Chris Lintott’s Universe

Venus has been hard to ignore in the evening sky these last few months, and it’s helped rekindle my love of city astronomy. It’s not that I’d ever lost the habit of looking up as soon as I step outside, it’s just that I’d begun to long for trips outside of town to see a properly dark sky. The searchlight of Venus shining in the west has been a reminder that even from the most light polluted spot you can watch the slow dance of the sky as the months go by, and that’s partly why we chose it as the star of the show for the first Living Space podcast.

I’ve been keeping up with the latest results from Venus Express, and looking forward to whatever Messenger will have provided during it’s last swing past yesterday, but it’s been a long while since I did any background reading on the Earth’s evil twin. I was therefore surprised when interviewing Fred Taylor for the podcast when he said confidently that there must have been oceans on Venus. I knew it had long been suspected that there was water, carried to the young planet’s surface by comets or contained in the gas released from volcanoes (and Venus certainly was and maybe still is a volcanic planet). But whole oceans? Where did all that water go?

The usual reason given for studying Venus (and other small, rocky balls like Mars) is that we can test our models of how atmospheres work, and then apply the results to Earth. Rather wonderfully, while reading up on the background following Fred’s interview, I found a wonderful piece of work from five years ago which applies what we already know about Earth to Venus. Researchers from NASA studied the only place on Earth where a ‘runaway greenhouse’ effect applies - a place where more energy is being absorbed from the Sun by the Earth’s surface than can be emitted. This is a runaway effect because the hotter the surface gets, the more energy it can absorb.

On Earth, there’s (currently - see the comments on this post below for the latest discussion here of our attempts to warm the planet) only one place where this happens (in the Pacific, just NE of Australia) but this must be what happened across the whole of Venus billions of years ago.

The moral of the story? The more we study all of the planets, including Earth, the more we learn about all of them. And that you should go and listen to Fred’s interview over at Living Space. It’ll be joined by a new podcast coming on Friday.

It hasn’t been a good week for my blood pressure. Reading stupid things written by people who know nothing is fine. Reading stupid things written or said by people in a position of authority who really should know better is just upsetting.

First up, NASA chief executive Mike Griffin.

First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.

I’m not sure where to begin with this, so I’ll let the Bad Astronomer say it for me, and move on to something more local.

Step forward the Rev Jan Ainsworth, the Church of England’s new head of education, who according to the Guardian said about intellegent design

You would get howls of protest from the scientific community, which would say there is absolutely no place for it in the curriculum. But you could do it in history of science,” she added, pointing out that religious education lessons in CofE schools include discussions of different beliefs.

This is just utterly wrong, so consider this my howl of protest. Would it be possible to include discussions of the alternatives to evolution that were considered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Yes, and such a discussion might even be a useful way of demonstrating the evidence in support of evolution. Is intellegent design such an alternative? No. It was invented 20 years ago when the US supreme court ruled that teaching ‘creation science’ breached the ban on mixing state and religion. See this and much else on the Panda’s Thumb for more details.

I’m writing to the Guardian right now.

I should be beyond getting riled about this kind of thing, but an article by Martin Livermore in today’s Telegraph takes this biscuit. Those of you who understand how science works, may skip the rest of this post.

His headline is ‘All those scientists may still be wrong’ and he is talking about climate change. The headline is correct, they may. We know that and they know that. That’s why the recent Intergovemental Report on Climate Change said that it was very likely that the climate change was caused by human activity. They even define ‘very likely’ as more than 90%, a level of precision not found in Mr Livermore’s article.

He seems very upset about the lack of experiments, for example, lamenting that scientists must

rely on observation and, in parallel, produce mathematical models of how the climate system operates. These models - fed with a range of assumptions about how population and energy use may change - are run on the world’s most powerful supercomputers to give projections for future climate changes. It is these on which tales of future catastrophe are based.

Well, yes. How else does he think scientists actually work? ‘Relying on observation and producing mathematical models’ is a pretty good one setence description of the scientific method! Or are we supposed to distrust these results because supercomputers are lest trustworthy than Newton and a pencil?

Mr Livermore then puts forward a theory (which is not his alone - I have met scientists who share this view) which blames change on Earth on changes in solar activity. The most recent variation on this theme is the suggestion that high energy cosmic rays can cause clouds in the atmosphere, and that an active Sun can protect us from these rapidly moving particles. This may or may not be true (and how we are supposed to test these ideas without ‘observation’ and - worse - ‘mathematical models’ I do not know), but I am convinced that the experts in this field weighed up the possibility as best they could. As Mr Livermore says The IPCC’s view is that these changes are too small to cause the climate changes we have seen.

Yes, the IPCC could be wrong; that’s why they said it was only very likely that climate change was our fault, not ‘extremely likely’ (95% confidence) or ‘virtually certain’ (99% confidence). Yet we are told by this pathetic article that

The scientific mainstream, however, refuses to concede that it could be wrong. It insists we must act now to decarbonise our economy, whatever the consequences. If the science were as certain as suggested, it would have a point.

How, how, how is saying you are 90% certain of something ‘refusing to concede’ that one might be wrong? Quantifying errors is what science is all about. It seems writing pieces for think tanks is about not quantifying anything at all.

There is worse, much worse in the article. Go and read it if you dare, but I need coffee.