This Satellite Could Help Save Humanity
But DSCOVR remains grounded. That fact is key to interpreting the so-called 'climategate' emails.
NASA's stalled Deep Space Climate Observatory (artist's rendering).
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This Is How You Fuel a Community of Climate Deniers
Start with big oil companies, and the money and connections flow.
The media missed the real story about the so-called "climategate" scandal.
After thousands of emails were mysteriously stolen from the University of East Anglia and distributed just before the climate conference in Copenhagen, many news outlets seemed content to report the story as it was presented to them rather than bothering to read the emails in the context they were written.
A closer look at these candid messages reveals a very different problem than the supposed scientific conspiracy theory that's been in high rotation in the media. This previously unreported story also shows why launching the long-mothballed Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is more urgent now than ever.
An email ripe for misreading
Let's start with perhaps the most widely distributed and misunderstood of the stolen emails, of October 12, 2009 from Dr. Keith Trenberth to Michael Mann, which reads:
"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
Out of more than a thousand emails dating back 13 years, this single sentence was seized on by some commentators as evidence that decades of climate research by hundreds of scientists is instead a global conspiracy.
If you are going to put that much weight on a single email, you may as well finish reading it. Here's what Trenberth says in the following sentence:
"The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."
Allow me to translate this dense jargon into English. CERES stands for Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System -- a five-satellite network launched by NASA dating back to 1997 to monitor heat flow in the upper atmosphere.
The story you haven't heard is that scientists can't get the numbers to add up using existing climate satellites. After billions of research dollars spent and over a decade of trying, the energy budget of planet as measured by CERES and other low-Earth orbit satellite systems is out of whack by about six watts per square meter.
That stubborn error in the satellite data is about six times larger than what is scientifically possible, and several times larger than the effect scientists are trying to see, namely planetary warming caused by continued massive emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
While this is a very big deal, it does NOT remotely suggest that climate change is a hoax. For evidence of that, you don't need a satellite, you can look out your kitchen window.
Sea ice is disappearing from the arctic so fast it could be gone forever in as little as 30 years. The Met Office predicts 2010 may be the hottest year on record and that this decade was the hottest ever "by far". Australia is currently enduring the hottest six months since record keeping began in the 1800s.
What Trenberth is saying in this now infamous email is that it is a "travesty" that scientists cannot accurately measure from space what is plainly obvious here on Earth. More than that, he is lamenting that our "observing system" is inadequate to be able to accurately balance the planet's energy budget.
An ideal device for studying climate shift
Dr. Trenberth is one of the world's most respected climate researchers. To hear him directly explain this problem himself, have a look at this video. If you happen to have a PhD in atmospheric physics (or just have trouble sleeping) you may also want to read his thorough research paper on the topic.
It's not that the CERES experiment is a bad project or staffed by incompetent people. But the fact of the matter is that our satellite systems have failed to provide coherent data to explain the defining issue of the 21st century. This important but esoteric problem is largely unknown to the public, but widely acknowledged within the scientific community.
So what's the problem with the data? In science, such unexplained phenomena are not a "problem" -- they are the most interesting things to look at. They reveal clues about things we don't yet fully understand, or hint that long-accepted methods of measurement need to be reassessed.
Which brings us back to the limitations of CERES and other low Earth orbit instruments. These satellites are traveling at more than seven kilometers a second and see our planet in thin strips as narrow as ten kilometers wide. Most take about 24 hours to get back where they started.
From this vantage it is like trying to map an elephant using a microscope. By the time you look at the same spot twice, the Earth (and the elephant) is doing something else. There are far better instruments for observing elephants: Binoculars.
The long-mothballed DSCOVR spacecraft, still languishing in clean storage here on Earth, is just such an instrument. Rather than seeing the planet from hundreds of kilometers away, DSCOVR was designed to track our orbit around the Sun from 1.5 million kilometers away.
From a unique gravitational dimple called "L1", the spacecraft would continuously monitor the entire sunlit disc of our planet, providing an entirely new way of collecting data on the Earth's energy budget. This coincident data would compliment and calibrate more detailed measurements from CERES and other satellites that observe the Earth from much closer.
A galaxy of excuses
Yet of the $160 billion given to NASA from the U.S. taxpayer since DSCOVR was built in 2000, they have stubbornly maintained that launching this already fully completed spacecraft is either too expensive or simply not important.
For the record, the most inflated estimate to launch and operate DSCOVR of $250 million would represent 0.15 per cent of that public largesse. In fact, the true cost to NASA to operate DSCOVR for seven years is likely less than $50 million due to cost sharing opportunities with other agencies, and use of cheaper launch vehicles such as a SpaceX rocket.
The reasons for NASA's apparent resistance to exploring new methods of Earth observation probably have more to do with internal bureaucratic inertia than anything else. As they say, old dogs have a hard time learning new tricks and NASA has being doing low Earth orbit for more than forty years.
They recently committed a further $1 billion on a low Earth orbit replacement to CERES called CLARREO that won't be launched until at least 2016. Whether or not this experiment will finally make the numbers add up remains to be seen, and the results will not be known for another six years at the earliest.
In the meantime, climate change proceeds apace, "skeptics" make specious arguments using glaring errors in the satellite data, and DSCOVR dozes in its storage box here on Earth waiting for 1/20th of the money required for a re-do the failed CERES experiment.
If there is a bright side to the sinister theft of thousands of emails just before the Copenhagen Conference, it is that we can now start to have a more intelligent conversation on the glaring discrepancies in our Earth observation instruments.
NASA's wrong trajectory
And let's not be too hard on NASA. After eight years of George Bush in the White House and billions diverted from worthwhile science towards inter-planetary photo ops like the manned mission to Mars, the space agency is understandably just now picking up the pieces.
The fabulously expensive (and scientifically useless) International Space Station will also have funneled off $100 billion in scarce research dollars when it finally plunges into the ocean in 2016.
These outside political pressures forced NASA to drop so many Earth-observing missions that by 2006 leading scientists were warning our climate monitoring system was "at risk of collapse". Four years later, the public was granted a rare glimpse of the frustration within the scientific community in Trenberth's now famously misinterpreted message.
Afraid of answers?
What about the stolen emails and global conspiracy theories? I suggest a more plausible alternative: The next time the media encounters such an obvious stick being thrown for them, maybe they should instead chase the mysterious person doing the throwing.
As for DSCOVR, it is interesting that an experiment that could help resolve glaring uncertainties abound this century's defining issue has somehow never been launched.
For some powerful interests far beyond NASA, continued uncertainty can be a very valuable commodity. To quote a notorious leaked strategy document from Big Tobacco when they were seeking to delay costly regulation of their dangerous industry in the 1960’s: "doubt is our product." ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
nightbloom
20-01-2010
Good article. My one
Good article.
My one criticism is the broadside contra the return to manned space exploration. NASA arguably should never have abandoned manned missions, and should have pressed on with a viable successor to the Apollo program (as Spiro Agnew’s Space Task Group recommended shortly after the first lunar landing). Crawford Killian made the same broadside in a Tyee article last year (arguing in favour of cheaper and more far-reaching unmanned satellite exploration exclusively, and zero investment in manned space travel/habitation capacity-building).
Fundamentally, I think Stephen Hawking is correct when he argues that the future survival of the human race is ultimately dependent on building the technology and capacity to expand beyond the Earth. He’s convinced that it’s only a matter of time before we exhaust the Earth, destroy ourselves, or are smacked by an object big enough to wipe out complex life (whichever happens first). There are realistic, scaleable, cost-effective ways of developing this technology and capacity now.
For a good overview of the politics around NASA’s appraisal of options see: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-space-program-for-the-rest-of-us
For the actual plan for manned missions presented by the Augustine Committee see: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/396093main_HSF_Cmte_FinalReport.pdf
For a pro-manned-mission critique of the Augustine Committee and related politics see: http://restorethevision.blogspot.com/
And for an alternative model for manned missions put forward anonymously by a fellowship of dissenting NASA scientists see: http://www.directlauncher.com/
Again, good article, I just disagree with that one point.
Jeffrey J.
20-01-2010
Excellent Analysis
Another excellent analysis in an effort to stand up to the massive, industry funded gobblydegook pretending to be science, in order to keep a dying industry going.
It just never ends.
The connection with climate change denialist tactics and big tobacco has been proven over and over again. But apparently it can't be said too often. The PR industry has learned how to misinform, trick, lie and confuse citizens about basic facts. Like tobacco kills people, day in and day out. Burning fossil fuels to go to the corner store and buy milk is destroying the planet.
Everyone knows when they're being lied to. But without being able to influence the MSM (mainstream media), we are left 'voiceless', as Fox News, CNN, CanWestGlobal and Glacier Ventures will continue to repeat the same old tired propaganda. Thank goodness for people's natural ability to detect good science from BS.
Great article.
Yammer
20-01-2010
The smoking gun
I'm not a climate change denier, or a believer in spewing hydrocarbons willy-nilly, but come on.
The 'smoking gun' part of the leak is not an email statement, but the readme text which indictates that the a climate-research program was coded to disguise data that conflicted with the theory.
Now, maybe that readme text is itself a fake. I don't know.
But if it real, then it is evidence of scientific fraud at its grisliest.
As an aside, why spend millions on a satellite to prove that dumping poison into the environment is not a great idea? I don't think anyone needs to have this "proven." It would be better to think of technologies that are clean and to market them on a business case and a moral case. Scientific evidence is persuasive only to reasonable people and that is a niche market at best.
ReeferMadness
20-01-2010
Polarized Debate
This type of polarized debate is taking us nowhere. While we get lost in semantics, the bigger question still remains. What will the effect be of doubling or tripling CO2 in the space of a few hundred years? Nobody really knows the answer to that question and, as a parent, I find that deeply troubling.
If there was a mine outside your town dumping toxins into the environment and you were told there was "only" a 10% chance it would harm your health, people would scream to the government to do something. We're running a massive chemistry experiment on the environment and people want ironclad proof it will wreck the planet before they'll agree to drive less. It's lunacy.
http://themadheretic.blogspot.com/2010/01/global-warming-debate-test-for-homo.html
Booker
20-01-2010
Details
Great article. It's good to see a journalist try to explain the complexities behind the research. It's always amazes me to hear the denialists say things like "the scientists didn't take into account water vapour", or some such thing, as if the researchers are a bunch of ignoramuses. It's good to see the Tyee continue to publish articles on this important topic. We need intelligent voices to counter the Terence Corcorans and Rex Murphys of the world.
Chris Keam
20-01-2010
best book for laypeople
Gwynn Dyer's "Climate Wars"
I find it hard to believe the world's major powers are running military scenarios surrounding climate change to prop up a hoax. If you can resist the urge to curl up in the fetal position and swallow your tongue once you realize how badly our current dithering will affect our children and grandchildren, there's plenty of work to be done and not enough willing hands.
Booker
20-01-2010
Illahie
Well if you want to talk about weather, as opposed to climate, up here in Western Canada the flowers are coming up and the ski hill had to close to the public to preserve the snow for the Winter Olympics. It's the warmest January I can remember.
But that is irrelevant to the climate debate, as you know.
dorothy
20-01-2010
Sticks and stones - or is that a hailstorm?
"The next time the media encounters such an obvious stick being thrown for them, maybe they should instead chase the mysterious person doing the throwing."
It should be enough to put the stuff on the table that makes it 'an obvious stick'. Instead, we get puffed-upness and condescension. The problem is that climate change advocates no longer have the easy advantage of slinging mud at an already hated establishment. They have themselves become an establishment, and the responses to the omigods are of the same nature as such responses coming from an establishment have always been: to ask what hole the doubters had come crawling out of, and making it clear that you don't question authority (theirs). This is more seriously widening the credibility gap than the original outcry did. The ordinary blokes are likely to conclude that there probably are no good answers to be had, or else they would be forthcoming. The media tug-of-war is getting really tiresome. try silence, and wait till there is something solid to back you up, instead of these lame, braintwisting yeah-buts. I think this round is unsalvageable. Too bad if you're right about the issues. Maybe next time, show more respect for the common folks.
ReeferMadness
20-01-2010
Polarized Debate
Steppeup, when I said that we were doubling or tripling the CO2 in a few hundred years, I was talking about the 20th and 21st centuries. Not, as you would like it to be, that we have 200 years to consider our options.
Democracy hinges on the ability for people to resolve differences civilly. When I see the level of discourse and then look at the increasing level of dysfunction in our democratic institutions, both provincially and federally, it reminds me of something Joseph de Maistre said.
"Every nation has the government that it deserves".
bfearn
21-01-2010
A no brainer
Global warming is a no brainer. If we ignore it and we are wrong we are in big trouble. If we spend billions to fix a problem that doesn't exist then we have lightened our footprint on this planet and this is a good thing.
There is so much GW ignorance and this didn't just materialize for no reason. Powerful vested interests have and are working hard to create doubt. The billions they already have are not enough for them and they care not for the impoverished or future generations.
North of Hope
21-01-2010
What is this article about?
What is this article about? It is about a device that will be used to examine the Earth and give better data than what is now used. It will make predictions more accurate. This is much like astronomers building new telescopes because they wanted more accurate data than Galileo could provide or engineers using a calculator rather than a slide ruler to make more accurate calculations. The deniers do not want this because it will provide more evidence for climate change. As for many the denier comments, they have just become personal attacks with no regard to the reality of climate change and the fact that CO2 is a green house gas.
Des
23-01-2010
Talk About
a tempest in a teapot! Arguing about minor details when a major catastrophe is looming over us is quite pointless. Global Warming is occurring right now - undeniably - just look at the pictures.
Whether it is man-made or natural can be debated ad infinitum but the current acceleration of the process itself is obvious. If it reverses itself without our intervention (by converting to green energy,etc.) then well and good, it's not our fault to begin with. If it does not reverse itself, either by natural "cycles" or by our intervention, we're s.o.l.
Climate change has happened in the past several times, accompanied by drastic changes in atmospheric composition, tectonic activity, sea-level fluctuations, glacial variability, and other symptomatic concerns.
You can either join Nero as a member of his orchestra, or you can fight the fire. But Rome is burning regardless of your efforts either way. As for me, I'm leaving the party.