#there is so much evidence for climate change. and even if there wasnt like what's the big deal with trying to take care of the world? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

transhumanitynet · 5 years

Text

The Future You That You Least Suspect

The other night my teenage boys asked me what was on my mind (likely looking for material to make fun of me. Just kidding, they’re thoughtful kids).

Instead of trying to “kid proof” my thoughts or rush the conversation, I wrote them this letter. First, to explain that I’m consumed by how we think about and where we look for answers to the biggest questions of our time (listed below), and second, to propose an alternative way of finding answers (hint: I found inspiration in an amoeba).

How are we going to address climate change before it creates global chaos?

What jobs will be available for my kids when they finish school? What should they study?

Over the next few decades, how will we re-train ourselves fast enough — again and again — to remain employed and useful as technology becomes more capable?

Can the human race cooperate well enough to solve our biggest problems or will the future simply overwhelm us?

Most importantly, where do we look to find answers to these questions?

Hopefully I didn’t ruin the possibility that my kids will ever again ask me what’s on my mind 🙂

Boys,

There is an old joke where a man is looking for his keys under a street light. Another person walks by and inquires, “Sir, are you certain you lost your keys here?”

“No” the man replies, “I lost them across the street.”

Confused, the stranger says, “Then why are you looking here?”

The man responded, “The light is much brighter here!”

Credit

This comic is as humorous as it is true. All too often, we each do this when we’re trying to solve something. It’s where our brains naturally take us first.

Our imaginations are constrained to the familiar (under the light), so we have a hard time finding answers to difficult questions and problems because the answers often lie in the unknown (or in the comic above, the darkness). Staying in the light is natural, easy, and intuitive, but this limits our discovery potential.

I. How to look in the dark?

History can give us some hints about how others found interesting things in the dark. For example, we discovered that:

the sun is the center of our planetary swarm

the earth is round

the physical world is a bunch of tiny, uncertain pieces governed by quantum physics

Before these became accepted truths, they were very difficult to imagine. This is part because they are non-obvious and also counter-intuitive to our everyday experience.

It’s also because we can’t know what is not known, which means we’re blind to what is yet to be discovered. Don’t believe me? Try to think of something you don’t already know. It’s impossible! That is, until you know it, and then it’s obvious.

Going back to the 5th question, how and where can we look today to find new unknowns (the dark) that help us solve our biggest problems? Where are today’s insights that are equivalent to the sun is the center of our planetary swarm?

I think the most exciting and consequential place to explore is not looking outside ourselves, but looking inside; in our own minds. This is where I see the most fruitful answers to the questions about your future and mine.

What if the next reality busting revolution happened to our very reality and consciousness? And if that happened, could the future of being human be entirely unrecognizable from our vantage point today? I hope so, because the answers to our challenges don’t appear under the lights we have turned on so far.

You’re probably thinking, c’mon Dad, this is crazy talk.

Well, it’s happened before.

II. Thanks Homo Erectus, We’ll Take it From Here

Our ancestor Homo erectus lived two million years ago and wasn’t equipped with our kinds of languages, abstractions, or technology. Homo erectus was possibly an inflexible learner as evidenced by the fact that they made the same axe for over 1 million years.

Imagine trying to explain to Homo erectus a complex phenomena of our modern day society, such as the stock market. You’d have to explain capitalism, economics, math, money, computers, and corporations — after extensive language training and the inevitable discussion of new axe design possibilities (of course, trying not to offend).

The supporting technological, cultural, and legal layers that enable the stock market to exist are the engines and evidence of our prosperity. It’s taken us thousands of years to develop this collective intellectual complexity. The point is, our brains are incredibly capable of evolving and adapting to new and more complicated things.

That our cognition evolved from Homo erectus demonstrates that we have radically evolved before.

III. Amoeba, You’re So Smart!

A few months ago, Japanese researchers demonstrated that an amoeba, a single-celled organism, was able to find near optimal solutions to the following question:

Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route a salesperson could take that visits each city only once and returns to the origin city? (image credit)

This is known as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), and classified as an NP-hard problem because the time needed to solve it grows exponentially as the number of cities increases.

Humans can come up with near optimal solutions using various heuristics and computers can execute algorithms to solve the problem using their processing power.

However, what’s unique is that Masashi Aono and his team demonstrated that the amoeba’s solution to the TSP is completely different than the way humans or computers have traditionally solved it.

That’s right, this amoeba is flexing on us.

(Note: it’s worth reading about the clever way they set up the experiment to allow the amoeba to solve the problem.)

This got me thinking: when we’re confronted with a problem, we use the tools at our disposal. For example, we can think, do math, or program a computer to solve it.

Professor Aono found a different tool for problem solving: a single-celled organism.

I know what you’re thinking, can the amoeba do my homework or take tests for me? It’s a good question!

Also, kudos to Aono and his team for searching in the dark — this experiment is non-obvious.

IV. Why Am I Telling You About Amoebas?

I strongly believe that we need a major cognitive revolution if we are to solve the global challenges we face. Our species evolved before and we can do it again, but we can’t wait a million years; we must accelerate this evolution.

What I’m saying is very hard to understand and imagine, because it’s in the dark. But bare with me.

The amoeba gives me hope because it didn’t evolve to solve the TSP. We augmented it with technology to accomplish something pretty amazing. Similarly, we haven’t evolved to deal with cooperating on a global scale, battle an invisible gas that warms our planet or retraining our brains every few years as AI takes over more of our work. How can we augment our own minds to allow us to take on these challenges?

Imagine a scenario where you are dressed head-to-toe in haptics (think Ready Player One) that allow you to experience and understand things by feeling changes in vibrations, temperature, and pressure.

Also imagine that you have a brain interface capable of both reading out neural activity and “writing” to your brain — meaning that certain communications can be sent directly into to your brain — the kind of stuff I’m building at Kernel.

Let’s call this a mind/body/machine interface (MBMI). It would basically wire you up to be like the amoeba in the experiment.

Now, what if you were given certain problems, such as the TSP, that your conscious and subconscious mind started working to solve? Imagine that instead of “thinking” about the problem, you just let your brain figure things out on it’s own — like riding a bike.

Would you come up with novel solutions not previously identified by any other person, computer or amoeba?

If we actually had the technology to reimagine how our brains work, over time, I bet that we’d get really good at it and be surprised with all the new things we can do and come up with. To be clear, this is not just “getting smarter” by today’s standards, this is about using our brains in entirely new ways.

Maybe that means that your school today would be in the museum of the future.

People would likely use these MBMIs to invent and discover, solve disagreements, create new art and music, learn new skills, improve themselves in surprising ways and dozens of other things we can’t imagine now.

When thinking about the possibilities, hundreds of questions come to my mind. For example, could we:

minimize many of our less desirable proclivities, individually and collectively?

become more wise as a species?

come up with original solutions to climate change and other pressing problems?

accelerate the speed someone learns (i.e. you get a new kind of PhD at age 12 versus the average of 31 today)

I wonder, is this what you will do at your job in 20 years? Would your mind change so much that it would be hard to recognize your 15 year old self?

Ultimately, for our own survival, we are in a race against time. We need to identify the problems that pose the greatest risks and respond fast enough so that we avoid a zombie apocalypse situation. The most important variable to avoid that: we need to be able to adapt fast enough.

I’m sure at this moment you’re thinking, woah, Dad, calm down!!

V. Your New Job — Being Really Weird (in a good way)

You’re right in wondering what jobs computers will take — if not all of them. They’ll do the boring things that adults do to make money, except far better and for far less money. But imagine a scenario where AI relieves you of 75% of your current day-to-day responsibilities, and is much better at doing those things than you. (I imagined what this world could look like)

A lot has been written, even movies made, about this scenario (e.g.Wall-E). If this happened, would you play fully immersive video games all day? Or live a life of pleasure and be work-free? Certainly possible, although those are linear extrapolations of what we are familiar with today — meaning that’s simply taking what we know today and mapping it into the future. The same thing as looking in the light.

What if millions or even billions of people could build careers by exploring new frontiers of reality and consciousness powered by MBMIs? These types of “weird” thought exercises may be breadcrumbs that extend the considerations we’re willing to make when thinking about our collective cognitive future.

These may be the starter tools that empower us to become Old Worldexplorers setting out for the New World, and journeying on the most exciting and consequential endeavor in human history — an expedition, inward, to discover ourselves.

Dad

orginally posted here:

https://medium.com/future-literacy/the-future-you-that-you-least-suspect-18cf63bd0061

The Future You That You Least Suspect was originally published on transhumanity.net

#climate change #kids #Parenting #Problem Solving #Thinking #crosspost #transhuman #transhumanitynet #transhumanism #transhumanist #thetranshumanity

0 notes

trendingnewsb · 6 years

Text

The Problem Isnt Just Trump. Its Our Ignorant Electorate.

For many of us, mornings have taken on a certain nauseating sameness. We roll out from beneath the blankets and, before the scent of coffee has reached our nostrils, we are checking the news feeds for the latest semi-literate tweet coughed up by the ranting, traitorous squatter occupying the Oval Office.

The rest of the day is spent in a kind of horrified suspension, holding our breath, waiting for whatever outrage will inevitably belch forth from the White Houseonce a bastion of seriousness and decorum, now ground zero for the demise of western democracy. How many lies will Trump spew today? Which dictators will he suck up to? Will he smear a Gold Star family? Attack a woman who dares to call out his smarmy predations? Unveil a puerile, racist nickname for a Senator or member of his own cabinet?

As much as we loathe it, however sickening it might have become, every day seems all about him, a former game show host and real estate failure, a hawker of rot-gut vodka and bullshit degrees from a fraudulent University who once styled himself as the Donald. The cable news shows lead with his most recent flatulence, the op-ed pages brim with intimations of doom, late night comedians are having a field day.

He is the president and, thus, bears watching. But we would be mistaken to think that he is truly the center of our universe, a man with a plan, commanding the heights, directing the action.

Virulent as he may be, Donald J. Trump is a symptom not the disease. Without us, he would amount to nothing more than what he had always been before the bizzaro presidential election of 2016: a foppish narcissist desperate for any measure of affirmation; a joke; a nothing. He did not create his voters. They have been there all along, seething with sometimes justifiable anger and suffering their various insecurities. They created and enabled Trump. And make no mistake, in all their vulnerable humanity, they are us: Gullible, compliant, distracted, marinating in irony.

At root, we the people are the problem.

We are understandably reluctant to impugn the intelligence and integrity of our fellow citizens. It is arrogant, uncivil, bad form. Who are we, any of us, to hold ourselves superior? When Hillary Clinton referred to some Trump supporters as deplorables, she was roundly castigated on all sides. How dare she? Yet it is an uncomfortable reality that anywhere from a fifth to a third of our electorate can be fairly (if gently) described as low-information voters. If the results of numerous polls and questionnaires are to be trusted, they know very little about the world they inhabit and what they do know is often woefully incorrect.

Surveys conducted every two years by the National Science Foundation consistently demonstrate that slightly more than half of Americans reject the settled science concerning human evolution. They are not unaware that virtually all credible scientists accept the overwhelming evidence that we evolved from earlier species. They simply choose not to accept that consensus because it doesnt comport with their deeply held beliefs. Many also embrace the absurd notion that the earth is only six thousand years old. Astonishingly, in the early 21st century, around a quarter of our citizenry seems unaware that said earth revolves around the sun.

It is a mistake to regard concern about such ignorance as effete snobbery or elitist condescension. While misapprehensions about basic astronomy, earth science and biology may have little impact on these folks daily lives, does anyone actually believe that similarly uninformed views arent likely to affect their grasp of policies regarding, say, climate change? Income inequality? Gun violence? Immigration?

Profound knowledge gaps like the aforementioned reveal an inability to think critically and leave a person vulnerable to all manner of chicanery. We are all ignorant about many things. Dont get me started on my dismal grasp of mathematics! But the hallmark of a sound education is not glorying in what you think you know, but, instead, appreciating the vastness of what you dont know.

If ignorance is the key that opens the door for charlatans like Trump, improved education, whether in school or in the public square, would seem to provide an obvious solution. But here we confront the perverse Dunning-Kruger Effect identified by psychologistsessentially, the less we know, the more certain we become of our superior knowledge. We have also discovered that exposure to facts and evidence does not always have the expected impact. Many people, when confronted by irrefutable proof that some core belief is incorrect, dont change their minds but dig in their heels. What feels right to them must be right and no amount logic and reasoning will dissuade them. Emotion trumps evidence.

Not too long ago, I fell into conversation with a woman aboard an airplane. Our chat somehow turned to health care. She offered the opinion that people who couldnt afford health insurance didnt deserve medical services. Why should she pay for someones care when they were obviously too lazy to earn their own money?

Because Im my own kind of fool, I rose to the bait. Did that mean they should be allowed to die in the street? I wondered. Well, no, she said. That would be inhumane. They could always go to an emergency room. So she was willing to pay for their care, I observed, but only in the least efficient, most expensive manner. This gave her momentary pause, but she quickly regrouped, simply repeating her prior assertion: Why should she pay? I didnt ask who she planned to vote for in the then-upcoming presidential election, but given that she had also voiced the opinion that women were, by virtue of their gender, unqualified to be news anchors, Im guessing it wasnt Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein.

She is hardly the worst example of an unthinking voter. Bill Maher once invited onto his show former GM Executive Bob Lutz. One supposes that such a fellow has benefited from an adequate education and that hes open to reason. Yet, when the subject of climate change arose, Lutz denied it was happening. A bunch of nonsense as far as he was concerned.

As it happened, Maher had also invited Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, educator and Director of the Hayden Planetarium. Tyson patiently explained why Lutz was misinformed. The planet was warming. Humans were largely to blame. This is how we know.

You might expect an educated person to respond by at least engaging on the topic. Tyson was, after all, vastly more knowledgeable on the subject at hand. Had their roles been reversed, with the topic being cars, I have no doubt he would have deferred to the automaker, asking questions, trying to improve the state of his own knowledge. Not Lutz. You could see him shutting down before Tyson had even warmed to the topic (no pun intended). As Upton Sinclair famously put it, Its hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.

youtube

Anyone who has watched the focus groups of Trump voters has seen this sorry dynamic played out again and again. Everything, no matter how tawdry or malicious, is excused or minimized. You get the feeling these folks would accept the sexual molestation of teenage girls as a trade-off for Neil Gorsuch. In fact, many did in supporting Roy Moore.

Welcome to the Post-Truth Era.

Much has been written about the impact social media and the internet in general have had on how people receive and absorb information. By now, we are all familiar with bots, trolls, phony scandals and the tendency of folks to hunker down in their own info-silos. The old adage that a lie is halfway round the world before the truth gets its socks on has never been more salient.

Consider the recent attacks on one of the young Parkland shooting survivors. A teenager who had just witnessed classmates being gunned down at his own school quickly discovered that speaking up for common-sense gun regulation resulted in vicious trolling and the viral lie that he was a paid crisis actor. This was similar to what befell the grieving families of the small children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Imagine waking one morning in a state of searing grief over the violent death of your baby to discover that some odious prankster like Alex Jones is telling his gullible audience that the whole tragic incident was staged, that your child was actually a paid performer doused in artificial gore and posed in a gruesome tableaux of death.

That Jones and his ilk have not been thoroughly shamed and driven from the public sphere says a lot about our growing tolerance for vile nonsense.

Trump did not invent Fake News. The Big Lie has been the stock in trade of con men and tyrants since time immemorial. But he understands its value. Alternative facts as his lickspittle factotum, Kellyanne Conway infamously put it, has long been his metier. Hes a bullshitter, a phony and now hes our president.

This shouldnt have happened. But we let it happen, though Trump did have plenty of help

Unsurprisingly, the Fox propaganda machine and any number of right-wing radio ranters enthusiastically clambered aboard the Trump Train. They were abetted by many in the mainstream media who, mindful that Trump lured eyeballs to advertisers and too timid to call him out as the carnival barker he so obviously was, went along for the ride. A number of Republicans in Congress dismissed him at first. But when it became clear he had a shot at winning and that his devotees comprised at least half of their party, they scurried to adopt him as their useful idiot.

Its true that we are not all equally culpable. Roughly three million more people voted for Trumps chief opponent. But the right-minded among us didnt do enough to forestall the plainly looming disaster. The proof of that is the Trump presidency itself.

So, if we in our various incarnations are the problem, then what is the solution? Is there any way out? Wed better hope so. Whats certain is that its on us. We made a wreck of our government and its up to us to fix it.

There are positive signs:

A once compliant media has begun to take the gloves off. Genuine conservatives, outraged that their movement has been hijacked by philistines, are sounding the alarm. People are rising up and calling BS. For every Sean Hannity there is a Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper or even Shepard Smith (at Fox News, no less!). For every Paul Ryan, there is a David Frum or Max Boot. Frothing crowds at CPAC are countered by the #MeToo movement and impressively eloquent teenagers fed up with politicians of any stripe who cower before the gun industry. On a good day, a John McCain or Jeff Flake will stand up to the cringing accommodationists in their own party. And, of course, Donald Trump himself, along with his corrupt lackeys, face a formidable foe in the person of Robert Mueller.

NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers recent testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee should mark a turning point, though he merely confirmed what has been apparent for some time: that even as our nation is under attack from a Russia determined to subvert our democracy, the president has not directed any relevant agencies to defend the country. This is a violation of the oath Trump swore on inauguration day and smacks of treason. We have entered uncharted waters.

Whats clear is that we need to use all non-violent resources at our disposal to rid ourselves and our country of the dangerous infection spreading from the White House into our body politic. These are not normal times and our usual reflexes will no longer suffice.

Trump is a problem of our own creation. We must become the solution.

Ron Reagan is an author and political commentator who lives in Seattle and Arezzo, Tuscany.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-problem-isnt-just-trump-its-our-ignorant-electorate

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2Daf3yw via Viral News HQ

#IFTTT #Viral News HQ

0 notes

topsolarpanels · 6 years

Text

Where global warming get real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, seeming down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to find why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

But its different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasas monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real day dramatising, in a sense the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a one-quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humen moved from hunting and meeting to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is met up in simply the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71 m sq km( 656,000 sq miles ), three times the size of Texas. At its belly from the top layer, yesterdays snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000 -1 30,000 years ago it reaches 3,200 metres( 10,500 ft) thick, virtually four times taller than the worlds highest skyscraper.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid stream, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and rapidly. In hypothesi, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would stimulate the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips-off scarcely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this sum of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would flood the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable angle. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for nearly a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document , among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is vanishing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as weather permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight schemes prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly changing ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that aimed its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launching next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS technologists, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I insured there were specialists who have, over the course of nearly 10 years on this mission, mastered the arts and science of polar data hunting while, at the same day, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has disintegrated in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding aircraft, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa technologists sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to see what they were assuring, to see the facts. What they told me revealed something about what it means to be a US federally money climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me uncovered even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a weather meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy climate office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag explained to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can produce unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the last decade of his life( Im away from home so much its likely why Im not married ). But at pre-flight weather meetings, polar ice is largely of fear to him for the quirky style it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight hour. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight time is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the weather and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight time, a lot of taxpayers money, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric conditions. He checks the climate the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With weather, there is no is. Whats required is the ability to grasp constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he said, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had made the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his reads in order to better navigate his expeditions shifting conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the climate meeting, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photograph: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

On that day, as it turned out, Sonntag was more worried about pilot visibility. You know, so we dont fly into a mountain, he explained, without taking his eyes off the blob dancing across the monitors. That kind of thing.

A few weeks before I fulfilled Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What stimulates this real to you? The topic had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I honestly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece coat and baseball cap, and his exuberances and mellowed ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that topic was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What attains it real ? I mean, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gas turned solid, almost sending it straight down into Antarctica, directly on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A team of polar scientists from across the US situateds the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at the construction and installing of the scientific instruments, and he is the person in the field responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for making sure that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter probably had something else in intellect. The melting of ice, the rising water, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what builds that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal regions. A conservative estimation holds that waters will rise approximately 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we dont know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen repository of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it.

First built during the cold warto track Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by technologists sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us find the specific characteristics in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulsings through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has also helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and valleys, and also a clear opinion of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa repeats its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The path of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to devise a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish glee( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for instance, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant canyon system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flow behind them, have decreased and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers situate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an epoch when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing corpuscles of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what builds this real for him. Behind even well-meaning topics is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has stimulated it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate arrangement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related funds from the federal budget this year. When the White House recently proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media has enabled them along by interring the story under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budgetary support deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dog on Mars.

The US built Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still maintain a small airbase there. In 1951, America constructed a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly kept armed atomic weapon. In one of naval history more ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, generated a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland gives the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice tunnels nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear rockets. In 1968, at the high levels of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A fire, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapon hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed quickly through passport control, but our pouches were nowhere find work. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial airplane at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our pouches still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the bags hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my embarrassment, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, the man told me, was actually merely one guy, who had a propensity to mysteriously disappear.

By the route, he added conspiratorially. You know customs here has a special arrangement with the Americans. The customs guy, the stranger told me, turns a blind eye to liquor headed to the US Air Force bar on the other side of the airfield.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres only ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles airplane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butt. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting one another with astound and hugs, because the last time they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photo: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I ultimately got my container, I stimulated my way down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was remain. But before I met the crew, I fulfilled the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low humming, like a shamen chant, was accompanied by the pleasant aroma of gently cooking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily rite of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and fragrance it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any route of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is determining cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard breaches in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew “was talkin about a” their P-3 they sometimes voiced as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is astonishingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark humour, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was staring at a photo of his children on his phone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually hollered Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sat there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, courtesy of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several each member of Congress. As one engineer put it to me, We just get nervous, honestly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed border wall .) If the government shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was en route to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the governmental forces in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant truly talking here that without feeling those feelings again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in anxiety of a shutdown of their work by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The impression in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launch, was of change workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least concerned with gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

Shortly before our 9am takeoff, I asked Sonntag what the plane should feel like when everything was going well what should I be looking for? He smiled sheepishly. To be honest, if you assure people sleeping, thats a good sign.

On the eight-hour flights, ensure engineers asleep at their stations meant international instruments below their feet were blithely collecting data. For some stretchings, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were spent flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or simply flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This permeating somnolence the hypnotic hum of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which devoted them the appear of sons in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, devoted the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier widens across the land. The eye immediately grasps that the ice is a being on the move, positively exploding ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photograph: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a very different view from that assured by novelists in past centuries, who saw this scenery, if at all, by boat or, more likely, from a depict. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of demise and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snows a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old narratives discontinued. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar decideds spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, die gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Deem that whiteness, which so frightened Melville and Poe, who objective his Antarctic tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snow and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep globes climate cool; the loss of all this white material means more hot is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other routes, including moderating climate patterns, the ice helps makes life on globe more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling dread in 19 th-century readers, actually stimulate the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be seen even in that typical term of praise for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is intimately connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripples of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flow, I considered the same strong hand that profoundly etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were made by shifting ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have expended the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low mounds smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice gave shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the lives of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is merely our ignorance that attains us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this scenery, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulp of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of nervousnes from the data hunters. At the same day that were getting better at assembling this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the witticism floating around the crew. I heard one engineer joke that it might be easier to merely rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do upkeep on that, he pointed out.

In another conversation, about how to increase public awareness about climate change in the US, I asked one of the senior crew members whether they would greet a novelist from Breitbart aboard one of these flights.

Oh, utterly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing up there. I believe sitting on this plane, assuring the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it said over and over again: merely stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already steeped in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing reply. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfy chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, a specialist in ice, got pedantic, telling me that there existed others more qualified to speak about rising sea level. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the confidence of a leading expert in the field. The off-the-record view expressed wasnt simply one of sober arrangements with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all assured the graphs !

The tonal discrepancies between this off-the-record answer and the taped answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I believed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, looking down at the red record sunlight. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I entail, if Nixon

The researcher chuckled a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the days headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the present US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the procession?

But the earnest question was only met with silence and a few jokes. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talking here trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the plan was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed relieved that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science meeting, beers in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont seem to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the day before. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing answer: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the sung Angie over and over again, creating a pleasantly mesmerising impact. Two crew members talked of killer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling stories. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had assured a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew spent his off-days on excursions with a camera-equipped drone, and had attained spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they gathered around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something moving in considering these people who had spend all day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now expending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon snuck into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage recently shot at the Thule base. The video indicated some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted cement bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft rockets. Today its simply an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, only a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the wreckings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

An engineer chipped a shard off the frozen block harvested the day before. Perhaps sensing my mood, he dropped it into a glass and poured me some whiskey over ice older than America and said: Well anyway, maybe thisll cheer you up.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which inspired one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because that approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched under a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Maybe its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and only do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chatter stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets run. Its is high time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post Where global warming get real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole appeared first on Top Rated Solar Panels.

from Top Rated Solar Panels http://ift.tt/2B88r4d via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Top Rated Solar Panels

0 notes

apsbicepstraining · 7 years

Text

7 Grounds That Feline Are Way Superior to Bird-dog

I dont believed to be any greater illustration of mankinds superiority at the top of the food chain than the facts of the case that we allow other swine into our dwellings for some mild presentation and intimacy. Sure, there are instances of cross-species relationships across the animal kingdom, but humans are the only species that are doing it exclusively for the recreation. Its various kinds of odd in a way.

When it comes to allowing animals to poop in our homes, “theres” two species that are more popular than any other: dogs and felines. Most beings prefer puppies, but most people also considered that the plural of Oreo is Oreos”. In both specimen, theyre wrong; the plural of Oreo is, in fact, “Oreo”, and felines are objectively better than dogs when it comes to being domesticated pets. Before you break down my entrance with lamps and pitchforks, Id invite you to hear me out.

1. Cat are altogether less labor

First things first: I will admit that the life of a bird-dog proprietor is full of awesome activities. You can take your furry friend out for feet, play retrieve on the beach, or school him nifty tricks. My cat, on the other mitt, liked to cry at my space at six in the morning until I fed her, at which point she would fall asleep and reject me for most of the working day. It can be a major bummer if you’re looking for a companion to do recreation trash with all the time, but as somebody with a more relaxed life, I’m reasonably happy to have an animal that will( chiefly) gives people cavity. I spend most of my weekends going out until the wee hours of the morning, and the last event I need in my life is to have to wake up early on a cold December morning with a hangover so I can pick up fresh, steaming poo, trying urgently not to upchuck. Cats aren’t going to bark frantically every time someone hoops my bell, they’re not going to eat my shoes or tear up my sofa, and if I tried to take my feline outside and stimulate her fetch a lodge for hours at a time, she’d look at me as if I was on dopes. She respects my time, and I respect hers. It’s a completely independent relationship.

2. Dogs give their love unconditionally, a cat’s cherish is gave

If youre a hound proprietor, youll possibly has been extremely used to your canine acquaintance accosting you with hundreds of thousands of pokes and furiously wagging posterior, as if he wasnt aware youd ever return( perhaps because he wasnt ). One of the sticks dog owners will beat cat fans with is the notion that your cat doesnt love you, or attend if “youre living” or croak. That categorically isnt true; cats adoration their humen even more than they cherish nutrient, and if youve got a “cat-o-nine-tail”, youll know theyre just as fond as any dog in their own lane. I find that it takes time and try before your feline obliges the decision to love you, and until youve proven yourself worthy of that ardour, a cat will consider you with the lethargy and defiance such a stranger deserves. Dogs are manic pellets of desiring tendernes, but there’s no animal better than a “cat-o-nine-tail” at uttering the feeling “you aint s ***, motherf *** er” until you demonstrate yourself worthwhile. A pup may plow every stranger with a high level of interest or excite, but a cat will bide its age, watch and celebrate, before opening its mettle to a human. To me, a cat’s charity simply intends more.

3. Feline are actually useful around the house

As you may already know, the common hound tumbled from the noble wolf, domesticated and multiplied over thousands of years to craft the perfect house baby. Cats, on the other handwriting, various kinds of only proved up one day and started chilling in people’s dwellings. Ancient DNA evidences cats pretty much domesticated themselves, and that’s in part due to the fact that the relationship between the bag of cats and people is naturally more symbiotic than that between bird-dogs and people, where there’s a clear hierarchy of ruler and topic. If you’ve ever come home to find a bird or squirrel carcass on your doorstep, you know that cats are moderately efficient hunters, and if you have a pest problem, they’re really useful for catching mice. I’m not sure I’m any better for having watched my “cat-o-nine-tail” catch a large moth, toy with it as it furiously tried to escape particular extinction, and eat it before vomiting it back up again, but it’s exactly an example of the subtle scout labour a feline gets through in the home( in between its 14 hours of sleep a era ). Yeah, I know that some dogs were multiplied for specific tasks like herding or fox hunting, but when was the last time you owned that many sheep?

4. Cats are generally more enjoyable to be around

A common misconception with cats and dogs is the idea that puppies are stupid, over-exuberant animals, while felines are cold, calculating executioners who could destroy you at any second. In world, “cat-o-nine-tails” are just as, if not more stupid, than your median hound. Bird-dogs are like that guy you knew at school who had mediocre points and spend all his time at the gym, but now passes a successful bodybuilding business. Cats, on the other mitt, can be like that university flatmate you had that seemed really smart or musing and was doing a really complicated route, but managed to spate the laundry room by trying to soak a duvet( spoiler alerting: I was that flatmate ). A cat will try to jump-start between kitchen bars, spectacularly underestimate the distance, fall to the field with a accident, slam and bang, and still has the fearlessnes to give you a stare that mentions: “what the f *** are you looking at? ” Watching a cat around the dwelling as it gets confused by waterbeds, DVD players or even cucumbers is a great way to pass the time, and there’s a good reason that YouTube is utterly full to the edge of feline videos. Hounds are lovely and fond and cuddly, but they’re not specially good at retaining me entertained.

5. They’re better for the environment

I’m going to be straight with you: owning any sort of domestic domesticated, especially one that eats flesh, is not particularly great for those of us who don’t is argued that climate change isa deceive developed by the Chinese. A 2009 book published by Robert and Brenda Vale, entitled( a little controversially) Occasion to Ingest the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living, talks about the massive ecological footprint a domestic companion racks up, calibrating the environmental damage in a component announced “global hectares”. A medium-sizeddog has the footprint of around 0.84 hectares, far more than the carbon footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser( or the commonwealth of Vietnam ), while a cat’s footprint is comparable to that of aVolkswagen Golf, possibly because they’re a lot smaller. I signify, it’s not as as good as leading wholly pet-less, but I’m sure Mother Nature will thank me for electing feline over canine. Eventually.

6. They’re cheaper, extremely

When you take home your “cat-o-nine-tail” for the first time, there are some things you’ll need to pick up before. You need to get a collar, offspring container, food … but that’s good-for-nothing in comparison to a dog. First off, because dogs have often been much greater, you’ll have to dish out a lot of currency per month on hound food, but even the dogs of comparable lengths ingest a lot more of your hard-earned currency( and if they get emphasized enough, literally your billfold as well ). Spending money on leashes, grooming discipline class or even ridiculously expensive munch toys are actually leave you broke at the end of the month, while your feline is entertained by a scratching post, a couple of plaything mouse and whatever random cardboard casket you have lying around the house. They pretty much bridegroom themselves, very. The ASPCA even backs me up on this one: a study found that felines are room cheaper than your median hound, to the sing of up to $800 a year.

7. Yes, felines are kind of yanks … but that’s why they’re awesome

I’ve written this side-by-side compared to a lot of enjoy , not to mention anecdotes, but I’ve got to level with you here: my feline is an a ** gap. When she’s not riling me on purpose, waking me up at pornographic hours or invariably trying to knock me off balance while I tie lightbulbs, she’s purporting scratchings at me and climbing up on my plateful as I try to eat something. Here’s the thing, though: I enjoy her. Don’t get me wrong; bird-dogs are great, but even with the monstrous ones, I seem as if they’re mostly innocuous, and the idea of manhandling me never spans their memories. With my “cat-o-nine-tail”, I have no doubt that she’d to continue efforts to sever my carotid vein if I so much as look back her funny, and that’s the same reasons she’s enormous. Even when she’s dragging a dead fowl into my front room or looking instantly at me as she use her litter casket, I know that she could destroy me if she so desired, and that builds it additional sweetened when she doesn’t. I don’t know about you, but I think that most movie rogues would be jug to hang out with than the heroes; who’d want to get a brew with Luke Skywalker or Batman when you are able to chill with Darth Vader or the Joker? Sure, they’d maybe try to kill you, but should you come out alive, you won’t be able to say you didn’t have fun.

Well, there you have it, “cat-o-nine-tail” suitors and hound suitors. Of trend, to each their own, and I don’t visualize I’ll have altered all of you to cat admirers. I do hope, nonetheless, that some of you preparing the decision to get a “cat-o-nine-tail” or a pup will look at the entertainment-based, financial and environmental perk, and acquire the best choice. You’d be barking mad not to.

The post 7 Grounds That Feline Are Way Superior to Bird-dog appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2vaSTMS via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

vitalmindandbody · 7 years

Text

Calm down, Game of Thrones followers, spoilers aren’t the end of the world | Gareth McLean

Fans were livid when Ian McShane let slip some forthcoming plan details but surely spoilers simply sharpen the appetite

Loose lips allows one to subside carries. Of course, this was back when most events mattered, in the 20 th century when we had world wars and menaces of nuclear armageddon. But even living with the ever-present danger of being subjected to dissolving up like the characters off Threads, it at least felt as if parties were worrying about the right things. Scarier, but somehow simpler times.

Today, it seems that our collective psychological barometer is so out of hit that while most people seem to be entirely sanguine about the arriving tragedy of climate change, they fuss, fear, rampage and are concerned about “the worlds largest” banal, insignificant happens. With no carries to scupper, it seems that careless whisperings still injure, but they do more damage to people gratification of their favourite Tv programs than anything. Sometimes youd were of the view that spoilers were a short bounce from hate speech.

Actor Ian McShane is the latest to feel his audiences wrath specific, love of Game of Thrones. For, in the course of doing interviews to publicise the brand-new serial( position done there, Ian, well done !) McShane let slip some major details of the upcoming floors that infuriated some. This advance knowledge would have been hard enough for most Game of Thrones followers can be a po-faced bunch. That McShane then lent revile to injury by rejecting the serial as nonsense about tits and dragons did nothing to alleviate followers furrowed brows.

At this stage, Im not entirely sure what their displeasure is comprised of. Itll either be the vengeful carnage of his entire family on what should have been a glad daylight for them, or itll be some croak on Twitter and some very detailed line drawing of him in reputation. Either space, its a lesson that he wont forget in a hurry.

You may, quite rightly, be allowed to attribute the incommensurate sorenes about spoilers to the irate souls wonky internal barometer because in my own experience, it is always incommensurate exasperation that responds the unwieldy resound of a dropped spoiler. Attributing this( over) reaction to the other persons dodgy mental wire would be a great way to avoid accepting any blame: this person who I thought was my friend and is now very upset because I disclosed who Kylo Ren really is in Star Wars is clearly an excitable and knotty nightmare and I must henceforth avoid them.

But such theory doesnt assistant where reference is not just their disproportionate response you have to deal with. There are your own more. The regret “youre feeling” if, just for example, you accidentally made a acquaintance whos a big fan of The Good Wife far too much notes the fact that Will Gardner was going to be killed off? Its icky and sticky and, every so often, it pops back into your premier to remind you that you devastated a friends pleasure of something they liked. Then, perhaps because you have a tendency to catastrophise, it isnt long before you decide that youre a socially clumsy nitwit that no one really likes regardless. Every avalanche starts with one snowflake.

But I cant help but think that this singular prickliness about spoilers is insane and old-fashioned. True , no one wants every twist and turn of a brand-new drama or novel telegraphed to them but most people want to be intrigued, to be tantalised, to be tantalized. Theres a pleasure to be had in a certain kind of advised prospect, of knowing the floor already a spectacular irony.

The last-place performance of the last Shakespeare play would have been hundreds of years ago if people were wired not to want to hear the same storeys, or versions of them, over and over again. We take more consolation in familiar floors than their familiarity reproductions disregard in us. Theres something about being accustomed to a narrative that can be reassure, even if the narrative itself is dark, distressing or difficult.

And thats as true of real life as it is of myth. Its one of the reason why so many secreted captives reoffend to get sent back to jail its the only narrative they are aware, and theres convenience in it. And its why the cold war was bewildering there was a perverse convenience to be had living in the shade of mutually assured termination, a consolation that numerous Americans evidently still miss if the notoriety of Donald Trumps sabre-rattling is anything to go by.

And Id argue that spoilers have a part to play in sharpening cravings, creating anticipation, placing panoramas. After all, most of us are grown-ups now and, as sure as we know that happy-ever-afters dont subsist, we should also know that having advance knowledge of scheme twistings does not annul further viewing of the programme in question. Because story what happens isnt the same as that used legend why what happens happens. The real grist of a storey its heart and soul and bones isnt the events that undid or the incidents that occur: its how the specific characteristics deal with whats happening to them.

Stories arent enormous or compelling or timeless because dramatic stuffs happen in them. Theyre great and dramatic and compelling because of how the characters cope with their lives. And in personas lives and fights, we attend our own. If a few spoilers peril a storys vitality, it genuinely wasnt often of a legend in the beginning. Likewise, stuns are overrated. A surprise is just a disturbance that you have to look pleased about.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post Calm down, Game of Thrones followers, spoilers aren’t the end of the world | Gareth McLean appeared first on vitalmindandbody.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2rFz1vi via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

viralhottopics · 7 years

Text

Armando Iannucci on Donald Trump: ‘This is the best moment, isn’t it?’

An open letter to the new president, from the creator of Veep and The Thick of It

Even when silent, you sound loud. You are, in fact, an avalanche of contradictions: real and unreal, scary yet amusing, fact and fiction rolled into one like a little rubber Mount Rushmore blown up to actual size by the use of helium. You confuse us. We want to laugh at your stumbles, but are petrified by what those stumbles may lead to. You are the worst person ever; and yet not as bad as Mike Pence.

But you do have a definite sense of purpose. While Hillary Clinton hedged and played the game, you said it straight. Youve been very clear: deport, build, repeal, replace. Everywhere you go, you shatter ossified politics. You slice through frozen convention like an icebreaker: set on a steady forward direction, leaving a stinking slick of oil and dead fish parts in its wake.

It was worth it, though, because of where you are now. This is the best moment, isnt it? Just as youve taken the oath of office, but still not worn down by that office. Frozen in your moment of history. All those doubters, the mewling enemies and haters, are silenced now: you are the 45th president of the US. Thats a fact. Its true.

They used to tease you about your attitude to the truth, didnt they? All your post-reality fictoid-facts, like how global warming was a myth invented by the Chinese, how you respected all women without exception, except the greedy, grasping, ugly ones who were trying to suck you dry, how Obama wasnt born in America, and also how you put everyone right when you said he was.

And that rigged election: you had evidence the election was rigged against you and you were going to lose, and then, when you won it fair and square, you had proof you would have won it even more fairly and squarely had it not been rigged against you so you couldnt win so bigly. And now they say the Russians rigged the election, and you say the election wasnt rigged, it was never rigged, and youve been saying for months: it was never rigged.

Some screwball no-mark in some pointless department will end up saying the wrong thing about China. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Yes, you were mocked nightly by damp-souled liberals who joked you couldnt tell fact from fantasy. Well, guess what? If you now tweeted, I am the 45th president of the United States, not a single person would doubt you. Because its true. Youre the president. Fact! No scientist, no economist, no so-called expert can call you out. You are literally the most important man on Earth, in the solar system, maybe even the galaxy. Right now, everything in the universe revolves around you.

But then comes the hard bit. The bit after this week. The rest of the presidency. Thats the bit others say cant be controlled. Something will go wrong. Some screwball no-mark in some pointless department will answer a letter to an elector, and end up saying the wrong thing about China, or single moms, or car manufacturers, or dyslexia, thinking that theyre echoing your opinion. Then your enemies will report it, and then people will think it came from you. Then your press secretary will deny thats what you meant and blame the no-mark, and name her. Then the no-mark will complain about sexism or bullying or some such artificial crime. Then youll act big, go against expectations, and apologise to that person.

Then some other people, your enemies, will imply youre a pussy. Your staff who attacked her and defended you, will express annoyance that you are contradicting what theyre saying. Then the person you apologised to, well, shell get arrogant and say how upset she was by what happened, and then youll have to tweet what she was really like when you met her, how annoying she was, how shes just looking for a bigger job and a TV contract, and how youre going to ask Congress to look into that department she works for and find out whats going on.

But, even then, it wont go away, and therell be maybe a hundred other little, stupid stories like that which will never leave you alone, all because other people are fools and losers. And so one night, youll tweet something bad about China and single moms and car manufacturers and dyslexics, all in one tweet, and the whole cycle will start all over again, and take up so much time, itll look like that wall will never get built.

And so, for the next four years, youll try to do stuff. With luck, the next eight years. (If your plan comes right, the next 12, even 16 years, too.) But this crap will keep coming up, wont it? This not-smart, so-overrated nonsense from the false media, determined to undermine you. Theyll say youre mishandling foreign affairs, causing conflict and hardship, arousing enmity, bitterness and division. Its all designed to make people not like you, isnt it? But you can get round that. You will tell people, again and again, that they do like you. That everything else theyve heard isnt true. And it will work. It always works.

If a war breaks out, isnt it more efficient to persuade people that it isnt happening? Photograph: John Gurzinski/AFP/Getty Images

You will explain that the things that come from your mouth are not necessarily the things that come from your heart. You will remind people that things are true not when they are real but when you believe them. You will urge the media to concentrate on covering peoples fears and feelings, rather than the dull objects and information that clutter up their potentially beautiful lives.

Why dont crime reporters report that people feel a bit funny about Mexicans? Why dont economists measure how freaked out people are about what might happen to their jobs one day, especially if your enemies were in charge? Why dont the weather people point out, at the end of the show, just how everyone is feeling so much better because of the work youre doing, and how thats making them cope with whatever rain or cloud comes their way? Why dont newscasters show the graphs that prove that anyone who fires a gun in America might well be a Muslim?

Of course, the liberal media will have fun, wont they, doing their little crazy skits about how theres no need for reporters any more because we just have to say whatever it is we think sounds true. Over now to our Chief-Bad-Feeling-About-China correspondent; We join our crime correspondent live outside the home of a suspicious couple new to the neighbourhood who keep themselves to themselves; And thats all weve got time for. Join us tomorrow night at seven for another edition of What The Hells Going On? Unfunny. You havent seen these skits (they havent been written), but theyre just so lame, arent they?

No, how you govern will be so special, and so different from that pathetic portrayal. Youre going to bring into your administration a whole heap of talented people who will oversee a climate change in the way facts are considered. You will bring in financial experts who will reassure everyone that, no matter what the markets say, everyone is, in fact, fine. You will bring in law experts who will prove categorically that anyone who feels their civil liberties are being infringed are themselves infringing the civil liberties of the vast majority who voted to change them. And, above all, you will persuade everyone, especially those who tell you that you polled nearly three million votes fewer than Hillary, that you do have a mandate since you believe you do, and it feels like the vast majority of people believe you do, too. And thats evidence no money can buy.

Thats how you will govern. Properly, effectively. Why, if the economy goes bad, or promised laws arent passed, or a war breaks out, why spend time and money and precious energy dealing with those things? Isnt it more efficient to persuade people that they arent happening? Think what money that would save, putting dollars back in the pocket of every American. You will do a deal with the American people, a great big beautiful deal, the ultimate deal, and they will absolutely love it. What youve done is started a revolution, a movement. Youve taught people to believe not what is empirically true but what is emotionally true, which is a better truth. Youve set free the credulity of the people.

So here is another undeniable fact. Soon the consequences of what you are doing will spread throughout the world. And, once done, they cant be undone. Yes, you will be remembered for a very, very long time. Fact.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2iWnsvs

from Armando Iannucci on Donald Trump: ‘This is the best moment, isn’t it?’

#Armando Iannucci on Donald Trump: ‘This is the best moment #isn’t it?’

0 notes

topsolarpanels · 7 years

Text

Where global warming get real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, appearing down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to ensure why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a one-quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humans moved from hunting and meeting to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is gathered up in only the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71 m sq km( 656,000 sq miles ), three times the size of Texas. At its belly from the top layer, yesterdays snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000 -1 30,000 years ago it reaches 3,200 metres( 10,500 ft) thick, nearly four times taller than the worlds highest skyscraper.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid stream, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and quickly. In hypothesi, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would build the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips barely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this quantity of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would flood the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable slant. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for almost a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document , among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is disappearing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as climate permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight schemes prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly shifting ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that objective its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launch next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS technologists, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I assured there were specialists who have, over the course of almost 10 years on this mission, mastered the art and science of polar data hunting while, at the same hour, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has crumbled in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding airplane, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to find what they were seeing, to see the facts. What they told me uncovered something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me uncovered even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a climate meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy weather office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag to present to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can make unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the past decades of their own lives( Im away from home so much its probably why Im not married ). But at pre-flight climate meetings, polar ice is largely of fear to him for the quirky style it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight day. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight hour is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the weather and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight time, a lot of taxpayers fund, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric condition. He checks the weather the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With climate, “were not receiving” is. Whats required is the ability to comprehend constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he said, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had stimulated the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his reads in order to better navigate his expeditions shifting conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the weather session, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photo: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

On that day, as it turned out, Sonntag was more worried about pilot visibility. You know, so we dont fly into a mountain, he explained, without taking his eyes off the blobs dancing across the monitors. That kind of thing.

A few weeks before I met Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What builds this real to you? The question had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I frankly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece jacket and baseball cap, and his enthusiasms and mellow ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that question was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What constructs it real ? I entail, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gasolines turned solid, almost sending it straight down into Antarctica, immediately on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A squad of polar scientists from across the US situates the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at its design and installation of the scientific instruments, and he is the person in the field responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for making sure that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter likely had something else in mind. The melting of ice, the rising water, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what stimulates that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise approximately 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we dont know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen archive of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it.

First built during the cold warto way Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by engineers sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us find the specific characteristics in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulsings through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has also helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and canyons, and also a clear position of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa recurs its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The track of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to devise a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish mirth( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for example, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant canyon system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flow behind them, have decreased and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers situate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an epoch when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing tinges of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what attains this real for him. Behind even well-meaning questions is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has made it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate agreement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related monies from the federal budget this year. When the White House lately proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media helped them along by interring the narrative under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budget supports deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dogs on Mars.

The US constructed Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still preserve a small airbase there. In 1951, America built a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly maintained armed atomic weapon. In one of naval historys most ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, made a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland dedicates the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice passageways nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear rockets. In 1968, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A fire, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapon hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed promptly through passport control, but our pouches were nowhere to be found. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial aircraft at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our containers still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the pouches hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my embarrassment, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, the man told me, was actually simply one guy, who had a propensity to mysteriously disappear.

By the style, he added conspiratorially. You know customs here has a special arrangement with the Americans. The customs guy, the stranger told me, turns a blind eye to liquor headed to the US Air Force bar on the other side of the airfield.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres merely ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles plane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butts. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting one another with astonish and hugs, because the last period they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photo: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I finally got my purse, I built my style down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was staying. But before I fulfilled the crew, I met the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low humming, like a shamen chant, was accompanied by the pleasant odor of gently cooking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily rite of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and odor it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any style of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is observing cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard breaches in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew talked about their P-3 they sometimes sounded as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is amazingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark witticism, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was look at this place a photo of his children on his telephone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually screamed Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sat there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, politenes of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several members of Congress. As one technologist put it to me, We simply get nervous, frankly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed border wall .) If the governmental forces shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was en route to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the government in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant genuinely talking here that without feeling those emotions again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in dread of a shutdown of the performance of their duties by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The impression in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launch, was of shift workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least concerned with gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

On the eight-hour flights, ensure technologists asleep at their stations meant international instruments below their feet were merrily collecting data. For some stretches, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were spent flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or merely flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This pervasive somnolence the hypnotic humming of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which gave them the looking of boys in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, dedicated the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier extends across the land. The eye immediately grasps that the ice is a animal on the move, positively exploding ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photo: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a most varied opinion from that considered by writers in past centuries, who saw this landscape, if at all, by barge or, more likely, from a describe. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of death and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snowfalls a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old tales terminated. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar puts spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, succumb gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Deem that whiteness, which so terrified Melville and Poe, who aims his Antarctic saga The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snow and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep earths climate cool; the loss of all this white material entails more heat is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other ways, including moderating weather patterns, the ice helps induces life on globe more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling fear in 19 th-century readers, actually stimulate the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be detected even in that typical term of praise for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is intimately connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripplings of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flowing, I ensure the same strong hand that deep etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were make use of shifting ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have expended the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low hills smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice devoted shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the well-being of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is merely our ignorance that attains us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this landscape, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear express of nervousnes from the data hunters. At the same period that were getting better at gathering this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the humor floating around the crew. I heard one engineer gag that it might be easier to simply rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do maintenance on that, he pointed out.

In another dialogue, about how to increase public awareness about climate change in the US, I asked one of the senior crew members whether they would welcome a novelist from Breitbart aboard one of these flights.

Oh, utterly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing up there. I believe sitting on this plane, considering the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it said over and over again: simply stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already immersed in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing respond. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfy chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, functional specialists in ice, get pedantic, telling me that there were others more qualified to speak about rising sea level. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the trust of a resulting expert in the field. The off-the-record opinion conveyed wasnt simply one of sober arrangements with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all insured the graphs !

The tonal difference between this off-the-record answer and the videotapeed answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I supposed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, looking down at the red recording illumination. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I entail, if Nixon

The researcher laughed a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the days headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the current US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the procession?

But the earnest topic was only met with silence and a few gags. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talk about trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the plan was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed relieved that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science session, beers in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont appears to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the day before. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about persons under the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing reply: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the sung Angie over and over again, creating a pleasantly mesmerising effect. Two crew members talked of killer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling tales. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had assured a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew spent his off-days on excursions with a camera-equipped droning, and had constructed spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they collected around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something are moving forward watching these people who had spend the working day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now spending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon crept into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage lately shot at the Thule base. The video presented some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted concrete bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft weapons. Today its only an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, merely a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the ruinings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which inspired one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because such an approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched under a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Perhaps its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and just do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chattering stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets go. Its is high time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post Where global warming get real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole appeared first on Top Rated Solar Panels.

from Top Rated Solar Panels http://ift.tt/2y39zVE via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Top Rated Solar Panels

0 notes

topsolarpanels · 7 years

Text

Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, seeming down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to assure why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humans moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is collected up in just the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid river, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and rapidly. In theory, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would stimulate the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips-off scarcely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this sum of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would inundate the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable slant. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for nearly a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document, among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is vanishing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as weather permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight plans prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly changing ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that ended its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launching next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS engineers, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I saw there were specialists who have, over the course of virtually 10 years on this mission, mastered the art and science of polar data hunting while, at the same period, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has disintegrated in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding aircraft, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to watch what they were ensure, to see the facts. What they told me uncovered something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me revealed even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a weather meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy climate office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag to present to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can make unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the past decades of their own lives( Im away from home so much its likely why Im not married ). But at pre-flight climate meetings, polar ice is mostly of fear to him for the quirky route it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight period. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight time is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the climate and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight period, a lot of taxpayers fund, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric conditions. He checks the weather the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With weather, there is no is. Whats needed is the ability to grasp constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he told, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had constructed the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his readings in order to better navigate his expeditions changing conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the climate session, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photograph: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

A few weeks before I met Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What makes this real to you? The topic had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I candidly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece coat and baseball cap, and his enthusiasms and mellowed ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that topic was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What makes it real ? I entail, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gas turned solid, nearly sending it straight down into Antarctica, immediately on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A squad of polar scientists from across the US sets the research priorities, in co-operation with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at the construction and installing of the scientific tools, and he is the person in the fields responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for inducing assured that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter likely had something else in intellect. The melting of ice, the rising waters, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what stimulates that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of approximately 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal regions. A conservative estimation holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

First constructed during the cold warto way Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by engineers sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us ensure the patterns in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulses through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has furthermore helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and canyons, and also a clear position of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa repeats its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The track of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to invent a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish hilarity( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for example, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant valley system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flowing behind them, have lessened and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers locate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an era when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing tinges of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what constructs this real for him. Behind even well-meaning questions is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has constructed it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate agreement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related monies from the federal budget this year. When the White House lately proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media has enabled them along by interring the story under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budget supports deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dog on Mars.

The US constructed Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still preserve a small airbase there. In 1951, America constructed a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly maintained armed atomic weapon. In one of naval historys more ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, made a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland devotes the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice passageways nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear missiles. In 1968, at the high levels of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A flame, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapons hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed rapidly through passport control, but our bags were nowhere find work. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial aircraft at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our purses still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the purses hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my confusion, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, “the mens” told me, was actually only one guy, who had a tendency to mysteriously disappear.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres only ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles plane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butt. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting each other with astound and hugs, because the last period they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photograph: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I ultimately got my bag, I constructed my route down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was bide. But before I fulfilled the crew, I fulfilled the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low hum, like a shamans chant, was accompanied by the pleasant fragrance of gently baking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily ritual of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and reek it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, garmented in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any route of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is seeing cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard violates in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew “was talkin about a” their P-3 they sometimes sounded as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is amazingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark witticism, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was look at this place a photo of his children on his phone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually hollered Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sit there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, politenes of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several members of Congress. As one engineer put it to me, We just get nervous, candidly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed perimeter wall .) If the governmental forces shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was on the way to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the government in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant actually talk about that without feeling those feelings again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in dread of a shutdown of their work by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The feeling in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launching, was of shifting workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least pay particular attention to gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

On the eight-hour flights, seeing engineers asleep at their stations entail international instruments below their feet were happily collecting data. For some stretches, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were expended flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or simply flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This pervasive somnolence the hypnotic hum of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which devoted them the look of sons in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, dedicated the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier widens across the land. The eye instantly grasps that the ice is a animal on the move, positively bursting ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photograph: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a very different view from that seen by novelists in past centuries, who saw this landscape, if at all, by boat or, more likely, from a depict. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of demise and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snowfalls a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old stories terminated. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar defines spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, succumb gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Consider that whiteness, which so scared Melville and Poe, who objective his Antarctic saga The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snowfall and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep grounds climate cool; the loss of all this white material means more heat is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other ways, including moderating climate patterns, the ice helps constructs life on earth more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling anxiety in 19 th-century readers, actually induce the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be detected even in that typical term of kudo for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is closely connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripplings of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flow, I saw the same strong hand that deeply etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were make use of changing ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have spent the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low mounds smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice dedicated shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the lives of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is only our ignorance that stimulates us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this scenery, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of anxiety from the data hunters. At the same hour that were getting better at meeting this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the witticism floating around the crew. I heard one engineer gag that it might be easier to just rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do upkeep on that, he pointed out.

Oh, perfectly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing here. I suppose sitting on this plane, watching the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it told over and over again: just stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already steeped in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing answer. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfortable chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, a specialist in ice, get pedantic, telling me that there were others more qualified to speak about rising sea levels. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the trust of a leading expert in the field. The off-the-record position expressed wasnt simply one of sober agreement with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all insured the graphs !

The tonal discrepancies between this off-the-record answer and the videotapeed answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I supposed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, seeming down at the red recording illumination. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I mean, if Nixon

The researcher giggled a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the working day headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the current US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the march?

But the earnest question was merely met with stillnes and a few gags. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talk about trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the scheme was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed alleviated that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science meeting, brews in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont seem to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the previous day. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing respond: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the song Angie over and over again, creating a agreeably mesmerising effect. Two crew members talked of murderer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling tales. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had find a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew expended his off-days on outings with a camera-equipped droning, and had attained spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they gathered around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something moving in insuring these people who had expended the working day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now expending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon snuck into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage lately shot at the Thule base. The video showed some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted cement bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft missiles. Today its merely an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, only a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the wreckings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

An engineer chipped a shard off the frozen block harvested the previous day. Perhaps sensing my mood, he dropped it into a glass and poured me some whiskey over ice older than America and told: Well anyway, perhaps thisll cheer you up.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which prompted one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because that approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched into a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Maybe its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and just do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chattering stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets run. Its time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole appeared first on Top Rated Solar Panels.

from Top Rated Solar Panels http://ift.tt/2uZJuXv via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Top Rated Solar Panels

0 notes

apsbicepstraining · 7 years

Text

7 Grounds That Feline Are Way Superior to Bird-dog

1. Cat are altogether less labor

2. Dogs give their love unconditionally, a cat’s cherish is gave

3. Feline are actually useful around the house

4. Cats are generally more enjoyable to be around

5. They’re better for the environment

6. They’re cheaper, extremely

7. Yes, felines are kind of yanks … but that’s why they’re awesome

The post 7 Grounds That Feline Are Way Superior to Bird-dog appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2vaSTMS via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

apsbicepstraining · 7 years

Text

7 Grounds That Feline Are Way Superior to Bird-dog

1. Cat are altogether less labor

2. Dogs give their love unconditionally, a cat’s cherish is gave

3. Feline are actually useful around the house

4. Cats are generally more enjoyable to be around

5. They’re better for the environment

6. They’re cheaper, extremely

7. Yes, felines are kind of yanks … but that’s why they’re awesome

The post 7 Grounds That Feline Are Way Superior to Bird-dog appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2vaSTMS via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes