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A little comment(ary)...
by Outspoken on Wed Jul 16, 2008 6:38 pm
The Whale Oil Economy
By Michael Gerson
The Washington Post
IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE -- North of Oslo, north of Longyearbyen, almost as north as North itself, the National Geographic Endeavor breaks pack ice in endless daylight through a gray-teal sea. The expedition has been cruising near Svalbard, a group of high arctic islands larger than Denmark -- in summer, a land of brown mountains streaked with snow-filled gullies, low clouds that blur distinctions of sky and land, and wide glaciers reaching the ocean in gashes of bright sky blue.
Ashore, this arctic desert is so harsh that the region's natives wisely never settled here -- only men digging coal, trapping arctic fox and polar bear, and hunting whales were foolish enough to come. A forlorn whaling camp remains -- ruined cabins, a few shallow human graves in the permafrost (most were washed away) and dozens of massive right whale skulls, still bleeding whale oil into the ground, feeding moss and low, pink flowers. Whalers searched for oil in blubber and bone to light their economy. Now the question arises: Is this last wilderness being changed by another kind of oil?
Stefan is a Swedish member of the crew who has sailed these waters for 24 years, after catching "polar fever" as a youth. When asked about the effects of warming he has witnessed, Stefan, who wanted only his first name to be used, displays a sailor's skepticism. Populations of walrus and polar bear, he believes, have been growing in strength, not declining. Ice conditions show "huge variation from one season to another," making it difficult to discern a pattern. But the local Hopen island weather station records that the thickness of winter sea ice has shrunk by 16 inches since the 1960s. And "the glaciers," Stefan says, "are retreating everywhere."
This desolate, grand, forgotten sea has suddenly come to the center of world attention for one reason: the pace of climate change is faster than expected. In the past 50 years, as much as half of summer sea ice has gone missing. Another few decades could mean that the ice disappears entirely. The absence of ice in water has little to do with raising sea levels; it is water stored on land in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that could fill the oceans like a brimming bathtub. But since ice acts as a kind of mirror, less ice means less reflected sunlight, which means that the Arctic could heat at twice the rate of the rest of the world. And in the past five years, some of Greenland's glaciers have shown accelerated melting as well. (The Antarctic sheet seems more stable because it is more isolated from global weather patterns.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/15/AR2008071502429.html?wpisrc=newsletter
(By Chris Jackson -- Getty Images)
By Michael Gerson
The Washington Post
IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE -- North of Oslo, north of Longyearbyen, almost as north as North itself, the National Geographic Endeavor breaks pack ice in endless daylight through a gray-teal sea. The expedition has been cruising near Svalbard, a group of high arctic islands larger than Denmark -- in summer, a land of brown mountains streaked with snow-filled gullies, low clouds that blur distinctions of sky and land, and wide glaciers reaching the ocean in gashes of bright sky blue.
Ashore, this arctic desert is so harsh that the region's natives wisely never settled here -- only men digging coal, trapping arctic fox and polar bear, and hunting whales were foolish enough to come. A forlorn whaling camp remains -- ruined cabins, a few shallow human graves in the permafrost (most were washed away) and dozens of massive right whale skulls, still bleeding whale oil into the ground, feeding moss and low, pink flowers. Whalers searched for oil in blubber and bone to light their economy. Now the question arises: Is this last wilderness being changed by another kind of oil?
Stefan is a Swedish member of the crew who has sailed these waters for 24 years, after catching "polar fever" as a youth. When asked about the effects of warming he has witnessed, Stefan, who wanted only his first name to be used, displays a sailor's skepticism. Populations of walrus and polar bear, he believes, have been growing in strength, not declining. Ice conditions show "huge variation from one season to another," making it difficult to discern a pattern. But the local Hopen island weather station records that the thickness of winter sea ice has shrunk by 16 inches since the 1960s. And "the glaciers," Stefan says, "are retreating everywhere."
This desolate, grand, forgotten sea has suddenly come to the center of world attention for one reason: the pace of climate change is faster than expected. In the past 50 years, as much as half of summer sea ice has gone missing. Another few decades could mean that the ice disappears entirely. The absence of ice in water has little to do with raising sea levels; it is water stored on land in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that could fill the oceans like a brimming bathtub. But since ice acts as a kind of mirror, less ice means less reflected sunlight, which means that the Arctic could heat at twice the rate of the rest of the world. And in the past five years, some of Greenland's glaciers have shown accelerated melting as well. (The Antarctic sheet seems more stable because it is more isolated from global weather patterns.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/15/AR2008071502429.html?wpisrc=newsletter
(By Chris Jackson -- Getty Images)
"Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."
Plato (427-347 BC)
Plato (427-347 BC)
Send It Somewhere Special
by Outspoken on Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:07 pm
Send It Somewhere Special
By Michael Benson
The Washington Post
Consider the International Space Station, that marvel of incremental engineering. It has close to 15,000 cubic feet of livable space; 10 modules, or living and working areas; a Canadian robot arm that can repair the station from outside; and the capacity to keep five astronauts (including the occasional wealthy rubbernecking space tourist) in good health for long periods. It has gleaming, underused laboratories; its bathroom is fully repaired; and its exercycle is ready for vigorous mandatory workouts.
The only problem with this $156 billion manifestation of human genius -- a project as large as a football field that has been called the single most expensive thing ever built -- is that it's still going nowhere at a very high rate of speed. And as a scientific research platform, it still has virtually no purpose and is accomplishing nothing.
I try not to write this cavalierly. But if the station's goal is to conduct yet more research into the effects of zero gravity on human beings, well, there's more than enough of that already salted away in Russian archives, based on the many years of weightlessness that cosmonauts heroically logged in a series of space stations throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s. By now, ISS crews have also spent serious time in zero gravity. We know exactly what weightlessness does and how to counter some of its atrophying effects. (Cue shot of exercycle.)
And if the station's purpose is to act as a "stepping stone" to places beyond -- well, that metaphor, most recently used by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin is pure propaganda. As any student of celestial mechanics can tell you, if you want to go somewhere in space, the best policy is to go directly there and not stop along the way, because stopping is a waste of precious fuel, time and treasure. Which is a pretty good description of the ISS, parked as it is in constant low Earth orbit.
This is no doubt why, after the horrifying disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, the Bush administration belatedly recognized that, if we're going to spend all that money on manned spaceflight, we should justify the risks by actually sending our astronauts somewhere. So NASA is now developing a new generation of rockets and manned spacecraft. By 2020, the Constellation program is supposed to take astronauts beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since Apollo 17 returned from the moon in 1972. Yes, that'll be almost 50 years. Where will they go? To the moon -- the only place humans have already visited.
Which leads us right back to the expensively orbiting ISS. It hasn't a fig-leaf's role left. The moon is the new "stepping stone," with Mars bruited as a next destination. Although NASA officials will never quite say so, their current attitude seems to be that the station is essentially a high-maintenance distraction, even a mistake. Their plan is to finish assembling the thing ASAP and hand the keys over to the Russians, Canadians, Europeans and Japanese, with minimal continuing U.S. involvement. This should happen by the shuttle's mandatory retirement in 2010. Meanwhile, we're still writing a lot of high-denomination checks and preparing the two remaining shuttles for risky flights to finish something we then plan to be largely rid of. This seems absurd. I have an alternative proposal:
Send the ISS somewhere.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102394.html?wpisrc=newsletter
By Michael Benson
The Washington Post
Consider the International Space Station, that marvel of incremental engineering. It has close to 15,000 cubic feet of livable space; 10 modules, or living and working areas; a Canadian robot arm that can repair the station from outside; and the capacity to keep five astronauts (including the occasional wealthy rubbernecking space tourist) in good health for long periods. It has gleaming, underused laboratories; its bathroom is fully repaired; and its exercycle is ready for vigorous mandatory workouts.
The only problem with this $156 billion manifestation of human genius -- a project as large as a football field that has been called the single most expensive thing ever built -- is that it's still going nowhere at a very high rate of speed. And as a scientific research platform, it still has virtually no purpose and is accomplishing nothing.
I try not to write this cavalierly. But if the station's goal is to conduct yet more research into the effects of zero gravity on human beings, well, there's more than enough of that already salted away in Russian archives, based on the many years of weightlessness that cosmonauts heroically logged in a series of space stations throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s. By now, ISS crews have also spent serious time in zero gravity. We know exactly what weightlessness does and how to counter some of its atrophying effects. (Cue shot of exercycle.)
And if the station's purpose is to act as a "stepping stone" to places beyond -- well, that metaphor, most recently used by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin is pure propaganda. As any student of celestial mechanics can tell you, if you want to go somewhere in space, the best policy is to go directly there and not stop along the way, because stopping is a waste of precious fuel, time and treasure. Which is a pretty good description of the ISS, parked as it is in constant low Earth orbit.
This is no doubt why, after the horrifying disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, the Bush administration belatedly recognized that, if we're going to spend all that money on manned spaceflight, we should justify the risks by actually sending our astronauts somewhere. So NASA is now developing a new generation of rockets and manned spacecraft. By 2020, the Constellation program is supposed to take astronauts beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since Apollo 17 returned from the moon in 1972. Yes, that'll be almost 50 years. Where will they go? To the moon -- the only place humans have already visited.
Which leads us right back to the expensively orbiting ISS. It hasn't a fig-leaf's role left. The moon is the new "stepping stone," with Mars bruited as a next destination. Although NASA officials will never quite say so, their current attitude seems to be that the station is essentially a high-maintenance distraction, even a mistake. Their plan is to finish assembling the thing ASAP and hand the keys over to the Russians, Canadians, Europeans and Japanese, with minimal continuing U.S. involvement. This should happen by the shuttle's mandatory retirement in 2010. Meanwhile, we're still writing a lot of high-denomination checks and preparing the two remaining shuttles for risky flights to finish something we then plan to be largely rid of. This seems absurd. I have an alternative proposal:
Send the ISS somewhere.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102394.html?wpisrc=newsletter
"Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."
Plato (427-347 BC)
Plato (427-347 BC)