Science

OSLO: Top climate scientists will blame mankind more clearly than ever for global warming next week but may struggle to drive home the message in a report that uses the term “uncertainty” 42 times. The ‘language gap’ between scientists and the policy makers, public and media they seek to alert is proving hard to bridge.

Scientists say uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge – in, for instance, calculating how much of Greenland will thaw or how fast temperatures will rise by 2100 – but that policymakers and the public often mistake it for ignorance.

That gap in semantics may complicate the message of greater overall understanding of global warming in the report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due for release in Stockholm on September 27 after a final round of editing.

A final draft summary raises the probability that most climate change since the 1950s has a human cause to at least 95 percent, from 90 in 2007 and 66 percent in 2001. Temperatures could rise by almost 5 degrees Celsius (9 F) by 2100, bringing enormous risks for society and nature.

Yet it also has the words “uncertainty” or “uncertainties” 42 times over 31 pages, according to a final draft obtained by Reuters, a comparable rate to 26 mentions in 18 pages in 2007.

Among the biggest uncertainties, it says, is how aerosols, such as air pollution, affect cloud formation. The white tops of low clouds can reflect sunlight and so cool the Earth’s surface.

“When scientists are explicit about the underlying uncertainties an immediate response from decision-makers and the public is: ‘Oh, scientists do not really know what they are talking about.’,” said Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“This is actually an inappropriate response,” he said. Edenhofer, who is a co-chair of a separate IPCC report looking at costs of fixing the problem due in 2014, and all other experts gave personal opinions and not details of the reports.

JAILED

Society needs to understand uncertainty and risk, he said.

Unrelated to climate change, he noted that six scientists were sentenced to jail in Italy last year for manslaughter after wrongly reassuring people of low risks shortly before an earthquake killed more than 300 people in L’Aquila in 2009.

“We know more and more about the big picture” of climate change, said professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey and a lead author of the study to be issued in Stockholm.

“At exactly the same time we are getting more and more data about the little pictures which are much harder to explain.”

Governments were no longer satisfied with estimates of global sea level rise, for instance, but wanted to know regional estimates, in places such as south England, to plan flood risks.

“Most people’s view of science is that ‘scientists know things’. But it’s actually all about uncertainty,” said James Painter, head of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.

A study he published on Wednesday found that media focused on disasters and uncertainty in covering climate change and that it might be better to stress risks and business opportunities.

Scientists reckon the focus on uncertainty, by governments and the media, may brake action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“There’s a general frustration among scientists that we get more and more certain: why doesn’t more happen?” said Cecilie Mauritzen, head of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

Scientists use a mixture of data and “expert judgment” to decide how likely it is that climate change is man-made and rule out other factors, such as changes in the sun’s output.

The IPCC draft halves the likelihood that natural factors are to blame to 5 percent from 10, the flip side of raising the probability that climate change is man-made to 95 percent.

“It’s based on a discussion among the authors…There must be multiple lines of evidence,” said Eystein Jansen, of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Norway and one of the authors of the Stockholm draft.

A graph in the draft, reconstructing temperature rises in the 20th century, shows the trend cannot be explained without the warming effect of greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere from cars, factories and power plants.

Those skeptical over human contribution to warming often say more certainty is needed before acting, something proponents of action reject given risks of floods, heatwaves, and rising sea levels. Society may act on little certainty when risks are high.

AL QAEDA

Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, once said that if there was a 1 percent chance that Pakistan was helping al Qaeda to develop nuclear weapons, then Washington had to treat it as a certainty in terms of its response.

Dan Kahan, a professor of Law and Psychology at Yale University, doubted that any change of certainty by the IPCC would have much impact on the public. Governments have not cut rising emissions even though repeated surveys show that 97-98 percent of climate scientists reckon warming is man-made.

“People fit evidence of what scientists believe – like all other sorts of evidence – to the position that affirms their cultural identity,” he said. In the United States, Democrats are more likely to agree with climate science than Republicans.

And IPCC reports, stretching to about 3,000 pages, have had errors in the past, such as a mistake in 2007 that Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, a big exaggeration of the thaw.

That has led to some criticisms that the IPCC stresses the negative effects of climate change. A review by outside experts in the InterAcademy Council in 2010 said that errors did not affect the IPCC’s overall conclusions but that authors should do more to nail down the probabilities of their predictions..–REUTERS

ISLAMABAD: The government is working on a plan to upgrade its forensic facilities at its National Forensic Science Agency.

According to official sources, the PC-I for National Forensic Science Agency (NFSA) had already been approved by the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) and tender for construction of building has also been floated in the press.

The agency is presently operating from a rented place. After 18th Amendment, law and order is the responsibility of the provinces and consequently establishment of Forensic Agencies is their own responsibility.

Punjab has developed its Forensic Science Agency and Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhawa and Baluchistan are further developing the facilities.

The sources said wherever required, the federal government is extending cooperation is this regard.

At the National Forensic Agency in the DNA section, five analysts are working since 2006, for firearms analysis two analysts are working since 2012,two analysts are working for document analysis since 2013, three analysts are working since 2013 for latent fingerprint unit and three analysts are working since 2013 for crime scene unit.

STOCKHOLM: Leading climate scientists said they were more convinced than ever that humans are the main culprits for global warming, and predicted the impact from greenhouse gas emissions could linger for centuries.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report that a hiatus in warming this century, when temperatures have risen more slowly despite growing emissions, was a natural variation that would not last.

It said the Earth was set for more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels from melting ice sheets that could swamp coasts and low-lying islands as greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere.

The study, meant to guide governments in shifting towards greener energies, said it was “extremely likely”, with a probability of at least 95 percent, that human activities were the dominant cause of warming since the mid-20th century.

That was an increase from “very likely”, or 90 percent, in the last report in 2007 and “likely”, 66 percent, in 2001.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the study was a call for governments, many of which have been focused on spurring weak economies rather than fighting climate change, to work to reach a planned U.N. accord in 2015 to combat global warming.

“The heat is on. Now we must act,” he said of the report agreed in Stockholm after a week of talks between scientists and delegates from more than 110 nations.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the report was a wake-up call. “Those who deny the science or choose excuses over action are playing with fire,” he said, referring to skeptics who question the need for urgent action.

They have become emboldened by the fact that temperatures rose more slowly over the last 15 years despite increasing greenhouse gas emissions, especially in emerging nations led by China. Almost all climate models failed to predict the slowing.

“LOOKING FOR THE CURE”

European Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said it was time to treat the Earth’s health. “If your doctor was 95 percent sure you had a serious disease, you would immediately start looking for the cure,” she said.

Compiled from the work of hundreds of scientists, the report faces extra scrutiny this year after its 2007 edition included an error that exaggerated the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers. An outside review later found that the mistake did not affect its main conclusions.

The IPCC said some effects of warming would last far beyond current lifetimes.

Sea levels could rise by 3 meters (9 feet, 10 inches) under some scenarios by 2300 as ice melted and heat made water in the deep oceans expand, it said. About 15 to 40 percent of emitted carbon dioxide would stay in the atmosphere for more than 1,000 years.

“As a result of our past, present and expected future emissions of carbon dioxide, we are committed to climate change and effects will persist for many centuries even if emissions of carbon dioxide stop,” said Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the talks.

The IPCC said humanity had emitted about 530 billion tons of carbon, more than half the 1 trillion ton budget it estimated as a maximum to keep warming to manageable limits. Annual emissions are now almost 10 billion tons and rising.

Explaining a recent slower pace of warming, the report said the past 15-year period was skewed by the fact that 1998 was an extremely warm year with an El Nino event – a warming of the ocean surface – in the Pacific.

It said warming had slowed “in roughly equal measure” because of random variations in the climate and the impact of factors such as volcanic eruptions, when ash dims sunshine, and a cyclical decline in the sun’s output.

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, told Reuters the reduction in warming would have to last far longer – “three or four decades” – to be a sign of a new trend.

And the report predicted that the reduction in warming would not last, saying temperatures from 2016-35 were likely to be 0.3-0.7 degree Celsius (0.5 to 1.3 Fahrenheit) warmer than in 1986-2005.

Still, the report said the climate was slightly less sensitive than estimated to warming from carbon dioxide.

A doubling of carbon in the atmosphere would raise temperatures by between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 8.1F), it said, below the 2-4.5 (3.6-8.1F) range in the 2007 report. The new range is identical to the ranges in IPCC studies before 2007.

The report said temperatures were likely to rise by between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees Celsius (0.5 to 8.6 Fahrenheit) by the late 21st century. The low end of the range would only be achieved if governments sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions.

And it said world sea levels could rise by between 26 and 82 cm (10 to 32 inches) by the late 21st century, in a threat to coastal cities from Shanghai to San Francisco.

That range is above the 18-59 cm estimated in 2007, which did not take full account of Antarctica and Greenland.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” said “the IPCC’s moderate projections clearly contradict alarmist rhetoric” of higher temperature and sea level rises by some activists

Scientists at the University of Leeds have solved a 300-year-old riddle about which direction the centre of Earth spins.

Earth’s inner core, made up of solid iron, ‘superrotates’ in an eastward direction — meaning it spins faster than the rest of the planet — while the outer core, comprising mainly molten iron, spins westwards at a slower pace.

Although Edmund Halley — who also discovered the famous comet — showed the westward-drifting motion of Earth’s geomagnetic field in 1692, it is the first time that scientists have been able to link the way the inner core spins to the behavior of the outer core. The planet behaves in this way because it is responding to
Earth’s geomagnetic field.

The findings, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, help scientists to interpret the dynamics of the core of Earth, the source of our planet’s magnetic field.

In the last few decades, seismometers measuring earthquakes travelling through Earth’s core have identified an eastwards, or superrotation of the solid inner core, relative to Earth’s surface.

“The link is simply explained in terms of equal and opposite action,” explains Dr Philip Livermore, of the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds. “The magnetic field pushes eastwards on the inner core, causing it to spin faster than Earth, but it also pushes in the opposite direction in the liquid outer core, which creates a westward motion.”

The solid iron inner core is about the size of the Moon. It is surrounded by the liquid outer core, an iron alloy, whose convection-driven movement generates the geomagnetic field.

The fact that Earth’s internal magnetic field changes slowly, over a timescale of decades, means that the electromagnetic force responsible for pushing the inner and outer cores will itself change over time. This may explain fluctuations in the predominantly eastwards rotation of the inner core, a phenomenon reported for the last 50 years by Tkalčić et al. in a recent study published in Nature Geoscience.

Other previous research based on archeological artefacts and rocks, with ages of hundreds to thousands of years, suggests that the drift direction has not always been westwards: some periods of eastwards motion may have occurred in the last 3,000 years. Viewed within the conclusions of the new model, this suggests that the inner core may have undergone a westwards rotation in such periods.

A new rocket from Japan lifts off, 600 miles south of Tokyo, its makers hope it will be a cheaper and more efficient way of sending satellites into space.

The launch of the rocket, which is called the Epsilon, was broadcast live on Japanese television.

Footage showed a white, pencil-shaped rocket shooting into the sky from the launch pad. An on-board camera then captured the rocket mid-flight.

The H2A remains Japan’s primary rocket but officials hope the Epsilon will lead to improvements in the more costly H2A programme.

The rocket is about 24 metres (80 feet) tall, half the size of the H2A, and can be assembled and readied for launch in just one week, one-sixth of the time required for the H2A.

The Epsilon is the first new rocket design for Japan since the H2A was introduced in 2001 and it is hoped that it will make Japan more competitive in the international rocket-launching business.

An international team of researchers led by Oxford University have new dating evidence indicating when the earliest fully modern humans arrived in the Near East, the region known as the Middle East today. They have obtained the radiocarbon dates of marine shell beads found at Ksar Akil, a key archaeological site in Lebanon, which allowed them to calculate that the oldest human fossil from the same sequence of archaeological layers is 42,400-41,700 years old. This is significant because the age of the earliest fossils, directly and indirectly dated, of modern humans found in Europe is roughly similar. This latest discovery throws up intriguing new possibilities about the routes taken by the earliest modern humans out of Africa, says the study published online by the journal PLOS ONE.

The research team radiocarbon dated 20 marine shells from the top 15 metres of archaeological layers at Ksar Akil, north of Beirut. The shells were perforated, which indicates they were used as beads for body or clothes decoration by modern humans. Neanderthals, who were living in the same region before them, were not making such beads. The study confirms that the shell beads are only linked to the parts of the sequence assigned to modern humans and shows that through direct radiocarbon dating they are between 41,000-35,000 years old.

The Middle East has always been regarded as a key region in prehistory for scholars speculating on the routes taken by early humans out of Africa because it lies at the crossroads of three continents — Africa, Asia and Europe. It was widely believed that at some point after 45,000 years ago early modern humans arrived in Europe, taking routes out of Africa through the Near East, and, from there, along the Mediterranean rim or along the River Danube. However, this dating evidence suggests populations of early modern humans arrived in Europe and the Near East at roughly the same time, sparking a new debate about where the first populations of early humans travelled from in their expansion towards Europe and which alternative routes they may have taken.

In Ksar Akil, the Lebanese rockshelter, several human remains were found in the original excavations made 75 years ago. Unfortunately since then, the most complete skeleton of a young girl, thought to be about 7-9 years of age buried at the back of the rock shelter, has been lost. Lost also are the fragments of a second individual, found next to the buried girl. However, the team was able to calculate the age of the lost fossil at 40,800-39,200 years ago, taking into account its location in the sequence of archaeological layers in relation to the marine shell beads.

Another fossil of a recently rediscovered fragment of the upper jaw of a woman, now located in a museum in Beirut, had insufficient collagen to be dated by radiocarbon methods. A method using statistical modelling was used to date by association the jaw fragment at 42,400-41,700 years old.

Ksar Akil is one of the most important Palaeolithic sites in Eurasia. It consists of a 23 metre deep sequence of archaeological layers that lay undisturbed for thousands of years until a team of American Jesuit priests excavated the rockshelter in 1937-38, and again after the end of the WWII, in 1947-48. The cave layers were found to contain the human fossils and hundreds of shell beads, as well as thousands of stone tools and broken bones of hunted and consumed animals.

Study lead author Dr Katerina Douka, from the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, said: ‘This is a region where scholars have been expecting to find early evidence of anatomically and behaviourally modern humans, like us, leaving Africa and directly replacing Eurasian Neanderthal populations that lived there for more than 150,000 years. The human fossils at Ksar Akil appear to be of a similar age to fossils in other European contexts. It is possible that instead of the Near East being the single point of origin for modern humans heading for Europe, they may also have used other routes too. A maritime route across Mediterranean has been proposed although evidence is scarce. A wealth of archaeological data now pinpoints the plains of Central Asia as a particularly important but relatively unknown region which requires further investigation.’
The earliest European modern fossil, from Romania, dates to between 42,000-38,000 years before the present time, and specialists have estimated the age of Kent’s Cavern maxilla from southern England, between 44,000-41,000 years, and that of two milk teeth in southern Italy, at 45,000-43,000 years old. The new dating evidence from Ksar Akil is largely comparable to these ages, if not slightly younger.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated a new mechanism for extracting energy from light, a finding that could improve technologies for generating electricity from solar energy and lead to more efficient optoelectronic devices used in communications.

Dawn Bonnell, Penn’s vice provost for research and Trustee Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, led the work, along with David Conklin, a doctoral student. The study involved a collaboration among additional Penn researchers, through the Nano/Bio Interface Center, as well as a partnership with the lab of Michael J. Therien of Duke University.

“We’re excited to have found a process that is much more efficient than conventional photoconduction,” Bonnell said. “Using such an approach could make solar energy harvesting and optoelectronic devices much better.”

The study was published in the journal ACS Nano and was discussed at a press conference at the American Chemical Society National Meeting and Exhibition in Indianapolis today.

The new work centers on plasmonic nanostructures, specifically, materials fabricated from gold particles and light-sensitive molecules of porphyin, of precise sizes and arranged in specific patterns. Plasmons, or a collective oscillation of electrons, can be excited in these systems by optical radiation and induce an electrical current that can move in a pattern determined by the size and layout of the gold particles, as well as the electrical properties of the surrounding environment.

Because these materials can enhance the scattering of light, they have the potential to be used to advantage in a range of technological applications, such as increasing absorption in solar cells.

In 2010, Bonnell and colleagues published a paper in ACS Nano reporting the fabrication of a plasmonic nanostructure, which induced and projected an electrical current across molecules. In some cases they designed the material, an array of gold nanoparticles, using a technique Bonnell’s group invented, known as ferroelectric nanolithography.

The discovery was potentially powerful, but the scientists couldn’t prove that the improved transduction of optical radiation to an electrical current was due to the “hot electrons” produced by the excited plasmons. Other possibilities included that the porphyin molecule itself was excited or that the electric field could focus the incoming light.

“We hypothesized that, when plasmons are excited to a high energy state, we should be able to harvest the electrons out of the material,” Bonnell said. “If we could do that, we could use them for molecular electronics device applications, such as circuit components or solar energy extraction.”

To examine the mechanism of the plasmon-induced current, the researchers systematically varied the different components of the plasmonic nanostructure, changing the size of the gold nanoparticles, the size of the porphyin molecules and the spacing of those components. They designed specific structures that ruled out the other possibilities so that the only contribution to enhanced photocurrent could be from the hot electrons harvested from the plasmons.

“In our measurements, compared to conventional photoexcitation, we saw increases of three to 10 times in the efficiency of our process,” Bonnell said. “And we didn’t even optimize the system. In principle you can envision huge increases in efficiency.”

Devices incorporating this process of harvesting plasmon-induced hot electrons could be customized for different applications by changing the size and spacing of nanoparticles, which would alter the wavelength of light to which the plasmon responds.

“You could imagine having a paint on your laptop that acted like a solar cell to power it using only sunlight,” Bonnell said. “These materials could also improve communications devices, becoming part of efficient molecular circuits.”

Wallops Island, Virginia, Sept 07, 2013 – NASA has launched an unmanned spacecraft that aims to study the Moon’s atmosphere, the US space agency’s third lunar probe in five years.

Blazing a red path in the night sky, the spacecraft lifted off at 11:27 pm (Saturday 0327 GMT) aboard a converted Air Force ballistic missile known as the Minotaur V rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

“The spacecraft is in good health and a good orbit at this point,” said NASA commentator George Diller about half an hour after the launch.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) hopes to learn more about the atmosphere and dust while circling the Moon.

Launch manager Doug Voss said the maiden mission for the five-stage rocket operated by Orbital Sciences Corporation was “nearly picture-perfect.”

“It’s quite a great ending to what has been a fantastic mission, a very unique mission.”

When US astronauts last walked on the Moon four decades ago, they learned that dust could be a huge problem for sensitive spacecraft and equipment, said space expert John Logsdon.

“If we were ever to go there with people for long duration, the dust gets in everything. It’s not smooth dust like a piece of sand on the beach. It’s made of very, very small fragments,” said Logsdon, a NASA adviser and former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

“All the Apollo crews complained about the lunar dust getting everywhere.”US astronauts first walked on the Moon in 1969, and the last explorers of the Apollo era visited in 1972.

The Moon’s atmosphere is so thin that its molecules do not collide, in what is known as an exosphere. Exploring that exosphere will be a $280 million solar and lithium battery-powered spacecraft about the size of a small car – nearly eight feet (2.4 meters) tall and five feet wide. The journey to the Moon will take a full month.

When the spacecraft first enters the Moon’s orbit on October 6, it will cruise at a height of about 155 miles (250 kilometers) for 40 days, and then move lower at 12.4 to 37.3 miles from the surface for the science portion of its mission.

It is carrying an Earth-to-Moon laser beam technology demonstration and three main tools, including a neutral mass spectrometer to measure chemical variations in the lunar atmosphere and other tools to analyze exosphere gasses and lunar dust grains.

“These measurements will help scientists address longstanding mysteries, including: was lunar dust, electrically charged by solar ultraviolet light, responsible for the pre-sunrise horizon glow that the Apollo astronauts saw?”NASA said.

Other instruments will seek out water molecules in the lunar atmosphere. One hundred days into the science portion of the mission, LADEE will make a death plunge into the Moon’s surface.

The spacecraft was made in a modular design that aims to “ease the manufacturing and assembly process” and “drastically reduce the cost of spacecraft development,” NASA said.

This module could pave the way for unmanned probes to an asteroid or to Mars, as well as future Moon probes, though none are planned for now.

LADEE was conceived when NASA was planning to return humans to the Moon as part of the Constellation program, which President Barack Obama cancelled in 2010 for being over budget and redundant in its goals.

NASA’s next big human exploration project plans to send humans to Mars by the 2030s.

Recent NASA robotic missions include the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which returned troves of images detailing the Moon’s cratered surface, and the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), which revealed how being pummeled by asteroids resulted in the Moon’s uneven patches of gravity.

A previous NASA satellite, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), discovered water ice when it impacted in 2009, the space agency said.