Deciphering climate messages via the heart of the atom

Vemork Hydroelectric Plant at Rjukan, Norway, which Hans Suess advised on heavy water production, telling Nazi Germany it couldn’t make heavy water quickly enough for military use. His expertise with heavy water was part of an interest in nuclear science that led him to become a pioneer in carbon dating.

When Hans Suess chose to study physical chemistry, he went nuclear, apparently overturning two generations of family tradition. Hans was born in 1909, just as his father Franz succeeded his grandfather Eduard as a geology professor at the University of Vienna. Hans got his PhD from the same university in 1936, but in studying heavy water he was set to aid the historic advances in nuclear science of the time. Yet a transatlantic scientific coincidence would bring him back to more environmental science, and see him help pioneer radiocarbon measurements. With that expertise, Hans showed humans were raising atmospheric CO2 levels, and revealed another surprising source of variations in climate.

The common theme to these achievements was how neutrons and protons combine in an atom’s nucleus. For example, hydrogen atoms found in conventional water have just a single proton in their nuclei. In heavy water, some of these atoms are replaced by a rarer form of hydrogen, known as deuterium, whose atoms have an extra neutron in their nuclei. That gives heavy water properties that can help nuclear reactors, which Nazi Germany notoriously hoped to exploit to make nuclear weapons.

With Hitler’s armies occupying Austria just two years after Hans finished his PhD, his expertise brought him to the attention of the Nazi regime. They called him in to advise a hydroelectric power plant in Vemork, Norway, that was making heavy water. Hans visited several times, reporting that it couldn’t make heavy water quickly enough for military use. Allied forces destroyed it in 1943 anyway, in audacious raids fictionalised in the film “Heroes of Telemark”.

Alongside working with heavy water, Hans studied why the chemical elements exist in the amounts that they do. The answer laid in how stable different numbers of protons and neutrons are when they come together in nuclei. He continued this work after the Second World War in West Germany, helping develop the “Nuclear Shell Theory” explanation, which other scientists won the Nobel Prize for Physics for in 1963. Suess missed out on this acclaim partly because two teams came up with the explanation at the same time. But when the other team, based at the University of Chicago, invited him to visit, Hans’ life changed course towards unravelling the secrets of Earth’s history.

Historical sea voyage sends manmade warming signal

The HMS Challenger sailed 69,000 miles, taking around 360 temperature soundings on the first global marine expedition from 1873-1876. This painting, by William Frederick Mitchell, is from its earlier life as a warship, in 1858.

Data from a 19^th century scientific mission, the first global marine research expedition, have provided strong evidence that humans have influenced climate throughout the entire 20th century. From 1873–1876 the HMS Challenger, a corvette of the British Royal Navy, sailed 69,000 miles and took hundreds of ocean temperature soundings. Last year, scientists used its measurements to show the top 700 metres of the ocean has warmed around 0.33°C since Challenger’s voyage. Understandably, seeing a global effect in the limited Challenger data is fraught with difficulty. Nevertheless, Will Hobbs from the University of Tasmania, Australia, and Joshua Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have now checked if this warming is linked to humans. “Even accounting for all uncertainties and limitations, the temperature change could not be realistically explained by natural variability alone, implying a long-term human signal,” Will told me.

Having swapped cannons for labs, among HMS Challenger’s projects was a series of around 360 soundings for temperature. At each sounding, its scientists dropped pressure-protected thermometers into the ocean attached to a rope every 100 fathoms (182 m) down to 1000 fathoms depth. “The scientists kept detailed records of how each measurement was taken, problems encountered, and how accurate and precise their measurements were,” Will said. “All instruments were calibrated in a lab before and after the expedition. So we have a lot of information about what level of accuracy we can expect, in some ways more than from modern automated observing systems, which are usually left to their own devices after deployment.”

Lifting the fog of war and climate

FIDO (Fog Investigation Dispersal Operations) petrol burners are ignited on either side of the main runway at Graveley, Huntingdonshire, as an Avro Lancaster of No. 35 Squadron RAF takes off in deteriorating weather, 28 May 1945. Guy Callendar helped devise the FIDO system.

• This is part two of a two-part post. Read part one here.

In November 1943, the British Royal Air Force used a new secret weapon in anger for the first time. Called FIDO, or Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation, it was a system of petrol burners that cleared fogbound airfields by raising their temperatures several degrees. It let the Allies launch and land warplanes safely when their enemies were still grounded by poor visibility. Newspapers billed it as near miraculous, crediting it with shortening the war and saving the lives of 10,000 airmen. But for one of the engineers behind it, Guy Callendar, it was just another way to combine his interest in weather and climate with his heat expertise.

From 1922-1941 Guy had worked on the Callendar Steam Tables, which he filled with data to help other engineers and scientists working with steam equipment. But after a decade carefully measuring the interaction between temperature, pressure and other properties in steam, his thoughts turned increasingly to climate. By 1938 he had stood up in front of a room of sceptical meteorologists, telling them that the world was warming, and burning fossil fuels was the cause. And while that marked a key turning point in identifying and understanding global warming, his later work in collecting evidence for that argument may have been still more important.

With his CO2 theory getting a frosty reception, and with his steam work winding down, Guy scoured scientific papers for evidence to back his argument. Since scientists like Svante Arrhenius had first suggested an important role for CO2 in climate in the 19^th century and even earlier, physics had made some important advances. Earlier scientists knew that gases like CO2 absorbed infrared radiation but in the 1920s they made leaps forward in understanding why.

The frequency of the wave of infrared radiation, the number of oscillations it goes through per second, matches motions in the gas molecules that absorb it. For example, if the molecules spin at a similar frequency to the radiation’s oscillations, they can absorb the its energy. Also, atoms such as oxygen and carbon in the molecule can move, pushed by thermal energy and pulled by chemical bonds between them. That creates a vibration, and if the frequency of the vibration matches that of the infrared radiation, the vibration can absorb the radiation’s energy.

The well-qualified amateur who threw the spotlight back on CO2

Guy Callendar in 1934, about the time he turned his attention to the CO2-climate question

In April 1938, a brave outsider stood up and showed a room full of sceptical experts evidence that would drive a revolution in climate science. Guy Callendar had pulled together temperature data from many parts of the world that clearly revealed global warming for the first time. Though few in the audience believed that humans could influence a planet-spanning system like climate, that’s just what Guy told them we were doing, by producing CO2.

But when better-known audience members at the Royal Meteorological Society meeting in London challenged his results, Guy fought back with a lifetime of scientific experience. He had followed in the footsteps of his father, physicist Hugh Callendar, making science the ‘family business’. But in 1938 the major part of that business so far for Guy – fully exploring the properties of steam – was nearing an end. And though climate science remained largely a hobby for him, Guy’s contributions are fundamental to our understanding of the global warming that is still ongoing today.

Guy was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1898 when his father, a pioneer in X-ray and steam physics, was a professor at McGill University. Hugh, his wife, and their three children returned to their native UK before Guy was one, when Hugh took up a position at University College, London. He then moved on to Imperial College London, where he chaired the physics department from 1908-1929. Beyond X-rays and steam, Hugh invented equipment to accurately measure and record air temperatures, wind speeds, and the Sun’s radiation. Perhaps it was these tools that inspired Guy to collect weather data, which he called his ‘figs.’, through much of his life. He took measurements so accurate that at one point they were used to form the official temperature records for central England.

In 1905, Hugh’s professorial salary and inventions bought a four story, 22-room house in Ealing. Life wasn’t entirely idyllic however, as by then Guy had been accidentally blinded in one eye with a pin by his brother Leslie. Further danger followed partly from Hugh’s encouragement of his children’s interest in science. He converted a greenhouse in Ealing into a laboratory, only for Leslie to destroy it while trying to make TNT. With his partial blindness preventing him from fighting in the First World War, Guy left school in 1915 to join his father’s laboratory. He performed X-ray tests, such as looking for cracks and other faults in aircraft engines, introducing him to the science of energy carried in waves.

Ocean heat puts pressure on poorest fisheries

Warm water Red Mullet catches in the UK have increased as sea temperatures have warmed, which William Cheung has linked to global warming. Credit: Nate Gray: A Culinary (Photo) Journal via Flickr Creative Commons License

Since 1970, our warming seas have driven fish across the world into cooler, deeper waters, potentially threatening fishing in Earth’s hottest seas. By analysing worldwide fish catches, Canadian and Australian scientists have found that the proportion of warmer-water fish caught has steadily grown. And in future, the warmest waters are set to become too hot for some of the fish that might previously have been caught there.

“Tropical fisheries are likely to be most impacted by ocean warming,” William Cheung from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told me. “We expect that the current trend would continue, and will reduce the catch for tropical fisheries. Many tropical fishing communities are in developing countries with limited socio-economic scope to deal with changes in resource abundance. Thus, these communities are most vulnerable to ocean warming.”

Like all living creatures, fish have a range of temperatures that they can comfortably live in. Sea temperatures are rising, with the US coast from North Carolina to Maine reaching the warmest level in 150 years last year, for example. Changing climate has already been linked to fish catches in some places, with William previously suggesting it’s behind rapid increases in warm-water red mullet catches around the UK. “However, there was no study that assessed the linkages between ocean warming and fisheries changes in the global scale,” he said.

So William and his teammates set about bringing together fish catch information from 52 ecosystems, including most of the world’s fisheries. That included data on 990 species, which the scientists analysed using a new measure, the ‘mean temperature of the catch’ or MTC, which William also calls a ‘fish thermometer’. To find the MTC, the scientists start by working out the preferred temperature of each species, based on the sea water temperatures in the areas that they used to live in. “For example, fishes that live in colder area, such as cod, will have a lower preferred temperature than a tropical fish, such as a tropical grouper,” William explained.

Arctic mission recovers record of surprising warmth

All cargo for the drilling operation on Lake El’gygytgyn in winter 2008/09 had to be transported to the lake from the nearest settlement, Pevek, located 360 km north across the frozen tundra with trucks supported by bulldozers. Credit: Pavel Minyuk

A warm climate with CO2 levels similar to today delayed ice sheets from forming over land in the Arctic until less than 2 million years ago. That’s the latest instalment in a climate history scientists are building using sediment from a lake created by a giant meteorite impact around 3.6 million years ago. The international team has found that 3-3.2 million years ago, summer temperatures in the region were about 8°C warmer than they are today.

Julie Brigham-Grette from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explained that other scientists have estimated CO2 levels in the Pliocene period from 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago. “Though the estimates are quite broad, most scientists suggest that 2-3 million years ago CO2 levels may have been similar to today,” she told me. “Our data are consistent with that – the world today could be headed toward a Pliocene-like world.” And as well as pointing to the warmer future, these findings could also help unpick climate puzzles from our past.

These insights are the prize Julie and her team-mates sought on an epic trek to North-East Russia’s frozen wilderness in 2009. She was chief scientist for the US side of the team, leading the expedition alongside Martin Melles and Pavel Minyuk, chief scientists for the German and Russian sides. Their goal lay at the bottom of Lake El’gygytgyn, or Lake E. A 13 km wide crater blasted by a meteorite up to a kilometre in diameter that filled with water, Lake E has slowly collected sediment ever since. It’s unusual because it largely escaped damage from the creep of ice sheets, meaning scientists can use its sediment to rebuild conditions further back in time.

And to get there, Julie, Martin and Pavel had to pave political, financial, logistical, and actual physical paths, Julie explained. “This lake sits in an area that has no roads,” she said. “It was an amazing logistical feat to gather the drillers and equipment and get there, without damaging the environment. It was the most difficult scientific project I’ve ever undertaken.”

Google search basis undermines sunspot-winter coldness link

Franck Sirocko’s 2012 study incorrectly dated this 1929 postcard identifying a year that the Rhine froze as being from 1963, which is one of many problems Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and his colleagues found with it. Image from van Oldenborgh et al, used under Creative Commons license, see citation below.

European researchers have strongly criticised a recent study linking cold winters in the continent to cycles affecting the sun for relying on a shallow internet search. In August 2012, Franck Sirocko at University of Mainz, Germany, and his teammates linked cold years to sunspot activity lows using historical reports of when the river Rhine froze. But their results disagree with previous research, and previously unpublished findings from Geert Jan van Oldenborgh from KNMI, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, in De Bilt. And when Geert Jan looked into why this was, he found problems common in research on this topic over 50 years ago, updated for the internet age.

“These problems are fundamental – all the results that they claimed are spurious,” Geert Jan told me. “It is simply an incorrect paper. Usually incorrect results are just ignored, they do not get cited much and are quickly forgotten. However, this time we took the unusual step to write a comment on the paper. This decision was based on the low quality and the wide publicity it was given.”

That publicity came largely because the American Geophysical Union, which published the 2012 paper, put out a press release about it that the media reported widely. It tells how Franck’s team used historical documents to find that the Rhine froze in multiple places fourteen different times between 1780 and 1963. 10 of the 14 freeze years occurred close to the point in an 11 year cycle when there are fewest sunspots. “We provide, for the first time, statistically robust evidence that the succession of cold winters during the last 230 years in Central Europe has a common cause,” Franck said in the press release.

Sunspot cycles had been linked to weather throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries, until Barrie Pittock started going over the evidence in the 1970s. Barrie, who led the Climate Impact Group at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia until his retirement in 1999, found no link beyond day-to-day weather effects. He also found many studies had used bad or incomplete data to say otherwise.

The climate scientist whose world spun on through war

A young Milutin Milanković as a student in Vienna, where he became the first Serb to achieve a doctorate in technical sciences. Image via Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons licence

On 6 April 1941, a world war left its mark on Milutin Milanković’s life and climate research for a second time. Nazi bombs destroyed the print works where his new book, summarising 30 years’ work, sat half-complete. As German-led forces occupied Serbia a month later, Milutin still had just one finished copy of his “Canon of Insolation and the Ice-Age Problem”.  In it, he brought together his general astronomical theory of climate, which would explain how Earth’s motion in space drives ice sheet advance and retreat over tens of thousands of years.

And when two German officers came to visit the University of Belgrade maths professor, he might have feared no-one else would ever see all his ideas in a single volume. But the officers were geology students, bringing greetings from Wolfgang Soergel at the University of Freiburg, who had previously published studies supporting Milutin’s calculations. Amid the drama unfolding around them, Milutin gave them his only copy to send to Freiburg for safe-keeping. But both Milutin and his work escaped to ultimately make strides forward in understanding what controls Earth’s temperatures.

Milutin fixed his focus on climate after joining the University of Belgrade in 1909, while reading a paper about the Sun’s heat on the Earth’s surface, whose starting equation was wrong. To study how climate could produce dramatic changes like ice ages courted controversy even then because it was unclear the puzzle could ever be solved. So little was known that when Svante Arrhenius correctly identified CO2 in the air as an important factor his findings were ruled out by flawed experiments.

Using heat from the Sun, the incoming solar radiation also known as insolation, Milutin looked at climate both on the Earth and other planets in our solar system. “A connection should be found between planets’ insolation and their atmosphere and surface temperatures,” he wrote. And thanks to the many different complex sciences such an astronomical climate theory combined, Milutin was the only one trying to make that link.

Probabilities reveal shape of climate change

Planners looking to prepare for floods, like this one in Venice, Italy, would like better local information on climate change – and now David Stainforth and his colleagues are helping deliver it. Image courtesy http://www.WorldIslandInfo.com, Allison Lince-Bentley, used under Flickr Creative Commons license.

If you want to plan for the future, or even for the present, knowing that our climate is changing, what’s the best way to do it? That’s a question that David Stainforth from the London School of Economics, Sandra Chapman from the University of Warwick and Nicholas Watkins from the British Antarctic Survey have puzzled over. And while David is co-founder of the climateprediction.net project that borrows spare time on peoples’ computers to run climate models, he doesn’t feel that models are always the best source of information.

“It’s clear to me that the detailed local information on how climate is changing, and what it will be like in 2050, can’t be had from climate models today,” David told me. “They’re just not that good. And yet I work a lot with the adaptation and impacts community, who are interested in what’s happening ‘here’, on a very local basis.” So together David, Sandra and Nicholas have turned to measured data, devising a simple way to pick the most important local climate changes from it.

Weather stations around the world monitor daily conditions, and combine to create a record containing occasional extremes, lots of ordinary days, and everything in between. Knowing how common these conditions are is important for people who want to prepare for future climate change. “For flood risks, you’re worried about going over certain rainfall amounts in a given time,” David explained. “Managers of overheating buildings are worried about what proportion of the time temperatures pass certain levels.”

Alternate histories back unique modern warmth claims

Tree rings have a light-colored band, or earlywood, that forms in the spring and a dark-colored band, or latewood, that forms in the summer. The width of the band tells how much the tree grew during that period and therefore can be used as a proxy for the climate during that season. That approach has some uncertainties, but Martin Tingley and Peter Huybers have reduced their impact on telling if any year is the warmest. Credit: thaths via Flickr Creative Commons license

If you build a temperature record going back in time to judge modern warming against, how certain can you be of your answer? That’s a big question for scientists making such records from effects temperatures have had on the natural world. And figuring out if today’s heat is unique is too great a challenge for the methods scientists normally use to calculate uncertainty, according to Harvard University’s Martin Tingley.

But Martin and Peter Huybers have shown the precise chances that northern areas of the world are warmer than any time in rebuilt records reaching back to the year 1400. They have worked out that there’s less than one chance in 20 that 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011’s northern summers weren’t the warmest in that time. They also find that summer 2010 has a 99% chance of being the warmest western Russia has seen. There have already been lots of claims made over the unusualness of recent warmth, Martin pointed out, but his and Peter’s are the most robust yet. “We put these estimates on a much sounder statistical footing,” he told me.

Saying one year’s summer is uniquely warm across a long period is difficult for subtle reasons that Martin explained through his height. “I’m a tall guy, 6 foot 4 inches,” he said. “I’ve never met you, but I’m going to bet I’m taller than you. What’s the intuition behind my bet? We have a sense of the distribution of heights. I’m aware I fall pretty far out on the tail, so the chances are if I meet an average person they don’t fall further out than I do. What if I’m in a room with 1,000 people I’ve never met before? Am I still likely to be the tallest in the room? Probably not.”