NCAR: Arctic Ice Melting Faster than Modeled

Arctic sea ice is melting at a significantly faster rate than projected by even the most advanced computer models, a new study concludes. The research, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), shows that the Arctic's ice cover is retreating more rapidly than estimated by any of the 18 computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in preparing its 2007 assessments.

The study, "Arctic Sea Ice Decline: Faster Than Forecast?" will appear tomorrow in the online edition of Geophysical Research Letters. It was led by Julienne Stroeve of the NSIDC and funded by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR's principal sponsor, and by NASA.

"While the ice is disappearing faster than the computer models indicate, both observations and the models point in the same direction: the Arctic is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace and the impact of greenhouse gases is growing," says NCAR scientist Marika Holland, one of the study’s co-authors.

The authors compared model simulations of past climate with observations by satellites and other instruments. They found that, on average, the models simulated a loss in September ice cover of 2.5 percent per decade from 1953 to 2006. The fastest rate of September retreat in any individual model was 5.4 percent per decade. (September marks the yearly minimum of sea ice in the Arctic.) But newly available data sets, blending early aircraft and ship reports with more recent satellite measurements that are considered more reliable than the earlier records, show that the September ice actually declined at a rate of about 7.8 percent per decade during the 1953-2006 period.

"This suggests that current model projections may in fact provide a conservative estimate of future Arctic change, and that the summer Arctic sea ice may disappear considerably earlier than IPCC projections," says Stroeve.

Things might be worse than people expect. The locals have been saying that for a while. We'll see how it goes.

NASA to Russia: NYET!

The head of Russia's space agency Sunday said the US has rebuffed an offer from Moscow to jointly explore the moon, while announcing a separate contract with NASA for nearly one billion dollars for the International Space Station.

Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency that Russia had proposed pooling resources to explore the moon.

"We were ready to cooperate but for unknown reasons, the United States have said they will undertake this programme themselves," he said.

*snorts*

There are a couple reasons that come to mind right now. The first is Mr Putin's friendliness to the US and West (and his likely successors'). The second is past performance on the ISS. Third is, frankly, the US does things best without too many chiefs when we have international cooperation: otherwise, we don't play well with others.

To the Media Vultures

I realize that you need to cover events.

I know that you are fascinated with the strange case of the recent meltdown of The Maze.

I know that this happened a scant mile or less from our apartment.

However!

You please move your gawddamned frakkin helicopters from over our apartments from too gawddamned early in the frakkin morning. In fact, it's so frakkin annoying for the past 24 hours+.

KNOCK IT OFF!

Challenges & Promises of Petascale Computing

CITRIS researchers will soon have access to a new generation of high-performance supercomputers far more powerful than those available today. Known as petascale computers, these new machines will be capable of conducting 10^15 floating-point operations per second (petaflops). These parallel machines may employ more than a million processors and will be able to handle huge data sets. Until now, they have been mainly the domain of military and other national security applications. With the delivery of a new petascale computer to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and with the possibility of a Berkeley team helping to host another one at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), researchers working on climate analysis, genomics, environmental monitoring, protein analysis, earthquake, nanoscience, and other CITRIS-related fields will gain access to powerful new modeling tools within the next four years.

[...]

Before these new giants can be fully exploited, some big challenges must first be addressed. UC Berkeley computer science professor Katherine Yelick is working with colleagues in the Parallelism Lab to bring such CITRIS-type applications and the petascale hardware and systems software together.

"We are trying to expose the best features of the underlying hardware to the software," says Yelick. "The hardware designers are trying to innovate and put in fast networks or networks with very interesting connectivity patterns, and we want to take full advantage of that," she says.

Yelick has one foot in the world of system-level software and the other in that of hardware development, which makes her particularly valuable to the coordination effort. She and her team have developed new compilers and programming languages (one based on C and another based on Java) for the new petascale computers.

One big challenge is the problem of pacing and managing the information flow through hundreds of thousands of processors. "It is like trying to get a million people coordinated and doing their jobs at exactly the same time," says Yelick.

Petascale machines not only have more chips, but each chip has more processors than earlier generation supercomputers. Coordinating the flow and sharing of so much activity is a job requiring new algorithms and new approaches to applications programming, too, says Yelick.

This is a big problem because the work the computer is trying to do is not equally distributed among all of its processors. In modeling weather, for example, the Earth's surface can be divided into equal sized parts, and each given a dedicated processor. But if there is a hail storm somewhere, for example, there will suddenly be a lot of significant activity in the processors associated with those parts of the model. If the rest of the system has to wait for the processors working on the hailstorm, it can lose a lot of time, says Yelick.

In addition to such load imbalance issues, the team is working to minimize the time it takes for information to travel around these computers, some of which can be as big as a tennis court.

"Light travels pretty slowly," explains Demmel. "if processors on opposite sides of the computer have to send huge amounts of information back and forth, the time adds up fast."

I love that last quote. It's so true too for our business.

There's also an issue, fwiw, of making the models capable of scaling that high. A lot of algorithms top out around 1024 processors. we'll need to go explore a lot more in that mindspace if we're going to use 'millions' of processors for programs.

Puerto Rico Status Update

Puerto Rico's rival advocates of statehood, independence and the colonial status quo vented decades of frustration and anger in a congressional hearing Wednesday, but made little progress toward convincing legislators to back one of their competing plans for the island's future.

The contentious issue of the island's status in relation to the United States has consumed Puerto Rico since it was ceded to the U.S. by Spain in 1898.

[...]

Puerto Ricans have held four plebiscites on their status since 1967, though none were authorized or recognized by Congress, which the Constitution charges with overseeing territories.

A slight majority of islanders has supported the status quo, with most of the rest wanting statehood.

During the last plebiscite, in 1998, voters were confused by the options and 50.3% chose "none of the above," a protest option inserted by commonwealth advocates when their preferred ballot language was rejected. Statehood won 46.5% support and independence less than 3%.

Acevedo Vila cast the formula proposed by the task force and in Serrano's bill as the two less popular options being lumped together to defeat the people's first choice, a revised status quo of a territory with enhanced independence.

"That's not just undemocratic, it's un-American," the governor told the panel.

Puerto Rico's nonvoting representative to the House, Luis Fortuno of the pro-statehood party, reminded the governor that his wished-for enhanced commonwealth is not on offer.

"Three administrations have told you what you are proposing is unconstitutional. What part of 'no' don't you understand?" he asked.

Same, statehood, or independence. Not the enhanced commonwealth option. With luck this will be done and over with in the nearish future.

Raise a toast: Here's to the future state of Puerto Rico!

Fish Respond to Climate Change

Changes in growth rates in some coastal and long-lived deep-ocean fish species in the south west Pacific are consistent with shifts in wind systems and water temperatures, according to new Australian research published in the United States this week.

“We have drawn correlations between the growth of fish species related to their environmental conditions – faster growth in waters above a depth of 250 metres and slower rates of growth below 1,000 metres,” says lead author, Dr Ron Thresher.

“These observations suggest that global climate change has enhanced some elements of productivity of shallow-water stocks but at the same time reduced the productivity and possibly the resilience of deep water stocks,” he says.

This shouldn't be a surprise, but it's good to have confirmation.

Putin: Nuke the CFE!

Mr Putin made the threat during his annual address to parliament - which he said would be his last as president.

He also hit out at an influx of foreign money which he said was being used to meddle in Russia's internal affairs.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed Russian concerns over the missile shield as "ludicrous".

BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says Mr Putin's speech marks a significant raising of diplomatic stakes.

The Russian president suggested that his country should freeze its compliance with the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty - which limits military deployments across the continent - until all Nato countries had ratified it.

The treaty was adapted in 1999 after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, but Nato states have not yet ratified the new version, linking it to the withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgia and Moldova.

Mr Putin accused Nato states of exploiting the situation to increase their military presence near Russia.

He said that the Russian moratorium would continue "until all countries of the world have ratified and started to strictly implement it".

This is silly. The BMD posts in eastern europe are going to be so small that unless Russia has only as many working nukes as I have fingers on my hands, they have nada to worry about.

$1 million for Naval Laser Prototypes

I didn't see anywhere in the press release for how much beam power the lasers were supposed to have. Hmm.

NorAtlantic Volcanic Origins of the PETM

Scientists examining a spike in worldwide ocean temperatures 55 million years ago have linked it to massive volcanic eruptions that pushed Greenland and northwest Europe apart to create the North Atlantic Ocean.

Writing in the journal Science, geologists at Roskilde University in Denmark, Oregon State University and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, present evidence that this intense volcanic activity occurred at the same time ocean temperatures jumped five to six degrees Celsius. A better understanding of previous global warming episodes will give scientists perspective as they study today's climate and ocean level changes pegged to human generation of greenhouse gases.

"That prehistoric volcanic activity released more than 2000 gigatonnes (billion metric tons) of carbon into the oceans and atmosphere in the form of methane and carbon dioxide – two potent greenhouse gases," said Michael Storey of Roskilde University in Denmark, the study's lead author. "The carbon probably came from the heating of earlier deposits of decayed organic matter – similar to deposits in the Atlantic and North Sea we tap today for oil and gas."

Consistent with the Late Permian-Siberian Traps theory too.

Building Airplanes in Flight

Another Gliese 581c Image

Reality Check for Russia's Railway Plans

Russia has announced an extraordinary project to build a transcontinental Yakutsk-Magadan-Anadyr-Alaska rail link, which would include the world's longest subsea tunnel under the Bering Strait. However, the news comes as a reminder that Russia's major railway projects in the East tend to be loss-making and take decades, if not centuries, to materialize.

Nothing that new here. We all know the railways are going to have issues materializing. However, the interesting thing is that the Russians are advertising Siberian-Alaska line that would go through via a Bering Straight undersea tunnel. I have a hard time believing that would ever happen.

Gliese 581c

It's all over the blogsophere already. Let me just add one small word of caution: a lot more work needs to be done before we can declare it habitable. ok? With luck, it is, and I hope it is! However, let's be a tad cautious with the labels, ok?

Russian Sukhoi T-50: Yet Another Pipe Dream?

Flight International has pointed out what may be the first pictures of the T-50 fighter: the follow-on to the Soviet era Sukhois. Yet, forgive me for my skepticism - it may be misplaced! - but...I can't help but feel this is like the Kliper which is doing its best impression of a limbo or the so-called T-95 tank or those wunderbar ballistic missiles that aren't even close to ready for the SSBN that was just launched.

Forgive me, but I don't believe that Russia has the technical capacity to produce a "5th generation" fighter. The above looks too much like someone had fun with a renderer.

*sighs*

I hate meeting days.

I hate the fact that Google Groups are completely fubared.

Introducing....BLONDAGE!

This is a good friend of mine, Vicki. I have known her husband for, well, ages. I was his roommate for three years and then his best man for their wedding. Vicki's nickname in the past has been 'Dori', but she's actually better than that. So welcome Vicki to the blogroll!

Mass Extinction Cyclicity...Again

The rise and fall of species on Earth might be driven in part by the undulating motions of our solar system as it travels through the disk of the Milky Way, scientists say.

Two years ago, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley found the marine fossil record shows that biodiversity—the number of different species alive on the planet—increases and decreases on a 62-million-year cycle. At least two of the Earth’s great mass extinctions—the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago—correspond with peaks of this cycle, which can’t be explained by evolutionary theory.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Kansas (KU) have come up with an out-of-this-world explanation. Their idea hinges upon the fact that, appearances aside, stars are not fixed in space. They move around, sometimes rushing headlong through galaxies, or approaching close enough to one another for brief cosmic trysts.

In particular, our Sun moves toward and away from the Milky Way’s center, and also up and down through the galactic plane. One complete up-and-down cycle takes 64 million years— suspiciously similar to Earth’s biodiversity cycle.

...with an extraterrestrial cause no less!

Didn't we do this already with Raup and the Nemesis Affair?

This stuff is really susceptible to statistical artifacts, folks, since the fossil record is known to be very biased: it favours animals that live in places that are easily fossilizable and it all depends on whether or not the strata are easily accessed to be studied.

The Future State of the Marianas?

Randy McDonald sent me a link, above, about the upcoming changes to Guam and the Northern Marianas wrt to the US military there. The OpEd piece has some speculation that eventually Guam and the NMas would be reunified as a single territory. Randy's emailing was on the heels of all the discussion about the future of Puerto Rico's potential statehood and suggestive of the idea of the Marianas becoming a state.

It's an interesting idea. If Doug Muir's hints of things are correct, it's a ways off. Possibly a long ways off.

Japan: We Want the F-22

Top Japanese military officials are quietly but firmly insisting they want the U.S. to release the F-22 to compete for the air force's F-X fighter program, and are adamant about fielding the most advanced air-combat technology available.

Tokyo wants a stealthy fighter equipped with an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar for cruise missile detection and wide-band data links to push additional information into Japan's increasingly sophisticated air defense system. For the moment, only the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor offers all these features.

Access, however, is far from assured, with the U.S. Congress requiring over-sight and approval of any plan for foreign sale of the stealth fighter. The U.S. has been trying to pitch either an upgrade of in-service designs (such as F/A-18E/Fs or F-15Es equipped with advanced, small-target, long-range radars) or the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for the F-X program. The primary driver for the F-X requirement remains air superiority--which includes cruise missile defense--for which Tokyo wants the F-22.

Japan has a long history of buying the latest American technology for their military (and integrating their own). The interesting thing here is that the F-X program was to make a indigenous stealthy aircraft originally. That's obviously no longer the case. I suspect that it is because of economic reasons that this might be true: Japan had a rough decade and a half. However, I am surprised since they did do the F-2 program that they didn't follow through this time to make another new fighter themselves. However, the costs of the F-2 might have to do with it too: they cut it from the original 138 fighters to 98 after all. Then again, climbing the tech tree ain't cheap and if you want to bootstrap it costs you.

Termites are Social Cockroaches

Termites may look like white ants, but new genetic research confirms they are really a social kind of cockroach.

Given how relatively solitary regular cockroaches are compared with termites and their complex societies, researchers note these findings could shed light on how social behaviors develop in all insects.

Researchers added that the cockroach penchant for coprophagy, or eating feces, could very well have led termites to evolve in the first place.

Scientists had long known that cockroaches and termites were related to each other and to praying mantises. Features they all share include specialized cases that enclose their eggs and perforations in the internal parts of their heads.

What researchers have debated for decades is whether or not termites evolved from cockroaches. Evidence suggesting this possibility included symbiotic microbes that certain termites and wood roaches had in common, as well as physical similarities between their young.

After conducting the most exhaustive genetic analyses yet into the subject, studying 107 different species of termites, cockroaches and mantises from across the globe, entomologist Paul Eggleton at the Natural History Museum in London and his colleagues now conclude termites are indeed a family of cockroaches, findings detailed online April 5 in the journal Biology Letters.

Oy. I REALLY (with blink tag) hate cockroaches because of a nasty apartment that I once had in Las Cruces. Sorry totally off topic. It seems that socialness for lack of a better word is an easily repeatable evolutionary route for insects with similar patterns (queen-worker-soldier-whatnot) repeating from different lines. Interesting that.