torturing the truth

Condi's trail of lies

'As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States' obligations under the CAT [U.N. Convention Against Torture], which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment -- those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States,' Rice said at a press conference with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.

The press should stop asking if the US tortures prisoners. The US will always say no, but they will be using their own tortured definition.

The press should ask if the US waterboards. prisoners.

Equally there is no point asking about extraordinary renditions.

The press should ask if the US holds prisoners without charge or trial.

There is no point asking such questions in Australia. Holding prisoners without charge or trial is the law here, a law passed with Labor's support.

Apophilypse Now

It's called Apophis. It's 390m wide. And it could hit Earth in 31 years time

In Egyptian myth, Apophis was the ancient spirit of evil and destruction, a demon that was determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness.A fitting name, astronomers reasoned, for a menace now hurtling towards Earth from outerspace. Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.

Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere.

'Space tractor' to avert asteroid ArmageddonOnline

No need to send Bruce Willis into space with a nuclear bomb: The best way to deal with a killer asteroid hurtling towards Earth could be a 'gravity tractor'.

Two NASA astronauts, gently mocking the solution offered in the Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon have come up with a deceptively simple plan to pull asteroids off course.

Dr Edward Lu and Dr Stanley Love propose in today's issue of the journal Nature that a rocket be launched into space, effectively to act as a giant magnet.

Landing on an asteroid, which is no more than a spinning pile of rubble, is very difficult to achieve.

Instead, the gravity tractor would hover alongside the asteroid, with its thrusters pointing outwards so the exhaust does not affect the surface.

The tractor would then gradually pull the asteroid off course, using nothing more than the gravitational pull between the two bodies.

'This saves you from having to land on the asteroid and then trying to stabilise yourself on a flying pile of rock and debris which is spinning all the time,' Dr Love said.

In Armageddon, a doomsday asteroid is on a collision course with Earth and the only way to knock it off course is to drill into its surface and detonate a nuclear bomb.

Instead, the scientists calculate that, with sufficient warning, a 20-tonne gravity tractor could safely deflect an asteroid 200 metres across in about a year of towing.

I doubt the Guardian's derivation of the name. There is more than one Apophis around and about the time of an unofficial push to name 2003 UB313, the putative tenth planet and its moon Xena and Gabrielle the discoverers named the asteroid formerly known as 99942 after an Apophis, apocryphal or not.

Still, demon of the ancient world or Goauld system lord, it's a relief we won't need Bruce Willis to save us.

Brokeback Mountain

The New Yorker has a free download of Annie Proulx' short story, but only for a week. Lot's better than the Penguin price of a single short story for $16.95.

Update
Bookslut has An Interview with Annie Proulx on the short story and the movie. The New West Network calls it Best Contemporary Realistic Western Ever?

march of the Phytoplankton

About 34 million years ago, the Earth's climate transitioned from a 'greenhouse climate' to the 'icehouse climate' of today, forming a massive ice sheet on the Antarctic continent. A new study by Linda Anderson, an ocean sciences researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests that oceanographic features in the Southern Ocean--the intensity of current flow and the amount of stratification (the formation of distinct layers at different depths)--may have played a key role in the transition.

Anderson will present her findings this week at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Anderson analyzed the chemical properties of seafloor sediments laid down millions of years ago to piece together a picture of how Southern Ocean circulation may have looked deep in the past. The periods covered in her study include the transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene epochs about 33 million years ago and a similar transition between the Oligocene and Miocene epochs about 23 million years ago. These transitions coincided with a configuration of Earth's orbit around the Sun that facilitated ice growth. Some additional factor on Earth, however, amplified the climate response during these transitions.

The geological record suggests that this additional factor was a reduction of greenhouse warming due to a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The Southern Ocean may have played a role in the drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide through its influence on the global carbon cycle, Anderson said.

Her study suggests that, unlike today, the mixing of the Southern Ocean around the time of the climate shift was neither as intense nor as deep as it is now. As a result, the ocean was more stratified and regional characteristics of deep and intermediate waters were maintained. This layered structure may have had important consequences for global carbon cycling, setting the stage for the transition from greenhouse to icehouse.

Phytoplankton--tiny plants growing in the surface waters--use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transform it into organic carbon. When the plants (or animals that feed on them) die and decompose, most of the organic carbon is recycled but a small amount is buried within the deep ocean. In a layered ocean, dead organisms can drift into the deeper layers before they decompose, effectively burying the organic carbon in the depths.

Shifting continents have gradually changed the Southern Ocean over the past 30 million years so that water now whips around Antarctica in a strong current known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The strength of the current blocks the influx of nutrient-poor surface water and, as this current squeezes through the narrow passage between South America and Antarctica, it mixes the water from top to bottom. As a result, most of the organic carbon formed within the Southern Ocean today is oxidized before it can be buried.

The impact of organic carbon burial on the atmospheric carbon dioxide depends on the relative burial of organic carbon to total carbon. The types of organisms that fix organic carbon are important, because some form shells of inorganic carbon in a process that releases carbon dioxide. Regional characteristics of the water affect which organisms are favored ecologically by controlling the nutrient content of the surface ocean. The integral relationship between biology (the organisms that fix the organic carbon) and the physical structure of the ocean (both the delivery of nutrients and removal of organic carbon for burial) ultimately control the atmospheric carbon dioxide, Anderson said.

Currents in Climate Change

But that doesn't mean that climate change isn't happening--ice core data stretching back 650,000 years show that current greenhouse gas levels of 380 parts per million (ppm) are about 80 ppm higher than any other level in that period, and still rising. And it doesn't mean that the results of such a weakening in currents couldn't have a profound impact. Between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago, the Earth experienced a temporary setback in its warming up after the last ice age. The creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway filled the North Atlantic with an excess of cold, fresh water, preventing North Atlantic salt water from achieving the density needed to sink. As a result, the conveyor belt shut down and Western Europe and North America became colder and drier. We may need that dramatic sweater mission after all.

All this just makes the international effort unfolding in Montreal this week even more important. In that freezing cold, Francophone city, diplomats from 157 countries continue to discuss climate change and what to do about it. Already last week, they ratified the Kyoto Protocol--our first, timid attempt to cut the greenhouse gas emissions associated with global warming--despite the best efforts of the U.S. and its allies to derail the global treaty. Next up for consideration is what to do after Kyoto runs out in 2012. After all we've got 80 ppm or more to shed from the atmosphere, a process that would take hundreds of years if we stopped all emissions today. The U.S. and others are adamant that such effort is not needed--or, at best, misguided, something I shall address in more detail in a future post. Indeed, some of our illustrious leaders have called climate change the 'greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.'

Climate change is not a hoax, nor is it a conspiracy. It is a giant scientific experiment human beings are running on the only planet we currently have: What will happen when we bring greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to prehistoric levels and beyond? Perhaps nothing, perhaps inundation of low-lying parts of the world, perhaps a flood of environmental refugees, perhaps an increase in disease, or perhaps the loss of oceanic currents that help regulate the present conditions of our world. Maybe all of the above and more. We can't control the outcome of this experiment. We can, however, choose not to run it.

Scary thought that the likes of Bush and the Man of Steel are experimenters-in-chief.