Coffee Party (Believes) in Science

Why some indigenous groups and environmentalists are saying no to the “green economy.”...

By Juliet Eilperin, Wahington Post

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned one of the Obama administration’s hallmark air-quality rules Tuesday, ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency had overstepped its authority in curbing pollution from power plants too sharply.

The 2 to 1 ruling by the appeals court represents a major victory for utilities and business groups, who fought the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule on the grounds that it was costly, burdensome and arbitrary. Environmentalists, who had hailed the rule as a major improvement over a Bush-era regulation, bemoaned the decision as a blow to public health.

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By Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor:

Earthquakes triggered by fluids injected deep underground, such as during the controversial practice of fracking, may be more common than previously thought, a new study suggests.

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However, researchers have long known that fluid-injection operations can trigger earthquakes. For instance, in 2006 one geothermal energy site triggered four earthquakes in Basel, Switzerland, ranging from 3.1 to 3.4 on the Richter scale. Fracking also appears linked with Oklahoma's strongest recorded quake in 2011, as well as a spate of more than 180 minor tremors in Texas between Oct. 30, 2008, and May 31, 2009.

It remains unclear why some injection wells set off earthquakes whereas others do not. To find out, seismologist Cliff Frohlich at the University of Texas at Austin analyzed seismic activity in the Barnett Shale of northern Texas between November 2009 and September 2011 and compared the properties of injection wells located near quake epicenters. He relied on mobile seismometers deployed as part of the EarthScope USArray program over an approximately 23,000-square-mile (60,000 square kilometer) area.

Frohlich identified the epicenters for 67 earthquakes — more than eight times as many as reported by the National Earthquake Information Center — with magnitudes of 3.0 or less. Most were located within a few miles of one or more injection wells, suggesting injection-triggered quakes might be more common than thought.

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By RICHARD A. MULLER

Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the author, most recently, of "Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines."

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth's land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

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What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.

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Admitting the possibility of climate change is enough to get you drummed out of the GOP these days, but Reagan's former Secretary of State George Shultz is taking it a lot further.

China sends its first woman into space as 33-year-old fighter pilot Liu Yang is one of three astronauts travelling to the orbiting Tiangong space lab.

By Rob Kunzig, National Geographic News

Swamp gas trapped under miles of Antarctic ice, a chemical souvenir of that continent's warmer days, may someday escape to warm the planet again, an international team of researchers report in Nature this week.

The researchers suggest that microbes isolated from the rest of the world since the ice closed over them, some 35 million years ago, have kept busy digesting organic matter and making methane—a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

If global warming causes the ice sheets to retreat in the coming decades or centuries, the researchers warn, some of the methane could belch into the atmosphere, amplifying the warming.

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by Nick Wing

A group of Kentucky Republicans is up in arms over a state testing program that requires high school students preparing for college to have an understanding of biological evolution.

When the Republican state legislature voted in 2009 to link the state's testing system to national education standards, it opened the door for biology exams that would test students' proficiency in the field of evolution. State Rep. Carl Rollins, a Democrat, told the Lexington Herald-Leader that this was standard practice, as ACT, the company that coordinates Kentucky's testing program, developed the material by surveying biology teachers across the country on which studies they believed should be included. They responded, rather unsurprisingly, that biological evolution was an important concept for incoming college students to grasp.

But state Republicans are now recoiling at their decision. They claim it doesn't give the theory of creationism a fair shake and places undue emphasis on the teaching of evolution, which they maintain exists only as a "theory."

By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times

Physicists are rarely wealthy or famous, but a new prize rewarding research at the field’s cutting edges has made nine of them instant multimillionaires.

The nine are recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize, established by Yuri Milner, a Russian physics student who dropped out of graduate school in 1989 and later earned billions investing in Internet companies like Facebook and Groupon.

"It knocked me off my feet," said Alan H. Guth, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was among the winners. He came up with the idea of cosmic inflation, that there was a period of extremely rapid expansion in the first instant of the universe.

When he was told of the $3 million prize, he assumed that the money would be shared among the winners. Not so: Instead, each of this year’s nine recipients will receive $3 million, the most lucrative academic prize in the world. The Nobel Prize currently comes with an award of $1.2 million, usually split by two or three people. The Templeton Prize, which honors contributions to understanding spiritual dimensions of life, has been the largest monetary award given to an individual, $1.7 million this year.

The $3 million has already appeared in Dr. Guth's bank account, one that had had a balance of $200. "Suddenly, it said, $3,000,200," he said. "The bank charged a $12 wire transfer fee, but that was easily affordable."

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By ROGER BRADBURY, NY Times Op-Ed Contributor

IT'S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem - with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor - will cease to be.

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But by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and services. Nor is money spent to preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on the state of the reefs rather than the rate of the processes killing them.

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This is not a story that gives me any pleasure to tell. But it needs to be told urgently and widely because it will be a disaster for the hundreds of millions of people in poor, tropical countries like Indonesia and the Philippines who depend on coral reefs for food. It will also threaten the tourism industry of rich countries with coral reefs, like the United States, Australia and Japan. Countries like Mexico and Thailand will have both their food security and tourism industries badly damaged. And, almost an afterthought, it will be a tragedy for global conservation as hot spots of biodiversity are destroyed.

What we will be left with is an algal-dominated hard ocean bottom, as the remains of the limestone reefs slowly break up, with lots of microbial life soaking up the sun’s energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of jellyfish grazing on the microbes. It will be slimy and look a lot like the ecosystems of the Precambrian era, which ended more than 500 million years ago and well before fish evolved.

Coral reefs will be the first, but certainly not the last, major ecosystem to succumb to the Anthropocene - the new geological epoch now emerging. That is why we need an enormous reallocation of research, government and environmental effort to understand what has happened so we can respond the next time we face a disaster of this magnitude. It will be no bad thing to learn how to do such ecological engineering now.

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Roger Bradbury, an ecologist, does research in resource management at Australian National University.

By Jane J. Lee, Science Insider

The North Carolina House of Representatives voted today to revise controversial legislation that would have barred state planning officials from considering the possibility that a changing climate might accelerate sea level rise. Climate scientists who had been highly critical of the former proposal gave a lukewarm reception to the changes, noting the bill still places a 4-year moratorium on the ability of planners to draw on the most up-to-date science.

"This version is better than the original Senate version," says climate researcher Robert Jackson of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "It's still bad policy though because it requires the state to bury its head in the sand for 4 more years."

Last month, North Carolina's Senate sparked controversy by approving language in legislation (HB 819) that would have required the state's Coastal Resources Commission (CRC), which sets rules and policies for coastal development and grants permits, to base predictions of future sea level rise along the state's coast on a steady, linear rate of increase. Critics argued that that would have prevented the commission from considering events, such as the melting of polar ice caps caused by increased global temperatures, which might accelerate the rate at which seas are expected to rise.

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