Penumbral Lore; the Shadows of Science

Today the first flurries of snow actually stick to the ground, and give that ‘powdered sugar’ effect which will be so boring in a few weeks, but is still nice at the moment. Today I indulged myself in my annual ritual of going barefoot in the snow, just once, just to prove I still can. Today I told the girls to make sure their snow boots still fit, because if we wait until the first big snow storm the stores will all be sold out (ridiculous, but no stores around here ever re-order snow boots, no matter how the winter turns out).

Today is not too early or too late for this kind of snow, pretty typical, actually, but it reminded me that I hadn’t posted anything about climate change yet.

This is a particularly good time for it, because at this very moment, in Bali, the UN is holding a major Climate Change Conference. Not surprisingly, there has been concern about the carbon emmissions generated in getting scientists from all over the world to travel to Bali. Also not suprisingly, there is apparently a virtual conference going on in Second Life, so those who would rather not (or can’t afford to) go physically can participate as well.

The conference started two days ago, and already the first major alarming story has come out of it. Apparently the tropics are expanding much faster than models have predicted they would. A free subscription is required to read the article online, but here’s the abstract:

Nature Geoscience
Published online: 2 December 2007 | doi:10.1038/ngeo.2007.38

“Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate”

Dian J. Seidel1, Qiang Fu, William J. Randel & Thomas J. Reichler

Some of the earliest unequivocal signs of climate change have been the warming of the air and ocean, thawing of land and melting of ice in the Arctic. But recent studies are showing that the tropics are also changing. Several lines of evidence show that over the past few decades the tropical belt has expanded. This expansion has potentially important implications for subtropical societies and may lead to profound changes in the global climate system. Most importantly, poleward movement of large-scale atmospheric circulation systems, such as jet streams and storm tracks, could result in shifts in precipitation patterns affecting natural ecosystems, agriculture, and water resources. The implications of the expansion for stratospheric circulation and the distribution of ozone in the atmosphere are as yet poorly understood. The observed recent rate of expansion is greater than climate model projections of expansion over the twenty-first century, which suggests that there is still much to be learned about this aspect of global climate change.

Timed to coincide with the beginning of the conference, activists from the Rising Tide Movement put up a false press release, claiming that the USCAP (US Climate Action Partnership) a consortium of a number of major businesses, had committed to a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emission by 2050. I’m not so sure what they hoped to achieve by this. The USCAP caught it very quickly and set out their own press release to clarify the situtation.

Another hoax of interest, last month a pseudonymous writer perpetrated an elaborate hoax on climage change deniers, by creating a faux publication and seeing who would take the bait.

Not a hoax, but probably a good candidate for the Ig-Nobel, a paper soon to be published “Who pays for the ‘beer fridge’? Evidence from Canada“ by Denise Young of the Department of Economics, University of Alberta, assigns a disproportionate amount of Canada’s greenhouse emissions to beer drinkers who often keep the old inefficient refrigerator around after buying a new one.

In other words, let’s Blame Canada.