The meaning of the Greenland DNA discovery

I've read some immensely confused responses to the discovery of ancient ice layers beneath the more modern Greenland ice. The usual whackos seem to think this somehow changes global warming models, but the real climate discovery is not that Greenland was once warm and largely ice free -- we knew that already. The real climate discovery is that even during periods of moderate to strong global warming the ice doesn't necessarily melt. That finding decreases the probability of large sea level rise over the next 50 years, and it reinforces the projections for a moderate rise that came from the recent UN climate consensus statement.

In other words, it strengthens the consensus climate models.

The non-climate discovery is of very old DNA, which will be very interesting indeed. The Boston Globe coverage is better than most, but it's better as edited below (honest!). Emphases mine:

Greenland ice yields hope on climate - The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
DNA hints warm era didn't melt entire cap
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff | July 6, 2007

An international team of scientists, drilling deep into the ice layers of Greenland, has found DNA from ancient spiders and trees, evidence that suggests the frozen shield covering the immense island survived the earth's last period of global warming.

The findings, published today in the journal Science, indicate Greenland's ice may be less susceptible to the massive meltdown predicted by computer models of climate change, the article's main author said in an interview...

....the discovery of organic matter in ice dating from half-a-million years ago offers evidence that the Greenland ice shield remained frozen even during the earth's last "interglacial period" -- some 120,000 years ago -- when average temperatures were 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are now. That's slightly higher than the average temperatures foreseen by most scientists for the end of this century, although some environmentalists warn it might get even hotter.

... "We should remain very worried about rising sea levels," he said. "We know that during the last interglacial, sea levels rose by 5 meters or more. But this must have come from sources additional to Greenland, such as Antarctic ice. It does not appear the whole [Greenland] sheet will melt."

.... Some scientists not involved in the study drew a conclusion very different from that of the Danish-led team .

"The raw results of this study are very impressive -- southern Greenland was unglaciated sometime during the last million years or so," said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist with National Aeronautics and Space Administration 's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "I would argue that this implies a more unstable ice sheet, not the opposite."

Schmidt said that during the more recent warming period, most but not all of the ice might have disappeared from southern Greenland, leaving a thin layer that would have been sufficient to preserve the DNA.

The organic matter found in ice cores taken from a southern Greenland drilling site known as Dye 3 represents the oldest-ever authenticated DNA found by scientists to date, with fragments of beetles, tree bark, prehistoric spiders, and other life verified independently in laboratories in Denmark, Canada, and Germany.

... Scientists were able to isolate only about 1.6 ounces of organic matter from the ice at the bottom of the core sample, according to Enrico Cappellini, a researcher specializing in ancient proteins at Britain's University of York.

....Analysis of the insect mitochondria, cellular components that contain genomes that can be used to date DNA, as well as amino acids, indicate d that the creatures were at least 450,000 years old. Uncertainties with dating, however, leave the possibility that the DNA dated only as far back as the last interglacial period.

The identification of such relatively well-preserved genetic material beneath ice sheets was exciting news for biologists. Ten percent of the earth's surface has been covered by deep ice for tens of thousands of years. "We could be opening up a frozen world of new discoveries," said Cappellini, the University of York researcher.

....The Nordic settlements -- the first European presence in the New World -- survived for nearly 500 years before mysteriously disappearing. Historians speculate that either the inhabitants starved as Greenland grew colder or they were killed by Inuit, who appeared on the scene around 1200 AD.

I kept the last fragment because I didn't know that the Inuit arrived on Greenland relatively late. In summary:

1. The study suggests the Greenland ice layers may be more stable than thought, which supports the consensus sea level rise model. If the DNA is found, however, to only be 500,000 years old, this will actually argue for a large sea level rise.
2. It's possible that lower layers of the ice are resistant to melting even if the top layers melt, in which case we're back to thinking Greenland will raise sea levels in 50 to 100 years.
3. Since sea levels rose lots in the last interglacial, and since the water had to come from either Greenland or Antarctica, if Greenland didn't melt that means Antarctica did. We don't know why however, current models predict Antarctica won't melt.

Thinking it over I'm leaning a bit towards #2. I sure hope Antarctica won't be melting, that would push us more firmly into a large sea level rise ...

Update 7/9/07: See the interesting comment by "JC". This makes me worry a bit more about #3 now ...

Update 7/11/07: RealClimate has a very good review. It sounds like the researchers themselves were responsible for the confused interpretations. I'm used to medical researchers garbling their own findings (often by overstating them, usually wrongly), unsurprisingly the failing is not limited to the medical domain. The scientists were evidently soundly flogged, for they've issued a clarification with is gratifyingly close to what I ended up with after a savvy commeter corrected my understanding of Antarctic contribution to sea level rise in the last interglacial:

The scientists do not want to put into question the rise in sea level during a global warming. During the last interglacial period 125.000 years ago, temperatures in Greenland were 5 degrees higher and global sea level was 4-5 meters higher than it is today. However, since the new scientific results show that the ice sheet also covered southern Greenland, the melting of the Greenlandic ice cap can only have caused a sea level rise of about 2 meters. Therefore some of the ice contributing to the sea level rise must have come from other sources, for instance the Antarctic. Furthermore, thermal warming of the oceans will cause expansion of the sea water and result in a sea level rise of half a meter, and the melting of small glaciers around the globe will result in an additional half meter rise.

The emergence of the carbon tax: first, denial

The carbon tax will come, in one form or another. It's already starting to ooze into the public consciousness, in the form of articles about why it can't be discussed ...

Al Gore's inconvenient tax | csmonitor.com

... Live Earth pledges do call for personal action against global warming, such as becoming "carbon neutral" and buying only from businesses committed to solving the climate crisis. Mostly, however, they call for government action, such as a new treaty that would reduce greenhouse gases by 90 percent in rich countries within a few decades.

Any such treaty with that kind of demand for a swift drop in CO2 output would require the kind of radical change in lifestyles that a stiff carbon tax would bring. Consumption taxes, after all, are often designed to wean people off bad behavior, such as smoking.

A 90 percent drop in these emissions is probably what's needed to limit any rise in atmospheric warming to 2 degrees Celsius, a goal that many scientists recommend.

Most presidential candidates do endorse pinching pocketbooks, but only indirectly, such as by calling for higher fuel efficiency in vehicles and a cap on greenhouse-gas pollution from company smokestacks. Such demands on industry have the advantage of creating more certainty in reducing emissions, but they are complex to enforce. Gore would do both: tax carbon use and cap emissions.

Putting a crimp on global warming can't be done solely by promoting new energy technologies and voluntary conservation. Consumers of oil and coal need a direct tax shock.

But the last time Congress raised the gasoline tax was in 1993. In the Senate, Gore cast the deciding vote. At the next election in 1994, the GOP won big on Capitol Hill. Politicians took note.

It may take more than one Live Earth concert to warm up the public and politicians to a carbon tax.

I dimly recall that a recent poll, somewhere in europe, rated the importance of global warming below commuting times. We're early in this process, it seems inconceivable now that the public will ever accept a carbon tax. We know how this will go, however, we've seen this movie before.

First come articles like this one, describing the idea as impractical, impossible, political suicide. Next will come furious denunciations from the usual morons. Then we'll be deluged by attack ads designed to slow adoption for a few more years, as industry realizes change is coming but fights for cash flow and time to adjust. Then, after denial and anger, slowly, comes acceptance. Then gasoline goes to $7/gallon, then $10/gallon.

I liked the reference to smoking in the editorial, it was not accidental. A few years before I went to college teachers and students smoked in the classroom. Nowadays a teacher smoking in the classroom wouldn't be a mere firing offense, it would be a mandatory psychiatric consultation.

Al Gore knows this very well. Thanks Al.

Williams syndrome: infantile colic, dorsal/ventral balance, patterning genes and genetic determinism

The NYT has a long article on Williams syndrome. There's a lot in there, as noted by "bestyoucanbe" (emphases mine):

Be the Best You can Be: Williams syndrome: the NYT Magazine review

Williams syndrome has some features in common with autism, but it is, scientifically, much easier to study. For one thing it's much better defined than autism; persons with "Williams syndrome" resemble one another more more closely than persons with "autism". For another, we have a reasonable understanding of the gene injury involved, and we can expect to match up the gene products with the "phenotype" (behaviors)...

....Williams syndrome is fairly well characterized because of the physics of our chromosomes. The defect involves a patch that is prone to being "wrongly ripped", but the absence is not lethal. It is very likely that some of these genes are injured in other ways, or they vary in other ways. Persons with these variations won't have Williams syndrome, but they will have some characteristics of Williams syndrome. Some of those characteristics will have adaptive advantages, some won't. Something to remember when conversing with a "normal" person who's very talkative, doesn't seem to know when to pause for breath, and isn't very good at abstract thought ...

... There's a lot here. For example, the incidental comment on infantile colic made my eyebrows jump. Does Williams offer clues to one of the most puzzling and common disorders of infancy -- the mysterious disorder we call "colic"?!

The "dorsal" and "vental" regions remind me of the "left" and "right" hemisphere of the 1980s. Just like "left" and "right" hemispheres the "dorsal" areas sound more "male" and the "ventral" sound more female. One wonders how they morph during adolescence. As to dorsal/ventral balance (and SAT score balance) being rare; I suspect it's not so much that a "balance" is rare but rather that there's a comparatively flat normal distribution -- any point in the curve is 'rare'.

The "patterning genes" are also likely to feature in many stories over the next few years, as we learn how they influence talents and preferences. Sociopaths, of course, are of great interest to all of us these days ...

There are a few predictable outcomes of this research in the our evolving world. One is that, like Downs syndrome, Williams syndrome will become very rare over the next twenty years. The other is expectation is that we will learn how to tweak the dorsal/ventral balance; we'll misuse this knowledge somehow.

Quantum erasure and apple of the tree of knowledge

I skimmed the SciAM article on building a home "quantum eraser", but I didn't appreciate that the 1982 experiment is just one notch weirder than the what I'd read in Gribbin's 1997 book [1]. I realized how ++weird the result is upon reading Greenes description today [2].

As I dimly recall it, the "Aspect experiments" showed that the measured interference pattern that

• requires passage of a single photon through spatially separated paths simultaneously [3]

also

• requires no peeking after the photon has travelled the spatially separated paths
  

It's the "no-peeking after" part that made the experimental results so delicious. Causality (arrow of time), 1 dimensional time, and 3 dimensional space and "objective" reality all took big hits from the Aspect experiment. The discussion ever since has been which, if any, survived.

My weak understanding of Greenes' non-mathematical interpretation of the "erasure experiment was that the "no peeking after" clause is extended as follows:

and

• tricks that allow you to defer "peeking" until after the interference pattern ought to be formed don't work either (no surprise here, this is a variant of the Aspect experiment)
• if you set up a "deferred peeking" trick, but then undo it before you "peek", then the interference pattern can return. (surprise)
  

So it's the last bit that adds an additional note of sublime weirdness to the aspect experiment. It makes it just a bit easier to believe that the fundamental rule is really "no peeking". This is just something you can't know about.

It invariably reminds anyone taught by nuns of the "apple of the tree of knowledge" -- "but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.".

The universe seems to be telling us we can't watch some things too closely. Naturally, that only increases our appetite ....

[1] I really don't think Gribbin discussed this experiment, even though it was old when he wrote the book. It doesn't show up here either. I wonder why not ...

[2] Greenes is a cosmologist at heart, and he tends to shy away from the quantum weirdness Gribbin and others embrace, but he did a good job describing erasure.

[3] Paradox puzzles often require one to think carefully about what words mean, so I italicized a few of the interesting ones. Spatial separation, for example, has been shown not to mean what we thought it meant. Two entangled photons a universe apart are, by some measures, not separated at all.

Nature: 5 July 2007 - the quantum mechanics and science fiction issue

Nature, one of the two preeminent journals of science has dedicated a "science fiction" issue to examination of the multiverse and other QM interpretations. Of course nothing is available for viewing online, you have buy the issue. I'll see if I can get access through my U MN account. More later.

Update: I was too quick. The many worlds essay is available, some others may be too.

Future Shock: Charles Stross and Alvin Toffler

"Future Shock"  was published in 1970. I read it as a child; what I remember best is how "shocking" Toffler thought it was to have a shopping mall appear where houses once stood. There was nothing in the Toffler's book that was anywhere as "shocking" as this post by Charles Stross, a highly regarded writer of very ambitious modern "hard" science fiction:

Charlie's Diary: Unpacking the Zeitgeist

I'm trying to work out how I'd go about explaining this news item from WOWinsider to someone thirty years ago, in 1977, and it is making my head hurt because there are too many prior assumptions nested recursively inside it to unpack easily...

...There are thirty years' worth of future shock condensed into this one news item. And the reason I'm writing about it is that I don't think I could get away with putting such an conceptually overloaded incident into one of my novels; it would take too much set-up and require so much infodumping that many readers would lose interest. This Russian doll of a news item contains some rather scary pointers to where we're going, and a harsh warning about the difficulty of accurately portraying plausible futures in literature.

There was another recent story about similar techniques (read the essay) used by children to bypass safety constraints set into Disney's online game communities. I think Schneier wrote about it; if I remember correctly the safety measures were to prevent non-game specific communications that might be exploited by very nasty adults. The children learned to rearrange objects to spell out messages they could not type.

So was Toffler being silly with his dire predictions of incapacitating "future shock" and the examples of vanishing shops that I remember? This is taken from the Wikipedia summary:

Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also coined the term "information overload".

In retrospect Toffler was wrong about the social transformations of 1970 (student unrest, racism, the civil rights movement, free speech, divorce drugs, rock and roll, antiwar demonstrations) being due to "future shock". They had a technological component (television, affordable automobiles, contraceptives, the emergent middle class, widespread education), but they were mostly due to demographics.

The examples of "future shock" I recall from the book also seem quaint nowadays, and hardly very threatening. We're used to massive structures vanishing and transforming with little knowledge, and most of us don't even live in Shanghai or Bangkok.

And yet ...

I have a suspicion we're not doing so well these days. There's a lot going on that, I think, would be setting off alarm bells in a healthy society. Instead, our society is quiet, passive, disconnected. We're more like stunned sheep than active participants in a changing world.

Maybe Toffler wasn't so much wrong as premature.

Photosynth. From ....

I expect something like this from Google, not from Microsoft.

• The TED demo: watch the video. I don't like watching videos, but this is well worth five minutes. You can zip past the boring introduction.
• Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth is the technology demo

The image management performance is astounding, but the jaw dropping part is the demonstration of the synthesis of thousands of Flickr images into a spatially coherent whole with essentially unlimited resolution.

The next demo might as well start with an picture of earth and end up with an atomic force image of an atom. Why not?

There are obvious implications for radiology imaging and image management.

Via CT.

It's time to cancel the war on terror - and the orange alert

It was a mistake. Emphases mine.

A New Declaration of Independence - Early Warning - William Arkin Washington Post

.. We live in an age where a terrorist attack could occur on any given day in any given public place. I'm afraid there's no returning to an imagined simpler era. The more we turn these criminal attacks into an assault on our national security, however, the more we reward terrorists with the attention they seek, and the more we turn terrorists into "warriors."

... the administration is applying the wrong strategy to the "fight," pursuing an approach that builds an environment of public fear. It's time, then, to declare independence from this hopeless cycle and demand a return to the pre-9/11 era of law enforcement. In the case of terrorism, war is not the answer.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says that because of the attacks and plots in the United Kingdom, security will be elevated at U.S. airports and other transit hubs today and through the holiday weekend. As President Bush says, "You never know where they may try to strike."

I'd say this response were a transparent attempt to incite fear in the public -- except that I think that the government may actually be clueless as to how best to respond. Yes, the president's observation has a partisan tinge to it. More important, however, his statement suggests another lost battle in a "war" that is no such thing.

... After 9/11, the reaction of the national security monolith was to decry the former "law enforcement" mode of counterterrorism. This was a kind of right-wing "Blame America" argument, suggesting that a litigious approach and our own high regard for the law were responsible for the ineffectual fight against al Qaeda. Only an all-out "war," the argument went, could save America and, by extension, the West....

... I'm sure that there is more that could be done, especially with the warfare paradigm: Throw more soldiers into the fight, employ better weapons, match each measure with a counter-measure. It's never-ending, because war is the wrong conception.

What is needed is a declaration that the war is over. Terrorists are not warriors, they are just criminals...

Also, can we stop with the freakin' "orange alert" already? Orange is the new norm. We aren't going back to yellow, or green, or whatever the colors used to be in the magic world we used to live in. I'd say we go to "normal" and "red", and red can't last more than 3 days without a renewal by Congress.

Morford on the pseudo-pardon - scathing and funny

Morford is in fine form today with a great rant on the sniveling pseudo-pardon. Here's the first paragraph:

Scooter Libby In Hell / What do Dick Cheney, Paris Hilton, "The Sopranos" and colon spasms have in common? Find out here!

So there you have it. Bush shrugs and smirks and then commutes the easy soft-focus sit-on-your-ass-all-day-and-knit white-collar prison sentence of a hollow political lackey who, in turn, took a bullet for his sneering mafia thug of a boss, Dick Cheney, who in turn was complicit (along with lead flying monkey Karl Rove) in the appallingly illegal outing of a CIA operative, which itself was a tiny but particularly nasty link in the giant chain of lies and deceptions undertaken to lead our wary and tattered nation into an unwinnable impossible costly brutally violent war that will now last, if current estimates are correct, until the goddamn sun explodes...

And he's off! Great reading, that man can write.

Update 7/5/07: This is witty. On first reading I was puzzled by the harsh condemnation of the pseudo-pardon by right wingnut stalwarts...

Yahoo! filters gmail invites as spam

Old news, I'm sure, but given the slow and awful implosion of Yahoo! it's worth a smile.

If you send a gmail invite to Yahoo!, Yahoo!'s usually excellent spam filters mistakenly mark it as spam.

Gee, isn't that funny.

Yahoo! is dead.

Social Atom reports on complex networks

Mark Buchanan* ("Who am I") is posting about a meeting on Complex Networks, 2-6 July, Sardegna, Italy. It's a "big ideas" topic, so fun to read about. You'll need to go to the blog to find the separate posts, they aren't linked. Oddly enough for someone writing about networks, Mr. Buchanan doesn't use Google's tags/categories to group related posts.

* "The Social Atom" is a blog to promote a book about the thesis that humans are individually simple ("atomic"), but that complex social phenomena emerge from the interaction of many "social atoms" (chemistry). The blog is pseudonymous, but the book has a name on it.

Salmonella poisoned snacks. China. Of course.

We've been playing it a bit safer with food. You know, Melamine. There was something else, but really, it's too much to keep track of. Oh, yes, defective tires. Maybe defective brakes. Definitely lead in toy point and christmas light wiring. Umm ... fraudulent medications. Fake hernia repair materials.

Let's see, what do they all have in common?

Right.

So we've been shopping at "organic" places, like our local "Mississippi market". You can't get any granolier in Berkeley. Really, I feel like an alien when I shop there. That's where my wife bought some "veggie snack" thingies that are supposed to fool the kids into eating something that's not a cookie. Snack thingies from one of those friendly "organic" companies -- Robert's American Gourmet Inc.

Snackes that were just recalled. My wife had to phone the kid's day camp to get the snacks pulled from the kid's lunches. Our local paper has a wee little blurb. Emphases mine.

Salmonella found in seasoning made with Chinese ingredients used on recalled snack foods:

...A seasoning made with imported Chinese ingredients used on recalled snack foods was contaminated with salmonella, a company official said Tuesday. The snack foods sickened dozens of people.

The seasoning, used on both Super Veggie Tings Crunchy Corn Sticks and Veggie Booty snack foods, tested positive for the bacteria, said Robert Ehrlich, president and chief executive of Robert's American Gourmet Inc. The 'veggie' seasoning's ingredients came primarily from China, the company said."...

...Ehrlich said he had been unaware of where the ingredients used in the seasoning originated. The products are made under contract; Ehrlich would not identify the manufacturer.

I love the last bit. It's so sweet. The "products are made under contract". "Roberts American Gourmet" doesn't know where they come from. Sounds a bit like Thomas the Tank Engine.

At least food is somewhat, intermittently, labeled. We don't buy any food now that has "China" on the label, but we know we can't dodge this completely.

You might consider writing your representative, thought it's been over two weeks and Betty McCollum's office has been suspiciously non-responsive (see update). Something for me to remember when the next primary comes by [1]. Or you might decide to grow your own food, but you'll have to synthesize your own fertilizer too ...

[1] In our district only the primary matters.

The only good thing is that we have a president we can rely on ...

Update 9/22/07: It took a while, but McCollum wrote me a pretty good form letter, turns out she's on the Agriculture appropriations committee. As usual, Bush is the villain here. Some excerpts:

• 2002: Farm Bill had Country-of-Origin labeling (COOL)
• 2004: Bush delayed implementation until 9/06
• 2005: Bush delayed implementation until 9/08
• 2007: Farm Bill requires COOL by 9/08 for all meat
  

McCollum has been a strong supporter of mandatory labeling, probably because it ought to boost Minnesota based agribusiness. It only applies to meat though, we need it for all food.

Liar scoots: a physics blog's commentary on Bush

CV, a physics blog, has one of the better commentaries on the Libby's get-out-of-jail pass. Perhaps the most disgusting bit of Bush's latest pile is GWB's record:

.... George W. Bush hates to pardon people or commute their sentences. Not his job to overrule a jury, he proudly proclaims. Even if we’re talking about a mentally retarded inmate sentenced to death by a jury that never had a chance to hear mitigating evidence. Those inmates could count themselves lucky if W didn’t openly mock them...

Bush is an awful human being.

Joel Spolsky starts a Wiki on the business of software

Spolsky, best known as "Joel on Software" is a hyper-productive scatter brained genius workaholic CEO. Or so I imagine. I've never met the man. I imagine he's very intimidating, but, who knows. Maybe he's actually a nice person too.

In addition to running a startup company, teaching us all on his blog, and writing several books, he has now launched a Wiki: The Business of Software Wiki.

Based on my longtime reading of Joel's blog, and the books of his I have, I assume he, and the contributors he will recruit, will create a template which anyone who wishes to launch a startup software business can try to apply. A franchise model, without the franchise fees. (Yes, someone might turn the template into a franchise model, or even create an outsourcing suite based on the template.)

Go Joel.

Ensembl Genome Browser: Take a walk on the wild side

Feeling adventurous? Visit the ensemble genome browser. Really, it's safe for work. All you have to do is click the link.

If you dare.

Come on, you know you want to. Browse a bit ...

There. That wasn't so bad, was it?

One link away.

Now, if you're old enough, remember the world of 10 years ago. I know it's hard, but try.

Things have changed more than we know.