Author: Scott K. Johnson

In the grand tradition of curiosity, some scientists with access to data from a seismometer in Baghdad pulled up October 10, 2006 to see what had been recorded. That day was host to an event slightly different from your run-of-the-mill earthquake: an attack on a US military base seven kilometers away managed to start a chain of explosions that continued for hours inside the base’s ammunition storage—an event that was captured on video (caution: language).

This isn’t that unusual a thing for a seismologist to do, really. The build-out of the global network of seismometers in the 1950s and 1960s came about partly because they could be used to detect and locate secret atomic bomb tests. Learning about the geologic violence of earthquakes was basically a bonus. In this case, the researchers’ curiosity was rewarded with a unique blow-by-blow record of one particular episode of human violence.

The team, led by Ghassan Aleqabi of Washington University in St. Louis, carefully analyzed each wiggle on the seismograph and discovered it could identify a number of different things. The firing of a mortar, for example, was identifiable along with the explosion when the shell landed. Car bomb explosions also stood out, although the bouncing of the shockwave off surrounding buildings made each one a bit different. The team could even identify signals from drones and helicopters and figure out if they were approaching or moving away based on the Doppler shift.

We’ve been covering the twists and turns of Congressman Lamar Smith’s (R-Tex.) tussle with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Rep. Smith, who chairs the House Science Committee, has accused NOAA scientists of manipulating climate data for political ends. While the NOAA has provided Smith with all the (publicly available) data and methodology behind the peer-reviewed study in question, Smith has also subpoenaed the scientists’ e-mails.

Now, a new combatant has joined the fray: conservative government watchdog and FOIA factory Judicial Watch.

According to a press release from the group, Judicial Watch submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on October 30 for many of the same records Rep. Smith is seeking. The group requested “all documents and records of communications between NOAA officials, employees, and contractors” relating to decisions about methods for building NOAA’s global surface temperature dataset. In addition, Judicial Watch included a request for communications about Rep. Smith’s subpoena.

"The sooner you start socking away part of your paycheck for retirement, the easier it is to hit your goals. If you wait until late in your career to start, your goal could be simply out of reach unless you take a second job or win the lottery." That axiom is a bit like how we've treated carbon emissions: when governments started negotiating to limit greenhouse gases in the early 1990s, the agreed-upon goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius was pretty doable. The continued rise of emissions since then has turned that into a tall task, while the 1.5 degree Celsius aspiration added to the recent Paris agreement is even taller.

At this point, hitting those targets very likely requires more than just shifting away from fossil fuels. We’ll also need “negative emissions”—activities that absorb carbon dioxide from smokestacks or directly from the atmosphere—in order to squeeze under the line. It’s a simple concept but a very big challenge. Some nascent negative emission technologies exist, like capturing CO₂ from smokestacks and pumping it into underground reservoirs. Other proposals, however, sound pretty wild and may not work—like dumping iron dust into the oceans to spur plankton growth.

One tempting strategy is to imitate nature’s longterm carbon control—the weathering of fresh rock. When certain minerals react with CO₂ in rainwater, they turn into different minerals, and the CO₂ turns into bicarbonate that ends up in groundwater, rivers, and ultimately the ocean.

Past performance may not always predict future results in the stock market, but in the Earth sciences, it can tell us a hell of a lot. Since we only have the one planet, examples of some processes can only be found in the past. That’s why so much effort goes into studying the past behavior of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. We need context for what we’re currently seeing and some ideas about what’s likely to happen next.

While many studies look tens of thousands or even millions of years into the past, much more recent histories can also be of interest. We’ve only had satellites measuring changes in the Greenland ice sheet since the early 1990s, so what happened over the preceding century is much less clear. That makes it difficult to answer questions about Greenland’s contribution to the full century's sea level rise or the ice sheet’s natural short-term variability.

But in a new study, a team led by Kristian Kjeldsen and Niels Korsgaard of the University of Copenhagen has managed to fill in this gap through some clever, if tedious, research. They took advantage of a trove of stereo aerial photos taken in the late 1970s and 1980s as part of a survey of Greenland.

Over the past couple months, there's been an ongoing battle between Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chair of the House Science Committee, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). After a June study published in Science concluded there was no evidence that global warming had slowed in recent years, Rep. Smith accused NOAA climate scientists of manipulating surface temperature data for political reasons.

Rep. Smith has subpoenaed the internal communications of those scientists despite being provided all the data, methods, and rationale behind the work. NOAA replied it does not intend to release e-mails between scientists.

On December 1, Rep. Smith changed tack in a letter reiterating his demands. The letter complained that NOAA’s objections had focused on his requests for scientists’ communications, when he was also requesting communications between other NOAA staff. So he modified his terms—he'd start with e-mails from elsewhere in NOAA. “In order to move the Committee’s work forward and to allow for further discussions on issues related to the subpoenaed communications about which the agency and the Committee disagree, the Committee is willing to accommodate NOAA and prioritize communications sent and received by non-scientific personnel,” the letter read. “However, this prioritization does not alleviate NOAA’s obligation to respond fully to the Committee’s subpoena.”

XPRIZE has tempted people to accomplish tasks ranging from putting stuff on the Moon to measuring pH in the deep ocean by using the promise of a sweet cash prize. At the annual American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco on Monday, XPRIZE announced a new competition that is more Jacques Cousteau than Neil Armstrong. This time, they want teams to build a better autonomous submersible that can help with ocean exploration and science.

Shell is putting up $6 million for teams that win based on the criteria of autonomy, speed, and depth. The three-year competition will include two rounds of tests culminating in a challenge to map at least 250 square kilometers of seafloor at high resolution in just 15 hours. That seafloor will reach a depth of 4,000 meters, and the vehicles will be expected to grab some high quality imagery. XPRIZE also wants vehicles that can be launched from shore or from the air rather than requiring the expensive presence of a research vessel for operation.

In addition, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is throwing in $1 million for a separate skill—the ability to track chemical or biological signals. That organization would like to see a vehicle that could sniff out and locate a hydrothermal vent on its own, for example.

A thermostat can be such a simple device—so dumb a device if we’re feeling 21^st Century snobby—that a strip of metal coiled up with a droplet of mercury at the end can do the job. The coil contracts as it cools, the mercury shifts to touch two wires and close a circuit, and on goes your furnace. Prefer a different temperature? Rotate the coil.

Simple is great, but that dumb device is responsible for a huge portion of your energy bill. That means constant adjustments are necessary if you want to avoid wasting energy overheating your house while you’re tucked into bed or away at work. This is the part of the story where the programmable thermostat walked in, offering automation in exchange for up-front fiddling. But a surprisingly large percentage of people with programmable thermostats don’t actually program them. In fact, the US EPA stopped offering “Energy Star” certification for programmable thermostats entirely in 2009 because their real-world impact was so unpredictable.

That's a problem, but the Nest Learning Thermostat has gained a following in the last few years by offering a solution—it programs itself as you turn it up or down throughout the week. The very same smarts that allow the device to program itself open other doors to efficiency as well. And at the company's Palo Alto offices, this seems to be just the beginning. Today, Nest is still working on its flagship device to make homes more energy-efficient.

After a week of tense negotiations, the 195 countries that met in Paris agreed to the text of a historic climate change agreement late Saturday. The accord is not itself an end game, but it lays out the road the world will have to travel in order to limit the harm of climate change.

The international agreement states that nations will aim to limit “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels." International negotiations have long been focused on a 2°C limit, but the 1.5°C language was a surprise addition.

Rather than prescribe some common emissions target, the negotiations took a “bottom-up” approach, with nations each submitting their own emissions pledges. Current pledges are only good enough to limit 20^th century warming to around 3°C. But a key part of the agreement is a framework for revisiting emissions pledges every 5 years, with the goal being that those pledges are ratcheted down over time. To that end, it states that nations will “aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible” and reach net-zero emissions “in the second half of this century”. While the details remain to be filled in, the agreement also calls for transparent reporting of emissions to keep nations to their pledges.

While the eyes of the world are on Paris, where nations are hammering out an agreement to do something about the reality of climate change, the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness once again held a hearing on Tuesday to debate whether climate change is for real. Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is running for his party’s presidential nomination, convened the hearing titled “Data or dogma? Promoting open inquiry in the debate over the magnitude of human impact on Earth’s climate.”

Senator Cruz brought in four witnesses to testify, mostly chosen from the usual suspects that have participated in similar hearings in the past. There were two of the very small handful of climate scientists who express doubts about human responsibility for climate change—Georgia Tech professor and blogger Judith Curry and John Christy from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. William Happer, a retired Princeton physicist and chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think-tank, was also invited to speak. The fourth person brought in to talk climate science was conservative radio host and columnist Mark Steyn. (The last two were keynote speakers at this year’s Heartland Institute conference for climate “skeptics.”)

Senator Cruz opened the hearing with some ironic remarks. “This is a hearing on the science behind the claims of global warming. Now, this is the Science Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, and we’re hearing from distinguished scientists, sharing their views, their interpretations, their analysis of the data and the evidence. Now, I am the son of two mathematicians—two computer programmers and scientists—and I believe that public policy should follow the actual science, and the actual data and evidence, and not political and partisan claims that run contrary to the science and data and evidence.”

We recently covered an analysis of global emissions of greenhouse gases in 2014 showing an encouraging slowdown in the growth of those emissions. Particularly encouraging was the fact that this slowdown occurred along with continuing economic growth rather than simply reflecting an economic downturn. With the critical Paris climate negotiations currently underway, a group of researchers organized by the Global Carbon Project has published a commentary in the journal Nature Climate Change projecting that 2015 emissions will actually be lower than in 2014. You shouldn’t declare 2014 the Year that Carbon Peaked, though.

The researchers’ estimates for 2014 look a lot like those from the US report. They show an increase in fossil fuel and cement production emissions of 0.6 percent over 2013, which is much lower than the 2.4 percent annual growth rate over the preceding decade. Using an obviously incomplete dataset for 2015, they project a decrease of 0.6 percent (with error bars from a 1.6 percent decline to 0.5 percent growth), even as global GDP increased. This comes amid a continuing trend of less emissions per unit of GDP.

The current story of changing trends is largely told by China. Economic growth there has slowed (but not stopped) recently, and significant efforts to move away from a dirtier industrial economy, and away from the use of coal, contributed to a projected 3.9 decrease in emissions for 2015, according to the researchers. China’s emissions are likely to rise again, but the Chinese government has pledged to hit the peak by 2030.