Earth v2.0

Astronomers are claiming to have found another Earth orbiting the star Gleise 581 in the constellation Libra.

Already known to be home to another Neptune-size planet, the little red-dwarf appears to have a planet 5 times the mass of Earth, or about 1.5 times the radius, making it the smallest exoplanet discovered so far.

Its position, orbiting the dim dwarf star every 13 days, places it in a prime orbit to sustain water at its surface.

But is it habitable???

I've already had a few comments on it here:

The next part, that the world is habitable, is more problematic. To get this the authors had to calculate the temperature from the star’s output, and the planet’s orbit. This is a very simplistic approach. For instance, Venus is far hotter than Mercury despite being further out. The reason is its atmosphere, which is mostly CO2 - and thus Venus is a an extreme case of global warming. Atmospheric composition strongly controls planetary temperatures, and this is the biggest uncertainty in this work, as we don’t know the specifics of the planets atmosphere. So take the temperature estimates with a grain of salt.

There are many other caveats to habitability too - Earth’s water likely came from comets that were perturbed and hit Earth late during its formation. If this cometary water source is non existent around a red dwarf then the planet could be bone dry. Etc etc.

Of course these caveats don’t make for as interesting a headline as “First habitable planet found” so bear in mind the reporting of the science here tends towards the more fantastical elements like little green men. But the discovery of this planet is a pretty neat find in its own right, even if we don’t know too much about it yet.

(The original report is at the Australian, or New Scientist).

Already dubbed the 'Goldilocks' planet, as the conditions are reputedly ideal for life. As mentioned above, this is extremely sensitive to the atmospheric composition, which we know little about. The atmosphere itself depends on many factors. Does the planet have plate tectonics? What is it made out of? Is it rocky like Earth, or a gas ball like Neptune, or a ball of metal like Mercury? How much of its early atmosphere was blown away during early star formation? (Earth lost a lot of its early atmosphere this way, particularly the hydrogen, whereas the gas giants are far enough away to keep most).

All these factors need a tick for a planet to be "habitable", but it does make you think nonetheless...

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Researchers have identified a 6m tall fungus in the fossil record called Prototaxites, which from 420-350 million years ago (source: NS).

"A 6-metre fungus would be odd enough in the modern world, but at least we are used to trees quite a bit bigger," says C. Kevin Boyce from University of Chicago.

"Plants at that time were a few feet tall, invertebrate animals were small, and there were no terrestrial vertebrates. This fossil would have been all the more striking in such a diminutive landscape. This gets my vote for being one of the weirdest organisms that ever lived."

So no other tall land plants, 6m tall fungus columns, and only millipedes and centipedes loafy around on land. Why are we looking for strangeness on other planets?



They kinda look a bit phallic.

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Also, smart people are no good at making money, and people actually get paid to study the froth on beer. These guys expanded the work of computing pioneer von Neumann on grain boundaries to study how the bubbles interact. I need to change my research direction.

Bugger the tornado, I'm winning!

Pick the Aussies. In the face of what looks like a massive cateogory 4 tornado (in fact a waterspout - essentially the same thing over the ocean), two fanatic bowlers at Scarborough bowling club south of Sydney continued bowling the game of their life entirely unperturbed. Until the rain, apparently, then they called it quits.

Something very 'Francis Drake'-ish about the whole thing.

From SMH.

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A crocodile has also eaten a small Chinese boy who was pissing it off by throwing sticks and catapulting stuff at it.

A bunch of kids snuck into what sounds like a wildlife park to take on the Archaic beasts.

"One of the irritated crocodiles bit Liu's clothes and dragged him into water, where he was eaten by a swarm of crocodiles," Xinhua news agency reports.

One crocodile was shot on the weekend, and found to have the childs remains inside. What happens to the rest of the 'swarm' is not clear. Bigger sticks?

From SMH.

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And Captain Ahab -, no, sorry, that's John Howard, PM, (I get confused sometimes), has redoubled his attack on that white whale of climate change:

"But to say that climate change is the overwhelming moral challenge for this generation of Australians is misguided at best and misleading at worst," said the PM, apparently referring to the vast majority of the Australian voting population who do not agree.

"At the same time we know that independent action by Australia will not materially affect our climate" he said, shrugging his shoulders, "So why bother."

"Australia emits fewer greenhouse gases in a year than the United States and China emit in a month," he said.

Of course we have 1.5% the population of China, and 6.7% the population of the US, and so we should take nearly 7 years to match the monthly greenhouse gas output of China and the USA, and the fact we're managing to do the work of 7 years in 1 means we're a very productive country at making greenhouse gas. Must be all those hard-working coal miners Howard loves.

I think there's a scratch on this record.

From SMH.

a busy week...

Its been a busy week in science, climate, and high-school teaching.

A principal has apologized to a 12 year old boy for throwing faeces at him, explaining it as a "momentary lack of judgement". Teachers everywhere understand. The only remaining question is where, exactly, did she get the faeces?

Returning to our previous story, the PM John Howard has struck back at the whole EU after it slammed him on climate change.

“I can really not understand why Australia has not ratified Kyoto,” said the EU's Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.

Quoth the PM:

“You've got the spokesman for a group of countries lecturing us about not having signed Kyoto yet the great bulk of the countries on whose behalf he speaks are falling well behind their Kyoto targets and are doing less well in meeting them,” Mr Howard told ABC Radio today.

“Our answer to spokesman for the European Union is look to your own affairs, get your countries complying with the targets you have proclaimed.”

He noted Australia is having no problem meeting its emission targets because it has none.

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Furthermore one notes the bloated corpuscule Piers Ackerman from Daily Telegraph has another 'climate change is not happening' rant on the weekend. Piers is of course a long time critic of climate change science since his gaseous methane emissions are a major contributor to the Australian greenhouse gas problem.

The column is bad science, and rather counter-productive. The bottom line is he's playing up uncertainties, and presented smidgins of truth half cloaked in facts to present the illusion of a controversy.

Whats worse, he derides the climate modellers without any attempt to understand their work, or the models, and what they predict, and their uncertainties. He just throws out a whole branch of science because its done on 'computers'. Well newsflash Piers: the world is a complicated place, and the maths behind these models even more so, the only way to get any sort of intelligent handle on the problem is to do computer simulations. Doesn't mean they're always right, depending on the assumptions in the models, but it is a hell of a better approach than misrepresentative newspaper articles with lots of exclamation marks! Yeah?!

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A brief perusal of the editorials on Nature and Science - the two leading science journals in the world - show no hint of a controversy over the mans' contribution to climate change. In fact, the recent editorials unaminously slam climate change sceptics over the harm they are causing by introducing false doubts by mispresenting the science.

There is complete agreement by working climate scientists over man's contribution to climate change. There is no real debate.

By working scientists - I'm talking about guys who publish, go to real conferences, and make up most of the international climate change panel (ICCP), and thus are behind the Kyoto protocol, the Stern report, the ICCP recommendation, and the latest EU comments. Banging heads with these guys is going against the largest flow of consensus you're ever likely to see in the scientific community, which by its nature is quite fractured.

The dissenters - and there are always a few - are either 1) pig headed old professors who have lost anything resembling mental agility in the face of new data - and sadly there are a few of them in science, or 2) fruitloops, and not serious scientists, ie the 'fringe science' community or 3) somehow paid by oil companies - and there are a lot of these guys, and have historically been the greatest critics of anthropogenic climate change.

His stupid 'no average change in 25 years'. Way to short. Look at the last century. 1998 was the hottest year on record (also an El Nino year). His comment that the temperature has plateaued out? Wait till the next El Nino again Piers, a man of your commensurate bulk is going to suffer.

Ice age? Yes, we're meant to be heading towards one. Mankind's contribution has completely tipped the scales though so who knows where we're headed. It depends on what we do now.

And what is this crap about firestick farming? I mean, this is exactly the sort of obfuscating red herring I'm talking about, when Pier's isnt eating them he's smattering them all over his article. Firestick farming might burn a few trees on a local scale every so often (even that changed the landscape/climate and fauna of Australia). Our coal plants are burning millions of years of concentrated vegetation. Its orders of magnitude difference. Firestick farming is a piss in the ocean compared with what the coal plants rip through.

Bottom line: 5 degrees temperature is not the end of the world. Man will survive it. The earth has had bigger fluctuations in the past. BUT: you will get the droughts. Thus the fires. The cyclones. Etc. Be ready for it, cause we have kinda screwed our water situation so far. THIS IS GOING TO COST MONEY.

Ditto the Barrier Reef. Corals as a phylum might survive. But the Barrier Reef will be royally screwed. Coral gets bleached, falls apart... au revoir Queensland tourism. And thus a significant fraction of Australia's GDP (4-5% comes from tourism). Piers seems quite happy to see the Great Barrier Reef go back to being a lifeless plain. But me and a lot of other Aussies are not to happy with Piers severe inertia to doing anything (which is, coincidentally, related to one's mass....).

This isn't considering the effect rising sealevels will have on water-front properties. Bangladesh and the Pacific Island nations are up for a wild time.

So, to sum it up, it is happening, and it will cost money - lots - even if its not the end of the world as we know it. But surely by acting to mitigate the excursions, which is within our power to do, we are at the very least acting in good economic sense. At the worse, we critically push our planets into a state like Venus, which is a greenhouse effect gone very bad. 400C at the surface kind of bad. I'm not sure even Mr Ackerman's impressive girth will protect him from that sort of temperature rise.

End rant.

In other news, they are doing strange things to penguins here. Ostensibly to test their heart rates (explained here), but I think its to train them to walk on land after the Ice shelfs break up.