It makes me sad that my fine colleagues and rivals at Science magazine already beat me to this story, but it is too much fun not to note here. There's a poster here at AGU in which seismologists report detecting 'footquakes' - the sound of jubilant soccer fans (football to you British types) celebrating goals during a major competition.

Garrett Euler, of Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues, were initially puzzled by instaneous tremors that appeared to happen all over Cameroon one day soon after the researchers installed new seismic equipment. But finally one of them figured out it was the stomping of joyous fans across the country, each time the Cameroon team scored a goal in the African Cup of Nations. And the stomping got worse the longer the match went on. "Goals that came later in the match - when the tensions were near boiling point - caused substantially larger tremors," they write.

For the full story, go to page 13 of the IRIS seismology newsletter found here.

Posted by Alex Witze at 06:44 PM | Permalink

Turns out that Jim Hansen, the outspoken NASA climatologist, didn’t attend John Marburger’s talk on Monday night, in which Marburger (who is President Bush’s science advisor), called accusations of censoring US climate scientists ‘ignorant’.

Hansen, who has long gone public with his thoughts about the problems of human-caused global warming, has said in the past that NASA public-affairs people censored his public speeches and media interviews to play down the risks of climate change. On Monday, Marburger charged that such accusations were baseless, saying that he personally had tracked down each claim and found it to be wanting. Marburger didn’t mention Hansen by name, but the subtext was clear to everyone in the audience.

Asked for his response today, Hansen simply pointed to a new book called Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. (I haven’t read it and thus can’t recommend it, but here is a link so you can see at least what it looks like.) According to Hansen, it details a systematic effort to suppress climate scientists such as himself.

Asked if he had ever spoken to Marburger about the issue of censorship, Hansen said simply: “Not about this.”

Hansen isn't just confining his criticisms to US leadership, though. He's got a draft letter in the works to UK prime minister Gordon Brown and the German chancellor Angela Merkel, criticising the planned construction of coal-fired power plants in their countries.

Asked today why he was focusing on these leaders when China is constructing a coal-fired power plant at the rate of nearly one per week, Hansen said he feels that the developed world needs to take responsibility, as it has been the source of the majority of carbon dioxide emissions up until this point.

Posted by Alex Witze at 06:18 PM | Permalink

Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist and lead author on the 2007 IPCC report, had a handy hint for any future authors attending her lecture today on stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change:

Proofread your papers.

The famous 1974 Nature paper by Mario Molina and Sherwood Roland, describing how chlorofluorocarbon chemicals are the trigger for ozone destruction in the stratosphere, contains an embarrassing typo in its title - one that has endured for more than 20 years of citations.

Check it out here.

Posted by Alex Witze at 02:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

News from the Arctic just continues to get worse. A fair number of presentations here have been dealing with the dire 2007 conditions for sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet.

First up, Greenland. Last summer, more ice melted atop Greenland than ever before measured, adding to a consistent downward trend of some 135 gigatons of ice disappearing per year. Marco Tedesco, of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told the meeting that surface temperatures in Greenland were four to six degrees Celsius warmer than usual this summer, which helped accelerate melting, particularly at high latitudes.

The situation is even more precarious for sea ice. A couple of researchers here have been tossing around dates like 2012 or 2014 for estimates of when the Arctic might be completely ice-free in summer. While these sorts of numbers are pretty arm-waving at the moment (numbers like 2040 were previously considered to be aggressive), there’s little reason to think the situation will get better in the next couple of years. Mark Serreze, of the University of Colorado, spent a keynote lecture on Tuesday showing images of Arctic ice shrinking like a snowman left out too long in the sun. In September of this year, sea ice covered just 4.2 million square kilometers - by far the lowest record ever.

And the ice isn’t only shrinking in extent – it’s also thinning. Don Perovich, of a US army cold regions and research laboratory in New Hampshire, reported on a single but extraordinary ice buoy in the Beaufort Sea. In June the buoy measured sea ice at that location as 3.3 metres thick – “really a healthy piece of ice,” as he put it. But by the end of the summer, 70 centimetres had melted off the top – and 2.2 metres (yes, metres) off the bottom.

When you see those dramatic maps of the Arctic ice extent shrinking over time, don’t forget that it’s also thinning – a complicating factor that may just make things worse in summers to come.

Posted by Alex Witze at 01:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

NASA Night is always a stressful evening at AGU. Researchers who depend on NASA funding pack into a lecture hall to hear the head of NASA science talk from on high about how dire the funding situation. Everyone usually ends up leaving the room complaining.

Things are a little different this year, though. The new chief of science at NASA is Alan Stern, who for many years was "one of you", as he put it -- a scientist struggling to fly new missions in an era of ever-uncertain NASA budgets. Fortified with a glass of chardonnay, he held forth from the other side of the podium at NASA Night with an approach that some call a refreshing change. (You can read a Q&A piece Nature did recently with Stern here - subscription required.)

The main thing to remember, Stern cautioned the crowd at AGU, is that blaming the budget is not cool. The science mission directorate at NASA gets $5.4 billion a year. That's on the scale of the entire National Science Foundation. It has 53 missions currently flying, and a host more are slated for launch in 2008, such as the GLAST gamma-ray telescope and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. In other words, NASA's space and earth science programs are the envy of the international research community.

But the big problem is cost overruns. This has been known for some time - projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, balloon in cost annually. But Stern made it abundantly clear just how much cost overruns are hurting the science community. Over the past five years, overruns on NASA science missions have cost the agency $5.8 billion. Yes, that's more than a billion dollars a year. The biggest offenders are the James Webb scope, which ran over by $1.3 billion over the past five years, and the SOFIA airborne telescope, at $1.1 billion (and it isn't even flying yet, despite having been finished years ago).

As a result, NASA is going to focus ever more strongly on cost control. "Once you're selected to run a mission, we're going to hold your feet to the fire," says Stern. How he will do that isn't exactly clear, but in many cases it might mean descoping a mission -- taking off an instrument or two -- or placing it in a different, less risky, orbit.

Of course, even with the most stringent belt-tightening measures at NASA, the agency is still subject to the whims of Congress. If Congress goes into the same financial meltdown it did last year, and passes a 'continuing resolution' to keep the government operating at fiscal year 2006 levels, NASA will suffer. A long-term continuing resolution, says Stern, "would almost certainly mean mission cancellations".

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:38 PM | Permalink

What a difference a year makes. Last AGU meeting, the evening keynote lecture was by Al Gore. This AGU, Gore was in Oslo, having picked up his Nobel Peace Prize for his climate activism, on the same day President Bush's science advisor John Marburger was giving a lecture here on climate change.

Gore got a standing ovation from the AGU scientists. Marburger got a slew of hostile questions. He probably should have expected this, given the Bush administration's policies on climate change. And lines like "scientists have lost credibility in this debate" didn't help either.

Marburger spoke for about 45 minutes on US climate policy, reinforcing many of the same messages he's put out there before. Bush recognizes the significance of climate change, Marburger argues, and has been saying as much since June 2001. The US is doing plenty to move towards taking action, including hosting a summit of major emitters in September and adopting 'aspirational' goals to improve energy consumption and develop new technologies to deal with it. Too much emphasis is being placed on mitigiation strategies for reducing carbon emissions, instead of adaptation strategies to get people to live differently in a greenhouse world.

Such messages did not go down well with the audience. Questioners pressed Marburger on mandatory emissions caps for US industries (ask Congress, says Marburger); alleged censorship of climate scientists (not a word of truth in it, he argues); and Bush's refusal to move the Kyoto protocol forward (Congress would have stymied it anyway).

Marburger also included a plea for people to read the details of the IPCC technical reports issued this year, not just the policymakers' summaries. Only in the technical reports, he argues, are the details and the complexity that everyone needs to understand in order to make informed decisions about what to do about climate change.

No one's arguing with that. But surely he hadn't forgotten that his very audience was made up of many of those who wrote the IPCC technical reports in the first place -- and they still don't agree with him.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:19 PM | Permalink

Those Mars rovers just keep on trucking. It's been nearly four years since Spirit and Opportunity touched down separately on opposite sides of the red planet, but they're both still going strong. Steve Squyres of Cornell and John Callas of NASA provided an update here on how they're doing - and how they're still making surprising discoveries.

First to Spirit, which has been something of the underdog of the rovers. But finally, scientifically, "it's caught up to Opportunity," said Squyres. And it's all because of a problem mission managers have been cursing for some time: the fact that Spirit's right front wheel is stuck, and whenever they have to move the six-wheeled vehicle they have to drag the stuck wheel behind it like a recalcitrant shopping cart.

But this awkward movement means that there's a deep trench behind the rover wherever it moves. And that recently revealed a glistening white trail in the wheel trench. Chemical analyses show that the stuff is nearly entirely made of silica -- the stuff that makes up glass -- with a touch of titanium. And that, says Squyres, suggests two possible environments: either hot springs or volcanic fumaroles, both of which mean heat plus water -- and potentially life. It's the first time Spirit has found potentially habitable environments, the kind of warm watery places where microorganisms like to thrive.

Continue reading "AGU: The latest from Mars" »

Posted by Alex Witze at 04:27 PM | Permalink

...it's 4:15 pm, and the exhibit hall, where the posters are displayed, are already smelling of beer.

Posted by Alex Witze at 03:39 PM | Permalink

Join Nature at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Our reporters will be posting diary reports here from Monday 10 December, with all the latest news on the Earth, the ocean, and beyond to the stars.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The spring AGU meeting this year is in Acapulco, Mexico.. It is a joint affair with nearly a dozen Latin American societies. About 2,300 scientists have registered. This makes it smaller than some of the earlier joint meetings the AGU has held in the last four years to enhance scientific outreach. Certainly not as huge as the joint meeting with European societies four years ago in Nice, France, where some 10,000 scientists attended. Security at that event was insane, due to invasion/war in Iraq. No such problems in Acapulco. Although Mexican police/army trucks cruising oceanfront boulevard watching for drug lords are almost as frequent as buses. My long walk along the coast late last night turned up nothing but great pork posole and fine cazadores tequila. To many US-named fast-food spots along the way though. But at least a trendy little tequilaria like a coffee stand. Balmy doesn´t fully describe weather. Only a 2 degrees F spread predicted, from 82 to 84, day and nite. High humidity, full clouds. It´s Chabuso (read tropical storm) season. Hopefully, that doesn´t mean an earthquake. We sit atop one of THE most active quake zones. And new research revealed at the meeting raises the spector of a strange calm before a tectonic storm. Off to 14th floor hotel room. Hoping the building engineers did their job right decades ago when with this slightly frayed resort sprouted high-rises.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 11:07 PM | Permalink

Join Rex Dalton at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco from 22-25 May. He'll be blogging here for Nature.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:07 PM | Permalink

Well, Al Gore has been here and gone. He spoke for an hour to a packed ballroom, and crowds also filled overflow rooms to watch a closed-circuit broadcast of his talk.

He started out with many of the same stories he trots out in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and in the talks he's been giving on climate change around the country. Yes, he introduced himself as the man who used to be the next president of the United States. Yes, the audience laughed dutifully.

But he also tested the waters on a new topic - the loss of reason as a driving force in America. There are reports he will have a book out early next year, The Assault on Reason.

Here's Gore: "I’ve come to believe that the reason why knowledge, and science as the most refined category in the field of knowledge, seems now to be paying a less important role than it did in the past has to do with a fairly dramatic change in the ways in which we communicate information among ourselves....The meritocracy of ideas has virtually disappeared in the television space....As a result the role of knowledge and reason and logic has been diminished."

Gore called on the assembled scientists to engage with the public, to clearly communicate the results of their science - particularly any findings having to do with climate change: "When you come into possession of a truth that has deep implications for the future, and find courage to express it … you will find that the force of that truth will move obstacles from your path."

No, we don't know if he's running for president in 2008. Yes, he got a standing ovation - and signed autographs before slipping out of the ballroom.

Posted by Alex Witze at 01:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes a couple of scientific instruments, in just the right place, can trigger all sorts of new investigations. Take the three strainmeters that the Carnegie Institution of Washington placed along the eastern coast of Taiwan starting in 2003. Alan Linde and Selwyn Sacks, working with their Taiwanese colleagues, were trying to figure out why the area didn't seem to have as many large earthquakes as it should - being located on the boundary of two tectonics plates and all.

Instead, the scientists arrived at a whole new theory. Typhoons passing over the island, the team argues, release pressure on the land and allows the faults there to slip at very high, but very slow and non-dangerous, rates. In essence, tropical storms enable a lot of very small earthquakes and prevent the large and dangerous ones.

It's a very cool concept that, unfortunately, may not apply other areas of the world. The US Gulf Coast, for instance, is not at high risk of killer earthquakes and thus could conceivably be saved by hurricanes. But Japanese scientists are interested in extending the work to their country, Sacks told me at his poster session this morning.

"This is a big surprise for us," he said. "It's the kind of finding that is driven by data, not by insight."

Posted by Alex Witze at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The big buzz for today is Al Gore's scheduled 12:30 talk on climate science and policy-making. Unfortunately, he won't be taking any questions, either from the audience or from reporters. But it should be interesting to hear what he has to say.

His movie An Inconvenient Truth is of course now out on DVD - and he's challenging the public to host a wave of viewing parties, with the first this Saturday. What do you think - is he gearing up for another presidential run in 2008? Is climate an issue that American voters care about? If not, should they?

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Some other people are also blogging this conference. Check them out:

-Andrew Alden, of About.com

- Joshua Colwell, with some good planetary science updates

- Kevin Vranes, who promises a good climate posting shortly

- Google Earth Blog, reporting on the 'virtual globes' sessions here

- Someone over at LiveJournal, with a focus on the traditional conference activities of drinking and hooking up

Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate will be talking about blogging and the global warming debate on Friday - unfortunately, I'll be gone.

And a thanks to Charlie Petit of the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, who thrilled me by linking to my blog ... although it seems to have since vanished off his page. Hmm. Anyway, Charlie - a longtime science journalist, formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle and US News and World Report - does a fantastic job of rounding up science journalism coverage every day, with his indomitable commentary on who's doing the best job around. Check it out.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Those Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, just keep rovin' along.

We science journalists have written that story time after time. The darn things just don't die. For the third consecutive year, project scientists presented their findings at a packed AGU press briefing.

Life for the twin rovers is getting tougher. Spirit spent the entire Martian winter - April through December - hunkered down to try to save energy. Its right front wheel is jammed, and mission controllers have to drive the thing in reverse. The radioisotope-powered alpha proton x-ray spectrometer instrument has been through so many half lives now that it takes days to conduct analyses that used to take hours.

And yet, says project scientist Ray Arvidson, "it's still exciting to come into work every day." Then he turns to Steve Squyres, the rovers' lead scientist, a slight glint of desperation in his eye. "Right, Steve? Right??"

Posted by Alex Witze at 09:08 PM | Permalink

The GRACE satellites are really very cool. Imagine: You've got two trapezoidal-looking satellites, chasing each other constantly above Earth's poles. They're about 130 miles apart from each other, but can measure their precise separation down to the precision of a single micron. GRACE is all about gravitational anomalies; big masses that shift around on Earth's surface exhibit subtle pulls on the satellites. And slight changes in distance between the two reveal how the masses are moving down below.

Those masses include water. Water is heavy, Jay Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine, told the meeting today. Since its 2002 launch, GRACE has watched monsoon rains pile up in some regions of the world, like the MIssissippi river basin, and dry out in others, such as the Congo basin.

Water shifting around, as seen from space - that's just cool. Nature subscribers can read more in a News & Views article published here.

Posted by Alex Witze at 12:08 AM | Permalink

There are mountains on Saturn's moon Titan! Big ones! This newsblog won't let me post images, so check out the very cool pix here.

Posted by Alex Witze at 12:07 AM | Permalink

Lots of well-meaning scientists invade Capitol Hill every year, meeting with lawmakers and (usually) arguing for more money for their disciplines. David Goldston, chief of staff for the House Science Committee, had some tips today for how researchers could best survive Washington. He's worked on the Hill for 20 years, so this man knows what he's talking about. Call them Goldston's Top Tips:

1. Don't claim that science provides an easy answer to questions of policy. Establishing the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and temperature rise is something scientists can and should do. Telling politicians how to regulate emissions is not.

2. Be very clear about the levels of uncertainty in your scientific field. In other words, don't try to sound like you know more than you do.

3. Do your homework. Realize the issues that are facing Congress every day, and that your inevitable plea for science funding will be balanced against competing priorities - say, the Iraq war or health care for children.

4. Remember Tip O'Neill's adage that all politics is local. Get to know your Congressional representatives at home, on their home turf. They'll listen to you better there than in Washington.

It'll be interesting to see how many of the geophysicists in the room will take all four to heart in January, when the new Congress convenes.

Posted by Alex Witze at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Peter Gleick, a water expert at the Pacific Institute in California, took issue this morning with the issue of consensus in science. His advice on how to deal with politicians and the public:

Don't say: 'Climate change is a big problem because most climate scientists agree it is a big problem.'

Say instead: 'Most climate scientists think climate change is a big problem because the best science available has convinced them it's a problem.'

It's a subtle argument, but a good one that is often lost in the public and political hoopla about what to do over climate change. Yes, consensus in science is a good thing to know about -- but just saying a lot of scientists believe in Position X doesn't make Position X right.

Posted by Alex Witze at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Hurricane researchers have a new idea: Get the oil industry to help pay for research into better forecasting the approach and impact of hurricanes.

After the devastating 2005 hurricane season, scientists scrambled for new ways to better improve hurricane science - in particular, forecasts of hurricane intensity, which lag far behind forecasts of hurricane trajectories. Greg Holland, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, described the result today: the Hurricane Intensity Forecast Improvements and Impact Projections, or HiFi.

It's a research push estimated to cost $250 million over ten years. Project leaders plan to hit up oil industry, who maintain their own hurricane information in a patchwork fashion - wind meters on their offshore oil platforms, and the like - but who have yet to share that information with the rest of the community.

It's a good idea. One can only hope the money is forthcoming, and a decade from now we will never see the likes of Katrina again.

Posted by Alex Witze at 06:04 AM | Permalink

First up on my slate this morning was a session on paleoclimate temperature reconstructions for the past millennium. This, of course, involves the famous 'hockey stick' reconstruction showing that temperatures in the 20th century were unequalled in the past 1,000 years. That, of course, is according to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, his coauthors, and a National Academy of Sciences study that broadly reaffirmed their findings earlier this year.

It's always fun to be in the same room with Mann and his chief antagonist, Steve McIntyre. McIntyre, a mineral exploration consultant from Canada, has spent years working to debunk Mann's hockey stick graph and its implications. Earlier this year, both spent an afternoon at the NAS presenting their respective sides of the argument to the panel of assembled experts. Mann left the room without giving McIntyre so much as a glance.

Sadly, there were no new fireworks today. Mann spent much of McIntyre's talk looking down at his lap and shaking his head. And McIntyre sat back down after his talk without even arguing with the other critics in the audience. Could it be finally true? Has the community actually moved on? Will we ever have to hear about hockey sticks ever again?

Posted by Alex Witze at 02:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There's one word for this meeting: packed.

I've been coming to AGU for more than a decade, and there are more people here than ever. There are more than 13,500 abstracts and 1,100 oral sessions. The numbers of presentations, and attendees, keep going up. Today, the registration line snaked around the lobby of the Moscone Center in San Francisco and back on itself. Several times.

I sure hope not everybody shows up on Thursday noon to hear Al Gore speak - we'll never all get in.

Posted by Alex Witze at 02:22 AM | Permalink

Join Alex Witze as she blogs from the AGU meeting in San Francisco, Dec 11-15.

The homepage of her blog is here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 10:29 AM | Permalink