Scientists have discovered 12 species of caterpillars that can survive for weeks underwater without ever breaking the surface. They don’t have gills and they don’t hold their breath.

Here’s an interesting one: Hawaiian scientists discover a terrestrial caterpillar (that eats tree snails) has an innate ability to survive underwater for weeks at a time. It seems that this isn’t a survival mechanism (just in case they fell out of a tree and into a stream whilst munching on tree snails), but a deliberate mechanism and possibly part of their lifecycle. What’s even more interesting – scientists have no idea how they do it:

Rubinoff and co-worker Patrick Schmitz of the University of Hawaii did not find any water-blocking stopper over the caterpillars’ tracheae or evidence of gills. The animals drowned quickly when kept in standing water, so they seem to need the higher levels of oxygen present in running water, and probably absorb it directly through pores in their body, the scientists said.

The trait appears to have evolved more than once, Rubinoff said. After analyzing the DNA of the 12 amphibious species, the scientists found that three separate lineages of moth had developed the ability to breathe underwater at different points in the past.

“When the pressures on an environment are released, what crazy things are animals capable of doing?” said John W. Brown, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“You just wonder . . . do all animals have that potential?”

Via reddit (link to PNAS article)

Cities of floating, underwater skyscrapers? Well I guess that is one solution…

This looks pretty cool.  I’d love the view from the kitchen.  And there is great watersports potential (open ocean kiteboarding!).  But having lived at sea on large ships and underwater in the NOAA Aquarius Habitat, I can attest that though very cool, it isn’t the most comfortable experience (think wet, cold, bad food, rough, lots of fungal growth on your body, etc).  And would they still be called “skyscrapers”?

Read all about underwater skyscrapers here.

O.J. and the climate change deniers: guilty as charged

This awesome essay is by Bill McKibben.  It originally appeared here and is being widely circulated. It is from his forthcoming book “Eaarth: Making a life on a tough new planet”.  I was in LA (doing my masters degree at CSUN) during the infamous OJ trials. Like everyone else around the world, I was shocked that a jury of peers could find him innocent given the overwhelming evidence against him. (and this is especially jarring given his recent quasi-confession). It was a stunning display of cognitive dissonance. The facts, more or less clearly presented, could not penetrate preconceived ideas and hardened socio-political biases. Doesn’t that pretty much sum up what is going on in the climate change “debate”?

The attack on climate science is the O.J. moment of the 21st century

by Bill McKibben

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from The Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.” And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet. Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil,” and last week the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome” on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin. If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: Fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet. At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress toward any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Climate-change denial as an O.J. moment

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: It was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning.  So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack theprocess, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: In closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: Virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.

Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climategate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made — that’s what Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down. I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.”

If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington, D.C.  It won’t even matter that such a record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy in what everyone swore was a warming world.

For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: “Al Gore’s New Home.” These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit.

Why we don’t want to believe in climate change

The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to ExxonMobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few right-wing British tabloids that validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.

That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even The New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel,” which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount.  He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:

… screen the entire population regularly and … quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month … all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic — and now from above the fold in the paper of record.

Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main, reason for the success of the climate deniers, though. They’re not actually spending all that much cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites. They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.

Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and it is manmade. On the other hand, I feel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models … [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong — Gore has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause — and scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”

When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.’s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.

Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economy stinks.Here’s David Harsanyi, a columnist for The Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation — a world — to fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’ credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”

“Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen.  There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case itself: If you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine-tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.

Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake because science can be — and, in fact, should be — infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.” That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.

Why data isn’t enough

I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by people who argue constantly. It’s fun. One of the better skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly what we can now say with any certainty. That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly don’t turn my back on the research — we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say is safe, measured in parts per million.

But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at ExxonMobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.

Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress — cap-and-dividend, it’s called — that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80 percent of Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.

By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right — and to figure it out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.

Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.

Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their political power to make sure that miners’ kids won’t get to build wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed — just not at climate-change scientists.

But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around. They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us at our best.

There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently, especially evangelical churches across the country. People who take the Gospel seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.

It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption.”

There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks through — a sunset, an hour in the garden — we’re suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: Get someone out in the woods at an impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to their history, their identity, their hope.

The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.

In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.

LA sushi bars busted for serving whale

Shock!  Somehow that Sei whale meat from Japan’s “scientific” whale hunt has found its way onto the plates of an LA sushi bar!  And giving this story an odd twist is the fact that the bust was initiated by hollywood activists that produced The Cove.

From the NYT: Oscar winners try to keep whale off sushi plates

with video cameras and tiny microphones, the team behind Sunday’s Oscar-winning documentary film “The Cove” orchestrated a Hollywood-meets-Greenpeace-style covert operation to ferret out what the authorities say is illegal whale meat at one of this town’s most highly regarded sushi destinations.

Their work, undertaken in large part here last week as the filmmakers gathered for the Academy Awards ceremony, was coordinated with law enforcement officials, who said Monday that they were likely to bring charges against the restaurant, the Hump, for violating federal laws against selling marine mammals.

The sushi sting actually began in October, when the documentary’s associate producer and “director of clandestine operations,” Charles Hambleton, heard from friends in the music industry that the Hump, a highly rated sushi restaurant next to the runway at the Santa Monica airport, was serving whale.

Mr. Hambleton, who has worked as a water safety consultant on Hollywood movies like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” created a tiny camera for two animal-activist associates to wear during a monster session of omakase — a sushi meal in which the chef picks all the dishes.

Video of their meal shows the two activists, both vegan, being served what the waitress can be heard calling “whale” — thick pink slices — that they take squeamish bites of before tossing into a Ziploc bag in a purse.

The samples were sent to Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. Professor Baker said DNA testing there revealed that the samples sent to him were from a Sei whale, which are found worldwide and are endangered but are sometimes hunted in the North Pacific under a controversial Japanese scientific program. “I’ve been doing this for years,” Professor Baker said. “I was pretty shocked.”

Serving unusual fish imported from Japan is the hallmark of many high-end sushi restaurants here, and whale meat is often found in Japanese markets, Professor Baker said. But he said he had never heard of it being served in an American restaurant.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYKNCN1ESZM&w=640&h=385]

Ever wondered what happens to a coffee cup in the ocean at 2300m depth?

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9456573&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1


Know you now. Here’s more from the Mar-Eco team:

[27.06.2004] In the deep ocean, the pressure is much higher than on the surface. In order to illustrate this, researchers onboard RV G.O. Sars put a coffee cup into the trawl and brought it down to 2300 meters depth…

The weight of the air presses down on everything on earth. The weight of the water in the sea also creates pressure. Because water is so much heavier than air, pressure in the sea increases much more rapidly with changes in depth. It increases by 1 atmosphere for every 10m of depth, or so. Thus at 1000m the pressure is about 100 times what it is at the surface.

When researchers onboard RV G.O. Sars was sampling down to 2300 meters depths, the pressure was about 230 times at high as it is on land. The coffee cup they put into the trawl was completely compressed.

Oarfish: the largest fish in the deep oceans

The BBC posted a pretty neat video about a rare giant deep sea fish called an ‘oarfish’ in the Gulf of Mexico. The footage is pretty neat as it’s one of the first times an oarfish has been filmed in the deep – most tend to wash up half dead or dying on shorelines (BBC don’t allow embedded footage, so click on image above to follow through to their site).

To be honest, I figured the video was a little underwhelming (these things are supposed to be 17m long and giants of the sea, right?) so I followed through to a Google search and came across these unbelievable photographs taken in Buena Vista, Mexico a few years back:

Here’s an even bigger one (23 foot) that washed up off a US Navy base in California back in ’96:

and one more from Baja California:

NASA deliberately crashes CO2-sensing satellite on take-off to avoid revealing that climate change is a complete hoax

No really, i’m not kidding. Remember that CO2 satellite NASA lost after a launch failure last October? (click here for the video). Well, according to Lord Monckton, the crash was “extremely dissapointing” for other more nefarious reasons:

”Not greatly to my surprise – indeed I predicted it – the satellite crashed on take-off because the last thing they want is real world hard data,” he told a climate sceptics’ lunch in South Yarra yesterday.

NASA understood that getting the satellite into orbit would have demonstrated ”the whole darn thing” – climate-change science – ”is nonsense”.

Now we’ve established that Lord Monckton is pedelling a conspiracy theory where NASA deliberately destroys their own infra-structure to hide evidence of global warming, we can pretty much declare that anything Monckton has to say from here on in is null and void. For entertainments sake, here are a few other highlights from his Australian tour courtesy of The Age newspaper:

Bold claims are stock-in-trade for Lord Monckton, a hereditary peer and one-time adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher who swung through Melbourne yesterday as part of a two-week national speaking tour.

He said he was the first to explain the theory of global warming on British television in the late 1980s; that the United Nations wanted to use climate change policy to create a world government; that today’s environmentalists were just yesterday’s communists in different clothing.

His biggest laugh at the first of his two Melbourne speeches came when he said describing environmentalists as ”green” was a misnomer. ”I tend to call them the traffic-light tendency – greens too yellow to admit they’re really red.”

His interests stretch beyond climate change. He makes the extraordinary claim, one that he admits sounds ”bonkers”, that he has also manufactured a cure to a long-term illness that attacked his endocrine system and patented the cure in conjunction with a British surgeon.

Though stressing it was in its early stages, he said the drug had had positive results treating HIV and multiple sclerosis. ”It also has been used to cure cases of colds, flu,” he said.

Lord Monckton’s stump speech is built around attacks on the science underpinning man-made climate change and the scientists and those that believe them. Though not a climate scientist, he said he had uncovered flaws through his understanding of mathematics – ”the language of science”.

He described government attempts to tackle climate change as ”a plot by the rich against the poor” that would ”kill 5 billion, 6 billion people”.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was guilty of ”systematically telling lies” and exaggerating by up to 15 times the global warming that was likely by 2100.

Scientists associated with the UN panel dismiss his claims. Even Senate leader Barnaby Joyce, probably Federal Parliament’s most prominent climate sceptic, has described Lord Monckton as being on ”the fringe”.

In the blogosphere, where the climate science debate thrives, his views are reviled and celebrated in roughly equal enthusiasm.

Yesterday he drew about 100 people -mostly retirees – to his lunch-time speech and an estimated 1000 to an evening address at the Sofitel.

Hungry tiger shark eats reefcam

I stumbled across today over at Sea Fever blog, and thought was worth re-posting here. First, a bit of background from the Australian Institute of Marine Science on exactly how they managed to get a tiger shark to eat their camera:

Baited Remote Underwater Video Stations (BRUVS) have been developed by AIMS scientists in order to monitor the vast areas of deeper inter-reef and shelf habitats inaccessible to research divers so that important bioregions there can be included in marine protected areas.

BRUVS consist of tourist-grade “HandiCam” video cameras in simple underwater housings made of PVC sewer pipe and acrylic, with a canister of minced pilchards on the end of a bait arm in the field of view. The housings are held in steel frames, and are deployed in strings of four to six under separate ropes and floats, to be picked up after one or two hours filming at the seabed.

Baited videos record species attracted to the bait plume or camera station, species attracted to the commotion caused by feeding and aggregation at the station, species occupying territories within the field of view of the camera, and species indifferent to the station but present in or passing through the field of view during the deployment.

The range of fish, sharks, rays, sea snakes and other animals sighted on BRUVS tapes has been remarkable – over 300 species to date, from 3cm leatherjackets to 3m hammerhead sharks.

http://v.wordpress.com/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.15