The eggshells of long-dead and extinct species are a particularly good source to find preserved DNA, researchers say.

Deforestation has revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, according to Italian scientists.

SAN FRANCISCO — In the late 1950s, American space companies jumped into a headlong race to build an aerospace industry that could launch missiles across the world and rockets above it.

In her new book Another Science Fiction, archivist Megan Prelinger delves into the hyperbolic, whimsical world of the advertisements these early aerospace companies created to sell themselves.

Far from the dry, technical ads you might imagine, companies like Northrup, Ex-Cell-O, and National tried to lure the most talented young engineers into their cubicles by drawing on the mystique of science fiction. Ball-bearing, engine-part, and guidance-system companies didn’t sell themselves, but rather the grand vision of space exploration as the next step in mankind’s destiny.

The book is lovingly crafted and exhaustively researched. Unlike so many “big idea” tomes that skip over the details to deliver the PowerPoint version of reality, Another Science Fiction glories in the details, providing a complex portrait of the nation’s spacefaring ambitions. Prelinger’s analysis reaches outside the narrow confines of space boosterism to reveal the neural connections in the American psyche between the final frontier, the Soviet menace, and good, old industrial engineering.

We caught up with Prelinger at the wonderfully strange library she runs with her husband, Rick, to ogle old space stuff and discuss countercultural space utopias, alternatives to Apollo, and her hopes for a human spaceflight renaissance.

Wired.com: Your book focuses on your amazing collection of space ephemera, particularly the advertisements of the aerospace companies that eagerly lapped up NASA cash. It’s kind of strange: what were they advertising for? And what tropes and themes did they tend to use?

Megan Prelinger: The companies were mostly advertising for recruitment. They were in a position of being funded to develop a civil space program that would be a nearly a whole new industry — from scratch. As well as responding to a steeply escalating Cold War that “demanded” massive missile proliferation. The companies needed to hire thousands of engineers to develop bids for NASA and DOD contracts, and hundreds of thousands of workers to build the new machines. They needed to hire those people in just a few years. And they did.

They tended to use tropes borrowed from science fiction and from mid-century modern design to convey a sense of fantasy and possibility around the process of technological emergence that was erupting. Imagery that was culturally associated with space exploration dominated, as the civil space program was the leading public face of rocket-and-missile work. Weapons development was more tacitly than explicitly expressed in the tropes and themes. The companies and NASA both wanted to inspire people, and they used whatever visual language they could to achieve that goal. Motifs of sci-fi influenced space exploration were prevalent, but also the trope of “space will be our new home,” is expressed in a lot of ways. Mostly through images of the human body in space, but also in imagery that frames outer space as an extension of the domestic environment, and a zone for new architectural invention.

Wired.com: What attracted you to this particular set of artifacts? Were you looking for stories of rocket advertisements past?

Prelinger: I’m a citizen-interpreter of the American West, a landscape aficionado, and a Cold War history buff. I was originally geopolitically awakened and politicized by the early-1980s crises in nuclear politics. When I first picked up these magazines and started to read them, I was looking for untold stories of the militarized American west and untold stories of our atomic nightmare. I thought there might be material in these magazines that would point to other interesting areas of research. I have also always been very interested in space exploration and its history, but at the time I thought I mostly knew the outline of the history of NASA. I didn’t expect to be surprised in that area.

Every discovery I made in the magazines that went into the book was an utter serendipity. I am not a terribly visual person and I wasn’t looking for the ads. I just happened upon them while reading the articles. As I gained momentum in reading the magazines, it hit me in a “Eureka!” moment: that the ads formed a visual language of their own that spoke to all the historical, ideological, and technological complexities that were embedded in the massive changes of the era in history. THAT was the story. The visual language. The idea framework for the book emerged almost overnight, an abrupt serendipity.

Wired.com: Your book seems fundamentally about the space race as an industrial opportunity. The space race here is individual and much more about career advancement than human advancement. How did companies adapt and borrow the grand themes of human advancement to support their own far more limited aims?

Prelinger: Human spaceflight is a cultural project; the mechanics to get us there are an industrial project. The ads represent the convergence of these two aims. At the baseline of course the companies were motivated by profit; at the same time the people working within industry were largely genuinely driven by a sense of contributing to an exciting period of emerging technology. I think the same can be said of our Silicon Valley giants of today. How can you separate career advancement from human advancement among the people giving their lives to Big Tech today?

Wired.com:The beauty of the ads and the grandeur of space provided cover for the many military projects that aerospace companies undertook during this Cold War period. If you had to say, do you think the dual military/civilian nature of space technologies hurt the long-range prospects of spacefaring or helped?

Prelinger: Oh, that’s complicated. The military complex enabled a lot of technological transformations that wouldn’t have happened — or would have taken much, much longer– in a peaceful environment. So in a basic technological sense, the military enabled spacefaring. We wouldn’t have had rockets powerful enough to launch satellites into orbit if we had not been developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. The rockets were a side project and a surplus of the missile research. It would be nice to imagine that we could’ve/would’ve funded the development of orbit-capable launch vehicles without the stimulus of the Cold War, but it’s unrealistic.

At the same time, the militarized nature of the early space program hurt it tremendously (tremendously!) by costing it a lot of its legitimacy as a civil-scientific enterprise. Viz. the conversation with Willi Baum that is quoted at the end of the book. Willi has said to me, “I’m a leftist! Of course there is no such thing as the space program!” That’s what he believes. He doesn’t understand how I can be a naturalist and wildlife rehabilitator and a space advocate at the same time. A lot of people think as he does — that the whole civil space program is just a fig leaf for our hyper-nationalist and hyper-militarized technological will to power. I see that it is more than that, but among the social justice community it’s very hard to convince people that there really is a hugely important civil-scientific aspect of space exploration (climate science research, anyone?). As a member of the social and ecological justice communities it’s sometimes hard for me to be “out” as a space fan. All because of this intense confusion/conflation and commingling of resources between military and civil space. That part is very regrettable.

Wired.com: The space race was intimately tied to the military ambitions of the Cold War superpowers, but you uncover and describe several more human alternatives, a kind of countercultural space program. Perhaps you can tell us what people like Stewart Brand and Princeton physicists Gerard O’Neill were up to?

Prelinger: The migration of space into the counterculture is a big story. You might be interested in Robert Poole’s book Earthrise, which is a cultural history of the image of earth from space. Stewart Brand was responsible for the integration of space themed visual imagery (the earthrise photo) into the counterculture. But back in the 1970s, through his initiative in developing the California Water Atlas, he led the cultural turn from space back toward Earth. He was really the first to notice and develop the fact that earthrise was more than a pretty picture: it stood for the emerging truth that our journey into space really made more meaning for us out of Planet Earth than it did out of space itself. He befriended astronaut Rusty Schweikart and integrated discussions about space exploration into the everyday discourse of the CoEvolution Quarterly, his post-Whole Earth Catalog magazine. Those discussions really seem pot-infused and diffuse to me. But they definitely express a perspective that space exploration is a natural and desirable expression of a combined techno-power and woo-woo state of things. Those conversations are heavily marked as countercultural in a number of ways.

At the same time Gerard O’Neill was coming from a different place and a different perspective. As a physics professor at Princeton he was much more Eastern Establishment and institutional than Brand. But his studies of physics convinced him that human beings could, and should, colonize space in huge numbers. He believed it was technologically and economically feasible to build huge orbital floating terraria that would be hyper-verdant and would house and feed thousands of people. He formed his own node of the counterculture just by being so extreme in his views. He was well-connected enough to gain an appointment at NASA, and NASA sponsored one of his studies and published it as a government document. That document is one of my favorite pieces of space ephemera. O’Neill also popularized his vision through the book The High Frontier; the book’s ideas were so far outside most peoples’ frame of reference that they represented a countercultural ideal. It’s important to also notice that his ideas weren’t utterly different from those espoused by the ex-Nazi hyper-militarized space visionary Wernher von Braun in the 1950s. von Braun’s ideas were assimilable in American culture because they were military themed. O’Neill’s peace-and-trees version of that vision was associated (I think) with the counterculture as much just by virtue of its pacifism as by anything else.

Wired.com: In reading about the 70s space utopias, I couldn’t help thinking back to the 1840s, when railroads started to open up the West, by which I mean the area beyond the Appalachians, and all that land seemed like a great place to test out all the philosophical ideas about the way to live that were bubbling out of the industrializing cities. You draw a lot of parallels between how people thought about frontiers (”The Final Frontier”) and space. How was exploring space different from exploring, say, Arizona or the Antarctic?

Prelinger: I’d love to have time to write an essay-length reply to this question. I did try to address this question in Chapter Four by making the point that we tried to make it like exploring Arizona, but it wasn’t. And that’s why a lot of our dreams and initiatives failed to reach fruition. We imagined we could colonize space as easily as the Europeans moved in to North America. — perhaps even easier, because there wouldn’t be pre-existing sapiens cultures to push out. Almost as if forgetting that we can’t breathe or eat or live or build in space. The “science fiction” aspect of future visualizations grossly overstepped reality by too swiftly suggesting a land-based model of colonization where such a model just could not operate.

It would have been better if space had been conceptualized more like Antarctica; a place where survival was really unlikely for early explorers, and would never be anything other than extraordinarily difficult for those who would follow them. NASA maintains research stations in Antarctica devoted not only to polar studies of planetary science, but also research into living in extreme environments. Human beings will have to adapt into extremophiles in order to live on the Moon or Mars.

Wired.com: At one point you write that “The twelve-year race between the United States and the USSR to reach the Moon was simple compared to the battle for satellite supremacy,” you write. That’s a fascinating statement because it goes against the entrenched idea that it was Apollo which formed the core of the American space program.

Prelinger: As soon as satellite launch technology was proven, many countries and many companies wanted to have a presence in the satellite sky. Competition was swift and multilateral. The binary nationalist “Moon-or-bust” competition between the US and the USSR was not really attainable by other countries, much less by companies. So it remained a simple binary for a long time. But the satellite sky was (and is) a much more accessible forum for crowding and competition. Apollo may have been the public face of the American space program, but we have always had a lot more going on with robotics than with human spaceflight. From a structural and functional perspective, satellites are the core of the American space program. Have been since 1958.

Wired.com: I think most people see NASA (and the American space program) as basically Vanguard to Apollo to the Shuttle. Maybe they throw Hubble in there. But you recover a huge chunk of space history where the moon shot was by no means assured and where human spaceflight seems as if it could have gone many places. Maybe not just or never to the moon. You make the argument that Apollo caused a kind of public amnesia about the competing alternative space programs that might have been. Can you describe the criticisms of and alternatives to Apollo in the scientific community and the media?

Prelinger: The criticisms of Apollo were comparable to the criticisms of human spaceflight today. The criticisms are based on a schism between space for science, by scientists, and space for exploration, by explorers. It is true now as it was then that robotic spaceflight is vastly less expensive and technologically difficult, and yields tangible scientific rewards. Scientists mocked the Apollo program because the life support system had to dominate the payload of the spacecraft to such an extent that only a few pounds of scientific equipment — sensors and sample collectors — could be included. That schism still exists, though within NASA great steps have been taken to resolve it as an internal contradiction.

Ambitious non-Apollo plans that were regrettably un-funded included a plan for a multi-planet flyby by a space probe in the 1970s. There was an alignment of the planets in the 1970s that meant a multi-planet probe could go on a “grand tour” and get a lot more bang for its buck than at any time in the late 20th or 21st centuries. Hey look, this idea has a wiki entry: Planetary Grand Tour.

Some people think that the emphasis on human spaceflight overshadowed what could have been public and political support for this Grand Tour. Other people think that it would have been canceled in the 1970s anyway, just because of the economic contraction. For the same reasons Apollo was canceled.

Wired.com: You write in your book, “With fifty years’ hindsight the tone of the popular press stories of the late 1950s criticizing human spaceflight seems cartoonishly overblown.” Is that really fair? It seems to me that the criticisms of the manned spaceflight program were pretty robust, the Apollo landing notwithstanding. What do you think the best argument for human spaceflight is? And do you think we should be attempting to send humans into space now?

Prelinger: I am a supporter of human spaceflight. I want to see it happen, and I will do what I can to promote it as a cultural enterprise. But it needs to be re-framed as a cultural enterprise. Our human spaceflight program was a civil public institution. Its primary functions were symbolic, inspirational, and cultural. It was a positive, non-destructive expression of the urge to explore and to “conquer” (space is un-conquerable, so space exploration de-fangs the conquering impulse). It was a positive, non-destructive expression of technological upsmanship. It was a positive, non-destructive expression of the human impulse to continuously expand our sense of territoriality. It can be those things again in the future, and I’d like to see that happen. Its most important job was to inspire young people to see themselves as junior members of an advanced, highly-accomplished society, and to identify positively and peacefully with technology. In its early years, that effect was worldwide. Space exploration has the potential to transcend nationalism. I have no doubt that the Apollo program inspired many young people to think higher than they would have without its symbolism in front of them, and I’d like to see that inspiration come back.

That being said, the Apollo program in particular was an artifact of a major post-war economic and technological surplus. We no longer have that surplus, we have spent it. I have to agree on a practical level with the cancellation of the Constellation programs. NASA’s robotic programs are the ones that bring home the bacon, in terms of new knowledge and important scientific discoveries. I’m sorry that we are losing it as a public program, but it will be reborn as some kind of hybrid public-private partnership. Private “new space” enterprise is hard at work developing human spaceflight alternatives, but it will be really hard for them to do that without some technology transfer from NASA. I see public-private partnerships as the way of the future.

I’m of two minds about the privatization of human spaceflight. On the one hand, I hate to see it lost as a public, democratic institution. On the other hand, the expense and the risk are utterly enormous. It seems more appropriate to me for private companies to take the risk and make the expense, rather than our heavily stressed taxpayer base. And it’s not as much of a dichotomy as it seems on the surface because even when human spaceflight was a “public, democratic” institution, the profits from it still all went to private industry.

Wired.com: One interesting argument you make is that the selection of a design for the Apollo rocketry and system actually stopped a lot of the more futuristic design proposals out there. Do you think the lack of a program of record now that NASA has effectively cancelled Constellation will re-open people’s minds and allow them to imagine new paths for NASA?

Prelinger: I was just discussing this question with a NASA staffer at the SpaceUp conference in San Diego this past weekend. NASA is definitely at a bit of an identity crisis. At least the parts of NASA dedicated to human spaceflight are at an identity crisis. The cancellation of Constellation will result in a huge infusion of moneys into the “new space” companies that are developing non-NASA rocket systems. Those systems are going to be bound to the same rules of physics as NASA rockets, yet they will innovate in design and function to some extent.

As for new paths for NASA well, that’s a big subject. What NASA does best and most importantly is robotic planetary science. No one in the world does that as well as NASA. Exploring Mars, bringing back samples of Martian soil — and using knowledge about Martian planetary science to help Earth sciences people understand our own planet’s evolutionary history — THAT’s what NASA does best. Increasing public awareness and appreciation about this really important, urgent, and fascinating work is NASA’s biggest hurdle.

I’d of course love to see the breakdown of existing structures lead to a creative eruption in design and technology. That could be visually as well as technologically interesting and exciting. It remains to be seen though, how “different” spacecraft can look, now that the limiting factors of design, materials, and physics are much better known than they were in the 1950s.

Wired.com: Science fiction, the entertainment not the advertisements, seems to thread its way through your narrative as in the hilariously titled sci-fi magazine, Satellite Science Fiction, which you note “published articles about science fact alongside fiction.” What was the relationship between science and science fiction in the late 50s and has it changed over the last 50 years?

Prelinger: In the 1950s, science and science fiction were close mutual contextualizers. The magazine Analog ran half science / half fiction articles in its table of contents every issue. The science fiction writer Fritz Leiber was commissioned to write a story — or a story of his was appropriated — by Los Alamos National Laboratory for an advertisement. The advertisement was actually just a block of copy from the story, with the Laboratory’s logo at the bottom. Also, writers such as Arthur C. Clarke wrote fiction that was directly based on working plans for emerging technologies, such as “The Wind from the Sun” about a solar wind ship. The relationship between science and sci-fi did not get much closer than it was during those years.

Today I think that relationship is a bit more diffuse. It has moved on to the realm of computers. The relationship between the world created by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash and Second Life is pretty close, but not as close as the examples above from the 1950s. And of course the relationship between sci-fi literature and the real stories of technological emergence vary quite a bit with media type. Narrative film has always been more adventure-oriented than technology-oriented. In the 1950s that relationship was probably closer than it is today — the ships themselves were part of the adventure. In contemporary sci-fi narrative film I think I see evidence that we as an audience have become desensitized to the various promises offered by advanced spacefaring technology. For instance in District 9, the spaceship is very much in the background. Though to really use District 9 as an example we’d have to also look at the centrality of the “gene therapy” theme in the story which is very much out of today’s science news headlines.

In sum I’d say that the relationship is not quite as close-seeming as it was back then, but it’s still there. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction runs occasional columns by scientists working at the Exploratorium. But that’s less than five percent of the magazine’s content.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Can all species live side by side in unique ecosystem?

A never-before-seen reaction in nanotubes could make for batteries that pack a mighty punch, say researchers.

Updated at 9:40 EST Tuesday:

SpaceX just released the official word on what happened with Tuesday's 3.5 second test-fire of the Falcon 9 rocket. The test aborted immediately after it started, and a a spin start system failure forced the early shutdown. The Falcon 9 sits on Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and from the Kennedy Space Center press site, (about 4 miles away) a muffled bang was heard at the time of ignition, 1:41 pm EST. "Today SpaceX performed our first Static Fire for the Falcon 9 launch vehicle," said Emily Shankin from SpaceX in a press release. "We counted down to an T-2 seconds and aborted on Spin Start. Given that this was our first abort event on this pad, we decided to scrub for the day to get a good look at the rocket before trying again. Everything looks great at first glance."
(...)
Read the rest of SpaceX Falcon 9 Test Fire Ends with Abort (370 words)

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Any parent will tell you that reproduction is costly. There are rising health care expenses, child care costs for working parents, expensive sports or extracurricular activities, and, eventually, college enrollment and tuition. From an evolutionary perspective, the only relevant costs of reproduction are those that depress survivorship and as a consequence decrease the future opportunity for subsequent reproductive output (and, in fact, such costs have been found in humans).

A recent study in the pages of 'Evolution' has demonstrated a very high toll of reproduction, indeed. By stymieing reproduction in female Brown Anoles (Anolis sagrei, pictured right) through surgical removal of the ovaries, Bob Cox and Ryan Calsbeek at Dartmouth University have found that female interannual survival increases nearly threefold (relative to females manipulated only with a control "sham" surgery; solid bars, right). In addition to the survival advantage of non-reproduction, ovariectomized females also exhibited higher growth than control females.

Although the result is consistent with abundant life-history theory predicting a trade-off between reproduction and survival, the proximate mechanism of increased growth and survival of non-reproductive adult female anoles remains unclear. In performance trials, females whose egg burden has been surgically relieved improved dramatically in both stamina and sprint speed, suggesting that ovariectomized females might be better equipped to avoid predatory attack. However, in results presented in this year's Society for Integrative and Compative Biology meeting (and discussed in a previous blog post), Bob found that experimental manipulation of predation regime had little effect on the survival probability of sham and ovariectomized females. Perhaps ovariectomized lizards are simply better able to allocate sparse resources to fat reserves, and thus exhibit improved survival during food scarcity. Furthermore, Cox and Calsbeek acknowledge that ovariectomy removes not only the physical burden of reproductive investment, but also the source of steroid hormones - which could also affect growth and survival in lizards.

No doubt these important questions regarding proximate causes for the relationship between reproduction and survival in female anoles will be the subject of future studies.

The Large Hadron Collider must be shut down for a year starting in late 2011 to address design flaws, the BBC has learned.

WASHINGTON—Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions of dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words unsure of what to do next.

Rating: +0 Respected Sir, I'm a BHMS student from Mumbai & I need to ask you what is the scope of Homoeopathy in HIV-AIDS (Type-1 & Type-2). Can it be treated with Homoeopathy & Cure if possible? Can Homoeopathic treatment be given along with allopathic treatment in this particular case for the sack of patient? regards, Farhan Nadaf HIV-AIDS is just a [...]

The response to the [email] vandals is to bury them with the data and experience of a century of scholarly research and analysis. The information that is important in making the decisions as to how to manage our world is unequivocal and must be advanced, not as questions at the edge of scientific knowledge where scientist like to dwell, but as the facts that they are, facts as immutable as the law of gravity. The climatic disruption is not a theory open to a belief system any more than the solar system is a theory, or gravity, or the oceanic tides, or evolution.  This approach is uncompromising, partisan in the sense of selected for the purpose. It is not a lecture to undergraduates; nor is it ecology 101. It is a clear statement of what is required for government to do its job in protecting the public welfare. The scientific community has a firm responsibility in this realm now. This is not the time to wring our hands over the challenges to hyper-scientific objectivity, the purity of scholars, and to tie ourselves in knots with apologies for alleged errors of trifling import.

That’s the opening paragraph of a statement Dr. George M. Woodwell emailed me yesterday.  Woodwell, founder, Director Emeritus and Senior Scientist at the The Woods Hole Research Center, was responding to some “private e-mails obtained by [the uber conservative newspaper] The Washington Times,” including one of his that has been misrepresented.

Since Woodwell has blogged here before, I asked him to clarify his original use of the word “partisan,” since I was pretty sure he was not using it in its Washingon, DC political sense, as some have implied.  He wasn’t.  In addition to his statement, he sent me a remarkable piece of 1988 Senate testimony he gave (reprinted below), which makes clear he has been at the forefront of warning the public about the dangers of human caused global warming.

His statement continues:

The fact is that we, humans, have changed the composition of the atmosphere with respect to heat-trapping gases enough to start the progression of global climate, not into a new steady state, but into an open-ended warming that is pulling the environment out from under this civilization. If one wonders where that process leads, one need not look far around the world to find dysfunctional landscapes. Have a quick look at New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, or Haiti before the earthquake.  All have fallen far below any point where internal resources can be used to restore a nation with a functional political system, a vital economy, and a functional environment. They have fallen into an abyss, beyond rescue without massive outside aid that will, first, restore a functional landscape to produce, for instance, a water supply, and stable agriculture, and a fishery. Something to build an economy around, and to support a government.

The challenge is complicated, the most complicated international environmental issue the world has ever faced. The scientific community has done brilliantly with the IPCC, by nature a conservative apparatus. It is time now, thirty years after the problem was recognized as threatening this civilization, for the scientific community to come forth with clear instructions, relentlessly repeated and amplified, as to how to restore a functional habitat for humanity. It can be done, but the scientific community has a big responsibility not now widely recognized or accepted.

Woodwell has published more than 300 papers in ecology.   His “research has been on the structure and function of natural communities and their role as segments of the biosphere….  For many years he has studied the biotic interactions associated with the warming of the earth.”  Indeed, he testified on the dangers of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions back in 1988 (click here).

As you can see, our scientific understanding even back in 1987, wasn’t that much different than today.  We face a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration by midcentury with a projected warming from that doubling of 2 to 4.5°C to (just from fast feebacks — not stuff like the defrosting tundra).

The rate of warming that we face in the high latitudes on our current emissions path is staggering (see “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F” [11C]).  Compared to preindustrial levels, we’re very likely to exceed 1.5°C by 2050 — and it could be much, much higher if the carbon-cycle feedbacks also turn out to be more severe than most models [which ignore the tundra] currently project (see “UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F [15C!] in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years”).

Testimony of G.M. Woodwell before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate

June 23, 1988

Rapid Global Warming: Worse with Neglect

I. Introduction: The Villach-Bellagio Report

I am a scientist, Director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Holes, Massachusetts.  I am also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a conservation law group with more than 75,000 members around the country.  I appear before you in both capacities.  My colleagues and I in science have done research on various aspects of climatic change for more than 25 years; my colleagues and I in the NRDC have made formal efforts spanning nearly two decades to make better connections in public affairs between what we know and what we do.

I am reporting on experience gained through two conferences held during the fall of 1987 in Europe dealing with climatic change.  The first was in Villach, Austria, and was a review by scientists of the details of the global climatic warming that appears to be underway.  The second, held in Bellagio, Italy, was an exploration of the implications of the changes in climate for governmental policies.  A report of these conferences has been published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO 1988) and is available to you.  I am emphasizing in what follows the biotic interactions involved in climatic change because those interactions affect people most directly and have the potential for affecting the course of the climatic changes.  I am also giving emphasis to the need for general solutions to the regional and global problems that will become increasingly acute through the next years.  I find it necessary to do so because we tend to overlook the fact that 5 billion people now occupy the globe, twice the number present as recently as 1950.  Before 2030 the human population could be 10 billion.  The 5 billion we now have use half or more of the energy available from plants globally.  Big changes in the human condition will be occurring without climatic changes.  The climatic changes will compound the difficulties in accommodating such extraordinary rates of growth.

II. A Consensus among Scientists

Several points about climatic change now constitute a consensus held by meteorologists and other scientists who have worked on the problem.  Most of these points have been made in slightly different form in the Villach-Bellagio report.

1. The dominant influence on global climate for the indefinite future is expected to be a continuous warming caused by the accumulation in the atmosphere of infrared absorptive gasses, especially carbon dioxide and methane, but including nitrous oxide and the CFC’s.

2. The warming marks the transition from a period of stable climates to climatic instability.  Stable or very slowly changing climates have prevailed during the development of civilization.  We are now entering a period of continuous warming accompanied by changes in precipitation.  The changes in climate are predictable in general at continental and broad regional levels; they are not predictable locally.

3. The rate of the warming is uncertain.  Estimates based on models suggest that a doubling of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere (or the equivalent through increases in other gasses) above the levels present during the middle of the last century will produce a global average warming of 1.5-5.5 degrees C.  Such an effect [doubling] is expected by the period 2030-2050.

4.  The earth has warmed between 0.5 and 0.7 degree C over the past century and the rate appears to be accelerating.

5. The warming in the tropics will be less than the mean for the earth as a whole; in the middle and high latitudes the warming will exceed the mean by two fold or more and will fall in the range of 0.5-1.5 degrees C/decade.

6. The current sources of carbon dioxide are the combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation.  The dominant source of methane is anaerobic decay.

7. A rate of warming in the middle and high latitudes that approaches 1 degree C/decade exceeds the rate at which forests can migrate and will result in the destruction of forests at their warmers and drier margin without compensating changes elsewhere.  Such destruction of forests and soils release additional carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

8. It is possible that the warming already experienced is stimulating the decay of organic matter in soils globally, increasing the total releases of carbon dioxide and methane.

9. No stimulation of the storage of carbon in forests or soils that is large enough to compensate for such rapid releases is known.

10. The warming will cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and an expansion of the water in the oceans.  The effect will be an increase in sea level of 30 cm to 1.5 m over the next 50-100 years.

11. The changes in climate anticipated over the next decades extend beyond the limits of experience and beyond the limits of accurate prediction.  Surprises such as the discovery of the polar ozone holes are common in such circumstances.  The possibility exists that a rapid warming will change the patterns of circulation of the oceans and produce sudden but profound changes in climate in regions such as western Europe, now kept warm by the Gulf Stream.  The same changes may have equally surprising effects of the storage or release of carbon from forests and soils.

The warming will move climatic zones generally poleward, shift the arable zones of the earth continuously, cause large and continuous dislocations of natural vegetation, and cause flooding of low-lying areas globally.  The arid zones of the northern hemisphere will expand because there is more land at higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere.  The warming will be greatest in winter and will be accompanied by increased precipitation in high latitudes.

A one degree C change in temperature is equivalent to a change in latitude of 100-150 km, 60-100 mi.  Rates of warming, if they occur as anticipated over the next decades, will exceed the capacity of forests to migrate or otherwise adapt.  In that circumstance forest trees and other plants will die at their warmer and drier limits of distribution more rapidly than forests canb be regenerated in regions where climates become favorable.  The destruction of forests will add further to the releases of carbon to the atmosphere.  The seriousness of this problem will depend heavily on the rate of warming.  There is sufficient carbon in forests and soils of middle and high latitudes to affect the atmosphere significantly.  While there is no proof of this process and there will probably not be proof until the changes are well underway, the process will hinge heavily on rates of warming.  Rates that approach 1 degree per decade exceed by a factor of 10 or more tha capacity of forests to accommodate the changes.

III. What Can be Done?

The earth will warm as a result of the changes in the composition of the atmosphere that have already occurred.  But an open-ended, continuous warming that speeds the rise in sea level and destroys forests over large areas is so thoroughly disruptive of the human enterprise as to preclude any thought that civilization might “muddle through.”  Can the warming be checked?

The annual increase in the atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide alone is about 3 billion tons currently.  The global warming has the potential for increasing this net accumulation by speeding the release of carbon from forests and soils without causing an equivalent increase in the rate of storage.  No estimate is available of the extent to which this additional source of carbon dioxide is likely to compound the problem.  But the new source will diminish as the warming diminishes.

At least three possibilities exist for reducing or eliminating the imbalance and moving toward long-term stability of climate:

1. a reduction in the use of fossil fuels globally, now estimated as the source of about 5.6 HG-tons of carbon annually;

2. a reduction in or cessation of deforestation, now estimated as releasing 1-3 G-tons annually;

3. a vigorous program of reforestation that would remove from the atmosphere into storage in plants and soils about 1 G-ton of carbon annually for each 2×10(6) km(2) tract in permanent forest.

Further adjustments in emissions will be appropriate as experience accumulates.  Such steps are appropriate now and possible.  They will bring widespread ancillary benefits to the human enterprise.  Further delay increases the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the severity of the warming that must be accommodated, and the risk of unexpected consequences that lie beyond the limits of current prediction.

These changes are possible now.  They will require adjustments in the efficiency of use of energy in the industrialized nations and imaginative and far-reaching changes in the patterns of development of the less industrialized nations.  Recognition of the need for the transition to a new era in the management of the earth’s resources opens new opportunities for industry and governments to pursue new paths for sustainable economic development on a global basis.

References

WMO. 1988. Developing Policies for Responding to Climatic Change. TD-No.255. World Meteorological ORgnaization. 53 pp.

Woodwell is justifiably frustrated that such frank, science-based warnings have not only been ignored decades — but also that those who have made such warnings have been subject to a well funded disinformation and harassment campaign (see “The rise of anti-science cyber bullying“).

The media continues to embrace a false balance and thus mislead the public about our basic understanding of the science (see Boykoff on “Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change”).  All scientists — indeed all people who understand what we face from unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions — must be as blunt and repetitious in explaining the science as the anti-science crowd has been in spreading disinformation.

Related Post:

• Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change.

The European Parliament is fed up with the secrecy surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Today, representatives from all the major parliamentary coalitions introduced a resolution demanding that the European Commission release all negotiating texts, inform Parliament about the negotiating process, and absolutely refuse to countenance any sort of "three strikes" Internet disconnection penalty for online copyright infringement.

The measure comes up for a vote tomorrow and looks set to pass—it has the support of all the important groups in Parliament, including the EPP, S&D, ALDE, and the Greens/EFA. One notable supporter: Christian Engström, the Pirate Party's lone MEP in Parliament, who aligns with the Greens/EFA group.

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I started this post yesterday, feeling I should write one to commemorate the anniversary of this blog, which began a year ago on International Women’s Day.

On the same day 38 years ago today, I went on my first march for women’s liberation in central London. We demanded an end to discrimination in education and the workplace, as well as contraception, abortion and nursery places for all who needed them. We protested about the demeaning way women were presented by various media and we challenged the ideology that women were responsible for the hateful way we were perceived and portrayed and for the sexual harrassment and violence visited upon us. 38 years ago, if I’d looked this far into the future, I would have expected International Women’s Day 2010 to be a day of celebration.

This post isn’t going to be an analysis of the successes and failures of the women’s movement. Suffice to say that I feel as if I live in a very different world nowadays to the one of my childhood — a world where so many people thought it was a waste of time for girls to get A’ levels, never mind go to university; a world where girls were told to aspire to marriage for “security” and to “give the children a name”; a world where women who reported sex crimes to the police came away feeling as if they were the criminals.

Undoubtedly, the bit of the world that I inhabit is a better place for women nowadays and the credit ultimately lies with all of us who’ve embraced the liberal and democractic values that are the legacy of the Enlightenment. However, that the world is still an agonisingly brutal and barbaric place for women the world over puts a dampener on things. And the absolute pits is that so many women living in liberal democracies — and benefitting from the reforms we fought for and won on their behalf — are kowtowing to a pernicious ideology that denies women our humanity and autonomy: the ideology that says ‘honour is between the the legs of women’* and they should cover themselves from head to foot so that men can control their dicks.

Because — let’s be honest — that’s all it’s about. In the eyes of misogynists, women exist to serve men and fulfil a primarily sexual function. Women need to be cowed and controlled. Making them feel vulnerable and ashamed (or just beating the crap out of them) if they’re not covered up is but one way to do it.

A commenter on one of my previous blogs, who calls himself “Kope”, invited me to look at his blog and read how “Islam will win the clash of civilization”. There he sums up the ancient spiritual wisdom of his worldview very succinctly:

Women must take responsibility for their dress standards.
Dress like sluts, get treated like sluts. Its only natural.

To me the hijab represents the biggest symbol of women’s oppression and the most hateful insult to every woman who has struggled for justice and equality in the developed world. I initially assumed the news that Tower Hamlets were planning to build some great monstrosity of a hijab-shaped arch at the end of Brick Lane was a tasteless wind-up — some April fool story I’d missed at the time, perhaps. Alas, it was for real and I express my heartfelt thanks to every one of the 158 residents of the borough who objected. Whatever were those morons on the council thinking??

Naturally, there are varying degrees of loathesomeness in respect of this garment. I recall a Saudi student of mine who, while she was in London, wore the smallest headscarf she could get away with. She would have loved not to wear one at all, she said, but didn’t dare. That’s one end of the loathesomeness spectrum. Women wearing headscarves have become a familiar sight but I still hate to see the bloody things just because of what they represent — and I don’t mean the commitment to Islam, I mean the obsequious deference to misogyny. At the other end of the spectrum are the full-face veils and long robes she had to wear back home in Saudi, the like of which I never saw on the streets of London when I was a child but which are now almost commonplace. For crying out loud, they even brought out a burkha-wearing Barbie doll!

Let me just say that I am not concerned with what the Qu’ran says or how Muslims interpret it. Any argument that women should cover themselves up because that’s what it says in some old book is going to be lost on an atheist like me, especially when a high profile Muslim like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is so comprehensive in her condemnation of the veil. As far as I’m concerned, if God expected women to cover themselve up, he wouldn’t have made sunlight so important for the production of vitamin D. I have Muslim friends and not one wears the hijab. Well, if they did, they wouldn’t be my friends. I don’t want to be friends with people who celebrate what I have agonised over and fought against all my life.

Just as any religious argument will be lost on me, I know my own argument will be lost on many hijab wearers reading this. Some of them have never even engaged their brain long enough to question the wearing of these odious garments for religious reasons; they do so because they’ve been indoctrinated from early childhood. Raising a child to believe that they must hide their hair, let alone their face, to be sure of avoiding hell fire is, in my opinion, a form of abuse. Yet that is what is happening in Muslim schools in Britain today, if the one featured on the Channel 4 TV series last year is anything to go by.

Then there was that episode of Wife Swap when the hijab-wearing mother, Nuzhat Ahmed, confessed that, yes, her  hijab was hot but “hell is hotter”. For shame!

By the way, in keeping with my open-minded approach to life, I prefer to conduct empirical research and, to prove it, here’s a photo of me wearing a niqab purchesed for a fiver on ebay together with the note I made when I first tried it on:

“As every specs wearer knows, seeing the frames of your glasses as you peer through them is something you get used to. I guess it would be the same for looking out from behind a niqab. At the moment everything has a thick black frame and it’s bugging the hell out of me. But the worst thing is not being able to breathe freely. I’m suffocating. And I can’t wear my glasses because they keep getting steamed up. I’ve been wearing it a mere 15 minutes and already I have a headache. It’s coming off.”

But — hey! — you can get used to anything, right?

For many hijab wearers in liberal democracies, hijab has become the badge of the club they belong to; a way to distinguish themselves and each other from members of other tribes. Just what we need in a multicultural society — let’s emphasise our differences, why don’t we?

Ed Hussain’s book, The Islamist, is illuminating:

To packed halls we brought speakers from different Islamist groups who explained why women must cover their hair, be different from non-Muslim women, and earn God’s approval. At the time there were a handful of young Muslim women at college who wore the hijab. This commanded my full support, but questions from teachers, and sometimes students, made the practice increasingly confrontational. We put pressure on unveiled Muslim women to join the ’sisters’ who wore the hijab or risk being seen as un-Islamic rather than practising, proud Muslims. The resultant upsurge of hijab wearing took even us by surprise as scores of fashionable free-fllowing hairstyles disappeared from view.

…The sisters who wore the hijab put their mothers and older siblings to shame — the fact that young, educated, confident women at Tower Hamlets College wore the hijab sent a message to the wider community. They saw our sisters on buses, on the roads and at weddings, and slowly the hijab became a symbol of defiance of Western values and of a return to Islam.

And some of those sisters may even delude themselves that, as long as they are covered up, they won’t arouse the interest or star in the gross fantasies of men they don’t fancy. Let Ed Hussain disillusion you:

If the hijab was supposed to make a woman less attractive, then it clearly had not worked. Several society members commented to me that the women looked extraordinarily feminine and more desirable in the scarf than without. I shared that sentiment, but dared not express it.

…The craving to unclothe the excessively clothed was cruel.

Not that those hijab-wearers whose faces are unveiled but who wear a bucketload of make-up will be unaware of the effect the mixed message might be having but, in fairness, not all hijab wearers go around looking like that. At least some are consistent and go easy on the slap (and the beautiful ones look beautiful in spite of wearing hijab and the plain ones look plainer because of it — just my opinion).

Ask a lot of young women why they wear hijab and they will give an answer similar to a commenter on another blog of mine, who posted from Egypt.

I want to explain why we do wear that (Niqab)
First of all,I wear it as god demanded me
More over,you may noticed those who were niqab more than others ,but you didn’t any of their body details
as they didn’t expose them except for their husbands,not by force,but by love.
Women quality ;as no one can deny;is by her thoughts,beliefs and spirit.Not by her body.So what disturbs any body whether to see her body or not?!
when i am married ,i feel that no one has the right to see my beauty but him(and of course my father brother and those who don’t ever marry me)

In a nutshell, if women cover up, they will be judged on what they say and do, rather than on their looks. A woman’s beauty should be a gift of love to her husband. I suppose the same goes for a woman’s ugliness.

In other words, men are in thrall to their animal natures and can’t see past what women look like and it is women’s responsibility to protect men from themselves because asking them nicely not to rape us won’t work — they can’t help themselves, poor bastards. All of which might have been convincing had I lived in some earlier century before the shameless unveiled women of the world had gained the success, power and respect that so many have today.

Another deadly weapon in the hijab-defender’s armoury is to point to the dark side, the negative consequences of Western sex-obsessed culture. I can’t be bothered to list these — suffice to say I agree there is a dark side to Western sex-obsessed culture. That kind of even things up a bit, doesn’t it? But it’s a bit like homeopaths who defend the worthlessness of homeopathy by pointing to the problems of conventional medicine. The ugly side of my culture doesn’t make the ugly side of your culture — whether it be ‘honour killings’, genital mutilation, executing rape victims or any of the other atrocities committed against women for no good reason — any less ugly. Prostitution, it seems, takes place everywhere.  But at least we don’t flog or execute our prostitutes.

Nor would I defend the raunchy dress and behaviour some young women adopt solely for the purpose of pleasing men but, as this tends to be a phase young girls grow out of, the suggestion that it typifies Western culture is just daft. Most women, young or old, don’t dress or behave like that but hijab-defending male commentators on Western culture seem oblivous to that fact, preferring instead to perve over pictures of naked female flesh and proclaim the superiority of a culture that would rather have women suffocating in hideous shrouds. Kope, whom I mentioned earlier, has helpfully provided plenty of pictures of nubile young women in various states of undress on his website, in order to illustrate “how Islam will win the clash of civilizations”. Here’s a typical caption:

The  judeo-christian’s sodomites half naked on the beach because of christian’s god does not require dress code for women and men

It’s not clear how he thinks those pictures demonstrate the greater glory of Islam but so what? At least he gets to have a wank.

One final thing: in case, you think I’m building up to calling for a ban on the burkha in Britain, I’ll end by disabusing you of that notion. I agree with Andrew Copson on this one. I don’t defend liberal values one minute only to flush them down the pan the next. Even though it is repressive, divisive, insulting and intimidating, I would defend to their death the right of these women to flaunt their vicimtisation in any way they choose.

Just don’t expect me to get used to it.

*’Honour is between the legs of women’ is a chapter title from Olivia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s, Does God Hate Women? — a book I possess but have so far found too horrific to read.

Newsnight's Olenka Frenkiel investigates how a former priest named in the Murphy report as one of the Catholic Church in Dublin's worst child sex abusers has been allowed to live quietly in Britain.

Step right up — you can now get your very own jetpack. That's right, a real, not-science-fiction-honest-to-goodness jetpack. New Zealander Glenn Martin has been working on perfecting his jetpack for 30 years, and in 1998 created the Martin Aircraft Company to develop and market his idea. Now, the jetpack has become a reality. The 200-horsepower, dual-propeller is designed to fly average-sized person for 48 km (30 miles) in 30 minutes on 18 liters (5 gallons) of gas. The newest model can also reach heights of 2,400 meters (about 1.5 miles). Price? $100,000. "They are a helluva lot of fun to fly," said Martin.
(...)
Read the rest of Where's My Jetpack? Right Here (288 words)

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China and India formally endorse the last-minute climate agreement struck at the Copenhagen summit

China and India wrote to the UN's climate secretariat today agreeing to be "listed" as a parties to the Copenhagen accord, the last-minute agreement that emerged from the chaos of the UN's summit in Copenhagen.

The action falls short of full "association" and highlights the gulf between the US – the strongest backer of the accord – and the other key nations on how to deliver a global deal to combat climate change.

Since Copenhagen, there has been confusion over how a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved. All observers, including the UN's top climate official, Yvo de Boer, are now clear that no such deal will be signed in 2010, with a meeting in South Africa in December 2011 now seen as the earliest date.

At the heart of the disagreement is whether a new global treaty, like the existing Kyoto protocol, must be agreed unanimously by all 192 members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and be a continuation of Kyoto, which enshrines bindings carbon cuts on industrialised nations but not on developing ones.

In a letter to de Boer, Trigg Valley, the director of the US office of global climate change, did move back from earlier suggestions that the US wanted to ditch the UN process, seen as cumbersome by some, and negotiate climate change in a smaller group like the G20 or Major Economies Forum. But he has proposed to set aside some of the existing UN texts, which had been laboriously negotiated over several years, and replace them with passages from the Copenhagen accord.

In the letter from India, Rajani Ranjan Rashmi, environment and forests minister, states baldly the unacceptability of this approach: "The accord is not a new track of negotiations or a template for outcomes."

China's submissions are also unequivocal. The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, strongly backs the UN process and its consensus-based approach to reaching agreement. "It is neither viable nor acceptable to start a new negotiation process outside the [UNFCCC] and the [Kyoto] protocol", he said.

The US now appears isolated as China, India and many other countries, firmly support the idea of continuing with the two existing UN negotiating tracks to try to achieve a consensus.

The battle of the texts was fought for much of last year with the US backed by Britain and the rest of Europe. Today, the European Commission's first formal statement since Copenhagen offered some support for the US: "The political guidance in the Copenhagen Accord – which was not formally adopted as a UN decision – needs to be integrated into the UN negotiating texts that contain the basis of the future global climate agreement."

But some rich country governments now accept privately that they had "crossed a red line" and failed to recognise that developing countries had not been prepared to abandon the Kyoto protocol without a new legal agreement in place to ensure developed countries reduced emissions.

"The US wants to appear to be leading the world on climate change but it is in a very, very difficult position," said Tom Burke, founder of the consultancy E3G, citing the difficulty President Obama faces in getting a climate change bill through a reluctant senate.

In an recent interview with the Guardian, Yvo de Boer,, played down talk of radical change to the way to the UN process demands unanimous decisions, which some, including Gordon Brown, blamed for a lack of progress in climate talks. He said a major stumbling block to an agreement remained mistrust between the developing and developed countries over the finance needed to help countries adapt to the impacts of global warming.

Rich countries had offered "recycled contributions from the past" he said, while the build-up to the Copenhagen summit had focused too much on the issue of binding emission reduction targets. De Boer has announced he will step down from the UNFCCC in July. Yesterday, the South African tourism minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, was nominated by President Jacob Zuma as a candidate. But other candidates, including from India and possibly Indonesia, are expected to make the private shortlist from which the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, will make his choice.

The usual rules of sexual attraction go out of the window when men are stressed, say psychologists

Men are drawn to a wider range women when they are feeling stressed out, according to research into the psychology of sexual attraction.

People are usually attracted to partners with similar facial features to their own, but after a brief but stressful experience, men's preferences changed to include a wider variety of women, the study found.

Relaxed men who took part in the study rated women on average 14% less appealing if they looked very different from themselves compared with women who looked similar. But a group of stressed men found dissimilar women 9% more attractive.

Johanna Lass-Hennemann, who led the study at the University of Trier in Germany, said the findings echo research suggesting that animals lose their normal mating preferences when they are under stress.

"Men have a tendency to approach dissimilar mates and to rate these to be more pleasant when they are acutely stressed," Lass-Hennemann said. "[But] we are not sure how this might reflect in true mating decisions."

Scientists suspect the appeal of similar-looking partners may be linked to our tendency to have more trust in a familiar face, a factor that is important for long-term relationships. Under stress, however, the importance of pairing up with someone similar-looking seems to vanish.

Lass-Hennemann speculates that stress might increase men's tendency to "outbreed", or reproduce with more genetically dissimilar women, with the potential benefit that any children born from the relationship might be better equipped to cope with a stressful environment.

"We think that chronically stressful environments should increase outbreeding, because inbreeding may lead to offspring that are not genetically diverse enough to deal with the varying circumstances that a risky and stressful environment imposes on them," she said.

In the study, 50 healthy heterosexual male students were divided into two groups. Those in the first group were asked to plunge one arm into a bucket of icy water for three minutes before taking part in the test. Those in the second group were asked to do the same, but with water heated to body temperature.

Measurements of the volunteers' heart rates and levels of the stress hormone cortisol indicated that the men in the first group were significantly more stressed before the test began than those in the second.

In the test itself, the men were shown a series of images on a computer screen. Some were of household objects, but others were of naked women. Some of the women's faces had been digitally altered to resemble either the person being tested or another man in the group.

Throughout the test, the scientists played occasional bursts of noise to startle the men and recorded their reactions. Previous research suggests people startle less when they are looking at something they find attractive. The men were also asked to rate the images by how appealing and arousing they were.

While men in the control group performed as expected and were more attracted to women who looked like them, the stressed men consistently rated the unfamiliar women as more appealing. Their startle reactions confirmed their preferences.

The research is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Lass-Hennemann said it is highly unlikely that the acute stresses of everyday life can switch someone's tastes when it comes to choosing a partner, but long-term stress might shift male preferences towards women who are more dissimilar.