Radioactive animal carcasses

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Spiderman exposed to radiation

I’m crossposting this from the NukeBeat because I think it would be insanely cool to be the number one result when you google “radioactive animal carcasses”, and this blog has more googlejuice.

No, that’s not an early ’80s British punk band. It’s the amusingly grotesque harvest of a nuclear waste cleanup project at Hanford:

Carcasses of animals used in radiological experiments at Hanford are among more than 40,000 tons of waste workers dug up and reburied on the nuclear reservation.

Closure Hanford remediation manager Mark Buckmaster told the Hanford Advisory Board last week that up to 1,000 animals at a time were kept at a farm near F Reactor along the banks of the Columbia River.

They included rodents, cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, pigs and alligators. No alligator carcasses were found, however.

One can imagine the conversation here between the reporter and editor about the latter:

Jameson: “Alligators? Get me a picture of the radioactive alligator carcasses!”

Parker: “Sorry, Mr. Jameson. No alligator carcasses were found.”

Peak Oil

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One of my favorite science journalists, Alex Witze, had an excellent recent piece in Nature on peak oil (sub. req.). It’s a terrific bit of work because of the thoughtful way Witze embraces the uncertainty, explaining to us why smart and reasonable people disagree about this issue, rather than trying to tell us which answer we should believe.

Both sides issue regular, well-referenced reports that come to opposite conclusions on whether the world is running out of oil. “There’s just no middle ground,” says Kenneth Deffeyes.

I’m all for embracing the uncertainty.

(As an aside, this also reminds me of a piece I wrote a couple of years back on a related topic.)

Scaaary

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It is rare that my two journalistic specialties, climate and the blinding tools of nuclear Armageddon, converge as they have today in Chicago. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved up the hands on its famed Doomsday Clock – not just because of those pesky Norks with the nuclear testing and the plutonium and the wacky dictator with the big hair, but also because of global warming!

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

Peak Water

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Marty Hoerling’s discussion of western U.S. drought in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report model runs (which I wrote about last fall) is out:

Our study reveals that a sustained change in moisture conditions is unfolding within the broad range of natural variations. The Southwest is likely past the peak water experienced in the 20th century preceding the signing of the 1922 Colorado Compact: a decline in Lees Ferry flow will reduce water availability below current consumptive demands within a mere 20 years. These projections further expose the risky reliance by Colorado River water users upon the Compact as a guarantee that streamflows will always materialize to match legislated requirements.

U.S. Precipitation, Last 90 Days

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This is not the U.S. precipitation pattern you expect in an El Niño winter. Here in Albuquerque, we’re living under a bit of an illusion, with the fourth storm since Christmas currently snowing east and north of us and clouds and a threat of rain here in New Mexico’s largest city. But you only have to travel up to Quinault, up on the Olympic Peninsula west of Seattle, to grasp the pattern. The new U.S. Climate Reference Network station there has received 23.6 inches of rain since Jan. 1. The typical El Niño pattern tends to be drier than normal across the Pacific Northwest, and wetter than normal across the southwest. But we’ve been getting instead what the National Weather Service forecasters down here call “bowling ball storms,” staring up in the Pacific Northwest and diving down across the Great Basin rather than coming in off of the Pacific. Southern California and Arizona, as you can see, have been extraordinarily dry the last three months. We’ve been getting the edge of the storms here in New Mexico, but even here, it’s been a lot drier than I think people perceive it to be.

The Press Release Problem

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When I wrote a brief squib last month about the new Holland et al. paper on sea ice decline, I made fun of myself for picking the worst-case scenario, suggesting a “a chance of an ice-free late summer arctic by as soon as 2040.” Apparently I was not alone. In her RealClimate post on the paper and its journalistic aftermath, Cecilia Bitz offers a nice explanation of the work and offers a similar observation to mine. The ice-free 2040 was the most extreme of a number of scenarios:

There is considerable uncertainty in future model projections, and Figs 2 and 4 illustrate why it would be better not to focus too much on the year 2040, which to our dismay was highly publicized.

In understanding why this happened, it is useful to look at the NCAR news relese:

The recent retreat of Arctic sea ice is likely to accelerate so rapidly that the Arctic Ocean could become nearly devoid of ice during summertime as early as 2040, according to new research published in the December 12 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

In the news release, only the “ice-free in 2040” model run is discussed. It is the model run featured in the animation included with the news release. Is it any surprise that this is the scenario journalists chose to focus on, given that this is what the scientists, through their news release, told them was the most important?

ENSO Peaking

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The monthly ENSO assessment, out today, suggests El Niño may be peaking (the “Kelvin waves” it talks about are essentially big pulses of warmth moving west to east across the equatorial ocean, which are a key feature of El Niño):

Most of the statistical and coupled models, including the NCEP Climate Forecast System (CFS), indicate that SST anomalies are near their peak and that decreasing anomalies are likely during February-May 2007 (Fig. 5). Recent observed trends in the upper ocean tend to support those forecasts. Decreasing upper-ocean heat content in the central equatorial Pacific has been progressing east in association with the upwelling portion of the most recent Kelvin wave. In the absence of any further Kelvin wave activity, the upper-ocean heat content should return to near average in a few months. However, there is considerable uncertainty in this outlook, given the resurgence of MJO activity in late December 2006. It is possible that the enhanced precipitation phase of the MJO, which is currently entering the western tropical Pacific, might trigger a more persistent pattern of cloudiness and precipitation over the anomalously warm waters of the central equatorial Pacific during the next several weeks. If that occurs, then the equatorial easterlies over the central Pacific will likely weaken possibly leading to the initiation of a fifth Kelvin wave.