Along with Wikipedia and other sites, this blog will go on strike on the 18th of January, 2012. We will be closed starting 13:00 UTC (also known as 1 pm Greenwich Mean Time – that’s 8 am Eastern Standard Time for you Americans). We should be back 12 hours later.
My homepage will be on strike too—in fact, it started today! Yours can easily do the same: just copy my homepage onto yours and adjust it to taste.
(By the way, the official version of the “strike” webpage is flawed because it uses relative links that don’t work when you copy it to your own site. I fixed those in my version.)
Happy New Year! I’m back from Laos. Here are seven items, mostly from the Azimuth Circle on Google Plus:
1) Phil Libin is the boss of a Silicon Valley startup. When he’s off travelling, he uses a telepresence robot to keep an eye on things. It looks like a stick figure on wheels. Its bulbous head has two eyes, which are actually a camera and a laser. On its forehead is a screen, where you can see Libin’s face. It’s made by a company called Anybots, and it costs just $15,000.
I predict that within my life we’ll be using things like this to radically cut travel costs and carbon emissions for business and for conferences. It seems weird now, but so did telephones. Future models will be better to look at. But let’s try it soon!
Bruce Bartlett and I are already planning for me to use telepresence to give a lecture on mathematics and the environment at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. But we’d been planning to use old-fashioned videoconferencing technology.
Anybots is located in Mountain View, California. That’s near Google’s main campus. Can anyone help me set up a talk on energy and the environment at Google, where I use an Anybot?
(Or, for that matter, anywhere else around there?)
2) A study claims to have found a correlation between weather and the day of the week! The claim is that there are more tornados and hailstorms in the eastern USA during weekdays. One possible mechanism could be that aerosols from car exhaust help seed clouds.
I make no claims that this study is correct. But at the very least, it would be interesting to examine their use of statistics and see if it’s convincing or flawed:
Abstract. This study shows for the first time statistical evidence that when anthropogenic aerosols over the eastern United States during summertime are at their weekly mid-week peak, tornado and hailstorm activity there is also near its weekly maximum. The weekly cycle in summertime storm activity for 1995–2009 was found to be statistically significant and unlikely to be due to natural variability. It correlates well with previously observed weekly cycles of other measures of storm activity. The pattern of variability supports the hypothesis that air pollution aerosols invigorate deep convective clouds in a moist, unstable atmosphere, to the extent of inducing production of large hailstones and tornados. This is caused by the effect of aerosols on cloud drop nucleation, making cloud drops smaller and hydrometeors larger. According to simulations, the larger ice hydrometeors contribute to more hail. The reduced evaporation from the larger hydrometeors produces weaker cold pools. Simulations have shown that too cold and fast-expanding pools inhibit the formation of tornados. The statistical observations suggest that this might be the mechanism by which the weekly modulation in pollution aerosols is causing the weekly cycle in severe convective storms during summer over the eastern United States. Although we focus here on the role of aerosols, they are not a primary atmospheric driver of tornados and hailstorms but rather modulate them in certain conditions.
The title has a question mark in it, but it’s been cited in very dramatic terms in many places, for example this video entitled “Peer reviewed study shows 14,000 U.S. deaths from Fukushima”:
Starting at 1:31 you’ll see an interview with one of the paper’s authors, Janette Sherman.
14,000 deaths in the US due to Fukushima? Wow! How did they get that figure? This quote from the paper explains how:
During weeks 12 to 25 [after the Fukushima disaster began], total deaths in 119 U.S. cities increased from 148,395 (2010) to 155,015 (2011), or 4.46 percent. This was nearly double the 2.34 percent rise in total deaths (142,006 to 145,324) in 104 cities for the prior 14 weeks, significant at p < 0.000001 (Table 2). This difference between actual and expected changes of +2.12 percentage points (+4.46% – 2.34%) translates to 3,286 “excess” deaths (155,015 × 0.0212) nationwide. Assuming a total of 2,450,000 U.S. deaths will occur in 2011 (47,115 per week), then 23.5 percent of deaths are reported (155,015/14 = 11,073, or 23.5% of 47,115). Dividing 3,286 by 23.5 percent yields a projected 13,983 excess U.S. deaths in weeks 12 to 25 of 2011.
Hmm. Can you think of some potential problems with this analysis?
In the interview, Janette Sherman also mentions increased death rates of children in British Columbia. Here’s the evidence the paper presents for that:
Shortly after the report [another paper by the authors] was issued, officials from British Columbia, Canada, proximate to the northwestern United States, announced that 21 residents had died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) in the first half of 2011, compared with 16 SIDS deaths in all of the prior year. Moreover, the number of deaths from SIDS rose from 1 to 10 in the months of March, April, May, and June 2011, after Fukushima fallout arrived, compared with the same period in 2010. While officials could not offer any explanation for the abrupt increase, it coincides with our findings in the Pacific Northwest.
4) For the first time in 87 years, a wild gray wolf was spotted in California:
Researchers have been tracking this juvenile male using a GPS-enabled collar since it departed northern Oregon. In just a few weeks, it walked some 730 miles to California. It was last seen surfing off Malibu. Here is a photograph:
5) George Musser left the Centre for Quantum Technologies and returned to New Jersey, but not before writing a nice blog article explaining how the GRACE satellite uses the Earth’s gravitational field to measure the melting of glaciers:
6) The American Physical Society has started a new group: a Topical Group on the Physics of Climate! If you’re a member of the APS, and care about climate issues, you should join this.
7) Finally, here’s a cool picture taken in the Gulf of Alaska by Kent Smith:
He believes this was caused by fresher water meeting more salty water, but it doesn’t sounds like he’s sure. Can anyone figure out what’s going on? The foam where the waters meet is especially intriguing.
Again, some eye candy to start the show. Stare fixedly at the + sign here until the pink dots completely disappear:
In a semiconductor, a ‘hole’ is the absence of an electron, and it can move around a as if it were a particle. If you have a hole moving to the right, in reality you have electrons moving to the left. Here pink dots moving counterclockwise look like a green dot moving clockwise!
A related puzzle: what happens when you hold a helium balloon on a string while you’re driving in a car with the windows closed… and then you make a sharp right turn? I’ve done it, so I know from experience.
Now for the real stuff:
• Tom Murphy, a physics professor at U.C. San Diego, has a blog worth visiting: Do the Math. He uses physics and math to make informed guesses about the future of energy production. Try out his overview on ‘peak oil’.
• Hundreds of top conservation scientists took a survey, and 99.5% felt that a serious loss of biodiversity is either ‘likely’, ‘very likely’, or ‘virtually certain’. Tropical coral ecosystems were perceived as the most seriously affected. A slim majority think we need to decide on rules for ‘triage’: deciding which species to save and which to give up on.
• Climate change is causing a massive change in tree species across Western USA. “Ecosystems are always changing at the landscape level, but normally the rate of change is too slow for humans to notice,” said Steven Running, a co-author of a study on this at the University of Montana. “Now the rate of change is fast enough we can see it.” The study used remote sensing of large areas over a four-year period.
• The James Dyson Award calls on design and engineering students to create innovative, practical, elegant solutions to the challenges that face us. This year, Edward Linacre won for a self-powering device that extracts water from the air for irrigation purposes. Linacre comes from the drought-afflicted continent of Australia. But his invention borrows some tricks from the Namib beetle, which survives some of the driest deserts in Africa by harvesting the moisture that condenses on its back during the early morning. That’s called biomimicry.
• The New York Times has a great profile of Jeremy Grantham. He heads a successful firm managing $100 billion assets, and now he’s 72. So why is he saying this?
… it’s very important to me to make a lot of money now, much more than when I was 40 or 50.
Not because he has a brand new gold-digger ‘trophy wife’ or spendthrift heirs. No, he puts all the money into the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. He’s famous for his quarterly letters on future trends—you can read them free online! And thanks to this, he has some detailed ideas about what’s coming up, and what we should do about it:
Energy “will give us serious and sustained problems” over the next 50 years as we make the transition from hydrocarbons—oil, coal, gas—to solar, wind, nuclear and other sources, but we’ll muddle through to a solution to Peak Oil and related challenges. Peak Everything Else will prove more intractable for humanity. Metals, for instance, “are entropy at work . . . from wonderful metal ores to scattered waste,” and scarcity and higher prices “will slowly increase forever,” but if we scrimp and recycle, we can make do for another century before tight constraint kicks in.
Agriculture is more worrisome. Local water shortages will cause “persistent irritation”—wars, famines. Of the three essential macro nutrient fertilizers, nitrogen is relatively plentiful and recoverable, but we’re running out of potassium and phosphorus, finite mined resources that are “necessary for all life.” Canada has large reserves of potash (the source of potassium), which is good news for Americans, but 50 to 75 percent of the known reserves of phosphate (the source of phosphorus) are located in Morocco and the western Sahara. Assuming a 2 percent annual increase in phosphorus consumption, Grantham believes the rest of the world’s reserves won’t last more than 50 years, so he expects “gamesmanship” from the phosphate-rich.
And he rates soil erosion as the biggest threat of all. The world’s population could reach 10 billion within half a century—perhaps twice as many human beings as the planet’s overtaxed resources can sustainably support, perhaps six times too many.
It’s not that he doesn’t take climate change seriously. However, he seems to have almost given up on the US political establishment doing anything about it. So he’s shifted his focus:
Grantham put his own influence and money behind the climate-change bill passed by the House in 2009. “But even $100 million wouldn’t have gotten it through the Senate,” he said. “The recession more or less ruled it out. It pushed anything having to do with the environment down 10 points, across the board. Unemployment and interest in environmental issues move inversely.”
Having missed a once-in-a-generation legislative opportunity to address climate change, American environmentalists are looking for new strategies. Grantham believes that the best approach may be to recast global warming, which depresses crop yields and worsens soil erosion, as a factor contributing to resource depletion. “People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change,” he said. “Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.” He believes this shift in emphasis plays to Americans’ strength. “Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan,” he said, “but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.”
Let’s wrap up with some more fun stuff: impressive volcanos!
Morgan Abbou explains:
Volcanic lightning photograph by Francisco Negroni. In a scene no human could have witnessed, an apocalyptic agglomeration of lightning bolts illuminates an ash cloud above Chile’s Puyehue volcano in June 2011. The minutes-long exposure shows individual bolts as if they’d all occurred at the same moment and, due to the Earth’s rotation, renders stars (left) as streaks. Lightning to the right of the ash cloud appears to have illuminated nearby clouds.hence the apparent absence of stars on that side of the picture. After an ominous series of earthquakes on the previous day, the volcano erupted that afternoon, convincing authorities to evacuate some 3,500 area residents. Eruptions over the course of the weekend resulted in heavy ashfalls, including in Argentine towns 60 miles (a hundred kilometers) away.
Here’s another shot of the same volcano:
And here’s Mount Etna blowing out a smoke ring in March of 2000. By its shadow, this ring was estimated to be 200 meters in diameter!
I’ve been spending a lot of time Google+ lately, trying to drum up interest in the Azimuth Project. Unsurprisingly, my ‘fun’ posts have attracted more attention than those dealing with serious issues. This confirms my suspicion that computers were invented so we could goof off while it looks like we’re working.
My most popular contribution was this eye-catching image:
63 people shared it with others, despite my warning that it causes brain damage. By the way, there’s another cool illusion at the end of this post, but it’s only visible to people who read the whole thing.
The second most popular tidbit was this movie of Alvin Lucier’s “Music for solo performer”. If you enjoy puzzles, watch it before reading my explanation, and try to figure out what’s going on:
This piece exploits the fact that the brain’s alpha waves—which only start when you’re relaxed with eyes closed—have a frequency of 8-12 hertz. Thus, if amplified enormously, they can be made audible! To perform this piece, you put electrodes on your head and route the signal through an amplifier to loudspeakers coupled to percussion instruments. The performer here wrote:
I welcomed the challenge to reduce my performative activities to a minimum. While working out my interpretation I slowly learned to be aware of my mental activities. I acquired a sensitivity for subtle changes in tension and the ability to switch the state of my brain from beta to alpha and back again. Nevertheless, the outcome is not completely controllable. This makes the live act quite thrilling.
For more, read the text on YouTube.
But I posted about some deadly serious issues, too!
Is the Earth’s surface warming?
In 2010, a Berkeley physicist named Richard Muller decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to independently check what the Earth’s surface temperature has been doing. The team included physicists, statisticians, and the climatologist Judith Curry, noted for “challenging the IPCC consensus” (her words).
Global warming is real, according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1 °C since the mid-1950s.
Analyzing temperature data from 15 sources, in some cases going back as 1800, the Berkeley Earth study directly addressed scientific concerns raised by skeptics, including the urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and the risk of selection bias.
On the basis of its analysis, according to Berkeley Earth’s founder and scientific director, the group concluded that earlier studies based on more limited data by teams in the United States and Britain had accurately estimated the extent of land surface warming.
“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other times in the U.S. and U.K.,” Muller said. “This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”
Anthony Watts’ response is here. As you might have guessed, he’s not “accepting whatever result they produce”.
Is it even possible for someone to back down from a position they’re deeply invested in? It may require a bit of help—an act of kindness. In Brian Merchant’s article Do climate skeptics change their minds?, he writes:
I asked Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who runs what may be the most popular climate-skeptic blog, Watts Up With That, what could lead him to accept climate science. A “starting point for the process,” he said, wouldn’t begin with more facts but instead with a public apology from the high profile scientists who have labeled him and his colleagues “deniers.”
Should we study geoengineering?
Should we study our options for fighting global warming by deliberately manipulating the Earth’s climate? This is called geoengineering—and not surprisingly, it makes lots of people nervous. There are plenty of things to worry about. But can we afford to completely ignore it?
An organization called the Bipartisan Policy Center, set up by four famous US senators, two Democratic and two Republican (Daschle, Mitchell, Baker and Dole) has released a report on this question.
Written by a panel of 18 experts on the natural sciences, social sciences, science policy, foreign policy, national security, and environmental issues, the report concludes that the U.S. government should start a “focused and systematic program of research into climate remediation.” They emphasize that it’s “far too premature to contemplate deployment of any climate remediation technology”, and note that:
Most climate remediation concepts proposed to date involve some combination of risks, financial costs, and/or physical limitations that make them inappropriate to pursue except as complementary or emergency measures—for example, if the climate system reaches a “tipping point” and swift remedial action is required.
But, they point out that even if the U.S. decides not to engage in geoengineering, it “needs to evaluate steps others might take and be able to effectively participate in—and lead—the important international conversations”.
• 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record since 1880 (NASA).
• The area of Arctic ice that’s been around for many years decreased by 42 percent between 2005 and 2008. This ice has gotten about 0.6 meters thinner during that time. The average thickness of the seasonal ice in midwinter is about 2 meters. (Kwok et al.).
• Ocean acidification—caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide concentrations—is a threat to coral in areas such as the Great Barrier Reef, and is happening much more quickly than anticipated (De’ath et al.). It is now recognized as having implications for the entire ocean food web which is critical to whales, fish, and mollusks (Munday et al., Gooding et al. and Comeau et al.).
• A global average temperature increase of 7° C, which is toward the extreme upper part of the range of current projections, would make large portions of the world uninhabitable to humans (Sherwood et al.). For more, see my article How Hot is Too Hot?
• Recent literature (Yin et al.) suggests that sea level rise will likely not be even around the globe. In other words, sea level rise does not occur just like water being added to a bathtub. As a result, the northeast coast of the United States may be especially affected by changes in sea level due to changes in ocean circulation.
• The latest research (Francis et al. and Petoukhov et al.) also suggests that recent winter weather experienced in temperate Northern Hemisphere could be connected to climate change. As winter sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean disappears, it can create a pressure and temperature gradient that sucks heat out of Europe. Therefore, recent extreme winter weather is not inconsistent with increases in global average temperature.
Shrinking Arctic lakes
Some Arctic lakes are shrinking. Why? One possibility: warmer temperatures and higher winds could cause more evaporation. Another: melting permafrost could let lake water soak into thawed soil. The scientist involved, Mark Carroll at the University of Maryland in College Park, “is not aware of any evidence that the permafrost in the far north is melting yet”. Hmm—compare my article Melting Permafrost.
Experiments in deforestation
Starting in December, a Malaysian state-owned company will start chopping down 75,000 hectares of rainforest on Borneo, to create yet another palm oil plantation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t count as newsworthy! What’s news is that a team led by Rob Ewers at Imperial College London will do an experiment based on this. Working to Ewers’s design, the loggers will leave patches of rainforest of different sizes, and at different distances from other patches of rainforest, to determine the effects of different levels of deforestation.
Permian-Triassic extinction
About 251 million years ago, our Earth suffered its biggest mass extinction event ever: the Permian-Triassic extinction. As many as 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates went extinct! Here’s what the sea bottom looked like before:
and after:
It took 50 million years for the Earth to completely recover its biodiversity!
Naturally there’s a lot of interest in figuring out what happened. The CO2 concentration soared to 2000 parts per million, and the temperature rose about 8 °C, but other things may have been at work too. I won’t attempt to discuss all this here!—just one little bit of news. Gregory Brennecka and others from Arizona State University and University of Cincinnati found that the ocean was low in oxygen for at most tens of thousands of years before the Permian-Triassic extinction. That’s shorter than previous estimates.
They saw a big shift in the ratio of 238U to 235U in carbonate rocks immediately prior to the mass extinction, which they claim signals an increase in oceanic anoxia—this is apparently a new technique. The team also found higher Th/U ratios in the same interval, which indicate a decrease in the uranium content of seawater. They also consider lower concentrations of uranium in seawater to be a sign of ocean anoxia.
I don’t know much about it yet, but it could be good. I’ve been wanting more people to join me blogging here on Azimuth, to build up more of a community and a higher level of energy, but maybe this is a better solution: keep Azimuth as is, but also put climate-related blog articles on Planet 3.0. We’ll see.
The part you’ve been waiting for
As with the picture at the top of this article, if you focus on any small patch, strange things seem to start happening everywhere else. Your eyes gets curious, and it’s hard to avoid looking. As your eyes flicker back and forth, the horizontal lines seem to twitch and bend.
This bet concerns whether neutrinos can go faster than light. John Baez bets they cannot. For the sake of the environment and out of scientific curiosity, Frederik De Roo bets that they can.
At any time before October 2021, either John or Frederik can claim they have won this bet. When that happens, they will try to agree whether it’s true beyond a reasonable doubt, false beyond a reasonable doubt, or uncertain that neutrinos can (under some conditions) go faster than light. If they cannot agree, the situation counts as uncertain.
If they decide it’s true, John is only allowed to take one round-trip airplane trip during one of the next 5 years. John is allowed to choose which year this is. He can make his choice at any time (before 4 years have passed).
If they decide it’s false, Frederik has to produce 10 decent Azimuth Library articles during one of the next 5 years—where ‘decent’ means ‘deserving of three thumbs up emoticons on the Azimuth Forum’. He is allowed to choose which year this is. He can make his choice at any time (before 4 years have passed).
If they decide it’s uncertain, they can renegotiate the bet (or just decide not to continue it).
I’m willing to take bets that this faster-than-light neutrino business will turn out to be wrong. We can negotiate the detailed terms, the odds, and the stakes.
But beware: I’m still enjoying the case of scotch I won from David Ring. I bet there’d be no “strong evidence for supersymmetry” within the first year of operation of the Large Hadron Collider.
It took a couple of days, but I finally got someone willing to take me up on this. And—surprise!—it was none other than Frederick De Roo, one of the key contributors to the Azimuth Project.
But he’s playing for higher stakes than I’d expected:
Hi John,
actually I’m willing to take a bet.
I propose to bet (even though I don’t believe it) that
neutrinos can go faster than light
The loser of the bet will promise to the winner not to fly for one whole year! (for a year chosen within a specified number of years after the bet has expired)
How about that? The earth wins regardless who’s right ;-)
I asked him if we could discuss the details here, and he said okay.
It’s a tricky business. While I’ve got the odds on my side, I’ve also got more to lose!
Frederik lives in Europe, where there are lots of trains. His idea of a fun vacation is a month-long bike trip. What’s he got to lose?
I could easily survive a year of not flying to conferences. It would hurt a bit. Still, I’d say yes in a minute if it were just up to me. But Lisa and I have permanent positions at the University of California in Riverside, and we’re trying to work out a deal where we work in Singapore every summer. So, I can’t really agree to this bet unless I get her okay!
How do I convince a non-physicist—and not just any non-physicist, but my wife—that it’s really, really safe to bet a summer of being together on the possibility that neutrinos go faster than light?
We spent seven years on opposite sides of the country before she got a job at UC Riverside. We promised we’d never do something like that again. And now I’m saying “oh, don’t worry, dear: special relativity is very well tested.” If you haven’t been in this situation, you don’t know how unconvincing that sounds.
Should I look into cruises from Southern California to Singapore? How long do those take, anyway? It would be a bummer to get there only have to head straight back.
What would you say, Frederik, if I changed the the terms of the bet to something like this? If I lose the bet, for each plane trip I take during the specified year, I’ll donate $10,000 to your favorite environmental organization. Carbon offsets, or whatever you like. That way if I lose, I suffer, but not my marriage.
Here are some of the tidbits I’ve posted to my Azimuth circle on Google+ recently. If you want to join this circle, just let me know!
First, here’s a random example of the fun stuff I’ve been bumping into over on Google+. This is a video of the Aurora Australis taken by the crew of the International Space Station on 17 September 2011 as they passed from south of Madagascar to just north of Australia over the Indian Ocean:
Note how the aurora lights up the bottom of the space station!
Next, the serious stuff:
• Unlike some US presidential candidates, the CIA takes climate change seriously. After all, intelligence is the CIA’s middle name. Two years ago they created the Center on Climate Change and National Security to study the political ramifications of a hotter world.
However, they just said that all of the work being done at this center is classified.
• Barry Brooks just wrote about the Azimuth Project in his BraveNewClimate blog. He likes it! He says he’s found it to be “highly useful”, and he invites you all to join:
Why bother? Because if done credibly, it may well be that resources like this will become one-stop-shops that you can recommend to your family, friends, business associates or even politicians, to make informed rather than evidence-free choices about our future options.
If you want to know more, visit the Azimuth Forum and see what we’re doing Even better, join it and tell us what you’re doing!
An international team of marine biologists recently traveled to Papua New Guinea where excess CO2 released from volcanic activity has already decreased local ocean pH to the levels that are expected globally by 2100. In this area, they found that more than 90 percent of the region’s coral reef species were lost.
• Climate Communication is a new science and outreach organization dedicated to improving public understanding of climate change science. The director explains the idea here.
For scientists, we’re offering workshops in communicating climate science that go far beyond typical media training. We focus on the specific challenges of communicating about climate change. We go beyond problems of language to consider psychological and cultural issues. Our Science Director, Richard Somerville, and I led a climate communication workshop at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December 2010 and we’ll both be speaking there again this year. We led a workshop at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab on communicating about climate change. And we have more workshops planned. We welcome inquires about holding additional workshops and professional development sessions.
For journalists, we’re making the latest science available in a more accessible form and helping them identify the best experts to interview on particular topics. In a fast-paced and challenging media environment, we’re bringing the science to journalists in ways that are credible and helpful. Last week we held a telephone press conference featuring leading climate scientists discussing the linkages between extreme weather and climate change. We also posted a summary of the latest peer-reviewed science on that subject. Journalists are welcome to contact us and we’ll do our best to help.
For the public, we’re producing clear, brief summaries of the most important things they need to know about climate change, using not only words but also videos and animations. We’re providing concise answers to the key questions people ask: What’s happening to climate and why? How will it affect us? And what can we do about it?
The Yale and George Mason Universities’ studies tell us the questions most Americans want answered. Our science advisors answer those questions and more, simply and clearly, at our website in both text and videos.
Our Science Advisors include many of the world’s leading climate scientists, who are also great communicators: Ken Caldeira, Julia Cole, Robert Corell, Kerry Emanuel, Katharine Hayhoe, Greg Holland, Jeff Kiehl, Michael MacCracken, Michael Mann, Jeff Masters, Jerry Meehl, Jonathan Overpeck, Camille Parmesan, Barrett Rock, Benjamin Santer, Kevin Trenberth, Warren Washington, and Don Wuebbles.
You can read their bios, learn what they do outside of science, and even see them in action on our website, in brief bio videos. We also put together a short video on what the public really needs to know about climate change. And there are many more videos on common climate questions, extreme weather and climate change, and other topics. We hope to help amplify their voices and bring more clarity to public discussions of this great challenge.
• You can get a lot of climate and geological data in the OPenDAP format by going here. Temperature data, solar radiation data, coral reef data, comparisons between the present and the Last Glacial Maximum, and much much more!
• R is a software environment optimized for doing statistics. Want to use it to analyze time series data? Seasonal adjustments and all that? Then this book is for you!
You need the word 'latex' right after the first dollar sign, and it needs a space after it. Double dollar signs don't work, and other limitations apply, some described here. You can't preview comments here, but I'm happy to fix errors.
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