Those were the days, back when UPI went toe to toe with the AP, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse to cover the world. Even the bottom of the place. In 1979 a packet of newspeople on an NSF-hosted tour of US Antarctic operations finished up and flew back to Christchurch NZ in an Air Force C-141 cargo plane. I was among'em. So was Ira Flatow. But not the late, indefatigable Al Rossiter, UPI's main scence guy. He had a sinus problem. The medicos told him not to go up in the ill-pressurized airplane till he got better. Nothing much had happened while the whole group was on the ice (we lapped up the lingo). That is, other than the standard parades to the Pole, to the Dry Valleys, to visit Penguins, and to gorge on fried Antarctic cod thank you U. of Illinois prof. Art DeVries, guru of hematic antifreeze.
A week earlier we'd watched an Air New Zealand DC-10 cruise low and slow past McMurdo. It was on a sightseeing tourist flight. The base helo pilots shook their heads. Some day, they feared, they'd be picking up its and its hundreds of occupants' pieces. Sure enough, the dire prophecy was realized while we were still in the air to Christchurch. There, the next day when the news reached us, we filed lame "I was just there" stories; Al was still there. He got the awful story, vividly.
In near-whiteout conditions and with compass sketchy at best in polar regions (this was pre-GPS), the ANZ flight was at about 1500 feet when it flew into the lower slope of 12,455-foot-high stratovolcano Mt. Erebus, just 23 miles from the base. It is among the world's more active volcanoes with condensed vapor and haze often visible streaming from its summit. 257 dead. No survivors. No one was sure what had happened for many hours, long after communications ceased and the plane would already have run out of fuel.
Over this last weekend other volcano news broke. Nature Geoscience reported a new study. Some of its authors are among the better known climate scientists. They concluded after a review of recent volcanic activity in recent years that an unusually frequent rate of explosive eruptions – not monster ones, but big enough to reach the stratosphere – has put enough extra volcanic sulfer-dioxide aerosols into the high atmosphere to cool the Earth just a bit. Enough, they calculate, to account for as much as 15 percent of the drop-off in the rate of global warming observed over the last 15 years or so. That makes it all the easier to pile on other factors, such as an enhanced upwelling of cold water in the mid-Pacific, to explain how the present near-level rate of warming could have occurred while atmospheric CO2 kept piling apace. And thus give reason to keep global warming contrarians, who believe the pause vindicates their world-wide fraud explanation for global warming, in the fringe-crackpot bins of the reality-based mind.
Lead author of the new study is Lawrence Livermore Lab's Ben Santer. Also there is NASA-Goddard's (NY) Gavin Schmidt, publicly prominent for his work on the Real Climate web log. These two are among arch fiends in climate contrarian cosmology.
The first news account I read about this paper yesterday morning while yawning in bed with the iPad set to a "climate" filter from that uber-robotic news masher-upper app Zite, was this:
- UPI – Brooks Hays: Volcanic eruptions help slow global eruptions / New study suggests sulfur-spewing volcanos help slow global warming ; The UPI origin is what got me to thinking of Al Rossiter.
First read finds this to be a concise, nicely written piece with an aroma of accuracy upon it. However … as many tracker readers know, UPI is no longer United Press International but just UPI, is drastically shrunken, has gone through many owners and more than one bankruptcy, and is now under the ownership of the Unification Church, aka the Moonies. It largely just aggregates, with some rewrite, the work of others, marketing its product apparently to sites that want a convenient news roundup for their users. It's not overtly dishonest. But mistakes, yes. This story credits two sources: the paper at Nature Geoscience and more power to it if the reporter actually read it, and The Guardian in the UK. There one finds a story much like this one. No byline. But it does have a Reuters credit line. The Guardian was just a way-station in the story's fermentation process. Further pursuit leads to some true terroir for this rebottled tale's provenance:
- Reuters – Alister Doyle: Sun-dimming volcanoes partly explain global warming hiatus — study; Doyle is a seasoned pro, does this nicely. He is old school, and uses a dateline to say where he is, not necessarily where the story happened. This one is datelined Oslo. Doyle is based there. The UPI story is datelined Livermore where lead author of the paper Ben Santer is. One doubts the UPI's Mr. Hays was in Livermore. But there is a writer of that name in the DC area where UPI has its hq.
One more remark about UPI's labeling of this story. I hope errors in attribution such as this are exceptions. Otherwise implies that UPI writers are given neither the time, nor the fear of punishment if they screw up, to get it right.
WAIT! Another volcanic-haze-and-slowed-warming report is in the news:
- Int'l Business Times – Philip Ross: Global Warming 'Hiatus' Caused By Volcanoes' 'Cooling Effect,' Study Says Eruptions Slow Global Temperature Rise ;
My search for news on the Nature Geosc. paper turned up this story where, surprise surprise, one learns that it has a different inspiration. In Geophysical Research Letters (See Grist below) is a related report called "Recent anthropogenic increases in SO2 from Asia have minimal impact on stratospheric aerosol". It backs into a point similar to that of the Nature Geosc. paper. That is, it finds that a recent bump in SO2 aerosols is due to more, moderate volcanic eruptions, not to Chinese coal burning power plants. Thus, to the extent that such aerosols curbed global warming, volcanism is the reason. This is not the same as saying volcanoes did the whole job – which is what Ross at Int'l Business Times writes and is pretty much what the U. Colorado press release encourages reporters to write. I've not read the paper, but had IBT's Ross read the release from NCAR/UCAR, below, he'd have seen that the GRL paper puts at about 25% the contribution by volcanic eruption to the slowdown in warming. That is in rough agreement with the Nature Geosc. paper's upper limit of 15%.
Grist for the Mill: Livermore Nat'l Lab Press Release ; MIT Press Release ; U. Colo Boulder Press Release (re GRL paper) ; NCAR/UCAR Press Release (re GRL paper), Nature Geoscience paper abstract ;
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