORE.”

1. Conduct research, particularly environmental research, on Earth, the sun, and Mars, the most Earth-like planet.
2. Locate asteroids and comets that might strike Earth, and devise a practical means of deflecting them.
3. Increase humanity’s store of knowledge by studying the distant universe.
4. Figure out a way to replace today’s chemical rockets with a much cheaper way to reach Earth orbit.

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Earth processes are extremely complex. The planet is 4.5 billion years old and yet we humans only have weather data starting in about 1895 available to calculate annual global temperatures.

We have even less information on hurricanes. The New York Times today does a pretty good job in reporting both :

1) the latest conclusions that different scientists have regarding whether global waring is leading to increased strength and/or frequencies of hurricanes and
2) the process of scientific debate in which “give and take is an example of the way scientists tug and haul at their own and others’ findings until a consensus takes shape”.

The NYTimes article reports that while “there is no doubt that as the world warms, seas will rise, increasing the flood risk, simply because warmer water occupies more space (and if the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets melt, the rise will be far greater)”, the question as to how global warming is or will impact the strength and frequency of hurricanes is more complex.

Since hurricanes get their energy from the warmth of surface ocean waters, a warming Earth with warming seas should logically result in stronger hurricanes. While global warming is and will continue to result in increased sea surface temperatures multiple changes are also occurring to other regional and global climate and weather systems and processes. Researchers reported in a study published las month that, in a warming world, wind shear in the Atlantic would increase, possibly enough to cancel out the hurricane-forcing effects of warmer water.

The Times article pointed out that these kind of debates among scientists often leads members of the general public people to begin to feel that nothing will ever be known with confidence regarding complex issues such as climate change. Certainly the perennial naysayers (who have long argued that nothing can ever be concluded about the effects of smoking, pollution, and other factors that they believe should never be regulated) will point to such cases of legitimate scientific debate to sew doubt on any and all scientific findings and the scientific process itself and to disparage legitimate scientists as being incompetent and/or having some hidden agenda utilized to reach their conclusions.

But as the Times article correctly points out that “the give and take (among experts involved in scientific debate) is an example of the way scientists tug and haul at their own and others’ findings until a consensus takes shape” and that “in the current debate over global warming and hurricanes, the problem is relatively new and the data are hard to obtain and analyze”.

The Times article also points out that, although there is ongoing debate among U.S. scientists regarding the ultimate impact of global warming on the frequencies and strengths of hurricanes in future years, the same scientists agree that “main hurricane problem facing the United States was the ever-growing concentration of population and wealth in vulnerable coastal areas, much of it subsidized by federal insurance and other programs”. This is a concern when 53 percent of Americans live within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of a coast.

In fact this is a global issue with roughly 40% of the world’s human population now living within 100km (63 miles) of a coast, people worldwide have been increasingly placing themselves at risk of impact of coastal or ocean storm events.

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Fifty years ago, Charles Keeling began measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations on the island of Hawaii. The location was chosen because it was far away from major industrial emission sources of the gas. Since that time, the persistent year-to-year increases led scientists to consider both the source of the CO2 and the impact of this greenhouse gas on global climate.

Through mass-balance calculations, scientists determined that half of the year-to-year rise in CO2 could be accounted for by human caused emissions of the gas. The other half was must have been absorbed either by terrestrial or marine processes.

But in a report this week in the journal Science  researchers report that the Southern Ocean around Antarctica is now saturated with carbon dioxide.  The Southern Ocean’s capability to absorb excess CO2 is thus reduced.  This weakened ability is attributed to observed increases in Southern Ocean winds resulting from human activities.

Corinne Le Quéré, the study’s lead author, is reported by CNN to have called the finding very alarming. “We thought we would be able to detect these only the second half of this century, say 2050 or so,” Le Quéré said. But data from 1981 through 2004 show the sink is already full of carbon dioxide.

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According to NASA, vast areas of snow in Antarctica melted in 2005 when temperatures warmed up for a week in the summer in a process that may accelerate invisible melting deep beneath the surface. The new analysis of satellite data showed that an area the size of California melted and then re-froze — the most significant thawing in 30 years.

The observed melting occurred in multiple distinct regions, including far inland, at high latitudes and at high elevations, where melt had been considered unlikely. According to Konrad Steffen, one of the authors of the work and director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, “Antarctica has shown little to no warming in the recent past with the exception of the Antarctic Peninsula, but now large regions are showing the first signs of the impacts of warming as interpreted by this satellite analysis.. Increases in snowmelt, such as this in 2005, definitely could have an impact on larger-scale melting of Antarctica’s ice sheets if they were severe or sustained over time.”
In the figure above, NASA’s QuikScat satellite detected extensive areas of
snowmelt, shown in yellow and red, in west Antarctica in January 2005.

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Contrary to what most climate change naysayers claim, scientists are mostly a conservative lot. The peer review process can sometimes be brutal. It is often only after significant resistance and repeated attempts and additional substantiation that new research ideas and findings traverse the gauntlet of reviewers and are published in the top scientific journals.

(One of the most important papers in ecology on the trophic-dynamic concept by Raymond Lindeman was originally rejected for publication. Reviewers felt there were insufficient data to support the theoretical model and that theoretical essays were inappropriate for the most important journal in the field.)

Recently, at least three reports have been published that document that recent scientific projections of global warming have likely been conservative.
The reports indicate that climate change models, used by the world’s scientists to make the projections, likely are providing underestimates of both future warming and the global impacts of a warming earth.

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First, new analyses reported in the journal Science, indicate that climate projections published in 2001 by the IPCC were conservative compared to actual warmings observed. The 2001 projections were part of the IPCC Third Assessment Report and modeled changes in key global climate parameters since 1973, compared with a series of differing emissions scenarios. Although published in 2001, the model projections were essentially independent from the observed climate data since 1990.

• As be seen in the figures (right), measured carbon dioxide concentrations between the years 1990 and 2006 followed the model projections almost exactly.
• But measured global mean surface temperature increase (land and ocean combined) between 1990 and 2006 was in the upper range of the various IPCC scenarios.
• However, the actual observed rates of sea-level rise since 1990 were faster than the those projected by models.

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Second, a NASA report suggests that existing climate models may be significantly underestimating future warmings in eastern North America due to limitations in their ability to accurately project future precipitation regimes.To focus on more local scales, the NASA scientists scaled the simulations from a global climate model developed by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and coupled the simulations with those of a widely-used weather prediction model.Coupling the weather prediction model with the global climate model allowed the scientists to assesses details about future climate at a finer geographic scale than global models alone. The coupling provided reliable simulations not only on the amounts of summer precipitation, but also on its frequency and timing. Accurately predicting the timing and frequency of precipitation events is important because daily temperatures are usually higher on rainless days and when precipitation falls less frequently than normal.Once more accurate information on the timing and frequency of summer rainfall events were incorporated, the simulations projected much higher summer temperatures that had been projected with the global model alone.The new projections indicate that eastern U.S. summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low-to-mid-80s (degrees Fahrenheit) will most likely soar into the low-to-mid-90s during typical summers by the 2080s. In extreme seasons — when precipitation falls infrequently — July and August daily high temperatures could average between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.

Image: A computer model projection of average daily maximum temperatures over the eastern United States for July 2085 (left) and July 1993 (right). Areas in violet shading show temperatures of 26°C (79°F); green 30°C (86°F); yellow 34°C (93°F); red 38°C (100°F);dark purple 42°C (108°F). Credit: NASA/GISS

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Third, another new study released by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that arctic sea ice is melting at a significantly faster rate than projected by the most advanced computer models.Satellite and other observations showed the Arctic ice cover is retreating more rapidly than estimated by any of the eighteen computer models used by the IPCC in preparing its 2007 assessments.Similar to the reports above, the authors of this study concluded that current model projections are providing conservative estimates of future global warming impacts such as the melting of the Arctic ice cap. The findings show that the shrinking of summertime ice is about thirty years ahead of the climate model projections.The 2007 IPCC report projected that the Arctic would become seasonally ice free sometime between 2050 to well beyond 2100. The new results suggest the Arctic could become ice free in summers even earlier than the year 2050.

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Another argument made by the climate change naysayers against the facts of global warming is that the global climate models are not accurate. Computer simulation models are, by definition, designed as simplified representations of the complex systems they attempt to simulate.Earth processes are extremely complex. Simulation models are developed because an exact replication of all of the multitude of Earth processes is simply out of the scope of our human capacity today. So models are necessarily incorporate simplifications of both processes and scales of the real Earth and its climate and weather systems.After 30-40 years of development, the global climate models are pretty good. They do a reasonable job of back-projecting known climate trends of the last 30-50 years against real world observed trends.The naysayers are correct in asserting that the climate models are not 100% accurate. But the lesson of their argument is not what they think it to be. The contrarians argue that since climate models are not 100% accurate, they provide no support to the facts of global warming.In fact as these reports show, in comparing model projections to real measured trends, the global climate models are doing a good job of projecting the directions of the trends, it is just that the current models have been underestimating the magnitudes and the rapidity in which the Earth is warming and in which the warming is impacting local and global Earth processes.

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The most detailed portraits ever of the Earth’s land surface have been created with ESA’s Envisat environmental satellite. The portraits are the first products produced as part of the ESA-initiated GlobCover project and are available online here.

Around 40 terabytes of imagery – an amount of data equivalent to the content of 40 million books – were acquired between December 2004 and June 2006 and processed to generate the global composites. The composites will support the international community in modelling climate change extent and impacts, studying ecosystems and plotting worldwide land-use trends.

The image above (click for larger size) is the GlobCover bimonthly global composite for May to June 2005 based on Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument working in Full Resolution Mode with a spatial resolution of 300 meters.

Read the ESA Article

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A new type of engine is being developed that is said to dramatically reduce oil consumption and the emission of global-warming pollutants.

(Image: Mechanical Engineering Professor Gregory Shaver working on new engine design)

According to a press release from Purdue University, researchers have created the first computational model to track engine performance from one combustion cycle to the next for a new type of engine that could dramatically reduce oil consumption and the emission of global-warming pollutants.

The key design change being implemented frees intake and exhaust valves from being directly driven by mechanisms connected to the pistons. The innovation would be a departure from the way automotive engines have worked since they were commercialized more than a century ago.

Mechanical Engineering Professor Gregory Shaver said that the new technology called variable valve actuation would enable significant improvements in conventional gasoline and diesel engines used in cars and trucks and for applications such as generators. The technique also enables the introduction of an advanced method called homogeneous charge compression ignition, or HCCI, which would allow the United States to drastically reduce its dependence on foreign oil and the production of harmful exhaust emissions.

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