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" I heard it
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AgLine"
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March 4, 2011
·
Oil prices
spur ethanol makers to crank it up
·
New growth
regulators are more effective
·
Tiny wasp
puts the big hurt on stink bugs
·
Plowing new
vegetable ground in S. Africa
·
Berkeley
project seeks global warming truth
Oil prices spur ethanol makers to crank it
up
(Los
Angeles Times) – Corn-based ethanol is the renewable fuel environmentalists
love to hate. But as turmoil in the Middle East and North
Africa has sent oil prices soaring, U.S.-made ethanol is making a
comeback.
Plants mothballed during the economic downturn are
reopening. Domestic ethanol production hit record levels last year, topping
13.2 billion gallons, according to the Renewable Fuels Assn. in Washington. Oil
companies including Valero Energy Corp., Sunoco Inc. and Marathon Oil Corp.
that snapped up facilities when the industry hit a rough patch a few years ago
are looking to expand.
The recovery can be seen in Stockton, where a once-shuttered factory is
now thundering to life. Train cars laden with Midwestern corn arrive daily to
feed the grinding mills and steaming pipes that distill the grain into gasoline
substitute. The surrounding air is pungent with the smell of yeast.
For the plant's owner, Pacific Ethanol Inc., which weathered
bankruptcy and is slowly reviving three of its plants, it's a whiff of
vindication.
"Ethanol is an important part of the country's energy
picture these days," said Neil Koehler, chief executive of the Sacramento firm.
That's largely because of Uncle Sam. Concerned about U.S.
reliance on foreign oil, federal lawmakers mandated the nation to quadruple its
use of biofuels to 36 billion gallons annually by 2022 from 2008 levels.
Corn-based ethanol is assured a 15-billion-gallon share of that market. Plus
it's heavily subsidized. The federal government gives producers a
45-cent-a-gallon tax credit. A number of states provide subsidies as well.
The liquid is blended into almost every gallon of unleaded
gasoline sold in the U.S and accounts for about 10% of the fuel that motorists
pump into their cars. That percentage is set to rise as the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency recently approved the use of blends of up to 15% ethanol for
newer vehicles.
That's good news for the ethanol industry with oil now
topping $100 a barrel and motorists experiencing sticker shock at the pump. On
Wednesday, the average price for a gallon of unleaded fuel was $3.39 nationwide
and $3.78 in California,
both up about 20 cents over the last week, according to AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge
Report.
"At a time of increased energy uncertainty and
volatility, domestic ethanol production … is helping create the kind of
economic and energy opportunities this country will need to regain control over
our future," said Bob Dinneen, president of the
Renewable Fuels Assn.
But whether corn ethanol is good for the planet, U.S.
taxpayers, the global food supply — or even an automobile's engine — is a
matter of intense debate.
Some scientists have concluded that growing corn, harvesting
and distilling it, and trucking it to refineries causes as much environmental
damage as burning oil. Many environmentalists want taxpayer subsidies devoted
to developing next-generation biofuels rather than supporting big agribusiness
and the oil companies that are now operating ethanol plants.
Budget hawks also want to end ethanol subsidies at a time
when commodities prices are rising and the U.S. budget deficit is ballooning.
An estimated 35% of the U.S.
corn crop will be devoted to ethanol this year, a figure that makes some
agricultural and global food policy analysts uneasy.
Speaking at an Agriculture Department conference in
February, former President Clinton warned about the need to strike a balance
between farming for food and biofuels, given political instability in parts of
the developing world.
"We have to become energy independent. We don't want to
do it at the expense of food riots," Clinton
said.
Auto manufacturers are concerned as well. They're suing the
EPA to stop sales of the 15% ethanol blend, known as E-15, which they said
would confuse consumers and damage older vehicles.
Ethanol industry officials said E-15 pumps would be clearly
marked, so consumers would not be misled. And they said political instability
in the Middle East and rising oil prices are
to blame for higher food prices. Far from taking corn out of the global food
supply, ethanol proponents said, the distillation process yields a protein-rich
grain byproduct that's being used to feed livestock.
Critics of ethanol aren't deterring investors — 17 idled
ethanol plants have reopened across the United States in the last year. And
the country's largest producer, POET Ethanol Products, is seeking federal help
to construct a 1,800-mile, $4-billion ethanol pipeline.
Despite the turnaround, memories of the previous bust still
linger. In the early to mid-2000s, investors poured billions of dollars into U.S.
ethanol plants. But the building frenzy led to a glut of product. When the
economic downturn hit and corn prices spiked in 2008, rural America was littered with closed
plants and bankrupt producers.
Pacific Ethanol's Koehler recalls that boom-bust cycle too
well. The company was founded by former California Secretary of State Bill
Jones, a political ally of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and backed partly
by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates' Cascade Investment. During its heyday
in 2006, it operated four plants, including one in Stockton
and another in Madera.
In 2009, as the industry slumped, Pacific Ethanol's
subsidiary that operated the plants filed for bankruptcy protection. Three of
its four facilities, including both California
sites, were closed.
But the company has been resurrected by the recent market
shift — and with taxpayer help.
State subsidies, drawn from a $15-million fund for
alternative fuels, helped the company reopen its Stockton plant in December and hire a staff
of 45.
Pacific Ethanol is now applying for more taxpayer subsidies
to reopen its plant in Madera.
Return to Top
New growth regulators are more
effective
(Purdue University
via Medical News Today) – A Purdue
University scientist and researchers
in Japan
have produced a new class of improved plant growth regulators that are expected
to be less toxic to humans.
Angus Murphy, a professor of horticulture, said the growth
inhibitors block the transport of auxin, a plant
hormone that, when transported throughout the plant, controls growth processes.
Current growth regulators that inhibit auxin
transport are inefficient because they also have hormonelike
activity or affect other important plant processes. Current growth inhibitors
also are often toxic.
Growth regulators are important in ornamental plants and
horticultural crops that would require labor-intensive manipulation and
pruning. The inhibitors are used to keep plants a desired size and shape and
control fruit formation.
"These regulators would be used primarily on ornamental
plants, flowers and trees that aren't going to be genetically changed
easily," Murphy said. "Growth regulators are used regularly on this
type of plant. Inhibition of auxin transport with
these new compounds is also an alternative to the use of more toxic regulators
like 2,4-D."
The toxicity of growth regulators can be an environmental
concern and add safety and monitoring costs to commercial growing operations.
They are generally not applied to edible portions of plants or are applied
early enough that there is little or no residue on edible portions of plants.
The new plant growth inhibitors are derived from natural and
artificial auxins but have a bulky benzoyl group - a chemical conjugate derived from benzoic
acid - attached that prevents movement of the inhibitor out of the cell.
"Since it looks like auxin,
it will open the door, but it can't get through," Murphy said.
"However, these new growth regulators have no hormonal activity
themselves."
Murphy worked with scientists from several universities in Japan, including Okayama University of Science, Tokyo Metropolitan
University, Niigata University
and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. Their findings were reported
in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Murphy said he would continue studying how to regulate other
hormonal pathways in plants and use the new regulator to understand hormonal
transport in plants. Companies licensed by the Japanese institutes will
continue environmental and toxicity testing of the regulators in greenhouse and
field trials.
The Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department
of Energy funded the research.
Source: Purdue
University
Return to Top
Tiny wasp puts the big hurt on stink bugs
(The
Baltimore Sun) Newark, Del. — Maryland's newest terrorist life form — the
brown marmorated stink bug — may eventually meet its archnemesis in the form of a tiny prizefighter of a wasp
from Asia.
The parasitic wasps that are being raised in quarantine in a
Delaware
laboratory are not glamorous-looking bugs. They are black, stocky and about the
size of the comma in this sentence.
But they are uncommonly efficient at hunting down and
injecting their offspring into stink bug egg masses. In true horror-movie
fashion, the larvae consume the stink bugs from the inside out. When the wasps
grow into adults, they chew their way out, procreate — and go on the hunt for
more stink bug eggs.
Available now -- get the new Baltimore Sun Android app!
"Tests have shown that these wasps will destroy up to
80 percent of the stink bug population," says Kim Hoelmer,
the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture scientist in charge of the project. "They're
efficient egg-stinging machines. For something so tiny, it's absolutely amazing
the behaviors that are hard-wired into their little brains."
Stink bugs aren't a threat to human health. And if they were
merely odoriferous and annoying, chances are that the nation's top bug experts
wouldn't be going to so much trouble to locate and develop an insect assassin.
But not only do stink bugs
represent an unprecedented threat to U.S. vegetable farms and orchards,
they have the potential to drive up food prices just when the nation is
struggling to emerge from a recession. Bug experts say that the Asian wasp may
be one of their best tools for keeping the stink bug population down to a
manageable buzz.
"I've never seen such a serious pest enter the U.S.
agricultural system," said Tracy Lesky, research
entomologist with the West Virginia-based Appalachian Fruit Research Station,
"if only because they attack so many crops."
Populations of stink bugs have been increasing steadily in Maryland for the past
five years, and are poised to invade the state in record numbers during the
coming growing season.
"I think we're going to have a bumper crop," says
Michael Raupp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland. "If 1 in 10 people had
stink bugs in 2010, 9 in 10 people will have them in 2011."
Hoelmer and his team have been
importing and studying the parasites since 2005.
Because the wasps are not allowed inside the United States
except for research purposes, technicians must don biohazard suits before going
through a set of five pressurized locked doors inside the Louis A. Stearns
Laboratory, where the wasps are housed.
Inside the quarantine rooms, research technician Kathy Tatman stuck a wad of cotton inside a piece of plastic
tubing. She inserted the other end of the tube into a petri
dish in which live wasps are kept, and inhaled through the cotton until several
female bugs were pulled up into the tube. Tatman
moved the tube into a second petri dish containing a
fresh layer of pale green stink bug eggs, breathed out, and deposited the mama
wasps on a nearby leaf.
Once the wasps find the egg mass, she said, they will almost
certainly "sting" every one, eventually killing the embryonic stink
bugs inside.
Preliminary indications are that wasps are effective, Hoelmer said, and, just as important, won't attack other,
more beneficial bugs.
But establishing the necessary scientific proofs takes time.
If all goes well, Hoelmer hopes to have authorization
to release the Asian wasps into the environment some time in 2013.
For desperate farmers, two years might not be soon enough.
So last month, Maryland
joined nine other states and submitted a grant proposal for $22 million to the
National Institute of Food and Agriculture to explore both long and short-term
solutions to the stink bug problem.
Hoelmer's wasps are part of that
proposal. So are a group of scientists in Beltsville who think they have
identified the stink bug pheromone, or chemical signal, that causes a large
amount of the insects to congregate. If researchers can replicate the
pheromone, they could potentially trap and kill the bugs before they damage the
fruit.
Researchers also are trying to come up with pesticides that
will poison stink bugs, repellants that will deter them, fungi that will attack
them, and a various other methods.
"We're taking a cafeteria of different
approaches," Lesky said.
"We still don't have any proven tools, but we're way
ahead of where we were at this time last year. We have all the pieces in place,
and we're working to find solutions as quickly as we can."
Right now, stink bugs are causing the most damage to the
mid-Atlantic region. But it's only a matter of time before the epidemic reaches
the rest of the nation.
Stink bugs are portable, voracious and formidably adaptable,
and populations of the insect have been verified in 33 states.
Brown marmorated stink bugs can
walk, and they can fly long distances. They are superb hitchhikers, often
traveling unseen inside the door jamb of a car or truck. They can live in wet
places and dry. They flourish in hot climates, and in cold ones.
In China,
Japan and Korea, stink bugs don't have much of a taste for
veggies, but in the United
States, the bugs will happily consume
everything from soybeans to tomatoes. The insects also seem to enjoy munching
on such ornamental shrubs as butterfly bush and dogwoods.
Orchard owner Robert Black knows the bug experts are doing
everything they can. He just hopes he can hold on long enough for them to find
a solution.
Last season, he found stink bug damage on a third of the
Catoctin Mountain Orchard's entire fruit crop, and on fully half of his Pink
Lady apples.
Though Black can recoup some of his loss by converting
damaged produce to applesauce and juice, these items are much less profitable
than whole fruit.
"We need help," Black said. "I had 30 to 35
percent damage last season, and I can't handle 40 to 50 percent. That's what
I'm scared about."
He warned that if the problem continues unabated for too
long, food prices could rise.
"This is a major problem, not just for fruit growers,
but for consumers," he said. "I don't mean to scare people, but
eventually, this could start affecting the food supply. People can live without
gasoline, but they can't live without food."
U.S. Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett will hold a town hall meeting
for farmers in Emmitsburg on March 18 specifically to
discuss the stink bug problem in Maryland.
"Stink bugs have all the features you'd design in a
terrorist bug," he said. "They're an invasive species, and they have
no native predators. They eat every plant with a thin skin and sugar. They
could inflict a plague of biblical proportions."
Return to Top
Plowing new vegetable ground in S. Africa
(AP via RN-T.com)
WOODBINE, Ga. – If Robbie Edalgo
had any doubts about the importance of his trip to South Africa, a tribe leader
cleared them up in his first meeting.
"He told me, 'We need vegetables because our people are
sick with HIV, and we can't afford medicine. Vegetables are our
medicine,'" said Edalgo, Camden
County's (Georgia) Cooperative Extension
coordinator.
The agriculture expert, 35, whose position is funded jointly
by the Camden County Board of Commissioners and the University
of Georgia, was chosen to serve for
three weeks as a teacher in the Farmer to Farmer program headed by Florida A&M University.
The cost of the trip was covered in full by a USAID grant.
His assignment was to teach villagers in Alice, South Africa,
how to better manage crop diseases in a cooperative gardening program at the
University of Fort Hare. But he quickly learned that
he could take nothing for granted in a place where a few modern pieces of
technology are intermixed with early 19th century equipment; where products like
fungicide are too expensive; and where food is often so scarce that leftover
scraps are kept rather than tossed on a compost heap.
Edalgo surveyed every stage of the
program's production process, from a seedling nursery to the fields and on to a
kitchen that dehydrated most of the produce. The food was ultimately put into
packages and soup mixes to be sold throughout the region.
The farmland belongs to the university, but the villagers
are in charge of farming it. The school rents them some equipment, such as its
tractor, but otherwise they must use their own resources.
With a translator at his side, Edalgo
taught classes to the villagers and conducted on-site lessons on powdery
mildew, weed control and crop rotation.
He found growing conditions in Alice
similar to those in Camden
County.
"The elevation is different, but the climate is quite
similar," he said.
But he had to change his thinking by about six months.
Because Alice is south of the
equator, its cold and hot seasons are the opposite of America's. When Edalgo
arrived in April, the villagers were planting cabbage and other cool season
crops.
When Edalgo visited a field, he
found villagers leading two powerful oxen that pulled a harrow to till between
the rows of cabbage. But something was wrong: One man had been assigned to
follow the group and push mounds of tilled dirt off the cabbage with a stick. Edalgo quickly realized the villagers were tilling too wide
a swath between the vegetable rows, which in turn created more disease than it
stopped. He showed the farmers how to narrow the harrow forks, which would make
the process work as it was intended.
Edalgo also found that the borders
between various crops were blurred. He had signs made and showed the farmers
how to divide the fields into quadrants that would help them keep track of
their plantings. Then, he explained to them, they could begin rotating crops
each season.
"By rotating, your disease frequency goes way down
because many diseases are host-specific," Edalgo
explained. He gave the farmers charts explaining the various vegetable families
they should rotate through.
The farmers listened, but they also hesitated when they saw
unfamiliar produce on the lists. They had been eating corn, carrots and
butternut squash all their lives, but what on earth was okra?
"Okra would be a great producer there, but they don't
plant it. They've never planted it," Edalgo
said. "They're very focused on eating what they've been eating for
generations."
Edalgo urged the farmers to give
the new vegetables a try.
"It will be a hard sell for them, at least at the
beginning," Edalgo said, "but I think it's
an opportunity for a niche market that could really help them."
He also talked to them about weed control and using cover
crops instead of allowing fields to overgrow. The weeds attract insects and
disease, he explained through his translator.
Edalgo said there is a lot of
potential for commercial farming in South Africa, but educational
programs like Farmer to Farmer are critical.
"You've got to remember, it's only been 15 years since
apartheid," he said. "The few commercial farms used to belong mostly
to the white farmers, but now the land has been redistributed and the
government is looking to make larger sections of the country commercial."
The extension coordinator returned to Camden County
with a new appreciation for the advantages Americans have in farming and
gardening. He also had new experiences to share with the community, and photos
to show exactly what happens when disease control practices aren't followed.
Edalgo, who lives with his wife
and two children in Folkston, grew up in "watermelon country" in Southwest Georgia. He knew Africa
would be very different from home, but felt moved to help when FAMU sent out an
e-mail last spring looking for agriculture experts to participate last spring.
He found the trip to be an education as much for himself as it was for those he
taught.
Edalgo stays in touch with some of
the villagers, and he recently had vegetable seeds shipped to Alice's elementary school. He'd like to
return to South Africa
for another Farmer to Farmer mission, and, in fact, he's already put in his
application.
Return to Top
Berkeley
project seeks global warming truth
(guardian.co.uk)
– In 1964, Richard Muller, a 20-year-old graduate student with neat-cropped
hair, walked into Sproul Hall at the University of
California, Berkeley, and joined a mass protest of unprecedented scale. The
activists, a few thousand strong, demanded that the university lift a ban on
free speech and ease restrictions on academic freedom, while outside on the
steps a young folk-singer called Joan Baez led supporters in a chorus of We
Shall Overcome. The sit-in ended two days later when police stormed the
building in the early hours and arrested hundreds of students. Muller was
thrown into Oakland
jail. The heavy-handedness sparked further unrest and, a month later, the university
administration backed down. The protest was a pivotal moment for the civil
liberties movement and marked Berkeley
as a haven of free thinking and fierce independence.
Today, Muller is still on the Berkeley campus, probably the only member of
the free speech movement arrested that night to end up with a faculty position
there – as a professor of physics. His list of publications is testament to the
free rein of tenure: he worked on the first light from the big bang, proposed a
new theory of ice ages, and found evidence for an upturn in impact craters on
the moon. His expertise is highly sought after. For more than 30 years, he was
a member of the independent Jason group that advises the US government on defence; his college lecture series, Physics for Future
Presidents was voted best class on campus, went stratospheric on YouTube and,
in 2009, was turned into a bestseller.
For the past year, Muller has kept a low profile, working
quietly on a new project with a team of academics hand-picked for their skills.
They meet on campus regularly, to check progress, thrash out problems and hunt
for oversights that might undermine their work. And for good
reason. When Muller and his team go public with their findings in a few
weeks, they will be muscling in on the ugliest and most hard-fought debate of
modern times.
Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth
project. The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the
undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and
more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent
assessment of global warming. The team will also make every piece of data it
uses – 1.6bn data points – freely available on a website. It will post its
workings alongside, including full information on how more than 100 years of
data from thousands of instruments around the world are stitched together to
give a historic record of the planet's temperature.
Muller is fed up with the politicised
row that all too often engulfs climate science. By laying all its data and
workings out in the open, where they can be checked and challenged by anyone,
the Berkeley
team hopes to achieve something remarkable: a broader consensus on global
warming. In no other field would Muller's dream seem so ambitious, or perhaps,
so naive.
"We are bringing the spirit of science back to a
subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious," Muller
says, over a cup of tea. "We are an independent, non-political,
non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the
results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we
find." Why does Muller feel compelled to shake up the world of climate
change? "We are doing this because it is the most important project in the
world today. Nothing else comes close," he says.
Muller is moving into crowded territory with sharp elbows.
There are already three heavyweight groups that could be considered the
official keepers of the world's climate data. Each publishes its own figures
that feed into the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. Nasa's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New
York City produces a rolling estimate of the world's
warming. A separate assessment comes from another US agency, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
The third group is based in the UK
and led by the Met Office. They all take readings from instruments around the
world to come up with a rolling record of the Earth's mean surface temperature.
The numbers differ because each group uses its own dataset and does its own
analysis, but they show a similar trend. Since pre-industrial times, all point
to a warming of around 0.75C.
You might think three groups was enough, but Muller rolls
out a list of shortcomings, some real, some perceived, that he suspects might
undermine public confidence in global warming records. For a start, he says,
warming trends are not based on all the available temperature records. The data
that is used is filtered and might not be as representative as it could be. He
also cites a poor history of transparency in climate science, though others
argue many climate records and the tools to analyse
them have been public for years.
Then there is the fiasco of 2009 that saw roughly 1,000
emails from a server at the University
of East Anglia's Climatic
Research Unit (CRU) find their way on to the internet. The fuss over the
messages, inevitably dubbed Climategate, gave Muller's nascent project added
impetus. Climate sceptics had already attacked James
Hansen, head of the Nasa
group, for making political statements on climate change while maintaining his
role as an objective scientist. The Climategate emails fuelled their protests.
"With CRU's credibility undergoing a severe
test, it was all the more important to have a new team jump in, do the analysis
fresh and address all of the legitimate issues raised by sceptics,"
says Muller.
This latest point is where Muller faces his most delicate
challenge. To concede that climate sceptics raise
fair criticisms means acknowledging that scientists and government agencies
have got things wrong, or at least could do better.
But the debate around global warming is so highly charged that open discussion,
which science requires, can be difficult to hold in public. At worst, criticising poor climate science can be taken as an attack
on science itself, a knee-jerk reaction that has unhealthy consequences.
"Scientists will jump to the defence of
alarmists because they don't recognise that the
alarmists are exaggerating," Muller says.
The Berkeley Earth project came together more than a year
ago, when Muller rang David Brillinger, a statistics
professor at Berkeley
and the man Nasa called when
it wanted someone to check its risk estimates of space debris smashing into the
International Space Station. He wanted Brillinger to
oversee every stage of the project. Brillinger
accepted straight away. Since the first meeting he has advised the scientists
on how best to analyse their data and what pitfalls
to avoid. "You can think of statisticians as the keepers of the scientific
method, " Brillinger
told me. "Can scientists and doctors reasonably draw the conclusions they
are setting down? That's what we're here for."
For the rest of the team, Muller says he picked scientists
known for original thinking. One is Saul Perlmutter,
the Berkeley
physicist who found evidence that the universe is expanding at an ever faster
rate, courtesy of mysterious "dark energy" that pushes against
gravity. Another is Art Rosenfeld, the last student of the legendary Manhattan
Project physicist Enrico Fermi, and something of a
legend himself in energy research. Then there is Robert Jacobsen, a Berkeley physicist who is
an expert on giant datasets; and Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia
Institute of Technology, who has raised concerns over tribalism and hubris in
climate science.
Robert Rohde, a young physicist who left Berkeley with a PhD last year, does most of
the hard work. He has written software that trawls public databases, themselves
the product of years of painstaking work, for global temperature records. These
are compiled, de-duplicated and merged into one huge historical temperature
record. The data, by all accounts, are a mess. There are 16 separate datasets
in 14 different formats and they overlap, but not completely. Muller likens
Rohde's achievement to Hercules's enormous task of cleaning the Augean stables.
The wealth of data Rohde has collected so far – and some
dates back to the 1700s – makes for what Muller believes is the most complete
historical record of land temperatures ever compiled. It will, of itself,
Muller claims, be a priceless resource for anyone who wishes to study climate
change. So far, Rohde has gathered records from 39,340 individual stations
worldwide.
Publishing an extensive set of temperature records is the
first goal of Muller's project. The second is to turn this vast haul of data
into an assessment on global warming. Here, the Berkeley team is going its own way again. The
big three groups – Nasa, Noaa and the Met Office – work out global warming trends by
placing an imaginary grid over the planet and averaging temperatures records in
each square. So for a given month, all the records in England and Wales might be averaged out to give
one number. Muller's team will take temperature records from individual
stations and weight them according to how reliable they are.
This is where the Berkeley
group faces its toughest task by far and it will be judged on how well it deals
with it. There are errors running through global warming data that arise from
the simple fact that the global network of temperature stations was never
designed or maintained to monitor climate change. The network grew in a
piecemeal fashion, starting with temperature stations installed here and there,
usually to record local weather.
Among the trickiest errors to deal with are so-called
systematic biases, which skew temperature measurements in fiendishly complex
ways. Stations get moved around, replaced with newer models, or swapped for
instruments that record in celsius
instead of fahrenheit. The times measurements are
taken varies, from say 6am to 9pm. The accuracy of individual stations drift
over time and even changes in the surroundings, such as growing trees, can
shield a station more from wind and sun one year to the next. Each of these
interferes with a station's temperature measurements, perhaps making it read
too cold, or too hot. And these errors combine and build up.
This is the real mess that will take a Herculean effort to
clean up. The Berkeley Earth team is using algorithms that automatically
correct for some of the errors, a strategy Muller favours
because it doesn't rely on human interference. When the team publishes its
results, this is where the scrutiny will be most intense.
Despite the scale of the task, and the fact that world-class
scientific organisations have been wrestling with it
for decades, Muller is convinced his approach will lead to a better assessment
of how much the world is warming. "I've told the team I don't know if
global warming is more or less than we hear, but I do believe we can get a more
precise number, and we can do it in a way that will cool the arguments over
climate change, if nothing else," says Muller. "Science has its
weaknesses and it doesn't have a stranglehold on the truth, but it has a way of
approaching technical issues that is a closer approximation of truth than any
other method we have."
He will find out soon enough if his hopes to forge a true
consensus on climate change are misplaced. It might not be a good sign that one
prominent climate sceptic contacted by the Guardian,
Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, had never heard of
the project. Another, Stephen McIntyre, whom Muller has defended on some
issues, hasn't followed the project either, but said "anything that
[Muller] does will be well done". Phil Jones at the University
of East Anglia was unclear on the
details of the Berkeley
project and didn't comment.
Elsewhere, Muller has qualified support from some of the
biggest names in the business. At Nasa,
Hansen welcomed the project, but warned against over-emphasising
what he expects to be the minor differences between Berkeley's global warming assessment and
those from the other groups. "We have enough trouble communicating with
the public already," Hansen says. At the Met Office, Peter Stott, head of
climate monitoring and attribution, was in favour of
the project if it was open and peer-reviewed.
Peter Thorne, who left the Met Office's Hadley Centre last
year to join the Co-operative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North
Carolina, is enthusiastic about the Berkeley project but raises an eyebrow at
some of Muller's claims. The Berkeley
group will not be the first to put its data and tools online, he says. Teams at
Nasa and Noaa
have been doing this for many years. And while Muller may have more data, they
add little real value, Thorne says. Most are records from stations installed
from the 1950s onwards, and then only in a few regions, such as North America. "Do you really need 20 stations in
one region to get a monthly temperature figure? The answer is no.
Supersaturating your coverage doesn't give you much more bang for your
buck," he says. They will, however, help researchers
spot short-term regional variations in climate change, something that is likely
to be valuable as climate change takes hold.
Despite his reservations, Thorne says climate science stands
to benefit from Muller's project. "We need groups like Berkeley stepping up to the plate and taking
this challenge on, because it's the only way we're going to move forwards. I
wish there were 10 other groups doing this," he says.
For the time being, Muller's project is organised
under the auspices of Novim, a Santa Barbara-based
non-profit organisation that uses science to find
answers to the most pressing issues facing society and to publish them
"without advocacy or agenda". Funding has come from a variety of
places, including the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (funded
by Bill Gates), and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Lab. One donor
has had some climate bloggers up in arms: the man behind the Charles G Koch
Charitable Foundation owns, with his brother David, Koch Industries, a company
Greenpeace called a "kingpin of climate science denial". On this
point, Muller says the project has taken money from right and left alike.
No one who spoke to the Guardian about the Berkeley Earth
project believed it would shake the faith of the minority who have set their minds against global warming. "As new
kids on the block, I think they will be given a favourable
view by people, but I don't think it will fundamentally change people's
minds," says Thorne. Brillinger has reservations
too. "There are people you are never going to change. They have their
beliefs and they're not going to back away from them."
Waking across the Berkeley
campus, Muller stops outside Sproul Hall, where he
was arrested more than 40 years ago. Today, the adjoining plaza is a designated
protest spot, where student activists gather to wave banners, set up tables and
make speeches on any cause they choose. Does Muller think his latest project
will make any difference? "Maybe we'll find out that what the other groups
do is absolutely right, but we're doing this in a new way. If the only thing we
do is allow a consensus to be reached as to what is going on with global
warming, a true consensus, not one based on politics, then it will be an
enormously valuable achievement."
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