Weathering the storm

Something that really grinds my gears is how quick people can be to trumpet their own ignorance, seemingly with pride.

I recall being in a school board budget meeting some years ago, and the science department line items were being discussed.  One of the proposed equipment purchases that came up was an electronic weather station for the Earth Science classroom.  And a local attending the meeting said, loud enough for all to hear, "Why the hell do they need a weather station?  If I want to know what the weather is, I stick my head out the window!  Hurr hurr hurr hurr durr!"

Several of his friends joined in the laughter, while I -- and the rest of the science faculty in attendance -- sat there quietly attempting to bring our blood pressures back down to non-lethal levels.

What astonishes me about this idiotic comment is two things: (1) my aforementioned bafflement about why he was so quick to demonstrate to everyone at the meeting that he was ignorant; and (2) what it said about his own level of curiosity.  When I don't know something, my first thought is not to ridicule but to ask questions.  If I thought an electronic weather station might be an odd or a frivolous purchase, I would have asked what exactly the thing did, and how it was better than "sticking my head out the window."  The Earth Science teacher -- who was in attendance that evening -- could then have explained it to me.

And afterward, miracle of miracles, I might have learned something.

All sciences are to some extent prone to this "I'm ignorant and I'm proud of it" attitude by laypeople, but meteorology may be the worst.  How many times have you heard people say things like, "A fifty percent chance of rain?  How many jobs can you think of where you could get as good results by flipping a coin, and still get paid?"  It took me a fifteen-second Google search to find the weather.gov page explaining that the "probability of precipitation" percentages mean something a great deal more specific than the forecasters throwing their hands in the air and saying, "Might happen, might not."  A fifty-percent chance of rain means that in the forecast area, any given point has a fifty percent chance of receiving at least 0.01" of rain; from this it's obvious that if there's a fifty percent chance over a large geographical area, the likelihood of someone receiving rain in the region is much greater than fifty percent.  (These middling percentages are far more common in the northern hemisphere's summer, when much of the rain falls in the form of sporadic local thunderstorms that are extremely hard to predict precisely.  If you live in the US Midwest or anywhere in the eastern half of North America, you can probably remember times when you got rain and your friends five miles away didn't, or vice versa.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Walter Baxter, The Milestone weather forecasting stone - geograph.org.uk - 1708774, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The problem is, meteorology is complex.  Computer models of the atmosphere rely on estimates of conditions (barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, air speed both vertically and horizontally, and particulate content, to name a few) along with mathematical equations describing how those quantities vary over time and influence each other.  The results are never completely accurate, and extending forward in time -- long-range forecasting -- is still nearly impossible except in the broadest-brush sense.  Add to that the fact there are weather phenomena that are still largely unexplained; one of the weirdest is the Catatumbo lightning, which occurs near where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela.  That one small region gets significant lightning 140 to 160 days a year, nine hours per day, and with lightning flashes from sixteen to forty times per minute.  The area sees the highest density of lightning in the world, at 250 strikes per square kilometer -- and no one knows why.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fernando Flores, Catatumbo Lightning (141677107), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Despite the inaccuracies and the gaps in our understanding, we are far ahead of the idiotic "they're just flipping a coin" that the non-science types would have you believe.  The deadliest North American hurricane on record, the 1900 Galveston storm that took an estimated eight thousand lives, was as devastating as it was precisely because back then, forecasting was so rudimentary that almost no one knew it was coming.  Today we usually have days, sometimes weeks, of warning before major weather events -- and yet, if the prediction is off by a few hours or landfall is inaccurate by ten miles, people still complain that "the meteorologists are just making guesses."

What's grimly ironic is that we might get our chance to find out what it's like to go back to a United States where we actually don't have accurate weather forecasting, because Trump and his cronies have cut the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the bone.  The motivation was, I suspect, largely because of the Right's pro-fossil-fuels, anti-climate-change bias, but the result will be to hobble our ability to make precise forecasts and get people out of harm's way.  You think the central Texas floods in the first week of July were bad?

Keep in mind that Atlantic hurricane season has just started, as well as the western wildfire season.  The already understaffed NWS and NOAA offices are now running on skeleton crews, just at the point when skilled forecasters are needed the most.  My intuition is you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Oh, and don't ask FEMA to help you after the disaster hits.  That's been cut, too.  Following the Texas floods, thousands of calls from survivors to FEMA were never returned, because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was too busy cosplaying at Alligator Auschwitz to bother doing anything about the situation.  (She responded to criticism by stating that FEMA "responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently," following the Trump approach that all you have to do is lie egregiously and it automatically becomes true.)

Ignorance is nothing to be embarrassed about, but it's also nothing to be proud of.  And when people's ignorance impels them to elect ignorant ideologues as leaders, the whole thing becomes downright dangerous.  Learn some science yourself, sure; the whole fifteen-year run of Skeptophilia could probably be summed up in that sentence.

But more than that -- demand that our leaders base their decisions on facts, logic, science, and evidence, not ideology, bias, and who happens to have dumped the most money into the election campaign.  We're standing on a precipice right now, and we can't afford to be silent.

Otherwise I'm very much afraid we'll find out all too quickly which way the wind is blowing.

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The cliff's edge

The universe is a dangerous place.

Much of what we've created -- the whole superstructure of civilized life, really -- is built to give us a sense of security.  And it works, or well enough.  During much of human history, we were one bad harvest, one natural disaster, one epidemic from starvation, disease, and death.  Our ancestors were constantly aware that they had no real security -- probably one of the main drivers of the development of religion.

The world is a capricious, dangerous place, but maybe the gods will help me if only I pray hard enough.

When the Enlightenment rolled around in the eighteenth century, science seemed to step in to provide a similar function.  Maybe the world could be tamed if we only understood it better.  Once again, it succeeded -- at least partially.  Industrial agriculture and modern medicine certainly saved millions of lives, and have allowed us to live longer, healthier lives than ever before.  Further reassuring us that it was possible to make the universe a secure, harm-free place for such creatures as us.

And we still have that sense, don't we?  When there's a natural disaster, many people respond, "Why did this happen?"  There's an almost indignant reaction of "the world should be safe, dammit."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons svantassel, Danger Keep Away Sign, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This is why in 2012 a judge in Italy sentenced six geologists to six years in prison and a hefty fines for failing to predict the deadly 2009 L'Aquila earthquake.  There was the sense that if the best experts on the geology of Italy didn't see it coming... well, they should have, shouldn't they?  

That in the present state of our scientific knowledge, it's not possible to predict earthquakes, didn't seem to sway the judge's mind.  "The world is chaotic, dangerous, and incompletely understood" was simply too hard to swallow.  If something happened, and people died, there had to be someone to blame.  (Fortunately, eventually wiser heads prevailed, the charges were thrown out on appeal, and the geologists were released.)

In fact, I started thinking about this because of a study out of the University of California - Riverside that is investigating a technique for predicting earthquake severity based on the direction of propagation of the shock wave front.  This can make a huge difference -- for example, an earthquake on the San Andreas Fault that begins with failure near the Salton Sea and propagates northward will direct more energy toward Los Angeles than one that begins closer in but spreads in the opposite direction.

The scientists are using telltale scratch marks -- scoring left as the rocks slide across each other -- to determine the direction of motion of the quake's shock wave.  "The scratches indicate the direction and origin of a past earthquake, potentially giving us clues about where a future quake might start and where it will go," said Nic Barth, the paper's lead author. " This is key for California, where anticipating the direction of a quake on faults like San Andreas or San Jacinto could mean a more accurate forecast of its impact...  We can now take the techniques and expertise we have developed on the Alpine Fault [in New Zealand] to examine faults in the rest of the world.  Because there is a high probability of a large earthquake occurring in Southern California in the near-term, looking for these curved marks on the San Andreas fault is an obvious goal."

The thing is, this is still short of the ultimate goal of predicting fault failure accurately, and with enough time to warn people to evacuate.  Knowing the timing of earthquakes is something that is still out of reach.

Then there's the study out of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research that found that the Sun and other stars like it are prone to violent flare-ups -- on the average, once every century.  These "superflares" can release an octillion joules of energy in only a few hours.

The once-every-hundred-years estimate was based on a survey of over fifty-six thousand Sun-like stars, and the upshot is that so far, we've lucked out.  The last serious solar storm was the Carrington Event of 1859, and that was the weakest of the known Miyake Events, coronal mass ejections so big that they left traces in tree rings.  (One about fourteen thousand years ago was so powerful that if it occurred today, it would completely fry everything from communications satellites to electrical grids to home computers.)

The problem, once again, is that we still can't predict them; like earthquakes, we can know likelihood but not exactitude.  In the case of a coronal mass ejection, we'd probably have a few hours' notice -- enough time to unplug stuff in our houses, but not enough to protect the satellites and grids and networks.  (If that's even possible.  "An octillion joules" is what is known in scientific circles as "a metric shit tonne of energy.")

"The new data are a stark reminder that even the most extreme solar events are part of the Sun's natural repertoire," said study co-author Natalie Krivova.  "During the Carrington event of 1859, one of the most violent solar storms of the past two hundred years, the telegraph network collapsed in large parts of northern Europe and North America.  According to estimates, the associated flare released only a hundredth of the energy of a superflare.  Today, in addition to the infrastructure on the Earth's surface, especially satellites would be at risk."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to scare you.  In my opinion, the point is to emphasize the fragility of life and of our world, and to encourage you to work toward mitigating what we can.  No matter what we do, we'll still be subject to the vagaries of geology, meteorology, and astrophysics, but right now we are needless adding to our risk by ignoring climate change and pollution, and encouraging the ignorant and ill-founded claims of the anti-vaxxers.  (Just yesterday I saw that RFK Jr., who has been nominated as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is pursuing the de-authorization of the polio vaccine -- an extremely low-risk preventative that has saved millions of lives.)

Life's risky enough without adding to it by listening to reckless short-term profit hogs and dubiously sane conspiracy theorists.

My point here is that the chaotic nature of the universe shouldn't freeze us into despairing immobility; it should galvanize us to protect what we have.  The unpredictable dangers are a fact of life, and for most of our evolutionary history we were unable to do much about any of them.  Now, for the first time, we have figured out how to protect ourselves from many of the risks that our ancestors faced every day.  How foolish do we as a species have to be to add to those risks needlessly, heedlessly, rushing toward the edge of the cliff when we have the capacity simply to stop?

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Forecasting on a fault line

Living in an earthquake zone is risky business.

I lived for ten years in Seattle, which is immediately adjacent to the Cascadia Subduction Zone, widely considered to be one of the most potentially dangerous faults in the world.  The little Juan de Fuca plate -- all that's left of a much larger piece of oceanic crust that once lay underneath Panthalassa, the ocean that surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea back around the time of the Permian-Triassic Extinction of 251 million years ago -- is slowly disappearing as it gets pulled underneath the North American Plate by convection currents in the mantle.  Subduction zone earthquakes occur along trenches that form the boundaries between plates that are moving toward each other, generating a "thrust fault" as one plate dives beneath the other.  Not only do these produce some of the most massive earthquakes known, they also generate volcanoes like Mount Saint Helens and Mount Rainier.

So lovely as the Seattle area is, it's kind of a disaster waiting to happen.  If you have a high tolerance for being freaked out by the power of the natural world, or you don't live in the Pacific Northwest (or both), you should read journalist Kathryn Schulz's wonderful analysis "The Really Big One" that appeared in The New Yorker in 2015.  Her predictions for what will happen to the area when Cascadia ruptures are truly terrifying -- and would be enough to keep me from ever moving back there, much as I loved western Washington for its culture, climate, and natural beauty.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

If you read the article hoping that Schulz (or the geologists she interviewed) can tell you when the "Really Big One" is going to occur, you're not going to find what you're looking for.  We have a pretty good idea of where earthquakes occur and the types of faults that cause them, but predicting when they'll happen is far more problematic.  And sometimes, even the "where" isn't predictable.  In November of 2019 a 5.0 magnitude quake hit the Rhône Valley in France, along the La Rouvière Fault -- a fault zone that we thought was last active twenty million years ago.

Just last week, though, three papers came out looking at the warning signs that a fault is about to rupture, and methods we may be able to use to predict when they'll happen and how big they'll be.  Getting better at this is imperative for the millions of people who live in quake-prone areas, and could potentially save countless lives.

The first, in the journal Nature, was by a team led by Jonathan Bedford of Helmholtz Centre Potsdam.  In "Months-Long Thousand-Kilometre-Scale Wobbling Before Great Subduction Earthquakes," we learn that there are warning signs -- a slow backward drag on the plate margin that ends with a massive slip in the opposite direction, a little like pulling backward on a bowstring and then letting go suddenly.  The authors write:

[We used] a recently developed trajectory modelling approach that is designed to isolate secular tectonic motions from the daily GNSS time series to show that the 2010 Maule, Chile (moment magnitude 8.8) and 2011 Tohoku-oki, Japan (moment magnitude 9.0) earthquakes were preceded by reversals of 4–8 millimetres in surface displacement that lasted several months and spanned thousands of kilometres.  Modelling of the surface displacement reversal that occurred before the Tohoku-oki earthquake suggests an initial slow slip followed by a sudden pulldown of the Philippine Sea slab so rapid that it caused a viscoelastic rebound across the whole of Japan.

The second paper, in Science, looked at what's happening deep underground beneath one of the most famous fault zones, the strike-slip San Andreas Fault.  In "Excitation of San Andreas Tremors by Thermal Instabilities Below the Seismogenic Zone," geologists Lifeng Wang of the China Earthquake Administration and Sylvain Barbot of the University of Southern California found that temperature patterns can predict the likelihood of a fault suddenly giving way.  For a while, the pieces of the plate margin can slowly, steadily grind past each other, but that motion generates frictional heating.  This can lead to rapid fault failure as the warming rock becomes more plastic.  "Just like rubbing our hands together in cold weather to heat them up, faults heat up when they slide. The fault movements can be caused by large changes in temperature," said study co-author Sylvain Barbot, in an interview with Science Daily.  "This can create a positive feedback that makes them slide even faster, eventually generating an earthquake."

Last, in Nature Communications, geologists Claudia Hulbert and Romain Jolivet (of the École Normale Superieure) and Bertrand Rouet-LeDuc and Paul Johnson (of the Geophysics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory) turned the power of machine learning on past patterns of seismic instability, and found that large "megathrust" earthquakes were preceded by as much as a year-long slow slip.  Where this slip is occurring, and how fast, might give us advance warning of a major fault rupture:

Slow slip events result from the spontaneous weakening of the subduction megathrust and bear strong resemblance to earthquakes, only slower.  This resemblance allows us to study fundamental aspects of nucleation that remain elusive for classic, fast earthquakes.  We rely on machine learning algorithms to infer slow slip timing from statistics of seismic waveforms.  We find that patterns in seismic power follow the 14-month slow slip cycle in Cascadia, arguing in favor of the predictability of slow slip rupture.  Here, we show that seismic power exponentially increases as the slowly slipping portion of the subduction zone approaches failure, a behavior that shares a striking similarity with the increase in acoustic power observed prior to laboratory slow slip events.  Our results suggest that the nucleation phase of Cascadia slow slip events may last from several weeks up to several months.

Even though such a pattern of slow slips might tell us that a major earthquake is imminent, it's unlikely we'll ever be able to say "... and it's going to happen next Friday at ten A.M."  And given our penchant for ignoring science unless it can give us pinpoint accuracy, we're probably not going to see much change in our behavior.  After all, that tendency is at the heart of the United States's failure to address the COVID-19 pandemic -- the scientists were saying back in December and January, "this has the capacity to be deadly and fast-spreading," and government officials said, "How fast and how deadly?"  The scientists had to say, "We're not sure yet," and that was insufficient for leaders to take swift and decisive action.  (And that's not even taking into consideration that Donald Trump knew about the danger, admitted up front the potential devastation COVID-19 could cause, and deliberately decided to lie about it because he was afraid it would hurt his chances of being re-elected.)

So we're not so good at reacting to clear and present dangers if the remedy is inconvenient or costly.  As James Burke said, in his frighteningly prescient 1991 documentary After the Warming, "The scientists said that devastating climate change was going to happen at some point, but for most people that wasn't good enough.  We wouldn't pay for what amounts to climate insurance, even though we happily insure our lives and our property against far less likely occurrences."

Be that as it may, I'm glad we're seeing this progress being made.  Earthquakes are notorious amongst natural disasters at giving no warning whatsoever, so anything we could do to figure out how to predict them more accurately could potentially save lives.

But even so, I don't think I'd want to live in the Pacific Northwest again.

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Humans have always looked up to the skies.  Art from millennia ago record the positions of the stars and planets -- and one-off astronomical events like comets, eclipses, and supernovas.

And our livelihoods were once tied to those observations.  Calendars based on star positions gave the ancient Egyptians the knowledge of when to expect the Nile River to flood, allowing them to prepare to utilize every drop of that precious water in a climate where rain was rare indeed.  When to plant, when to harvest, when to start storing food -- all were directed from above.

As Carl Sagan so evocatively put it, "It is no wonder that our ancestors worshiped the stars.  For we are their children."

In her new book The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars, scientist and author Jo Marchant looks at this connection through history, from the time of the Lascaux Cave Paintings to the building of Stonehenge to the medieval attempts to impose a "perfect" mathematics on the movement of heavenly objects to today's cutting edge astronomy and astrophysics.  In a journey through history and prehistory, she tells the very human story of our attempts to comprehend what is happening in the skies over our heads -- and how our mechanized lives today have disconnected us from this deep and fundamental understanding.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Art imitates life

I got a bit of a shock from something a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me yesterday.

I was emailed a link to an article claiming that a 1950s television show had predicted the future -- because it featured a character named Trump, a snake-oil salesman who convinced a town that he knew how to prevent an invasion of aliens (and the collapse of civilization).  All they had to do, he said, was to build a wall around the town.

My immediate reaction was that it was going to turn out to be like the similar claims made a couple of years ago that Adam Sandler had repeatedly predicted future events.  In other words, entirely bogus, complete bullshit, and made up from the get-go (the Adam Sandler claims came from a satirical website called Clickhole that was up front that they'd invented the whole story, but thousands of conspiracy theorists evidently missed that part).

But the weird thing about the Trump television show is...

... it's true.

The show was called Trackdown, which was an obscure western series starring Robert Culp as Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman.  And in the episode called "The End of the World," a huckster named Trump -- at least it was Walter Trump, not Donald -- comes into town claiming that there's going to be a worldwide invasion and subsequent destruction of civilization, and the only way to prevent the town from being destroyed was to pay him money so that he could oversee the building of a wall around the town.

"I bring you a message, a message few of you will be able to believe," Trump tells the townspeople.  "A message of great importance.  A message I alone was able to read in the fires of the universe.  And at midnight tonight, without my help and knowledge, every one of you will be dead."

When he's challenged on whether he's telling the truth, he says to the doubter, "Be careful, son, I can sue you."

Walter Trump, who at least doesn't look like the President-elect [image courtesy of Snopes]

The doubter, of course, is shouted down, and the townspeople fall for Trump's lies.  Later in the episode, we hear the following:

Narrator: Hoby had checked the town.  The people were ready to believe.  Like sheep they ran to the slaughterhouse.  And waiting for them was the high priest of fraud. 

Trump: I am the only one.  Trust me.  I can build a wall around your homes that nothing can penetrate. 

Townperson: What do we do?  How can we save ourselves? 

Trump: You ask how do you build that wall.  You ask, and I'm here to tell you.

Fortunately for the town, Hoby Gilman unmasks Trump's duplicity, and the con man is arrested and jailed.

Weird, no?  The whole thing has been vetted by Snopes, and apparently is 100% true -- in fact, on the Snopes link you can watch a clip from the show.

So a lot of woo-woo types are claiming that the show was prescient, as if television acted as some kind of electronic version of the Magic 8 Ball that was popular with kids when I was young.  (E.g., "Is Donald Trump's Mexican wall idea a complete and utter boondoggle?"  Magic 8 Ball:  "It is decidedly so.")

Be that as it may, the race is on by the wingnut contingent to scour other obscure 1950s television shows to see what else might be in store for us.

Honestly, however, all we're seeing here is the law of large numbers, plus a heaping measure of dart-thrower's bias.  If you have a large enough sample size and no parameters for narrowing down what you're looking for, eventually you'll notice weird coincidences; and of course we're going to pay more attention to cases where there was a weird coincidence than the tens of thousands of times there wasn't.  (I, for one, am glad that most television shows don't predict reality.  I would prefer not to live in a world where The Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie, or (heaven forfend) Lost in Space was an accurate predictor of future events.)

But I won't deny that it's peculiar.  And if it is going to play out the way it did in Trackdown, I wonder who our version of the Hoby Gilman character will be?