…for private industry. From Defense Industry Daily:
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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space capsule launch successfully (webcast & tweets | PDF briefing | Space.com). This is the first flight under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) project, and the 1st new American human capable spacecraft to travel to orbit and back since the Space Shuttle took flight in 1981…
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Mark
Ottawa
A new study, funded by NASA, has discovered that the most serious drought in the Amazon in over 100 years has had little impact on the rainforest. This flies in the face of the IPCC’s claims that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be significantly damaged by a small reduction in rainfall, potentially leading to replacement by tropical grasslands.
The IPCC proposed the dire possibility in 2007 of a warming Amazon climate that researchers attributed to human activity. The UN predicted that by 2025 or 2030, at least half of the Amazone Basin will disappear because of severe drought, fire, or logging. The report went on to say that by 2050, parts of the Amazon will be decimated, with an extinction of between 20-30% of the world’s plants and animals by 2100.
While we can’t exactly wait until 2100 to find out whether the IPCC was right or wrong, the new NASA research suggests that the 40% figure, also used by the World Wildlife Fund in fund-raising, has no scientific basis.
Scientists now believe that the rainforest, estimated to be 9.9 million years in age, could be more resilient than originally thought. Researchers from Boston University published a study of satellite data for the Amazon rainforest in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters, that looked at 2005 for the worst drought in a century.
Although people who depended on the water from the Amazon suffered, the researchers could find no evidence that the rainforest itself had been damaged. The level of “greenness” in the forest between drought years and rainy years were more or less indistinguishable, scientifically speaking.
The IPCC has been accused recently of using greatly exaggerated claims for global warming in order to politicize the cause, and get governments to take action to stop it. But the damage done to the credibility of the scientific community over climategate may be irreparable, and new reports of falsified data are not helping.
Climate scientist for Georgia Tech, Judith Curry, recently said in an interview with Discover magazine that she recognizes the damage that climategate has done to the reputation of scientists, but that it’s still worth pursuing action. When asked whether we should wait until all scientific uncertainty is resolved before taking action, she answered that the “probability of something bad happening is at least as high as the probability that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” And while that threat turned out to be false, we addressed the threat anyway. So, Ms.Curry claims, we have a history of taking action on things that “have a low probability of happening.”
Here’s a little piece of advice. Comparing the need to act on climate change to the war in Iraq is probably not the best selling tool at the disposal of climatologists.
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