Anti-climate science group "experiments" with billboard trolling

Prior to this spring, the Heartland Institute was a relatively obscure think tank that was primarily known for organizing an annual conference of people who take issue with mainstream climate science. That changed when an environmental researcher tricked the group into sending him internal documents, setting off a public drama that ended up leaving both parties worse off (Heartland lost sponsors, while the researcher had to resign a number of his positions).

Apparently, the experience left Heartland craving more public controversy, and it responded with what can best be described as a bit of trolling. In advance of this year's climate-skeptic conference, Heartland paid for a billboard that showed a picture of the Unabomber accompanied by the text "I still believe in Global Warming. Do You?" In a press release, Heartland said future iterations would feature Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, and possibly Osama bin Laden.

Instead, the campaign was stopped after 24 hours as prominent conference speakers threatened to cancel and a number of the Institute's financial backers threatened to depart.

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Carbon storage capacity: there’s plenty, but fracking may be wrecking some

Recent changes in the Earth's climate are primarily being driven by the burning of fossil fuels—that is, taking carbon from deep in the Earth, and dumping it into the atmosphere at breakneck speed. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just sort of… put it back?

That’s roughly the idea behind carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Carbon dioxide is captured from the effluent of a large generator, like a coal power plant, and compressed into a supercritical liquid. That liquid is then transported via pipeline to an injection station where it’s pumped deep underground.

But the technique requires some very specific rock formations if we expect the carbon to stay there. Two new studies have looked at how much CO₂ we could hope to store, and how that storage may be affected by another process that's booming: fracking.

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Climate change proponent realizes he was wrong, but for the wrong reasons

James Lovelock is an interesting character. He has a medical degree and has successfully designed a number of scientific instruments, but he's probably most famous for some of his big ideas, which range from specific geoengineering proposals to the Gaia concept, which proposes that the planet's geology, biology, and atmosphere interact in a complex, self-regulating system.

In recent years, his attention has turned to climate change and, unfortunately, he's largely decided to skip brushing up on science before making grandiose predictions. After having suggested that the human population on Earth would be whittled down to a handful of survivors this century, he's now backed away from these claims—and has gotten nearly as many things wrong in the process of doing so.

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Certain coral species may be better adapted to deal with ocean acidification

Corals may be better able to cope with ocean acidification than previously believed, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change, providing a glimmer of hope for the future of coral reefs.

As more carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, more carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean, lowering the pH of the water. This process, known as ocean acidification, is occurring at an unprecedented rate. This is causing problems for shell-building organisms, and it raises concerns for corals. Can corals and their symbiotic algae have the ability to adapt or acclimate to such rapid changes in ocean chemistry?

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An open Bering Strait blocks off sudden swings in climate

You may remember 2004’s disaster movie and CGI delivery vehicle, The Day After Tomorrow. The premise of the film (which like any self-respecting disaster film, is excessively absurd) is that global warming suddenly plunges the world into the depths of an ice age. New York City drowns under the largest storm surge in history, and then flash freezes. As is the case with many disaster movies, there’s a small kernel of truth at the eye of this hurricane of exaggeration.

That kernel relates to ocean circulation and the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream carries warm water toward Western Europe, helping to keep it more temperate than its latitude would otherwise dictate. It depends on the downward flow of dense, salty water in the North Atlantic that drives a "conveyor belt" of ocean circulation in the Atlantic. Large amounts of fresh water discharged to the North Atlantic (from melting ice sheets, for example) can clog up that overturn by decreasing the density of the surface water. Slowing down Atlantic circulation drives down temperatures in Europe and affects climate around the globe.

During the most recent ice age, changes to the Atlantic conveyor system appear to have triggered bursts of extremely rapid climate change. A new study pins these changes on an event that took place elsewhere in the globe: the closing of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia.

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Greenhouse gases drove the close of the last ice age

The Earth's orbit isn't perfectly even. Its poles wobble a bit. The cyclical changes in these orbital features create small changes in the amount of sunlight reaching our planet, as well as its distribution across the surface. Despite their relatively small size, these changes have been driving our planet's climate for millions of years, causing events called hyperthermals 50 million years ago, and the entry and exit to glacial cycles more recently.

This raises a pretty obvious question: if the solar changes are so small, how do they drive such large changes in the global temperature? An answer was provided in part by ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. These showed that the concentrations of greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane rose and fell in near-perfect synchrony with the rise and fall of the temperatures. These would provide an obvious amplification of the orbital cycles, and could account for the large, global change.

But the precise timing of the warming and rise in greenhouse gasses was a bit uncertain, as some ice cores indicated that the warming was well underway before the greenhouse gasses rose. This being climate change, the uncertainty has been used to cast doubt on the significance of the greenhouse effect. Skeptics argued that if the warming started without a rise in carbon dioxide, that carbon dioxide might not be needed at all. Now, researchers have performed a careful reconstruction of our planet's exit from the most recent ice age, and clarified the relationship between orbital and greenhouse climate forcings. Their data shows that CO₂ actually led the global rise in temperatures, and played a critical role in bringing the ice age to a close.

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Researchers match modern ocean temperature records to those of the 1870s

In 1872, the HMS Challenger left Portsmouth on a daring mission, but it didn’t set sail as a military ship. It had been retrofitted, not to project power, but to humbly petition the ocean to give up some of its secrets. Over three and a half years, the Challenger and its crew of over 200 (at the start, that is) circumnavigated the globe, collecting every scrap of information they found along the way. The crew frequently measured the depth of the seafloor and the temperature profile of the water, and brought up sediment samples (sometimes including living organisms). Among other accomplishments, the expedition discovered the submarine mountains of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, described more than 4,700 new species, and learned that the ocean was stratified by temperature.

There is still much we do not know about the ocean, but quite a lot has changed. Thanks to the Argo project, we’re now up to 3,500 automated buoys that continuously record data from the upper 2 kilometers of Earth’s oceans. Using that incredible data coverage, oceanographers were able to compare Challenger’s temperature measurements to today’s oceans.

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"Teach the controversy" science education bills advance in Tennessee, Oklahoma

Earlier this week, legislators in Tennessee approved a bill that singles out public school science education for special attention. Now, the Oklahoma House has passed a very similar bill that attacks an identical range of subjects that the legislation deems controversial: biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

Both bills contain identical language, saying they "shall not be construed to promote any religious or nonreligious doctrine." There's also identical language about how they're intended to "help students develop critical thinking skills they need in order to become intelligent, productive, and scientifically informed citizens." However, the subjects they target are not areas where there are significant scientific controversies; either the bills' sponsors are poorly informed (and thus shouldn't be injecting themselves into science education), or they have non-educational goals in mind.

In any case, the legislators want to do what they can to enable science teachers to teach the controversy. To that end, they're basically attempting to block any educational authority—school board, principal, the state board of education—from punishing a teacher for covering the "scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories." The Oklahoma bill goes a bit further, adding protections for students who choose voice their disagreements with the science in any medium.

Given the staggering amount of scientific-sounding misinformation available on topics like evolution and climate change, these bills are a recipe for chaos in the science classrooms. It's a chaos that state legislators are inviting local school districts to sort out at great expense via lawsuits.

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Not just the weather: climate change acceptance nosedives with the economy

A few years back, the US public's acceptance of conclusions reached by climate scientists took a dramatic drop. It's only now beginning to recover. Not a lot has changed about the science during that time, raising questions about what's driving the ups and downs in the polls. Studies have found correlations with the weather and a role for political leaders in driving these changes, but a new study suggests some of that is misplaced. Instead, its authors come to a conclusion we've heard before: it's the economy, stupid.

The authors use polling data from a variety of sources, which creates a bit of a challenge. Not all polls ask questions that address the same things. For example, one of the studies we linked above asked about the public's acceptance of a basic fact: has our planet been getting warmer over the past few decades? In contrast, one of the polls used here assessed feelings about climate change by asking its participants whether they felt the media "exaggerate the seriousness of global warming."

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Attempt to grab climate scientists’ e-mails rejected by Virginia Supreme Court

The climate researcher Michael Mann last worked at the University of Virginia in 2005, but his past employment has continued to haunt him. Virginia's attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli decided that, in the wake of some of Mann's work e-mails being released, he'd like to see more of them. So, he sued UVa under Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act (FATA), claiming that Mann had engaged in fraudulent activity. A preliminary ruling had blocked the suit, as Cuccinelli was unable to specify whether there was any actual fraud to investigate. Cuccinelli appealed, and the Virginia Supreme Court has now officially thrown out the suit.

The ruling indicates that the suit was flawed from the start. The statute in question allows suits that target persons and corporations, but UVa is an agency of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and past precedent dictates it is "entitled to the protection of the immunity of the state." In fact, the majority ruled that treating the university as subject to the Act would create internal inconsistencies that would "do superior damage to FATA as a whole."

One of the justices dissented, and argued that FATA should apply. That said, he ruled that Cuccinelli's suit should be thrown out, as it never specified any conduct by Mann that constituted a violation. The nature of the ruling gives Cuccinelli no ability to target the university at all, and thus seems to end this phase of the legal attack on Mann. This still leaves him facing a Freedom of Information Act suit in Virginia, brought by a private organization that calls itself the American Tradition Institute.

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