Media finally listening to what Brian Schmidt has to say about climate change

Yep:

Astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, 44, named in Sweden as one of three winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, used his first day in the spotlight to appeal to "policy people" to listen to scientists on climate change.

....

"The science is science. Policy is policy. And I would really like the scientists to continue to debate what's right and what's wrong about everything, accelerating universe, climate," he told reporters in Canberra.

"And I'd really like the policy people to debate how to deal with what is coming in from the scientists, rather than an ill-formed scientific debate.

I even like astronomy. This guy is my overachieving alter-ego. He could at least have the common decency of getting old before receiving the Nobel Prize, but no.

Judging the experts on the arsenic-bacteria pushback

Here's an angry pushback contradicting the implications of the recent Science article finding Mono Lake bacteria that could use arsenic instead of phosphorus. It's interesting from my perspective because I know virtually nothing about the field and am completely incompetent to judge its validity, but it feels like the pushback you see from the 3% of climatologists who have some doubts about climate disruption. It does sound "sciencey", which must be what climate skeptics think when they read something from Lindzen or Michaels telling them what they want to hear.

In this case, my worth-little gut reaction is that she might have a point. A big difference from people like Pielke Sr. and Judith Curry is that Redfield seems to be attracting support from experts (see the comments), instead of incredulous looks. And she's pushing back on a single paper at the cutting edge of new research, instead of trying to overturn decades of established knowledge. Finally, while her certainty in the post is offputting (as is her attacks on the Mars meteorite researchers, one of whom was a housemate of mine), she's much more reasonable in response to comments that criticize her post.

Should be interesting to see where this goes.

UPDATE: As Eli comments below, the problem may be pushing a cool discovery far beyond where it belongs. I posted something relevant to Rosie Redfield's blog:

This part of the OP interested me, re that either P or As had to be added for the bacteria to grow:

"(21) Agreed, with the proviso that the media be tested and shown to be identical except for the phosphate and arsenate. But this wouldn't mean that arsenic replaced phosphorus in any biological molecules in GFAJ cells, just that the cells needed arsenate for something."

That cells needed arsenate for something would be an interesting finding, I'd guess. And cells need As for something that P does is also implied by this finding.

Is this an area of potential agreement between the original article authors and critics?

(IANAS, BTW, so YMMV)

Carnival of Space #155: Short, Medium, and Haiku-long

Hi everyone, Backseat Driving is hosting this week's Carnival of Space, a round-up of space-related posts across the blogosphere.  Format is the host's choice, so I'll go with short (blog name and post name); followed by a combined medium length (same plus a sentence summary or excerpt) and haiku-long (a lousy haiku I'm adding at no extra charge for each post).  Check out the main Carnival of Space page for past Carnivals and for info on how to participate.

Short:

Backseat Driving: Not your typical SETI conspiracy
Weird Sciences:  Extreme Tech:  Genetic Engineering and Genetic Programmer [Part-I]
Weird Sciences:  Could There Be Life on Every Planets
Arts Nova:  The 2010 NASA Moon Art Contest
Cheap Astronomy: Cheap Astronomy in Transit podcast
Centauri Dreams:  Burying the Digital Genome
Alice's Astro Info: Ikaros - Japan's Solar Sail
Robot Guy:  administering space
Out of the Cradle:  2010 Metroplex Moonday Machinations
21st Century Waves:  Obama's New Space Policy: an Encore!
Spread Science:  Why Does One Bit Matter to Voyager?
Planetary Blog:  The Most Amazing Image of Enceladus Cassini Has Captured Yet
Astroblog:  Using the Gimp for Astrophotography (Part 2)
Chandra's Blog:  Innovative Exhibit Connects Art and Science Through X-Ray Light
Discovery News:  Can a Black Hole Have an 'Aurora'?
Urban Astronomer:  What is the Face on Mars?
The Spacewriter's Ramblings:  Soaring to the Stars
Next Big Future:  Combining MHD Airbreathing and IEC Fusion Rocket Propulsion for Earth-to-Orbit Flight
Next Big Future:  Mach Effect Propulsion Experiment May Generate 50 Milli-Newtons in 2010

CollectSpace:  STS 132 Atlantis Flight Day Journal

Cosmic Log:  Two faces of a grand galaxy
Cosmic Log:  Spaceships get day in the sun
Cumbrian Sky:  Gazing across the Gulf of Time...


Medium and bad-haiku long, combined together:

Backseat Driving: Not your typical SETI conspiracy Argues that SETI pros Paul Davies and Seth Shostak are contradicting each other on how to handle an alien signal, and that Shostak is right.

No, Davies.  Shestak.

It's beyond what we should stop.

People must know.

Weird Sciences:   Extreme Tech:  Genetic Engineering and Genetic Programmer [Part-I] Other elements besides carbon and other solvents besides water can form the basis of alien life, with examples.

Hey why the long face?

Carbon life spurned you, but then

Fish a solvent sea

Weird Sciences:  Could There Be Life on Every Planets Runs through theories of biogenesis, argues that some experimentation shows it's not so unlikely, but that a discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system could help settle the issue.

Everyone's a winner!

Okay, chance's role's unclear

Mars may tell us soon.

Arts Nova:  The 2010 NASA Moon Art Contest  The experience of judging NASA's moon art contest, and how judging criteria was applied.

In space no one can

Hear you ooh and ahh over

Good art or bad poems.  (Host's note:  please don't judge my haiku!)

Cheap Astronomy: Cheap Astronomy in Transit podcast Snippets on lunar spacecraft explosions being different from scifi, and speculating on how to research problems on a strangely earthlike, planetary civilization. 

On the road again,

Thinking lunar boom's a bust.

Hey, sounds familiar....

Centauri Dreams:  Burying the Digital Genome  An article about the need to preserve not just digital documents and multimedia but the formatting used to display them, describing project in Switzerland is now creating a long-term database of these materials in hopes of preserving knowledge that might otherwise be lost.
Ah, the Rosetta Stone!

Copied it on floppy disk.

Oops.  Help, Genome!

Alice's Astro Info: Ikaros - Japan's Solar Sail How the (now launched) Japanese solar sail works, with video.

Japan's Solar Sail.

Alice's Astro Info?

She wrote the haiku!

Robot Guy:  administering space Detailed ideas for NASA's management in "administering space," with specific comparisons to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Developing space:  fine.

Take it to the next level.

Commercial space, it's time.

Out of the Cradle:  2010 Metroplex Moonday Machinations Summarizing events happening at the very busy Moon Day celebration in Dallas this July 18th.

Zone 1:  glamor show

Zone 2:  time for real learnin'

Zone 3-8: wow.

21st Century Waves:  Obama's New Space Policy: an Encore!  A dialog about NASA's future, Maslow Windows, and potential near term opportunities

History doesn't 

Repeat itself.  But it does

Rhyme ever better.

Spread Science:  Why Does One Bit Matter to Voyager?  How a recent problem with the Voyager probe was traceable to single flipped memory bit.

Now where did I put

My memory? It was here.

Problems, getting old.

Planetary Blog:  The Most Amazing Image of Enceladus Cassini Has Captured Yet  Enceladus geysers, Enceladus, Titan, and Saturn's rings all imaged and composed together.

What Cassini sees

What's never before been seen

What's ours to dream of.

Astroblog:  Using the Gimp for Astrophotography (Part 2) Using software to put your astrophotography together and make animations.

GIMP layers it on

Not so hard after a bit

You're now Walt Disney.

Chandra's Blog:  Innovative Exhibit Connects Art and Science Through X-Ray Light  X-rays as the theme connecting an understanding of art and of science together

Art shows the inside

X rays get inside the art

Chandra shows it all.

Discovery News:  Can a Black Hole Have an 'Aurora'? An accretion disk in a black hole could generate a magnetosphere and aurora.

Spinning your way in

Shocking where you're going now

A flash, then goodbye.

Urban Astronomer:  What is the Face on Mars?  Synopsis of history of the famous "face" on Mars.

Beauty's in the eye

of the beholder.  It's now

a beautiful hill.

The Spacewriter's Ramblings:  Soaring to the Stars  How an interest in space can inspire kids and adults, with the example of space events in Los Angeles.

Captain Adama,

inspired by the stars when young.

Actor inspires us.

Next Big Future:  Combining MHD Airbreathing and IEC Fusion Rocket Propulsion for Earth-to-Orbit Flight

The post title says it all, and the post provides technical information that outlines how it could be done.

Got to be a way

A way that can really work

This might be the one.

Next Big Future:  Mach Effect Propulsion Experiment May Generate 50 Milli-Newtons in 2010 If mass fluctuations are real, then propellantless space drive may be possible.

They tell us, no way

You can't get to there from here.

Mach Effect?  Make it so.

CollectSpace:  STS 132 Atlantis Flight Day Journal  Summary of the shuttle Atlantis' return home.

The final time back.

The shuttle of the future,

Now a memory.

Cosmic Log:  Two faces of a grand galaxy  Very different light wavelengths give very different portraits of the beautiful Pinwheel Galaxy

Shall I compare thee

To a summer's day? Got it.

Warmer is diff'rent.

Cosmic Log:  Spaceships get day in the sun  Amazing photos of the Shuttle and space station, including ones where they transit in front of the sun.

The shuttle's huge

ISS even moreso

Then you see the sun.

Cumbrian Sky:  Gazing across the Gulf of Time... Rock-art images of people 7,000 years ago and images from Cassini today show how far we've come

Someday, a visit

To Enceladus geysers

Will carve memories.

All your astrophotography are belong to us

Here begins my career as an astrophotographer - I took this picture of Saturn by awkwardly jamming my cell phone alongside my telescope eyepiece. I'm sure I'll be beating out the Hubble in picture quality in no time.

Not your typical SETI conspiracy

Nature has a recent "Podcast Extra," an extended interview with physicist Paul Davies that I listened to while injuring my foot on a trail run.  He's got an interesting book, The Eerie Silence, about the failure so far of SETI to detect alien intelligence and what the next steps might be.

Davies talked about his position as chair of the SETI post-detection task group, which is where the not-very-secret conspiracy issue arises and where he said some things that contradicted statements I've heard from SETI guy, Seth Shostak.  He said that if they receive a signal demonstrating alien intelligence that has no policy implications beyond the demonstration of its existence, then the world should be told.  If, however, the communication has implications like instructions for how to transform our technology, the potential disruptive impact means we shouldn't immediately disclose the news.  He also said we should be very careful and controlling of what information humanity should send in response.

I'm just going off of memory, but I think Shostak has said the exact opposite - that all information should be disclosed, and that a cacophony of signals sent to the aliens might actually give them a better idea about us than careful control would.  I think Shostak's right.

As a practical matter, I don't think SETI scientists are capable of keeping secret something this important, and I'm not sure they and anyone they recruit in the decision-making has the right to keep the information secret.  And as I'm certain I heard Shostak say, it's not possible from stopping anyone with a two-bit radio antennae from making their own broadcasts in response.

Otherwise, Davies had some interesting stuff to say, and his book might be worth picking up.

The Europa science conspiracy is no climate science conspiracy

It seems doubtful that a scientific conspiracy to oppress alternative scientific viewpoints is even possible at the level denialists claim, a level so successful that "Since 2007, no scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion" against human-caused warming.

There are some of my fellow space nuts who think they've proven that it's at least possible for a massive scientific conspiracy to exist, and they point to research about Jupiter's moon Europa as their example. Astronomer Richard Greenberg, member the Galileo space probe team, alleges repression of the view of his team that Europa has a thin ice sheet and not a thick one that separates its oceans from the surface. He's got a book out that I've read, Unmasking Europa, that makes exactly this case.

At first read, it gives some support to an argument that parallels denialists, saying

It seems bizarre that political clout would be used to promote a scientifically weak position...[but] the situation is both familiar and disturbing....Deviation from [the scientific "party line"] is risky business....less secure [researchers] may feel pressure to toe the party line or move on to other fields.

(page 7).

Things go downhill from this point on though, if you're trying to use Europa as a metaphor for the alleged climate conspiracy. It starts with Greenberg's next paragraph:

The political aspects of the story of Europan science play out largely within the scientific community. In this way they are different from the even more ominous attempts at political control of science from the outside, such as the recent efforts to discredit the scientific consensus on climate change.

(emphasis added).

Yup, Greenberg might agree that there's a conspiracy related to climate science, except that it's about powerful interests trying to obscure the understanding that we are changing the climate.

On a broader level, Greenberg and other thin-ice supporters think science can work through the peer-review process, saying "even the hard-line isolated ocean are starting to hedge their bets" (page 34). He's doing exactly what the reality-based faction are suggesting to climate skeptics, that they prove their case in and through the scientific process.

Greenberg also argues that political power in Europa research was highly centralized in a small team that controlled access to Galileo imagery (current NASA missions allow easier and quicker access to data), and one government agency, NASA, indirectly controls their future careers. Climate change involves thousands of scientists in a broad range of fields - climatology, physics, oceanography, geology - where a small shadowy cabal can't run everything.

Another major distinction between Europa and climate is that Greenberg isn't arguing that his view has been completely excluded from the scientific process. He has even been included on the design team for the next mission to the Jupiter system that will definitively resolve the issue, although not until 2026.

So denialists will have to look elsewhere to show that it's even possible to find an example of a scientific conspiracy at the level they're describing.

Setting this all aside, Greenberg's book is well-written, persuasive, and has gorgeous photographs. He's also quite willing to name names about who's unfairly working against his viewpoint.

I have no idea who's right, and my opinion would be worthless anyway. Reading the wiki article on Europa is a good balance to Greenberg's point of view (the article acknowledges the lack of consensus, of course). I can say, however, that Greenberg's contrarian inclinations are obvious. For example, he claims it's good that the probe's main communication antenna failed, because this kept the researchers from being overwhelmed with data and could concentrate on a small set of images instead. That is simply ridiculous. Being a contrarian isn't ridiculous -they can sometimes make the big leaps - but it's something to keep in mind.

Greenberg and his book will either be considered a visionary or a footnote when the next probe finally gets to Europa. It'll be interesting to find out which.

A WISE result could bring extrasolar exploration in this century

2010 looks to be a boring year in space, at least for space buffs like me who want eye candy.Cassini will continue to do its amazing thing, but that's been going on for a while. Same with theMars Rovers. We'll find out in a few weeks if Phoenix will have survived the Martian Arctic winter, which would be cool, but a stationary lander doesn't bring much in the way of new images.

Mars Science Laboratory was to be the big thing in 2010, but they blew the deadline along with the budget, and now it's delayed to 2012.

On the bright side, the Kepler space telescope should finally put out some results on its search for extrasolar planets. It's not eye candy, and it won't be until later that it finds how many Earth-sized planets are in Earth-sized orbits around stars, but next year we'll finally get some statistically-valid information on the percentage of stars with planets in short-period orbits.

And then there's WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a space telescope that launched yesterday. Other telescopes are more sensitive for detecting cold objects in space, but they can view only tiny parts of the sky, while WISE will survey the entire sky. That means it could find brown dwarfs (massive planets/failed stars) or stray gas giant planets that are closer to our solar system than the Centauri star system, the closest known stars that are four light years away.

If WISE finds a brown dwarf within .5 light years or less, I think it's conceivable that a robotic mission to explore it could be launched and arrive there in this century. If aerocapturetechnology gets sufficiently developed, it might even go into orbit instead of being a flyby.

Not exactly a mission to another star, but pretty close.

UPDATE: Cool Cassini pic of sunlight on a lake on Titan. No one has ever seen sunlight on a lake anyplace besides Earth, until this picture was taken. I guess we will have some eye candy in 2010.

David Grinspoon still thinks there might be life on Venus

My wife and I attended a lecture by astronomer David Grinspoon, "Evolution of Planetary Exploration," a survey of the solar system, exoplanet discoveries, and a comparison to Darwin's five-year trip on the Beagle. I thought it was fine, although necessarily abbreviated. My wife with less exposure to astronomy thought it was great.

Grinspoon wrote Venus Revealed, a 1998 book sizing up the scientific understanding of Venus prior to European space mission that went there several years ago. (I'm not aware of a similar book today that incorporates the newest findings, and the European space agencies are doing their usual terrible job of releasing scientific information, so it might be a while to get a good new book.) At the end of the book, Grinspoon speculates that life might have survived the boiling off of venusian oceans and live today in the higher parts of the cloud deck.

I got a chance to ask him whether he still thinks it's possible and he said yes as an outside chance, although it would require atmospheric probes to figure it out. So neither the current European mission nor the upcoming Japanese one will answer the question, and we'll have to wait for a more spectacular mission.

Really easy view of Comet 17P Holmes in binoculars

Comet 17P Holmes brightened from an extremely dim 17th magnitude object to an easily viewed, naked-eye "star" even visible in light-polluted cities, due to some poorly-understood explosion in the last two weeks. In binoculars, it's clearly not a star but a white sphere. From what I've read elsewhere, these brightening events have occurred before, but never so dramatically as this one.

It's also ridiculously easy to spot. Find the Cassiopeia constellation in the northeast sky around 9 p.m., look a short distance down and to the right to find another star, Alcheb, about as bright as the Cassiopeia stars. Alcheb appears to form the apex of a small, narrow triangle, and Holmes is the star at the bottom left.

Holmes is moving though, so in a week or so these directions will be less clear, and the exploding debris might dissipate and go away. If you're going to look, do it now.