Japan Earthquake: 1000x stronger than Port-au-Prince quake

A couple of striking facts from a briefing on the earthquake in Japan, and the subsequent tsunami: 

According to Dave Applegate, of the US Geological Survey, this quake, measuring "almost nine" on the Richter scale, substantially ruptured the earth's crust, tearing it up for 150 or more miles. Applegate said the energy released by the quake was nearly 1000 times stronger than the Haiti earthquake of last year, with as much as fifty feet of movement. 

Grist is featuring a post about a scientific conference in London in 2009 that discussed the climatic forcing of geological events, as reported in this story from Reuters. Not sure how to assess that connection: have a call into the USGS to try and figure it out. 

The wit and wisdom of David Brower: the teepee

David Brower, the late great executive director of the Sierra Club, founder of Friends of the Earth, conservationist extraordinaire, is given plenty of credit for his accomplishments, but not, in my estimation, nearly enough credit for his wit, courage, and charm.

All by himself, he demolishes any number of cliches about conservationists; that is, that they are humorless, verbose, and uninterested in people. To wit:

Brower It is far too late to advocate, even if we would, a return to the teepee — to the Indian's custom of living on the income of natureal resources, the replenishable deer, acorns, pine nuts, and grasshoppers…No, we won't return volutarily to the teepee. Our descendants can live there later, when the inevitable eviction notice is served.

From For Earth's Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower, l990

Winter Sunset on the Merced River (Yosemite National Park)

They say pro nature photographers (including Black, who kindly posted this picture) flock like swallows to Yosemite in February, for the low sunsets and the colors at Horsetail Fall. 

Why the Bering Sea is chilling as the world warms

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, a vast pool of cold water sloshing around the northern Pacific ocean, was first discovered just fourteen years ago. It's existence has yet to make an imprint in public consciousness, in part because its effects are so varied. But Wendee Holtcamp, an excellent freelance science reporter, helps us understand the climatic ironies, such as a chilling Bering Sea in the midst of a warming planet, in a story for Climate Central. 

Scientists do not yet have any reliable way of predicting how the PDO will change in the future, as they do with the better-studied El Niño. In the meantime, year-round ice cover in the Arctic continues to decline every year, and global average land and sea surface temperatures continue to rise.

And even as some folks get lost amidst these erratic global climate and weather patterns, the reality is that the interaction between manmade climate change and natural cycles like the PDO is complex. “I think a lot of people are confused by it. They think, ‘how can you have these fierce winters in the Eastern U.S. or Western Europe if we’re facing global warming?’” poses [Nathan] Mantua, [a climate scientist]. “The simple answer is that there’s a lot of regional variation that may be completely independent of global warming.”

Holtcamp has a knack for simplifying the complex, something I'm trying to learn from her in her courses for free-lance journalists. 

Here's the PDO on a global scale, color-coded by temp so you can see the shifts over time: 

News_wendee_PDOmap-375x198
We're now in a negative phase, meaning cool temps along the Pacific coast. 

NASA drops another climate satellite in the ocean

Two years ago I observed the launch of a NASA satellite, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, intended to help scientists understand the wide variation in uptake of carbon from the atmosphere by the earth. I wrote about it for the Santa Barbara Independent.

At an impromptu press conference held after the OCO crashed into the Southern Pacific ocean, launch director Chuck Dovale vowed on NASA TV that the agency would not rest until they had found the cause of the failure, and would not send up another satellite until they knew they had found the solution. 

Well, this weekend NASA launched another climate satellite, Glory, designed to measure aerosols in the atmosphere. The mission was powered by the same kind of Taurux XL rocket as before, and the satellite built by the same corporation, Orbital Services. Once again the launch failed, and once again the failure was traced to explosive bolts designed to open a clamshell snout and release the satellite into orbit.

Veteran journalist Seth Borenstein reported on the "contingency," as the engineers say, once again for the AP, as he did on the last failed launch. 

The Taurus XL rocket carrying NASA's Glory satellite lifted from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and plummeted to the southern Pacific several minutes later. The same thing happened to another climate-monitoring probe in 2009 with the same type of rocket, and engineers thought they had fixed the problem.

"It's more than embarrassing," said Syracuse University public policy professor Henry Lambright. "Something was missed in the first investigation and the work that went on afterward."

The cost? $424 million. 

Hosted2.ap.org

Borenstein adds:

Scientists are trying to move climate change forecasts from ones that are heavily based on computer models to those that rely on more detailed, real-time satellite-based observations like those that Glory was supposed to make. The satellite's failure makes that harder.

Epic bad luck? Or incompetence at NASA and Orbital?  

How to understand the unemployment numbers

A slight fall in the number of new jobless claims has thrilled Wall Street. This is great news, and as I wrote in a long economic story a couple of weeks ago, there is reason to think a recovery is on the way. 

But for perspective, lets look at the unemployment numbers geographically, courtesy of Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: 

— Payrolls have shed the equivalent of Virginia since the recession started in December 2007.
— The entire populations of Virginia, Colorado, and Rhode Island are unemployed.
— The entire metro areas of Chicago and Los Angeles have been unemployed for six months or more.
— The entire metro area of New York City is working part time for economic reasons.
— The whole of Kentucky has left the labor force since the start of the recession.
— The workweek population of Washington, D.C., has given up looking for work.

Or, for the stats-impaired, a visual representation: 

Economix-04jobsreport-custom1
Or, to put it in Dilbert's charmingly despairing way:

114409.strip

Texas state climatologist: Fossil fuels are evil

From an interesting Q & A in an MIT alumni pub with John Neilsen-Gammon, the former Texas state climatologist: 

Slice: What do you think is the single most effective thing we as a country could do to address the problems posed by man-made climate change?

Nielsen-Gammon: Acknowledging that potential problems exist would be a great start.  There’s a lot of scientific debate about how bad those problems might be, but much of the public has been completely fooled into thinking that the scientific debate is about whether or not there will be any problems at all.  

True. But how can we discuss "potential problems" when leading voices in the "debate" — such as Senator James Inhofe — claim global warming is a "hoax?"  

Neilsen-Gammon discusses just such a case in Canada, where one climate scientist, Andrew Weaver, is suing a retired geographer, Tim Ball, for libel. According to The New York Times, Ball wrote numerous pieces for a right-wing site, and alleged that Weaver didn't understand climate science, and would not be invited to participate in the IPCC's upcoming report. The claims were demonstrably false. After the suit was filed, the site (called Canada Free Press) that had run hundreds of Ball's stories apologized, printed a retraction, and no longer associates itself with Ball. 

That's one case where the public appears to have been misled. But that's not always the case, as in oil-rich Texas, as Neilsen-Gammon says: 

Texas has a traditionally oil-based economy, so there’s naturally a lot of resistance to the idea that fossil fuels are evil.  I think this has led a lot of people to tilt too far in the other direction and accept the argument that massive releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are harmless.

What if we could push a button and strip all influence of money out of the debate? Wouldn't that be interesting to see? 

The Millenials: An abused generation?

So argued economist Ed Leamer in a piece I wrote that the Reporter ran last week: 

“I see a lot of kids who are really struggling, and it’s very troubling to me,” he said. “I think we’re looking at an abused generation. A lot of kids are graduating from college with a huge amount of debt. They’re going into a poorly functioning economy, and as a group, they’re taking on huge levels of public debt with pensions and other obligations."

This recession has a lot of strange ironies that have not been well-discussed. Much of the public anger (about debt and such) is found at the older end of the age spectrum, but our seniors have suffered much less from this recession than have the younger generation, according to a plethora of stats. Curious. 

Another smart person against global warming

Speaking of this country's most famous single investor, Warren Buffett, who last year bought a railroad for his holding company. The Northern Pacific went on to do wonders for his bottom line, and shares in his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, were up 29% in a year, doubling the market's performance. But from his perspective, the railroad was great for others reasons as well:

“Railroads have major cost and environmental advantages over trucking, their main competitor,” said Mr. Buffett. “Our country gains because of reduced greenhouse emissions and a much smaller need for imported oil. When traffic travels by rail, society benefits.

Great to see his shareholders profit from his environmentally-minded wisdom.