Science is the best way to dig out the truth of the natural world, but that doesn’t prevent many people from denying truths that are inconvenient or contrary to their preconceptions or faith.

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U.S. 30, east of Blair, Neb. June, 2011, Iowa DOT

The stunning floods, tornadoes, droughts and heat waves in 2011 caused more Americans to accept global warming — even if climate whizzes are chary of attributing individual weather events to the warming trend.

In the last month, denial of global warming has subsided in the wake of a string of floods, droughts and heat waves, culminating in the “summer in March,” 2012. Although Americans’ attitudes toward warming ebb and flow, on April 17, a Yale University poll reported that 69 percent think global warming is affecting the weather in the United States.

In the same month, however, a Discovery Channel series called “Frozen Planet” attracted ire when scientists noted that it documented massive melting at the poles, but ignored the “why?” question. Scientists have said for decades that polar warming would be an early sign of global warming.

In the recent past, this phenomenon of “denialism” has also appeared in doubts about issues that have long been settled in the scientific community, such as whether:

An April conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison delved into the origin and development of denialism. Is a refusal to face facts growing more common? Are there better ways to explain how the world works?

Denial in the brain

Scientists, by training, are professional skeptics, but if after decades of debate 97 percent of them accept the link between greenhouse gases and global warming, why are so many unconvinced? “The theory is that if we tell people what we know, they will change,” says Arthur Lupia, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, but that ignores how people really listen and make decisions.

Speaking to a high-level gathering of science journalists in Madison, Lupia said the problem does not reside with the audience. “The problem is us. Our expectations aren’t consistent with how humans react to information, what they will listen to, or what they will remember. People don’t pay attention, or they don’t remember what we said or what we intend them to remember.”

To change an opinion, you must first attract and then hold the audience’s attention, but attention wanders all the time. No matter how important you think your message is, Lupia says, “Biology does not change its rules … about when people will think about things that challenge them. … If I am saying something abstract, that does not connect to your core aspirations,” you may be more interested in counting tiles on the ceiling.

Can you hear me now?

To communicate with a general audience, Lupia says, “You have to make it close, concrete, immediate. I understand the joy of telling the whole story about climate, but there are some audiences that can’t handle it; in their reality, it’s not the most immediate thing. They might be more receptive if you make the conversation about pollution, energy security or energy costs.”

Information is filtered by attention and ideology, Lupia concludes. “Learning is always an away game. All the real action occurs in the audience’s heads,” he says.

Reasoning: Logical or “motivated”?

Ideally, science adheres to logical reasoning: the conclusion must be true if the premises are true.

But psychologists say it’s common to see “motivated reasoning,” the tendency to fit new information into existing attitudes.

Making a judgment or decision can often involve a “fundamental tension between believing what you want and believing what you have to believe based on the information in front of you,” says Peter Ditto, professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California-Irvine.

“There is overwhelming evidence” that hopes, fears and social connections affect our judgments, Ditto adds, “but it’s not just that we believe whatever we want. I want to be taller, but I don’t believe that because the data won’t let me.”

Since processing information and making judgments have major emotional components, the standards for evidence are skewed in favor of reinforcing our preconceptions. We are more skeptical about ideas that are new, or that conflict with our thoughts and opinions, Ditto contends.

Over the course of evolution, bad events — but not beneficial ones — forced our ancestors to focus on whether to fight or flee. “People are the same way about information,” says Ditto.

The social element in motivated reasoning surfaced in a 1950s experiment, when six people convinced a seventh, the only real subject, that two lines were equally long. One line was clearly shorter than the other, Ditto says, “But six of them are confederates, and a substantial number of [subjects] go with the obviously wrong answer. That’s the power of having other people who believe as you do. It’s much easier to believe something that does not comport with reality if a whole bunch of others” hold the same erroneous belief.

History of denialism

Although denial of global warming and the erroneous link between vaccines and autism both originated in the 1990s, the organized rejection of evolution dates to the 1920s, when some American Christian fundamentalists promoted creationism — a Biblical explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

In a 2009 survey, 87 percent of scientists, but only 32 percent of all Americans, agreed that organisms have evolved over time through natural processes. Thirty-one percent of Americans thought humans and other living things “have existed in the present form since the beginning of time.”

Scientists and other Americans certainly have a different understanding of how organisms change through time!

Scientist data and general public data from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press surveys, May-June 2009. For question wording, see survey toplines. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding. Reprinted from Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Much of the attention to the issue comes from battles over teaching of evolution or creationism in public schools, but there is “a lot of misunderstanding,” about the anti-evolution movement in the United States, says Ronald Numbers, a professor of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and longtime student of the movement.

Although creationism is commonly considered a backlash against science, “Virtually nobody in the movement [in the 1920s] thought of themselves as anti-scientific,” Numbers says. “They were denying the scientific status of evolution.”

The dictionary defines science as “organized, certain knowledge about nature, and they said, ‘Nothing is certain about evolution, nobody has seen it.’”

During the 1970s, primarily in response to court decisions, creationism morphed into “creation science” or “scientific creationism,” Numbers says. “The anti-evolutionists realized that evolution had a great deal of scientific support … so their approach was that they, too, were scientific.”

Unlike most anti-evolutionists in the 1920s, the new creationists used a literal interpretation of the Bible to date creation to less than 10,000 years ago. But this created a problem, Numbers says, since according to the Bible, on the sixth day, “God created the animals and Adam named them all.”

No way Adam could rattle off the more than 1 million names of the modern species so quickly, but Numbers notes that the Bible refers to “kinds,” not “species.” If those “kinds” — created in Eden and saved on Noah’s ark — were equivalent to taxonomic families, they could have evolved into the profusion modern species.

“So creationists can accept evolution within the family, and all the evidence for speciation is welcome, because in only about 4,300 years since the flood, they have to have evolution of all the species,” says Numbers. “It’s evolution in fast-forward,” but only among closely related species.”

Even if “kind” equals family, anti-evolutionists exempt humans from this reasoning, allowing them to reject human descent from apes — our fellow hominids.

“It’s strange, I know,” says Numbers. “They are anti-evolution, but most of the evidence evolutionists use against them, they are happy to embrace! One thing that has not been true for 50 years, but lingers in the popular mind, is that creationists deny all forms of evolution.”

The manual of denialism?

Evolutionary biologists regard evolution through natural selection as the organizing principle of biology. Yet for 30 or 40 years, surveys have shown a substantial fraction of Americans, even a majority, who do not “believe in” evolution, Sean Carroll, vice-president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told the denial conference.

Carroll, who like many biologists is aghast at the effort to squeeze evolution into a biblical straitjacket, says, “The denial of evolution was my introduction to denialism.”

ENLARGE

American Museum of National History

In 1954, children got a “Polio Pioneer” card, and a piece of candy after getting a jab of polio vaccine.

Typically, biologists have approached the evolution debate by amassing evidence, but “it’s never been about the data,” maintains Carroll, who is also a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And if it’s not about the data, what are we talking about?”

An earlier example of denialism occurred in the 1950s, after Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, a breakthrough that halted a dreaded, paralyzing disease.

Many chiropractors, Carroll found, opposed vaccines since they negated the central premise of chiropractic — that all disease results from misalignment of the vertebrae. “It shocked me. They actively opposed, disputed the efficacy of the polio vaccine. The opposed the March of Dimes, and federal and state efforts to get everybody vaccinated.”

Five hallmarks of denialism

The opposition continued — even after the polio epidemic tapered off as a result of the mass vaccination that started in 1955, says Carroll. And he identifies the tactics used then as a “playbook” of science denial that is echoed in more recent struggles over evolution, vaccines and global warming:

We just don’t agree!

Add it up, and the theme is this: The science must not be allowed to endanger a key philosophy, Carroll says.

But the cost of denialism is high, Carroll maintains. “It’s difficult, as an evolutionary biologist, to realize that half the county is deaf to anything you have to say, especially if the story you have to tell is about a magnificent achievement, understanding the complex relationship of living things on the planet, the deep history of our species.”

To reach young people, Howard Hughes has begun producing and giving away a series of videos on evolution called The making of the fittest.

Go to links for videos

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

To bring science to the masses, Hughes has produced videos on evolution; this one describes how cold-water fish evolved “anti-freeze” genes.

The idea is to engage in storytelling — to help people understand and remember facts by putting them into a narrative framework, Carroll says. As a professor, he’s seen the power of a story. “When I got lost, off-topic, and students see me years later, they say they still remember some of those stories, and I know they don’t remember any of the genetics. Stories count.”

Time (dis)honored tactics

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California at San Diego, has written about the “merchants of doubt.”

The message, she says, is simple: The facts are not all in. We need to hold judgment until the scientists agree.

This kind of corrosive doubt — in the face of scientific certainty — is “very depressing” if you “believe that knowledge is power,” Oreskes says. “Knowledge is not powerful enough — an ideology is more powerful still. It’s about ideas, not facts.”

During the last half-century, she says, “Political powers are willing to attack rational truths, and those who deliver them.”

There is also money at stake in many of the issues, especially in the case of climate change, which threatens the fossil-fuel industry.

Car exhaust from eutrophication&hypoxia; smoky butt from Raul Lieberwirth

What do these have in common? Many companies in the oil and tobacco industries have sown seeds of doubt about the long-term effects of their products.

The model for such campaigns, Oreskes said, came from the tobacco industry in the 1960s. Facing growing evidence linking their profitable product to lung cancer, the industry settled on a strategy of promoting “Questions, manifested in a memorable maxim: “Doubt is our product.”

And for decades, doubt helped big tobacco deride and deny a tidal wave of evidence that cigarettes cause lung and heart disease.

December, 2011, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

After the crazy weather of the past year, pollsters have seen a bump in the number of Americans seeing “solid evidence” for global warming.

The same strategy, Oreskes says, was adapted to undermine “nuclear winter” (the discovery that huge clouds of ash and dust released during nuclear war could freeze and starve the planet), the dangers of the insecticide DDT, acid rain caused by power-plant pollution, the ozone hole, and global warming.

The tactics were to “challenge the evidence, claim the science is not settled, cherry-pick the data, to demand balance from journalists and threaten to sue if they don’t,” says Oreskes.

Changing the climate change story

The basic physics of global warming have been known for 100 years, Oreskes said. Scientists started exploring the subject with early computerized climate models in the 1980s.

In 1992, Oreskes said, the first President George Bush, “Called for concrete action to protect the planet. We had political leadership that committed us to doing something, yet we never did take the concrete steps that Bush called for. It’s a story about political challenges, selling uncertainty, about science in the age of denial.”

The doubters, funded by the oil industry, included some prominent Cold-War physicists who had been advocates for Ronald Reagan’s anti-missile defense system. “They said the science was unsettled, that it would be premature to act,” says Oreskes, who was intrigued to find that one of those physicists, Frederick Seitz, had been a consultant to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company.

In 1998, Seitz organized a petition against the Kyoto Protocol, the first international agreement to control greenhouse gases.

Seitz and his fellow doubters, Oreskes says, “Found a new enemy: environmental extremism. You see anxiety about environmentalists as socialists, using climate change as a lever to effect social or economic change.”

What began with a handful of people with roots in the Cold War has since spread to “a range of free-market think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute,” Oreskes says.

The arguments against the settled scientific debate over warming, she adds, “are not just different interpretation of the data; that’s a normal part of scientific life. This is not about normal scientific claims. These are the scientific equivalent of saying Belgium invaded Germany during World War I.”

Why deny? Because it works, Oreskes implies. Almost 25 years after the scorching summer of 1988 brought global warming into the public sphere, the United States has yet to get serious about controlling greenhouse gases.

“We ignore the facts of nature at our peril,” says Oreskes. “Ignoring them is not going to make them go away.”

On March 10, atmospheric chemist “Sherry” Rowland of the University of California-Irvine died in the company of his son and his wife of almost 60 years. Rowland became prominent in the 1970s after warning that common chemicals would destroy ozone 10 kilometers above Earth, exposing life to a shower of harmful radiation.

While exploring how chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) degrade after being released into the atmosphere, Rowland and graduate student Mario Molina realized the CFCs would float to the upper atmosphere, be cleaved by sunlight, and release chlorine that would destroy ozone through a chain reaction.

(Ozone contain three oxygen atoms; most oxygen molecules contain two oxygens.)

By intercepting cancer-causing UV radiation, ozone in the stratosphere allows life to exist on Earth. Significant damage to this ozone would cause an epidemic of human and animal cancer, and likely damage plants as well.

This alarming prospect was not popular in industries that relied on CFCs, but it sparked a long and largely successful effort to restrict and then ban production of the chemicals.

And although Rowland never retreated from his findings, his calm, charismatic personality helped his cause. Ralph Cicerone, now the president of the National Academy of Sciences, recalls collaborating with Rowland on CFCs. “We talked on the phone nearly every day. I considered Sherry to be my best friend, and over time I learned that many people considered him to be their best friend, too. In the midst of the debates over CFCs, he never exaggerated the dangers, always cited the science, and treated other people with dignity and respect.”

What must a scientist do?

According to the University of California-Irvine’s press service, Rowland knew his results mattered far beyond the lab: “Mario and I realized this was not just a scientific question, but a potentially grave environmental problem involving substantial depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. Entire biological systems, including humans, would be at danger from ultraviolet rays.”

At the time, scientists were studying the health implications of ozone-bearing smog in the lower atmosphere, but few people knew or cared about “good” ozone in the stratosphere.

The sudden notoriety of CFCs had a certain irony: The chemicals were invented in the 1920s at General Motors, maker of Frigidaire brand refrigerators, as a stable, non-toxic alternative to the ammonia and explosive propane used in air-conditioning and refrigeration.

CFCs later were used to expand plastic foam, clean electronic parts, and propel paint and deodorant in the mushrooming aerosol-spray business.

Antarctic ozone hole, 2011

   

Video: NASA

Chlorine and bromine in the upper atmosphere cause rapid ozone destruction in the super-chilled polar winter. Although the ozone “hole” (blue) is declining with the phase-out of CFCs, it still recurs.

They publish lest we perish!

Rowland’s 1974 study¹ ignited a long squabble over CFC production. Aerosol Age, the spray-can industry’s trade journal, implied that Rowland was a member of the Soviet KGB who wanted to destroy capitalism!

CFCs remained a back-burner issue, however, until the British Antarctic Survey discovered an alarming absence of ozone in 1985. The “Antarctic ozone hole” gave the theoretical worry sudden significance, and as the industry gradually found substitutes for CFCs, the ozone hole stopped expanding.

Today, as we watch the faltering response to global warming, it’s comforting to recall that the ozone threat prompted prompt collective action: The Montreal Protocol, a treaty to restrict CFC production, became effective in 1989 and has since been tightened after further alarm over ozone destruction, and 196 nations — essentially all of them — have signed the original Protocol. Production of ozone-depleting substances has fallen by more than 95 percent.

“CFCs were extremely useful compounds and their use was pervasive,” says Rudy Baum, editor in chief of C&EN (Chemical and Engineering News). “Although manufacturers maintained that there would be dire consequences if the use of CFCs were restricted or banned, it became clear pretty quickly that alternatives could be found in most cases.”

And yet ozone is still a problem, as shown by a 40 percent drop in Arctic ozone in the winter of 2010-2011. Continuing destruction is blamed on the stability of CFCs and the fact that the replacements, while less damaging, still destroy ozone. “Ozone can be thought of as a patient in remission, but it’s too early to declare recovery,” said Susan Solomon of the University of Colorado.

Not bounded by the lab walls

Nonetheless, the Montreal protocols are considered an epochal case of planetary preventive medicine, and Rowland, Molina and Paul Crutzen, who also worked on CFCs, were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

But for 10 or 15 years, Rowland had played the role of maverick — speaking outside the laboratory about the importance of what he had found inside it. It’s not a comfortable role for many scientists; many find it safer to stay in the lab and let others figure out what to do with their results.

Jonathan Fink, vice-president of research at Portland State University, says “The culture of science is pretty deep in terms of how we are trained. Most science grad students are taught to focus on being the best at something, rather than thinking about the application of what they do to society.”

All along, Rowland explained the science and gently reminded us of our stake in an intact ozone layer. He continued to study atmospheric chemistry, mentor younger scientists, and show by example how scientists could speak responsibly about what their results mean for the rest of us.

Somehow, Rowland managed to fight his battles without making enemies, at least outside the industries that had inadvertently begun calamitous destruction of ozone.

Why do scientists like Rowland speak out? “Because they’re scientists and scientists are addicted to facts and what facts tell them,” says Baum. “I knew Sherry Rowland pretty well — I was the West Coast correspondent for C&EN from 1991 to 2004 … he was a gracious, dignified, reserved individual, certainly not a rabble-rouser. But he knew that his science was solid and that it told him that humans were doing something that would have catastrophic consequences if they didn’t stop. So he spoke out. Simple as that.”

A new disaster unfolds

Even before the Montreal Protocol was signed, climate scientists were starting to warn that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would enhance the greenhouse effect and trigger global warming. In testimony to the U.S. Senate in the torrid summer of 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen linked rising temperatures to rising levels of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

The debate over global warming and climate change had begun, and going public put Hansen in much the same position as Rowland had occupied 15 years before. Via email, Hansen credited Rowland and atmospheric scientist Don Hunten as “role models… . They showed that it was possible to do first-rate science and also uphold our responsibility to make clear the implications of our research for society.”

Rowland redux?

Until then, Hansen had been a well-regarded but faintly visible NASA expert in planetary atmospheres. He had studied Venus, where an atmosphere choked with carbon dioxide produces a “runaway greenhouse effect” that raises the surface temperature to 460° C.

After making news in 1988, Hansen retreated from the public discussion of warming, but in the early 2000s, as temperatures continued to rise, he began to speak up again. In 2005, after the Bush White House tried to muzzle him, he went public with a vengeance.

Why? Journalist Mark Hertsgaard, who has written extensively about global warming and repeatedly interviewed Hansen, says he “thinks like a scientist, believes if you find the information, and present it properly, the truth should carry the day. I think he came out of hibernation in 2005 only because he felt he had to. He looked around and saw that the information alone was not carrying the day.”

Hansen’s regular emails combine climate facts with political opinions for a broad audience. For example, a recent commentary argued that “Scientists attempt to communicate, but are flummoxed by the ability of the profiteers to manipulate democracies. The scientific method (objective analysis of all facts) is pitted against the talk-show method (selective citation of anecdotal bits supporting a predetermined position).”

On Aug. 29, 2011, Hansen was arrested at the White House with hundreds of others protesting the Keystone XL tar-sand oil pipeline. Tapping such a vast reservoir of carbon, Hansen believes, will bring us that much closer to a “tipping point” on greenhouse warming. “Now we’ve got the spectacle of one of the world’s foremost climate scientists getting arrested and urging others to get arrested,” says Hertsgaard. “This is way beyond speaking out.”

Hertsgaard, a native of Minnesota, says it’s “very hard for [Iowa native] Jim Hansen the person to speak out.” In the Midwest, Hertsgaard says, “it is just not seemly to draw attention to yourself or bring up a topic that is likely to discomfort others. … but it’s not corny to talk without irony about the importance of doing the right thing.”

The scientific culture

A fully indoctrinated scientist is chary of talking much beyond the lab, Hertsgaard says. “Many scientists very much frown on taking the public agitator role, and that’s another tribute to Hansen’s courage. He was prepared not only to take brickbats from the Exxon-Mobil front groups, but to endure the judgment of his own peers, who said ‘That’s not what scientists do.’ He remembers that he’s not just a scientist, he’s a human being too.”

Despite the successful example of the Montreal Protocol, the global warming problem is vastly harder to solve, says Baum of C&E News. “The scale of fossil fuel use is several orders of magnitude larger …. Humans consume between 80 million and 90 million barrels of petroleum every day, and that represents only about a third of the fossil fuel that is consumed.”

Finally, while the specter of cancer caused by increased UV radiation is unsettling, “people actually like the warmer conditions, at least for now,” Baum wrote. “We didn’t have a winter in Washington, D.C., this year … and people loved it.”

So will the environmental victory over CFCs that started with Rowland and Molina be mirrored by serious action over global warming? Maybe not, says Spencer Weart, a long-time chronicler of warming. Comparing the ozone battle to the fight over global warming “is like comparing a single battle to a world war. Ozone depletion (once the ozone hole was detected) was clearly an urgent problem, with a straightforward solution. But with global warming, it’s hard for people to worry much about something that seems remote in space and time — isn’t it just a problem for polar bears and our grandchildren?”

Slowing warming “will require wholesale changes in our entire world economy,” Weart says. “And that must begin with government regulation of the fossil fuels industry, the largest concentration of economic power the world has ever seen. The pushback has been fierce, beginning with industries that suspected their profits would be restricted, and extending to people who fear governmental threats to their freedom.”

Rowland was once libeled as a Soviet spy, but “Scientists who have put themselves into politics like Jim Hansen … have been subject to ad hominem attacks: crude vilification and direct threats far beyond anything that Rowland experienced.”

Hansen and his colleagues, says Weart, “have persisted nevertheless. For the logic of their scientific understanding forbids them from keeping silent about the dangers they foresee.”

Ever wonder why the calendar requires us to retool a schedule every year? Ever question why your birthday will fall on a different day of the week next year? Do you grit your teeth trying to remember to insert a leap day every four years, except on the century, except you do add a leap day on the fourth century?

Any rule that requires a double-exception to the exception, friend, is a rule that has overstayed its welcome.

Our calendar must account for the fact that Earth rotates 365.2422 times during one full orbit of the sun, so any calendar will require some shimming.

Two questions: How many shims are too many? And how many people would be willing to swap out the clunky calendar for a better one? Remember, no matter how smart the invention, inertia always gives an undeserved advantage to tried-and-true kludges like the QWERTY keyboard, invented to slow your typing speed.

Shims and arrows of outrageous calendar

The modern calendar dates to 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar (or more likely a lackey) built a calendar on the assumption that the year contains 365.24 days.

For a while, that was close enough, but by the 16th century, the tiny error was adding up, and the actual seasons no longer jibed with the calendar. In 1582, Pope Gregory (or was it his flunkeys?) pruned 11 days from October and produced the modern calendar.

The Gregorian calendar, sadly, still relies on that jury-rigged leap day, and it also forces any given date, whether holiday or not, to rotate around the seven days of the week like a weather vane in a tornado.

All those encumbrances bothered Richard Conn Henry, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s disjointed, hideously inefficient and there’s no value added,” he told us.

Hideously inefficient?

Rather than kvetch ’til the end of days, however, Henry worked with Steve H. Hanke, an economist also at Hopkins, to build the logical, “permanent” calendar seen in the rollover, above.

Henry studies an obscure type of background radiation in the universe. We mentioned that astronomers are obsessed with time, date and Earth’s position, but Henry says, “I got into this calendar as a complete sideline. Some years ago, I was putting together a schedule for my course, and I thought, ‘Why do I have to put together a schedule? I just taught the same identical course.’ The reason is the stupid calendar changes each year in a pattern that is completely irregular.”

Nor was he the only person with this problem, he realized. “Every school, team, club, everybody has to go through this. But it’s not necessary at all. We can make a simple adjustment, preserve religious sensibilities, and come up with a stable calendar.”

Calling clever calendars

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar has 12 months: four have 31 days, and eight have 30. Each quarter of the year is 91 days long, with two 30-day months and one 31-day month. Each year starts on Sunday, meaning Christmas is also Sunday.

Every year.

If you’ve been pecking keys on your calculator, you’ve already objected: I’ve been short-changed! The year has only 364 days! Right, and to compensate, every five or six years, we get an added seven-day week.

The freebie week, while not part of a month, allows the calendar to jibe with the seasons.

Beyond simplicity, the new calendar would help the money-changers, Hanke observes. Financial institutions calculate interest on a daily basis, but months have different numbers of days, and calculations require a lot of software tweaks. “Our calendar would simplify financial calculations and eliminate what we call the ‘rip off’ factor,” explains Hanke. “To determine how much interest accrues on mortgages, bonds, forward-rate agreements, swaps and others, day counts are required. Our current calendar is full of anomalies that have led to the establishment of a wide range of conventions that attempt to simplify interest calculations.”

Can the new calendar fly? The Gregorian calendar won acceptance because the Pope backed it, Henry notes, but he’s not sure he can get papal participation this time around. But without widespread acceptance, an “improved” calendar would really make things even worse.

Image: eliazar

Here’s a great idea that flopped: Part of a lesson in Esperanto, a simplified language invented in 1887 that, sadly, never caught on and brought international peace despite its many practical advantages.

One time fits all?

We’ve been saving the best for last. Doesn’t a stable calendar deserve a universal system of time? That’s right: one time, one date, worldwide. If it’s midnight in London (already hour zero on universal time), it’s midnight in San Francisco — where the sun is shining.

For people who do lots of traveling, or arrange international meetings, the advantages are obvious. Although this sounds awkward to The Why Files, Henry notes that, “In every single country, with zero exceptions,” airplane pilots already use coordinated universal time (UTC) rather than local time.

UTC helps fight confusion in the air, but even Henry recognizes that one-time-fits-all could be a tougher harder sell than the permanent calendar. The new calendar, he says, can stand on its own. “There are 365.2422 days in the year, there is nothing you can do about that. Our calendar must reflect that length. We have to take that magic number that nature has given us by accident and see what kind of calendar we can make.”

For decades, scientists have thought that the pre-historic Antarctic climate was governed by events at the other end of the planet — in the Arctic. That’s because variations in solar radiation in the northern summer tracked nicely with the temperature record from sediment cores and ice cores taken on or around Antarctica.

Our record of temperatures in the deep south is carried in the ratios of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes (atoms with different masses) contained in ice cores. But Thomas Laepple, of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, has just published an article maintaining that because the Antarctic ice cores did not accumulate at a steady pace, they have not been interpreted correctly.

Today, more snow (the source of ice), gathers in winter. Because that likely also happened in the past, ice cores from Antarctic tell us more about winter than summer, says Laepple.

And God created winter!

Photo 1: Hans Oerter, Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany, Photo 2: Eric Cravens, National Ice Core Lab

This 150,000-year-old piece of Antarctic ice is 10 centimeters in diameter, and was taken from a depth of 2,250 meters. After researchers clean, measure and catalog this core, it may be stored in a giant freezer like the one in the next image (rollover).

When Laepple and his colleagues factored in this seasonal effect, the level of sunlight in the southern hemisphere suddenly began to explain Antarctic temperatures. Although the orbital cycles still globally affect solar radiation, there was no longer a need to look at the other end of the Earth to explain rhythms in Antarctic temperatures.

The orbital cycles in question are named for Serbian engineer Milutin Milankovitch, who, about a century ago, sought to understand how three slow shifts in Earth’s orbit would affect the amount of sunshine in different regions, different seasons and years.

These orbital variations, which are influenced by gravity of the moon, sun, Jupiter and Saturn, are the basis of the “Milankovitch cycle:”

As scientists examined ocean sediments and then ice cores, the Milankovitch influence on solar radiation in the Northern hemisphere became the accepted explanation for the changing global climate. But when Laepple factored in the seasonal nature of Antarctic snowfall, he found that Milankovitch could explain the climate on the southern continent more directly. “I don’t question that the Milankovitch cycle has an influence on climate,” says Laepple, “but I question that its influence on the Antarctic is coming through the Artic.”

The adjustment was needed because more ice accumulates during winter and does not affect the overall climate record, Laepple says, “but it completely changes the recording of the signal stemming from the precession of the earth axis, which was the evidence for the remote North-South connection.”

Photo 1: Steven Profaizer, Photo 2: Sepp Kipfstuhl, Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany

Scientists use massive drills to uncover the stories about past climates told in ice cores (roll over for to see a core from a depth of 2,668 meters).

How would you explain it?

Climate is never simple, notes Richard Alley, a climate expert and professor of earth science at Penn State, who was not involved in the research. The Milankovitch cycle, he says, “shifts sunshine around on the planet, with more in some places and less in others, changing the length of seasons, the total sunshine during seasons … so it is not surprising that multiple hypotheses can be advanced to explain a given climate record. Ultimately, the mere fact of correlation is not the answer; we seek understanding of the physical linkages. … The new paper provides a clever new idea for a physical linkage, and I anticipate it will get people discussing and studying.”

Any new study concerning climate processes could get sucked into the political vortex enmiring global warming, so we asked if Laepple’s study of Antarctic conditions should lead us to question the widely-accepted theory that burning fossil fuels and changing land use have altered the climate.

Laepple reminded us that he’s studying changes that occur over periods of 10,000 years. He also insists that the new analysis “will not change the basic record of glacial and interglacial periods — the march of ice ages over the past million years. We are focusing on the precession cycle [the 21,000-year cycle affecting the location of Earth's axis], as this provides the evidence showing where and how the climate is affected by radiation changes, and might hold the key to the mechanism of slow climate change.”

Years ago, scientists began to revise their interpretation of Greenland ice to account for the seasonality in snowfall, Laepple says. “This new study is part of a long discussion. As we interpret the climate record, we have to focus more on how the climate signal gets recorded in the climate record.”