Updating the Science of Global Warming: A Q&A with Marine Biologist Katherine Richardson

Updating the Science of Global Warming: A Q&A with Marine Biologist Katherine Richardson

  9:22:00 AM    Science Lover

---

A lot of the current debate seems to center around cost. So what will it cost?

A lot of people go around saying this isn't going to cost us anything. This is cheap. It's not.

We just are going to have to stop thinking of investment in the environment and climate change as being opposed to economic growth. [For] economic growth in the future, a prerequisite is that we stop treating the planet like a subprime loan. In that sense, the economic crisis we have at the moment is useful in terms of analyzing what's going on with the planet.

We don't take into account the resources that we are moving around. One of the things that will be argued is that solar is more important as a long-term fix than many have argued. I think the figure is the sun bathes the Earth in 120,000 terawatt-hours of energy and the global community only uses 12 to 15 terawatt-hours. And all the renewable energies are derived from the sun in some way. [A terawatt equals one trillion watts.]

The plants [collect] energy from the sun [that] is the equivalent of 32,000 hydrogen bombs. It's amazing the amount of energy they suck out of the sun.

So what more do we know now?

This 2-degree [Celsius, or 3.6-degree Fahrenheit] change that everybody talks about [as a limit on warming], which is probably unattainable, has some serious ramifications for oceans. It's not just two degrees and we all take off a sweater. Changes that are occurring may accelerate [carbon dioxide] coming out of the ocean.

I have two abstracts myself: One of them is that we know a lot about the ocean as a sink. It takes up half the extra CO2 that we put out. It takes it up by biological and physical processes, like the material gets caught in plants and then sinks to the bottom when they die. Bacteria break this material down much more quickly when it is warmer and less of it falls. We are measuring the effect of temperature on this breakdown and it's quite substantial. So this much of a temperature increase will mean that the oceans will take up this much less and that provokes the problem even more. You can make much better models out of this of what's going to happen than you've gotten out of the IPCC.

Is it too late?

I'm not at all depressed. This is an exciting time in Earth's history. Twelve thousand years ago our ancestors discovered agriculture. When they did that they broke the rules about the number of people the Earth could hold. And now that there are even more people, there have to be some rules.

Over the last 50 years, we've thought the oceans and atmosphere are big enough that we don't need any rules. But we're smarter now, we do need some rules.

We've been regulating on the basis of the different subcomponents of Earth: land, air, water. But the doctor doesn't give you medicine for your head if he knows it will hurt your feet. You need to treat the body as a body and we need to treat the Earth as an Earth. We have to manage not by segment but by the planet as a whole.

First  Page

Read More

Updating the Science of Global Warming: A Q&A with Marine Biologist Katherine Richardson

Updating the Science of Global Warming: A Q&A with Marine Biologist Katherine Richardson

  9:09:00 AM    Science Lover

---

Will it be a consensus document?

The scientific community is notoriously divided. But we will speak with one voice. And there will be a review process by outside researchers of this synthesis document to make sure that it is the best science. There will be mechanisms to make sure that this is not just one researcher's opinion.

But the strength of the IPCC is that it's not just the scientists, it's also the governments.

Probably the value of this in terms of the negotiations themselves is to keep the sense of urgency. It will keep that right in front of the policymakers. It doesn't matter if everybody agrees with everything in there.

Scientists should see this as a possibility to communicate to a much wider audience than even this meeting. We show these pictures of the ice in the Arctic melting. We think when we've showed these pictures, we've communicated the problem. But people just say, "Oh, let's put a shipping traffic route in there." Or "There must be some oil in there we can exploit." The implications for what this means for the planet maintaining itself, people just don't have the faintest idea about. We are missing the boat in communicating this story to the wider world.

Who will be involved?

It reads like a who's who of climate science. One of the first people we asked was [economist] Lord Nicholas Stern. He said, "no thank you." But then he called back later to ask whether he could still come and talk.

We also have [Rajendra] Pachauri from the IPCC to indicate that this is a compatible exercise with IPCC; [José Manuel] Barroso, president of the European Commission; [energy expert] Dan Kammen from [the University of California,] Berkeley; and [economist] William Nordhaus from Yale is a speaker.

Famously, Stern and Nordhaus really disagree on what should be done about climate change.

I recognize those conflicts. It wouldn't be a real scientific conference, I wouldn't be being honest, if I chose one or the other. We also have [economist] Terry Barker, an IPCC author from [the University of] Cambridge, who has invited Nordhaus to debate with him at this meeting. We are trying to make sure that we have well-balanced economic presentations and conclusions as well as scientific ones.

What will be the outcome?

Politicians' biggest challenge is getting the balance right between mitigation and adaptation. The core of this meeting is entirely devoted to mitigation and adaptation.

There are six themes: The first one is the natural science part of it— What do we understand about this climate system, tipping points, how bad could this go? There is also a theme about ethics, or equity, between nations, generations [as well as] humans and nature or animals.

Then there is mitigation and adaptation. How far can renewables take us? What are the potentials and limits of biofuels? And then there is the theme of managing the planet as a whole.

Next

Read More

Updating the Science of Global Warming: A Q&A with Marine Biologist Katherine Richardson

Updating the Science of Global Warming: A Q&A with Marine Biologist Katherine Richardson

  8:57:00 AM    Science Lover

---

When the world's governments gather in December 2009 in Copenhagen to negotiate a treaty to restrain global greenhouse gas emissions, the science on which they base their decision could be as much as four years out of date. The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered its synthesis of existing research in February 2007 and it was based on studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals only through 2005.

Stepping into that gap—at the request of the Danish government—will be the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, a collection of the world's top scientists and economists set to meet in Copenhagen in March 2009 to deliver an updated state of the science on global warming. The prognosis is grim: Emissions throughout the world, both in countries pledged to restrain such pollution and those that have ignored or sidestepped the issue, continue to grow, and impacts can be felt from the Arctic and Antarctic to the Amazon.

ScientificAmerican.com's David Biello spoke with Katherine Richardson, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen and chair of the climate congress, to discuss the event and what it hopes to achieve.

Tell me about the climate change congress and where the idea came from.

The idea for doing this came from the Danish prime minister's office. [Denmark is] the local host of the meeting in December 2009 and [it is] worried about two things: One, people argue that it is economically problematic to invest in climate. [To deal with that] business people are arranging a conference in May next year on how, in some cases, it can pay to invest in climate. For example, Denmark, despite the fact that we're at 20 percent renewables [in our energy supply], is experiencing tremendous growth.

Two, this meeting is coming in the middle of an IPCC period. The IPCC report is absolutely crucial for starting negotiations. That has been accepted by everyone so you don't need to argue whether it's right or wrong. It's based on consensus.

But that is both a strength and a weakness. It takes a long time to get consensus. There were no scientific results in the 2007 [IPCC] report that came after 2005. By the time you sit down at the table in December 2009, you are missing the last four years of what we now understand about climate, adaptation, mitigation, security and about all sorts of interactions with our society.

So with an international alliance of universities, we will try to carry out a scientific meeting where we simply synthesize all this new information. We will try to put it all together into something understandable for the people coming to this meeting in Copenhagen. That's my goal.

So how is it working?

What we are trying to do now is to reach out to the scientific community at large. We have contacted every scientific meeting that we could find. This is our chance as scientists. We've been asked to put this together in real-people language: What do we really know?

There will be 57 different sessions and none of them will be on whether there will be a four-inch glacier melt or a two-inch. So your ice is melting, what does this mean for sea level rise? Is there a technical fix? What's the cost of not fixing it? We will bring the scientists out and get them to answer questions.

So far, there has been tremendous interest in this. We have received more than 1,000 abstracts from 70 different countries. It's going to be great and it's going to be big.

And what we're hoping to do with it, most of us, as scientists, were taught: Don't get your hands dirty with policy once you get your results. Let politicians figure it out. But these challenges are so big that we have to get out there and help the politicians understand what's happening. This is science's chance to describe the urgency of what's happening.

Next Page

Read More

Indian moon mission (HQ)

Indian moon mission (HQ)

  4:20:00 PM    Science Lover

---

Read More

PCs that respond to your emotions

PCs that respond to your emotions

  9:13:00 PM    Science Lover

---

A new navigation can provide emergency services with the quickest route while simultaneously taking stress into account. Trung Bui of the University of Twente's dialogue system recognizes the user's emotions and is able to react to them.

Bui used a mathematical technique developed in the 1960s for controlling factory processes called Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). He demonstrated that this technique was suitable for integrating the user's emotions into a dialogue system because it could deal with uncertainties.

Bui applied the technique to a navigation system for emergency services that took the stress experienced by the user into account.

The navigation system receives input from a separate stress module that measures an emergency worker's stress levels, taking these into account when the user is communicating with the system. Whenever the user's stress levels become raised, the system will anticipate that the user is more likely to make mistakes and will request confirmation more often.

Dialogue systems are computer systems which communicate with humans and which are used for information provision such as in the speaking computer that provides travel information.

Read More

Life from Space

Life from Space

  8:58:00 PM    Science Lover

---

Introduction

Growing evidence suggests that life on earth may have been seeded from outer space.

Podcast
Life from Space

Transcript

1. Nucleobases from Space

DNA components from space. I'm Bob Hirshon and this is Science Update.

Life on earth may have been jump-started by a special delivery from outer space. This according to a new report from an international team of scientists.

The researchers identified key chemical components of DNA and RNA—components called nucleobases—in a meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969. Lead author Zita Martins of University College London says nucleobases have been found in other meteorites too, but it wasn't clear how they got there.

Martins:
Our study really proved that in fact they are extraterrestrial.

That's because they contain a heavy isotope of carbon that forms only in outer space. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that the first building blocks of life came from meteorites and comets: an attractive theory, because the primitive earth appears unlikely to have formed them spontaneously. I'm Bob Hirshon for AAAS, the Science Society.

2. Molecular Space Cloud

Seeds of life in space. I'm Bob Hirshon and this is Science Update.

There's growing evidence that life on earth may have started with organic chemicals from outer space. Now, scientists are using the massive Green Bank Telescope to find these molecules in our Milky Way today.

Anthony Remijan of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory says they're studying a rich cloud of gas and dust, like the one that formed our solar system long ago.

Remijan:
There must have been complex organic molecules in that cloud in order to seed the molecular complexity we see in the solar system today. We just haven't had the instruments yet to detect these large molecules until now.

They're surveying the cloud across a wide range of radio frequencies. Then they'll look through the data for distinct radio signatures that are unique to each organic molecule. I'm Bob Hirshon for AAAS, the Science Society.

Making Sense of the Research

How did life arise on earth? It's a question that scientists have asked since the dawn of science. These studies address the very earliest stages of evolution, before actual life even existed.

According to current models, the earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, and the oldest known fossils are about 3.5 billion years old. Sometime in between—no one knows exactly when—microscopic life began. But before you even get to the origin of life, you have to explain the origin of complex organic chemicals: chemicals that are the building blocks of all living things.

Those chemicals wouldn't have been abundant on a brand-new earth, which had a very different and much simpler chemical composition than today's planet. No one knows for sure what the early earth was like, but evidence suggests that it began as a ball of hot molten rock, surrounded by a thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. Later, as the surface cooled, volcanic eruptions would have released heavier gases into the atmosphere, like ammonia, methane, and water vapor.

Some scientists believe that the first building blocks of life, perhaps early forms of the genetic molecules DNA and RNA, were formed by chemical reactions in this early earth environment. Others believe that these molecules came directly from space, by hitching a ride on comets or meteorites that slammed into the planet's surface. There is evidence supporting both sides, but these two studies focus on the second hypothesis, which was once considered far-fetched but has been gaining favor over the past decade.

One reason that many scientists have doubted the life-from-space hypothesis (sometimes called panspermia or exogenesis) is that comets and meteorites burn as they enter the earth's atmosphere. Some scientists have argued that the extreme heat would destroy any organic molecules on the comets or meteorites before they hit the ground. Martins' study, however, claims to have found important organic molecules inside meteorites that could only have come from space, based on the chemical signature of the carbon in those molecules.

While the meteorites Martins studied fell to earth just forty years ago, the findings suggest that the same thing could easily have happened four billion years ago. Furthermore, evidence suggests that the early earth got smacked with meteorites a lot more than today. More meteorites means more chances for those nucleobases to collect on earth in large enough quantities to get life going.

Remijan's work is just getting started, but instead of looking on earth, he'll look in outer space for signs of organic compounds. His team will use a new, powerful radiotelescope to look at a cloud of space dust that resembles the cloud that formed our own solar system. They will base their search on the fact that all molecules emit radio waves as they rotate and vibrate, and that each molecule gives off a distinctive radio signature. By pointing the telescope at the cloud and sifting through these radio frequencies, they should be able to identify the types of chemicals in the cloud. Finding organic molecules in that cloud would lend further support to the idea that life may have been seeded from space.

Now try and answer these questions:

1. What are two basic explanations for the origin of organic compounds on earth?
   
2. Why is it important to explain the origin of these chemicals?
   
3. What are nucleobases? How did Martins establish that the nucleobases in the Australian meteorites came from space?
   
4. How will Remijan's work add to our understanding of the origin of organic molecules?
   
5. What limits our scientific understanding of the origins of life on earth?

Read More

How to boost your PC speed

How to boost your PC speed

  4:51:00 PM    Science Lover

---

Frustrated with slow computer speed? Hate it when your computer slows down while you access the Internet.

And you simply bang your head when your computer takes ages to search your files. You desperately wish that your PC could gain some speed.

Don't worry. You can easily overcome this.

Here are some easy-to-do tips which can boost up your PC speed.

Clean up disk errors

Whenever a programme crashes or you experience some power outage, your PC may create some errors on hard disk. This slows down computer speed.

For this, check and clean any errors on the computer hard disk.

To run Disk Check go to My Computer. Now, right-click on the drive you want to check for errors and click Properties.

In Properties dialogue box, click on the Tools tab. In the Error-Checking section, press the Check Now button. Access Check Disk to check for errors on your computer.

Depending on the errors, it may take up to an hour to check and clean. This must be followed at least once a week.

Remove temporary files

Your PC stores temporary files whenever you browse through the Web. Also, your PC stores temporary files when you work on programmes like Microsoft Word or Excel.

This ends up slowing down your PC speed. To overcome it you can use the Windows Disk Cleanup screen to rid your PC of these dead files.

To run Disk Cleanup go to My Computer. Right click on the drive you wish to check for errors and click Properties. In the Properties dialogue box, click Disk Cleanup. You can also use Disk Cleanup to clear unused files from your PC.

After scanning, the Disk Cleanup dialogue box lists the files you can remove from your computer.

Organise your data 

Often when you search files your PC takes a lot of time to track them. This is because computer breaks files into pieces to increase the speed of access and retrieval.

However, once updated, computer saves these files on the space available on the hard drive, which results in fragmented files. This makes your PC go slow because it then searches for all of the file's parts.

You need a Disk Defragmenter programme to needle all your files back together.

For this, go to My Computer and right click on the drive you want to check for error and click Properties.

In the Properties dialogue box, click the Tools tab, and then in the Defragmentation section, click Defragment. In the Disk Defragmenter dialog box, select the disk and then click Analyse.

After analysing your PC, the Disk Defragmenter pops up a message asking whether you need to defragment your computer or not. Once you defragement your PC, it will reorganise files by programme and size.

Install anti-virus 

Biggest culprits behind slow PC performance are viruses and spyware. Both end up reducing your PC speed. Not only this they can also destroy your data and tamper files.

Also, with the 24X7 online environment, it is important to have anti-virus and anti-spyware programmes installed for secure online experience.

These programmes need to be frequently updated to avoid any attack on your computer.

You can do a recee of the Net for popular anti-virus and anti-spyware solutions. There are also several paid options like McAfee, Norton Anti-virus and Trend Micro.

Reduce page history 

Is your PC giving you trouble while accessing the Internet? Don't worry. For Internet Explorer users, Microsoft has some rescue options for faster Web browsing.

To improve your PC speed, first reduce the size of your Web page history. For this go to Internet Explorer, and on the Tools menu click on Internet Options. Then go to the History section and type in the number of days you want to keep pages in history.

Preferably reduce the number of days as this will reduce the size of your Web page history.

Automate Microsoft updates 

For Windows users, Microsoft frequently release updates which may help boost up your PC speed. For this activate automate Microsoft Update so that your computer downloads and installs all the latest updates without giving you any trouble of finding any new releases.

Go to Start menu and click Control Panel. In the Automatic Updates dialog box, check the Automatic check box. If your PC finds any new updates, it will automatically download and install them. This will help you keep your computer up to date. 

Read More

Review: 3G iPhone

Review: 3G iPhone

  5:19:00 PM    Science Lover

---

After a few days of playing around with the new iPhone 3G, I'm convinced that Apple's iconic piece of gadgetry is a misnomer.

The "mobile phone" is clearly the most unimpressive and probably the most unimportant part of the second generation iPhone.

It's is a great computer; to be more specific, a great mobile Internet device -- probably the best ever made -- and it's a pity that it's debuted in the country before 3G networks are up and running.

The other pity of course is that the two Indian operators whom Apple has chosen -- Airtel and Vodafone, have both decided not to subsidise the handset as AT&T for instance does in the US, where it retails at $200 (approx Rs 8,600) with a compulsory extra charge by the operator for a 2-year usage plan.

At a whopping Rs 36,100 for the 16GB (which comes in black and white rear panels) and 31,000 for the 8GB model, the iPhone is destined to border on being a luxury product, rather than a mass appeal phenomenon.

There are some cosmetic exterior changes from the earlier version, which in India, was widely available in the grey market. The rear panel has been changed from metal to plastic while the external buttons have gone from plastic to metal.

There's a thin metal ring around the camera lens which is actually the new GPS antenna. The smoother rounding off on the sides means that the phone's dimensions have undergone a tiny change -- too small to notice, but small enough to prevent it from fitting into speaker docks that were made for the original iPhone - Aaargh!

To be fair to Apple though, they've taken consumer frustration over the headset jack seriously and replaced the old design that only allowed only the bundled headphones, with a "flush" port which means that you can use any standard 3.5 mm earpiece you wish.Next >>>

Read More

Review: 3G iPhone

Review: 3G iPhone

  5:12:00 PM    Science Lover

---

The actual phone itself is just a programme that you can access from the home screen and is average to say the least. Simple things like transferring contacts from the phone onto the SIM card or selecting multiple contacts are unavailable, while the SMS programme still lacks the ability to forward or copy-paste text.

The camera is another feature that hasn't undergone any upgrade and although image quality is fairly impressive, the absence of flash, auto-focus, optical zoom or video recording takes it well behind the curve.

The only saving grace is that pictures once taken, can be expanded or shrunk or moved around by literally squeezing them on the screen with two fingers or flicking them with a single finger. This is the quintessential iPhone experience and typically the first thing you would want to show off about your gizmo.

The "iPod" programme that controls music and movies is great if you're familiar with the iPod-iTunes system. If you're like most Indian users who get music onto their phones through Bluetooth transfers or memory cards, you're in for a steep learning curve.

After all there's no external memory option on the iPhone and the Bluetooth feature -- which most other high-end phones exploit for data transfer and wireless music -- is configured to only allow handsfree calling.

Of course the lack of an FM radio adds insult to the injury of the iTunes music store not being made available for Indian users. Basically, any music or video that you want to get onto your phone has to be done through the iTunes programme on your computer which often involves some amount of re-formatting.

Exceptions of course include free content such as podcasts, which can be downloaded and the YouTube programme which allows you to watch streaming video from the site if you're connected via Wi-Fi or a GPRS/EDGE network.

The other key feature that wasn't available on the older iPhone is the assisted GPS (Global Positioning System). The word "assisted" is there since the GPS is able to home onto your location faster thanks to some assistance from the nearest cellular towers that are feeding the network to your iPhone.

Next >>>

Read More

Review: 3G iPhone

Review: 3G iPhone

  5:09:00 PM    Science Lover

---

Google Maps comes pre-installed and is a great piece of software except for the fact that it doesn't provide voice-assisted driving directions in India.

The star of the show is clearly the Internet browser Safari, which renders Web pages better than any browser on any mobile device that I have ever seen.

Most websites are shown true to their form instead of scaled-down mobile versions and the multi-touch features allows you to easily move the page around, zoom in on the region you want to read and tap on a link to navigate.

This single-handedly takes the Web-surfing into a new dimension compared to clumsy joysticks, keys or even a stylus. The iPhone 3G's browser even manages to improve on the original by allowing you to click and save pictures in Web pages.

The crowning glory though, of the iPhone 3G is "App Store", an online marketplace where users can download software applications (apps) that are created by programmers and developers all around the world.

These apps could range from games to medical encyclopedias to social networking tools to online auctions to pretty much anything that one can use a computer for.

The games are especially addictive since the iPhone has no controls except one large screen button. All the movement in a game thus has to be controlled by physically moving the iPhone so that the accelerometer can detect which way you're orienting the device.

The brilliant, large 3.5 screen puts your gaming experience on par with handheld devices from Nintendo and Sony while the improved loudspeakers guarantee that the experience will be incredibly annoying to those in your vicinity if you decide to dump the earphones.

Next >>>>

Read More