The lost forests of the Fens

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I have a fascination for considering how the terrain of the Earth has changed over its history.  It's a topic I've come back to again and again as scientists piece together the shifting topography of the continents, molded by plate tectonics and glaciations and even the occasional meteorite impact.

It's tempting to think that you have to go back hundreds of millions of years to see a significant difference from what we have now, as we did in yesterday's post about the peculiar geology of Scotland.  In some cases, though, things have changed on a far shorter time scale, so recently that the remnants of the past lie right beneath the surface of the modern landscape.

The Fens are a region in eastern England, lying in Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk.  It's virtually all dead-flat and only a meter or two above sea level, so the whole area is prone to flooding -- water is controlled by a network of levees and drainage channels that crisscross the entire nearly four thousand square kilometer region.  You'd think this would discourage people from living there, but the opposite is true; it's been settled since Mesolithic times, mostly because of the excellent quality of the soil for agriculture.  The largest communities in the Fens are understandably concentrated on the highest ground, which are nicknamed "islands" (and in rainy periods, they sometimes are islands in actual fact).  The largest of these is Ely, a beautiful cathedral city that is now home to twenty thousand people.

Ely Cathedral [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tilman2007, Ely-071, CC BY-SA 4.0]

It's a strange and surreal landscape, prone to long periods of fog and swirling mist, largely devoid of trees, dominated by wide grassy marshes that are home to a great variety of birds and other wildlife.  The region so impressed composer Ralph Vaughan Williams that he wrote his melancholy and evocative piece In the Fen Country to try to capture the otherworldly beauty of the place.

Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire [Image is in the Public Domain]

What brings up this topic today is a study by researchers at the University of Cambridge that appeared in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews last week, which showed that only five thousand years ago, the Fens looked very different -- and traces of that vanished landscape still lurk right below the surface.

Farmers plowing the rich soil to plant crops such as grains, vegetables, potatoes, canola, and mustard frequently find their plows getting snagged on heavy logs that then have to be dug up and dragged out.  "A common annoyance for Fenland farmers is getting their equipment caught on big pieces of wood buried in the soil, which can often happen when planting potatoes, since they are planted a little deeper than other crops," said study lead author Tatiana Bebchuk.  "This wood is often pulled up and piled at the edge of fields: it's a pretty common sight to see these huge piles of logs when driving through the area."

Upon analysis, Bebchuk and her team found that nearly all of the wood came from yew trees -- many of them absolutely enormous, on the order of twenty meters tall.  Only five millennia ago, what is now the marshland of the Fens was a huge forest of yew trees.

Then, about 4,200 years ago, all of them suddenly died.

The reason, Bebchuk found, was a sudden influx of salt water as the world warmed following a cold period, and sea levels rose.  Within a generation the yew forests were nothing more than a vast expanse of bleached trunks, which ultimately fell and were buried in the marshy soil.  Replacing them was an ecosystem of salt-tolerant marshland grasses that still dominate the region today.

What's curious is that this coincided with significant events in other parts of the world -- a serious drought in China, and the collapse of the Egyptian Old Kingdom and the Mesopotamian Akkadian Empire.  Whether these are all directly related is, of course, impossible to say; it's rare that complex historical events have only a single cause.  Climate change may, however, been a significant contributor -- otherwise this is quite the coincidence.

"We want to know if there is any link between these climatic events," said Bebchuk.  "Are the megadroughts in Asia and the Middle East possibly related to the rapid sea level rise in northern Europe?  Was this a global climate event, or was it a series of unrelated regional changes?  We don't yet know what could have caused these climate events, but these trees could be an important part of solving this detective story."

It's fascinating, and a little scary, to see how rapidly things can change -- and if this doesn't put you in mind of what we're currently doing to the climate, it should.  Consider what landscapes we have today, places that seem like they'll never change, that might be drastically different fifty years from now.

I wonder what the scientists five thousand years in the future will piece together about our current world?

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Meltdown

With the insane weather we've had this summer -- and which is showing no signs of calming down -- it's easy to forget about another inevitable outcome of anthropogenic climate change: sea level rise.

Part of the issue, of course, is that humans have a regrettable tendency only to pay attention to what's right in front of their faces, like the current worldwide extreme heat wave.  It's why researchers found in 2014 that public concern about climate change decreases during the winter, an attitude Stephen Colbert summed up as "I just had dinner, so there's no such thing as world hunger."

And sea level rise is so gradual you really do have to have a long baseline even to notice it.  It's only in extremely low-lying places like Louisiana's Isle de Jean-Charles that people have been forced to notice -- and that only because the place looks very likely to cease to exist entirely in the next ten years.

Another reason the (well justified) panic over climate change has mostly focused on extreme high temperatures on land and hot sea surfaces fueling bigger storms is that climatologists thought we had something of a buffer, ice-melt-wise, in the Greenland Ice Sheet.  The Greenland Ice Sheet, they thought, had been unmelted for millions of years, which not only kept all that water locked up in solid form on land, but also helped stabilize the Arctic climate.

Note my use of the past tense.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christine Zenino from Chicago, US, Greenland Glaciers outside of Ammassalik (5562580093), CC BY 2.0]

New research, based on an ice core that had been collected in the 1960s but then lost for nearly sixty years, showed something terrifying: four hundred thousand years ago, nearly the entire Greenland Ice Sheet melted, raising the sea level by several meters -- at a time when the carbon dioxide concentration was lower than it is today.  Using something called a luminescence signal -- a highly-sensitive technique that measures the last time flakes of feldspar or quartz were exposed to light, and therefore were on the surface -- the researchers found what they are calling "bulletproof" evidence that layers thought to be continuously buried deep in the Greenland ice were exposed between 420,000 and 370,000 years ago.

If this happened today -- and the indications are that if we don't curb climate change fast, it will -- the results will be nothing short of catastrophic.

"If we melt just portions of the Greenland ice sheet, the sea level rises dramatically," said Tammy Rittenour, climatologist at Utah State University.  "Forward modeling the rates of melt, and the response to high carbon dioxide, we are looking at meters of sea level rise, probably tens of meters.  And then look at the elevation of New York City, Boston, Miami, Amsterdam. Look at India and Africa -- most global population centers are near sea level."

Considering that the average elevation of the state of Delaware is twenty meters -- and that Louisiana and Florida tie at thirty-three meters -- this should scare the absolute shit out of everyone.  (And like Rittenour said -- even in those low-elevation states, most of the population is still along the coast -- so even a meter or two rise would be catastrophic.)

And, typical of privileged people in industrialized countries, I've focused on where I live.  If you look at the top ten cities threatened by climate change, only one (Miami, Florida) is in the United States.  Two are in India (Kolkata and Mumbai), two are in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City and Hai Phong), two are in China (Guangzhou and Shanghai), and one each in Bangladesh (Dhaka), Myanmar (Rangoon), and Thailand (Bangkok).  Just counting the urban population of these ten cities puts almost seventeen million people with the choice of relocating or drowning.

You think the refugee problem is bad now?  

And I'm not just talking about the dreaded "caravans of foreign refugees" the right-wingers here in the U.S. like to bring out every time there's focus on the fact that their entire platform lately has consisted of denying rights to people they don't like.  If the sea level rises even by a meter or two, every coastal city in the United States is in trouble -- so we're gonna have an internal refugee problem the likes of which we've never seen before.

People, we have got to figure this out.

We've had enough time to process it all, to come to the conclusion that yes, it's real, and no, it's not a "natural warm-up."  I'll end with a quote from British science historian James Burke's brilliant (and prescient) documentary After the Warming, which aired all the way back in 1989: "People spend money to insure their homes, their health, and their lives against far less likely occurrences.  That's all legislation to stop climate change turns out to be: planetary insurance...  Our attitude thus far has been like the guy in the old joke, have you heard it?  A man falls off the top of a twenty-story building, and someone on the seventeenth floor sticks his head out of the window and asks the guy how he's doing.  The man shrugs as he falls and says, 'So far, so good.'"

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Meltdown

One of the most frustrating things about human behavior is that we can receive repeated hints and warnings that if we keep doing what we're doing, bad stuff will happen, then when we continue and bad stuff does indeed happen as predicted, we act all surprised.

We've seen it before with volcanic eruptions, a topic I just dealt with in more detail last week.  As I pointed out, it's impossible (as science currently stands) to predict exactly when volcanoes will erupt, and sometimes they still take us completely by surprise, such as the May 2021 eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  But a much better-known example of an eruption geologists saw coming was the March 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, which killed 57 people, a significant fraction of whom were leisure hikers hoping to get close to the mountain, some of whom deliberately went around signs and barricades warning of the danger.

There's something in human nature that makes us say, "Oh, c'mon, that sign isn't meant for me.  We'll be fine."

Which is why we're now in the position of being presented with a study from the University of South Florida confirming what climatologists have been saying for decades -- that anthropogenic climate change, generated by the burning of fossil fuels, is going to melt the on-land ice masses in Antarctica and Greenland, and produce catastrophic sea level rise.

The first person who connected atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with global average temperature was, I shit you not, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, 126 years ago.  That's how long we've known about this.  It started being the subject of serious study (and concern) in the 1970s, and in the 80s and 90s popularizers such as James Burke and Al Gore brought it to the public notice with (respectively) After the Warming and An Inconvenient Truth.  But it's easy to ignore people if paying attention to them means having to change your lifestyle; easier to listen to knuckle-draggers like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who famously brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate as "proof" that the world wasn't warming up.

Unfortunately for Senator Inhofe, nature continues to operate by the laws of physics and not the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry, because the temperature has continued to climb.  And just last week, a new study in Nature has shown that the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica has lost contact with the rocky basin it rests on, and is in the process of collapse -- something that could raise global sea levels by three meters.

"Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails," said marine geophysicist and study co-author Robert Larter from the British Antarctic Survey.  "We should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future -- even from one year to the next -- once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed."

If that doesn't drive the point home hard enough, the authors point out that according to the United Nations, roughly forty percent of the human population lives within a hundred kilometers of the coast.

The edge of Thwaites Glacier [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

I feel like the climatologists, and also science writers like myself, have been jumping up and down yelling ourselves hoarse for years trying to get people to wake up, and for God's sake, do something.  But the USF study is the most recent indication that whatever window we had to mitigate the effects of human-induced climate change might well have closed.  I hate to be a doom-and-gloom purveyor, and I wish I had good news; but at the moment, this is what we have.  We've allowed people like Senator Inhofe and their mouthpieces over at Fox News to convince the public that somehow we climate activists want bad things to happen, so we're exaggerating them for our own malign purposes.  And all the while, the voters have been climbing over the signs saying "Danger, Do Not Proceed Past This Point," saying, "Ha ha, this can't be meant for me."

I'm very much afraid that the result is we're in the latter half of "Fuck around and find out."

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The rising waters

2020 has become some kind of nihilist joke.  How many versions of the "2020 Apocalypse Bingo Card" have you heard?  And it does seem like things are just piling on.  Right now, we have a major category-3 hurricane bearing down on southern Louisiana -- that just got hit by a totally different tropical storm three days ago.  We're in the middle of a pandemic that is showing no signs of letting up.  There are record-setting wildfires in California.  The economy is giving serious signs of tanking in a big way.  Protests against police brutality seem to erupt every other day.  Last, we're in the middle of the Republican National Convention, where the platform seems to be, "Look how fucked up everything has gotten in the last four years!  Give us another four and we'll do the same thing again but even bigger this time!"

In a situation like this, I'm always reluctant to add to the doom and gloom.  But I would be remiss in not pointing out that all of the above is small potatoes, really.  A lot of us, in fact, are concerned at how the current chaos has distracted us from a far, far bigger problem.  We are facing an unprecedented climate catastrophe, not in a hundred years, not in fifty years, but right now. and three papers in the past two weeks have added to what was already a clarion call to action.

Let's start with the deep oceans.  The abyssal region of the Earth's oceans is supposed to be one of the most stable ecosystems on Earth.  Saline, completely pitch dark, crushing pressures, and always at just shy of four degrees Celsius -- the temperature at which water is its densest.  No change, no matter what's happening up above.

But last week a paper in Nature Climate Change looked into the deeps of the ocean, and found something terrifying.  The anthropogenic climate change signature is showing up in a place that is supposed to be about as insulated from human effects as you could imagine.

A team led by oceanographer Yona Silvy of the Université Sorbonne wrote the following:

[U]sing 11 climate models, we define when anthropogenic temperature and salinity changes are expected to emerge from natural variability in the ocean interior along density surfaces.  The models predict that in 2020, 20–55% of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian basins have an emergent anthropogenic signal; reaching 40–65% in 2050 and 55–80% in 2080.  The well-ventilated Southern Ocean water masses emerge very rapidly, as early as the 1980–1990s, while the Northern Hemisphere water masses emerge in the 2010–2030s.  Our results highlight the importance of maintaining and augmenting an ocean observing system capable of detecting and monitoring persistent anthropogenic changes.

Perhaps this should have been unsurprising, considering that 93% of the anthropogenic heating the Earth is experiencing is being absorbed by bodies of water.  But the idea that this absorption isn't limited to the surface -- that we're actually impacting the deepest parts of the world's oceans -- is seriously scary to anyone who knows anything about the environment and climate models.

Scientists have long been concerned about the tipping point -- the point that climatic catastrophe becomes inevitable no matter what we do.  A second study out of Ohio State University has shown conclusively that we've passed that point with respect to one of the Earth's systems, the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

What the researchers found was that up until about the year 2000, the glaciers in Greenland were pretty well in balance.  The amount of ice loss during the summer was nearly equal to the amount of ice gain from snowfall during the winter.  But around 2000, the situation changed, and since then Greenland has lost a staggering 50 gigatons (50 billion tons) more ice than it gained.

"Glacier retreat has knocked the dynamics of the whole ice sheet into a constant state of loss," said Ian Howat, who co-authored the paper.  "Even if the climate were to stay the same or even get a little colder, the ice sheet would still be losing mass."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christine Zenino from Chicago, US, Greenland Glaciers outside of Ammassalik (5562580093), CC BY 2.0]

The polar bears aren't the only ones who should be concerned.  Greenland is second only to Antarctica in its potential effect on sea level rise.  If the Greenland Ice Sheet melts -- which is has sometimes done during warm periods in Earth's climate -- it would raise the sea levels by six meters.  Everywhere under six meters of elevation would be under water.

So wave goodbye at New Orleans, Antwerp, Charleston, Boston, a good chunk of New York City and Long Island, and most of Florida, Delaware, the Netherlands, and Bangladesh.

If that's not bad enough, a paper in The Cryosphere last week, authored by a team from three universities -- Leeds, Edinburgh, and University College London -- considered the situation worldwide, and found that in the past twenty-three years, the Earth lost 28 trillion tons of ice.

"To put that in context, every centimeter of sea-level rise means about a million people will be displaced from their low-lying homelands," said Andy Shepherd, director of Leeds University's Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, in an interview with The Guardian.  "In the past researchers have studied individual areas – such as the Antarctic or Greenland – where ice is melting.  But this is the first time anyone has looked at all the ice that is disappearing from the entire planet...  What we have found has stunned us.  There can be little doubt that the vast majority of Earth's ice loss is a direct consequence of climate warming."

It's easy to focus on what's right in front of your face and forget about the big picture.  This would be okay if the big picture wasn't so deeply horrifying.  I hate to be another purveyor of pessimism, but we have got to start taking this seriously.  I'm as upset about the pandemic and the global political chaos as the next guy, but this isn't a time to be distracted away from a much bigger issue -- the long-term habitability of the planet.

Let's keep our eyes on the ball, here.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a brilliant retrospective of how we've come to our understanding of one of the fastest-moving scientific fields: genetics.

In Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book The Gene: An Intimate History, we're taken from the first bit of research that suggested how inheritance took place: Gregor Mendel's famous study of pea plants that established a "unit of heredity" (he called them "factors" rather than "genes" or "alleles," but he got the basic idea spot on).  From there, he looks at how our understanding of heredity was refined -- how DNA was identified as the chemical that housed genetic information, to how that information is encoded and translated, to cutting-edge research in gene modification techniques like CRISPR-Cas9.  Along each step, he paints a very human picture of researchers striving to understand, many of them with inadequate tools and resources, finally leading up to today's fine-grained picture of how heredity works.

It's wonderful reading for anyone interested in genetics and the history of science.

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

The danger of comfort

There is nothing as dangerous as our attitude that if something isn't bothering us right here and right now, it can effectively be ignored.

It's what is behind the phenomenon that doctors rail against, that if you're feeling good at the moment, there's no reason to have an annual physical.  I say this with a degree of wry amusement because I'm a doctor avoider myself, but at least I acknowledge how foolish that approach is.  There are large numbers of illnesses that if caught early and treated are not really that serious, but if left untreated long enough can kill you.  I was just chatting a couple of days ago with a friend about a mutual acquaintance who had ignored increasingly severe headaches for weeks, and ultimately died of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm that probably would have been operable -- at the age of 41.

Scale that attitude up, and you have our current approach to the global environment.

Every time you look at the news you see more alarm bells about the current state of the natural world.  Just in the last two weeks, we've had the following:

• A study at the University of Sussex showing that the world's biodiversity is falling far faster than previous models had estimated
• A paper in Nature with new data about mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet, projecting the displacement of forty million people worldwide from coastal flooding and incursion of seawater in the next eighty years
• A rather horrifying study from the University of California-San Diego detailing more accurate estimates of microplastics in the ocean -- bits of effectively non-biodegradable debris suspended in seawater, with unknown long-term effects on ecosystems -- and found that the average concentration was 8.3 million pieces of microplastic per cubic meter of water, on the order of six orders of magnitude higher than previous measurements

But here I sit in my comfortable office in rural upstate New York.  It's a clear December morning, the sky is a pristine pale blue, the tilled cornfield across the road dusted with snow.  There are birds at the feeders, a hawk is kiting high overhead, my dogs are snoozing in a patch of sunlight after an early morning's romp.  I have a cup of hot coffee, a fire in the wood stove.

All's well with the world.  Right?

Certainly looks like it is.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pranjal kukreja, Adventure-clouds-environment-672358, CC BY-SA 4.0]

We're geared to respond to how our personal conditions are in the moment, so stories like the ones I mentioned above have a hard time gaining any traction in our consciousness.  I consider myself more environmentally-conscious than a lot of people (and for cryin' in the sink, I just spent the morning researching serious problems with the global ecology) and I still have a hard time feeling viscerally alarmed by it, the way I would if there was a forest fire headed this way or a chemical spill was killing all the fish in my pond or smog was making it impossible to breathe without a filter mask.

There's really no difference, though, between the three problems in the news and the three hypothetical ones I just mentioned -- or if there is, it's a matter of scale.  The three papers I referenced above are orders of magnitude more serious than any of the three local ones I listed.  If a wildfire went out of control and burned my house down, it would be a tragedy for me.  But the three papers I described are disasters in the making that affect not just one person, nor even a single community, but the entire world.

And for most people, they elicit nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders.

It doesn't help, of course, that the current government of the United States is actively involved in perpetuating this attitude, and (worse) spreading scientific misinformation.  For some of the perpetrators it's done with malice aforethought, because of the influence of money from the fossil fuel lobby and others like it, but for some -- like Donald Trump -- it's a combination of the "who cares, I'm doing fine" attitude with outright willful stupidity.  Take, for example, this direct quote from Trump's speech to a Turning Point USA (a conservative student group) rally just two days ago:

I never understood wind.  I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody.  I know it is very expensive.  They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere.  You know we have a world, right?  So the world is tiny compared to the universe.  So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything.  You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right spewing, whether it is China or Germany, is going into the air...  A windmill will kill many bald eagles.  After a certain number, they make you turn the windmill off, that is true.  By the way, they make you turn it off.  And yet, if you killed one, they put you in jail.  That is okay.  But why is it okay for windmills to destroy the bird population?

Watching a video of this speech, it was hard to escape two conclusions: (1) Donald Trump is the single stupidest person ever elected to public office, and (2) the fact that there are still a significant number of supporters of this man's policies, who apparently still think he's the best president ever, makes me despair for the future of the human race.

When I taught Environmental Science, I was up front about my goal -- to widen students' perspective from what's right in front of them, to their homes, to their communities, to their nation, and finally to the entire world.  So much of what we're doing wrong lately -- or failing to do -- is purely because we only care, and act, on what is right before our faces.

So I'm glad that I've got a beautiful morning to enjoy, clean air, a warm and safe place for myself and my family and pets.  But I can't let that lull me into the Panglossian attitude that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."  In the current conditions -- with ecological perils everywhere, and a government that combines complicity and ignorance -- complacency is the deadliest danger of all.

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As technology has improved, so has our ability to bring that technology to bear on scientific questions, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In the fascinating new book Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past, archaeologist Sarah Parcak gives a fascinating look at how satellite photography has revolutionized her field.  Using detailed photographs from space, including thousands of recently declassified military surveillance photos, Parcak and her colleagues have located hundreds of exciting new sites that before were completely unknown -- roads, burial sites, fortresses, palaces, tombs, even pyramids.

These advances are giving us a lens into our own distant past, and allowing investigation of inaccessible or dangerous sites from a safe distance -- and at a phenomenal level of detail.  This book is a must-read for any students of history -- or if you'd just like to find out how far we've come from the days of Heinrich Schliemann and the excavation of Troy.

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

Rising tide

The current administration's approach to facts they don't like seems to have three parts:

1. Lie about them.
2. Get all the members of your administration, and any other cronies you can convince, to avoid mentioning them.
3. If the facts come out anyway, blame "Fake News."

If you needed any further proof of this, all you have to do is to look at the recent news release from the United States Geological Survey regarding improving infrastructure on the California coast.  The news release was based on a paper published earlier this year in the journal Scientific Reports, and focused on methodology -- ways to mitigate flood damage and damage from mudslides, for example.

The problem is, if you read the paper itself, you'll see that the press release neglected mention of the study's major conclusion -- that California is in dire danger of catastrophic flooding, with property damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars -- and that the cause is anthropogenic climate change.

Worse still, it wasn't a simple omission.  An earlier version of the press release included facts and figures from the study, including the alarming conclusion that between three and seven times more people and businesses will be at risk than estimated in earlier projections, but the Trump administration "sanitized" the press release by removing every single reference to climate change, and making it sound like the entire study was about thinking ahead and shoring everything up and making everyone safe.

"It's been made clear to us that we're not supposed to use climate change in press releases anymore," one federal researcher said, under conditions of anonymity for fear of reprisal.  "They will not be authorized."

The problem goes all the way to the top.  James Reilly, director of the USGS, authorized the scrubbing of the press release, despite his statement at his 2018 confirmation hearing that he was "fully committed to scientific integrity."

Which, at this point, appears to have been a blatant lie.

Flooding on Assateague Island, Virginia [Image is in the Public Domain]

Trump has been (rightly) criticized for his blatant disregard for scientific research and his overturning of dozens of environmental protections -- loosening standards for pollution, removing corporate oversight, making it more difficult for industry to be sued for cleanup.  Despite this, in a rant earlier this week that was bizarre even by his standards, Trump portrayed himself as an environmental leader, skewing facts (such as his claim that the United States has been a leader in reduction of carbon emissions, when in fact we're the second highest in the world) and rambling on with nearly incoherent bits like this:

You don't have to have any forest fires.  It's interesting.  I spoke to certain countries, and they said, "Sir, we're a forest nation."  I never thought of a country -- well-known countries; "we're a forest nation."  I never heard of the term "forest nation."  They live in forests.  And they don't have problems...  Remember, management.  It's called forest management.  So it's a very important term.  When I went to California, they sort of scoffed at me for the first two weeks and maybe three weeks and not so much four weeks, and after about five weeks they said, "You know, he's right.  He's right."

It's almost a guarantee that if Donald Trump said "I was told..." the next thing that comes out of his mouth will be a lie.  And for what it's worth, elected officials and policy leaders in California have all denied (some of them, after laughing uproariously) that they agreed with anything Trump said about environmental policy.

Remember, this is the guy who said that Finland avoids forest fires because they spend a lot of time raking.

For fuck's sake.

"Don't trust what the government says" has become almost a cliché regarding every resistance movement ever organized, but in this case, it seems like it's not an overgeneralization.  This administration has made a policy of deceit, coverup, corruption, and subterfuge that makes Watergate and Teapot Dome look like kids staging a play for their parents.  The problem here is that in this case, what they're lying about is the long-term habitability of the planet.

Which moves this whole issue from "immoral" to "unconscionable."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun for anyone who (like me) appreciates both plants and an occasional nice cocktail -- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart.  Most of the things we drink (both alcohol-containing and not) come from plants, and Stewart takes a look at some of the plants that have provided us with bar staples -- from the obvious, like grapes (wine), barley (beer), and agave (tequila), to the obscure, like gentian (angostura bitters) and hyssop (Bénédictine).

It's not a scientific tome, more a bit of light reading for anyone who wants to know more about what they're imbibing.  So learn a little about what's behind the bar -- and along the way, a little history and botany as well.

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

Reality denial

What does it take for people to look at a belief they hold and say, "Okay, I guess I was wrong?"

I ask this because there is still a sizable number of people who call themselves "climate skeptics."  The better term would be "reality deniers."  They tend to fall into two groups -- ones who agree that the Earth is warming up but deny that humans have anything to do with it, and ones who say the Earth isn't warming at all.  Lately, the evidence has been piling up so soundly against the latter claim that more of the reality deniers are ending up in the first class, but honestly, they don't have any more evidence on their side than the ones who deny anthropogenic climate change outright.

It's a little like the anti-vaxx nonsense.  How many studies, with how many thousands of test subjects, do you need before you admit that there's no connection between vaccination and autism?  Or that the risks of vaccination are far outweighed by the benefits?  The evidence is incontrovertible at this point, yet we still have people refusing to vaccinate their children -- which is why measles has been rearing its ugly head in the United States in the past few months. 

Look, on the one hand, I get it.  If you've been vocally in support of a claim, and it turns out the claim was wrong, it's kind of embarrassing to admit it.  Plus, there's the sunk-cost fallacy working against you -- if you've put a lot of energy and time supporting something (or someone), and it turns out your support was unwarranted, it can be less emotionally wrenching to put on blinders and continue your support rather than to admit you were taken in.

But honesty is more important than pride, here.  Especially since in the case of climate change, the long-term habitability of the Earth is at stake.

So at the risk of ringing the changes on a topic I've already beaten unto death:  just this week, three more studies were released showing that climate-wise, we're in big trouble.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

First, we have a paper in the Journal of Glaciology, authored by Regine Hock, Andrew Bliss, Ben Marzeion, and Rianne Giesen, of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska - Fairbanks, looking at the rate of mass loss from glaciers, and finding that just taking into account the smaller land-based ice sheets, there will be a thirty to fifty percent loss in the next eighty years, contributing 25 centimeters to the sea level.

When you consider the fact that this does not take into account the far greater contribution of the huge Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets -- which are melting at an unprecedented rate -- you'd be right to be alarmed.

You'd also be right to relocate away from the coast.

"The clear message is that there’s mass loss—substantial mass loss—all over the world," said lead author Regine Hock, in a press release from the University of Alaska - Fairbanks.  "The anticipated loss of ice varies by region, but the pattern is evident.  We have more than 200 computer simulations, and they all say the same thing...  Even though there are some differences, that’s really consistent. Our study compared 214 glacier simulations from six research groups around the world, and all of them paint the same picture."

The second study, released by the European Space Agency, takes data from the GlobPermafrost Project, using data from the Copernicus Sentinel 2 satellite program to estimate the rate of loss of permafrost from the Arctic -- and are finding that what we are seeing is the beginning of a positive feedback loop.

And don't read "positive" as "good."  Here, "positive" means something that keeps getting worse -- i.e., the "snowball effect."

The problem is, when permafrost melts, it unlocks (literally) millions of tons of carbon that had been stored in the frozen subsoil.  This not only leads to slumping (one of the factors the GlobPermafrost Project measured) but causes the release of both carbon dioxide and methane, each of which is a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect.

If you're not scared enough yet, the main finding of the project is that our estimates of the rate of permafrost melting were too small -- by an order of magnitude.

The last study is the one that should cause the deniers to admit defeat and retreat in disarray -- but probably won't.  The paper, which has already passed full peer review, will be released in the Journal of Geophysical Research in June.  What it does is look at the data from GISSTEMP, one of the main computer models used to predict temperature change, and backpedals the model over a hundred years to see whether it's in agreement with what the global average temperature actually did...

... and found that the model predicted the temperature to within an inaccuracy of 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit.

"We’ve made the uncertainty quantification more rigorous, and the conclusion to come out of the study was that we can have confidence in the accuracy of our global temperature series," said lead author Nathan Lenssen, a doctoral student at Columbia University, in a press release from NASA.  "We don’t have to restate any conclusions based on this analysis."

"The Arctic is one of the places we already detected was warming the most. The AIRS [Atmospheric Infrared Sounder] data suggests that it’s warming even faster than we thought,” said Gavin Schmidt, co-author of a study that supported the Lenssen et al. results.  "Each of [these analyses]  is a way in which you can try and provide evidence that what you’re doing is real.  We’re testing the robustness of the method itself, the robustness of the assumptions, and of the final result against a totally independent data set."

And this result -- like all of the studies that have gone before it -- is unequivocal.

At this point, there's only one question we should be asking the politicians who are still in denial about what we're doing to the Earth.  "What would it take to change your mind?"  Because if what we've already seen from the climatologists isn't convincing, it's hard to know what would be.

And if the politicians answer, "Nothing would change my opinion, my mind is made up," it's time to vote them right the hell out of office, and elect some people who actually care about reality -- and about whether the world our grandchildren inherit will still be habitable.

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In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

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

Listening to Cassandra

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy.  Apollo fell in love (well, fell in lust, actually) with her, and gave her the gift of perfect foreknowledge.  But afterward, Cassandra decided that love affairs with the Greek gods seldom ended well, and told Apollo she wasn't interested.  Apollo was furious, but once a god gives a gift, it can't be revoked, so he just added a clause to it.

She had perfect foreknowledge, but when she told people what was going to happen, no one believed her.  Thus it was that she foresaw the Trojan War and the fact that Troy would be defeated and destroyed -- and instead of taking steps to prevent it, the people of Troy locked her up as a madwoman.

The people who understand climate and ecology are feeling a lot like Cassandra these days.

Now, though, what is being forecast isn't the destruction of a single city, but a trend that is well on its way to triggering a mass extinction.  And we had a study funded by the Smithsonian Institute released last week that highlights the trouble we're in -- a survey of the global climate that extends back five hundred million years.

The temperature data was derived from the ratio of O-16 to O-18 in bubbles of air trapped in ice,  amber, and bound up in calcium carbonate in fossils.  Because water molecules with the lighter isotope evaporate faster and therefore end up in precipitation -- including snowfall -- more readily, air that is enriched in the heavier isotope indicates colder temperature.  This method has been checked against other types of proxy records and shows good agreement, indicating that the technique gives a reliable indication of global average temperature.

If you take a look at the link I posted, you'll see a graph that should be alarming.  The first thing is that we're currently heading toward a frightening benchmark -- a world with no polar ice caps.  The amount of sea level rise this would engender isn't certain, but the current best estimate is about 65 meters, which would be sufficient to inundate every coastal city in the world, not to mention virtually the entire states of Florida, Delaware, and Louisiana and the countries of Belgium, Bangladesh, and the Netherlands.

Scott Wing, one of the scientists who led this research.  During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, there were alligators swimming in what are now the Wyoming Badlands.

The other thing to notice is the slope of the lines on the graph.  On a graph with time on the x-axis, the slope of the graph gives you the rate.  The current rate is one of the three highest on the graph -- and the other two correspond to the two biggest extinction events the Earth has ever experienced, the Ordovician-Silurian Extinction and the Permian-Triassic Extinction.

To quote Paul Voosen, who wrote the article in Science:

Scott Wing and Brian Huber, a paleobotanist and paleontologist, respectively, at the [Smithsonian], wanted to chart swings in Earth's average surface temperature over the past 500 million years or so.  The two researchers also thought a temperature curve could counter climate contrarians' claim that global warming is no concern because Earth was much hotter millions of years ago.  Wing and Huber wanted to show the reality of ancient temperature extremes—and how rapid shifts between them have led to mass extinctions.  Abrupt climate changes, Wing says, "have catastrophic side effects that are really hard to adapt to."

That's putting it mildly.  During the Permian-Triassic Extinction, 95% of the species on Earth died, and the cause was the eruption of the Siberian Traps, which dumped huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, jumping the global average temperature by ten degrees.

So there are two concerns, only one of which people tend to focus on.  There's the actual temperature rise, which is certainly scary enough, but more frightening still is how fast it's happening.  Yes, as climate change deniers will happily tell you, there have been climatic ups and downs throughout Earth's history.  But the one happening now is happening at a rate several orders of magnitude more quickly than anything we have on record.

Of course, this is only the last piece of a mountain of evidence supporting the validity of anthropogenic climate change and the amount of trouble we're in.  Yet still our leaders waffle and cast doubt and talk about expediency and short-term profits and how hard it would be to switch to renewable energy.

And the rest of us keep trying to call attention to the actual science, and are left feeling like Cassandra, knowing that Troy is about to fall but incapable of getting anyone to listen.

The problem is that here, we're not talking about one city's demise, but the long-term habitability of the entire Earth.

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Back in 1989, the United States dodged a serious bullet.

One hundred wild monkeys were imported for experimental purposes, and housed in a laboratory facility in Reston, Virginia, outside of Washington DC.  Soon afterwards, the monkeys started showing some odd and frightening symptoms.  They'd spike a fever, become listless and glassy-eyed, and at the end would "bleed out" -- capillaries would start rupturing all over their body, and they'd bleed from every orifice including the pores of the skin.

Precautions were taken, but at first the researchers weren't overly concerned.  Most viruses have a feature called host specificity, which means that they tend to be infectious only in one species of host.  (This is why you don't need to worry about catching canine distemper, and your dog doesn't need to worry about catching your cold.)

It wasn't until someone realized the parallels with a (then) obscure viral outbreak in 1976 in Zaire (now the Republic of Congo) that the researchers realized things might be much more serious.  To see why, let me just say that the 1976 epidemic, which completely wiped out three villages, occurred on...

... the Ebola River.

Of course, you know that the feared introduction of this deadly virus into the United States didn't happen.  But to find out why -- and to find out just how lucky we were -- you should read Richard Preston's book The Hot Zone.  It's a brilliantly-written book detailing the closest we've come in recent years to a pandemic, and that from a virus that carries with it a 95% mortality rate.  (One comment: the first two chapters of this book require a bit of a strong stomach.  While Preston doesn't go out of his way to be graphic, the horrifying nature of this disease makes some nauseating descriptions inevitable.)

[Note:  If you purchase this book through the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Rock falls and sea levels

Why do we tolerate abject stupidity in our leaders?

I'm asking this not, surprisingly, because of Donald Trump, but because of Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, a member of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology,who claims -- and I am not making this up -- that sea level rise is not being caused by climate change, but by rocks falling into the ocean.

At the time of this writing, I have been emailed this story five times by loyal readers of Skeptophilia, usually accompanied by the words, "What the fuck is wrong with these people?"  In case you are disinclined to believe that someone can be that big an idiot, here's the actual quote:

What about the White Cliffs of Dover … [and] California, where you have the waves crashing against the shorelines, and time and time again you have the cliffs crashing into the sea?  All of that displaces water which forces it to rise, does it not?  Every single year that we’re on Earth, you have huge tons of silt deposited by the Mississippi River, by the Amazon River, by the Nile, by every major river system — and for that matter, creek, all the way down to the smallest systems.  Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up. You put it all together, erosion is the primary cause of sea level rise in the history of our planet and these people who say to the contrary may know something about climate but they don't know squat about geology... 

Keep in mind I'm talking millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years, erosion is the primary cause of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of cubic miles of sea displacement that in turn forces the sea levels to rise.

It didn't take long for a story to appear in the Washington Post estimating the size of the blob of rock you'd have to drop into the ocean to see what we're seeing (a 3.3 millimeter rise per year).  The answer: 1.19 trillion cubic meters, equivalent to a sphere eight miles in diameter.

Every year.

Put another way, this would be like scraping the top five inches of dirt from the entire United States, rolling it into a ball, and dropping it into the ocean.

Every year.  In case I haven't made that point clear.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Immanuel Giel, White Cliffs of Dover 02, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Brooks went on to say that the polar pack ice is actually increasing, and the tired old story about how climatologists in the 1980s said there'd be "global cooling," and that didn't happen:

What I'm trying to establish is that a lot of these climatologists have no idea what they're really talking about, and it's because we have not had a long enough period time with exact scientific measurement to know what the climate's going to be like fifty years from now or a hundred years from now.   The bottom line is nobody is smart enough to know with the evidence we have and the relatively small time frame we have - fifty years in the history of the planet.  That's just not enough information with which to make accurate predictions.

Of course, we do have more information than that; we have accurate proxy records going back thousands of years, and some pretty shrewd guesses going back millions.  The link between carbon dioxide and global temperature, and predictions of what would happen if we kept burning all the fossil fuels we could get our hands on, go all the way back to Svante Arrhenius in 1896.  At least Brooks has a clear understanding of how someone could be this willfully stupid, ignoring mountains of evidence and the arguments of climatologists (i.e., the people who actually understand what's going on, despite Brooks's pronouncement that they "have no idea what they're really talking about"):

Money.  Money to invest in a certain kind of resources where you might have a financial interest.  There's also politics as you're trying to cobble together the votes to win an election, that's probably part of it, too.

Which is spot-on, even if not in the way he meant it.  The ones getting rich are not the climatologists -- it's not like you routinely see climatologists living in mansions and driving Jaguars.  The ones who are getting rich are the politicians, who are being bankrolled by the fossil fuel interests, to the tune of millions of dollars annually.

Which, presumably, is how imbeciles like Mo Brooks "cobble together the votes to win an election."

The cure, of course, is an educated electorate, but with the disinformation campaign going on right now, there's been so much distrust of the experts sown in the minds of laypeople that you can tell them damn near anything you want.  The first thing that the talking heads and corporate lobbyists do is to teach people to doubt the facts -- to claim that the data itself is wrong, skewed, or deliberately falsified.  The Earth's not warming, the sea's not rising, storms are not getting stronger.  Oh, and even if the Earth is warming up, all that's going to do is make the cold parts of the world nice and balmy.

Don't worry.  We're not doing anything dangerous.  Trust us.

At least one person was willing to call Brooks on his bullshit, and that was Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, who amazingly was asked to participate in the meeting of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology, despite being an actual scientist.  He and Brooks had the following testy exchange:

Duffy: We have satellite records clearly documenting a shrinkage of the Antarctic ice sheet and an acceleration of that shrinkage. 

Brooks: I'm sorry, but I don't know where you're getting your information, but the data I have seen suggests — "  

Duffy: The National Snow and Ice Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 

Brooks: Well, I've got a NASA base in my district, and apparently, they're telling you one thing and me a different thing.  But there are plenty of studies that have come that show with respect to Antarctica that the total ice sheet, particularly that above land, is increasing, not decreasing.

In other words, your NASA is clearly wrong.  There are "plenty of studies" showing that my NASA is right.

The whole thing is profoundly upsetting, at least to those of us who know how to read a scientific paper.

On the other hand, at least we don't have to fret about what will happen if the White Cliffs of Dover collapse.  It'll be upsetting to the people in that part of England, no doubt, but there's no worries about the resultant sea level rise flooding Omaha or anything.

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This week's recommended book is an obscure little tome that I first ran into in college.  It's about a scientific hoax -- some chemists who claimed to have discovered what they called "polywater," a polymerized form of water that was highly viscous and stayed liquid from -70 F to 500 F or above.  The book is a fascinating, and often funny, account of an incident that combines confirmation bias with wishful thinking with willful misrepresentation of the evidence.  Anyone who's interested in the history of science or simply in how easy it is to fool the overeager -- you should put Polywater by Felix Franks on your reading list.