Science Friday - Historical Climate Change, Weighing Galaxies, Great Lakes Water Rights. April 27, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: April 27, 2018

It’s not uncommon these days to hear scientists and journalists say that our planet is experiencing record-setting temperatures due to climate change. But they’re talking about a small part of Earth’s history—human history. The story of the earth’s climate contains much more than what human beings have recorded. In their new book, Weather: An Illustrated History, longtime climate reporter Andrew Revkin and co-author Lisa Mechaley track the incredible range of climate history. They condense that history—from the formation of Earth’s early atmosphere to the invention of temperature, the tracking of tornados and the discovery of greenhouse gases—into a digestible timeline of 100 weather-related events. Science Friday is partnering with citizen science platform Zooniverse to help a team of astrophysicists identify galaxies showing an astronomical phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when the light coming from a galaxy, quasar, or other bright object is bent and distorted by a massive object in front of it, giving the light the appearance of passing through a “lens,” like how an image appears through a magnifying glass. These lenses are rare, but incredibly neat. So, a gravitational lens essentially allows us to weigh a galaxy. Pretty cool, right? But, we need your help to find more lenses! With the aid of the citizen science website Zooniverse, everyone can take part in this real, cutting-edge area of research. You can help contribute to making a real discovery! Plus, on this week's State of Science, Foxconn's Lake Michigan bid raises questions about interpreting a young law—when water is public and when it isn't.       Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, it's your chance to get involved in cutting-edge astronomy research, and we'll tell you how to hunt for distant galaxies. But first, around 5,000 years ago, back before we knew any better, people went around drilling holes in their skulls. Well, the Y is still unclear, but if you were an ancient healer getting ready to administer this treatment to a person, you might want to do what modern medicine does, and that is practice on a a non-human first.

And scientists report this week that they've uncovered the skull of a cow with a hole in its skull that likely played guinea pig to one of those surgeries. Here with the details, as well as other short subjects in science, is Annalie Newitz Tech Culture Editor for Ars Tectica. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me back. You're welcome. So people really did this with animals?

So now we have evidence that they did. This is a 5,000-year-old cow skull that was discovered in France. And at first, scientists thought that this perfect hole in its forehead was from a fight, basically, with another cow that had jammed its horn into the skull. But after analysis and really looking at it under the microscope, they saw that the hole was surrounded by all of these little tiny knife cuts, these telltale signs that actually someone had used some kind of stone. knife to grind a hole in the skull. And it's exactly the same kind of pattern that we see on human skulls that have been given this rather dubious medical treatment that was very, very popular in prehistory. It was. I mean, 5,000 years ago, people were doing this to themselves, you're saying. Yeah, and it's called trepination. It means putting a hole in your skull. And we see it all across

the world, actually. This is something that was very common in prehistory. And we aren't sure if it was a medical procedure or it may have been some kind of spiritual practice, but we know for sure that people survived it because we can see that there's regrowth of the skull around those holes. So people were living with these, sometimes with up to five of these holes in their skull, and they are not small holes. These are like dime or nickel-sized holes. Wow, I'm just sitting here. Why would they do this? Yeah, and so what we think is that this cow skull, as you said,

earlier may have been a young, you know, surgical resident of the era learning how to do this kind of procedure on a cow before doing it on a human. The other possibility is that this may have been the same kind of spiritual practice or the cow may have been sick. And so they may have thought, well, let's try it on the cow. What we do know for sure is the cow did not survive. So unlike the people who had this procedure, the cow, was sacrificed for medical science. Let's move on.

It's hard to. Archaeologists say they have evidence that 19th century women made decisions about family planning. Tell us about that. So this is a great example of historical archaeology, which is where we use the techniques of archaeology like excavation, to look at places that are known in history, that have lots of writing about them, times like the 19th century, when we know a lot about what people said they did in their lives. But using archaeology, we can do things like dig through their trash, go through old houses, and find out how people really lived. What were the real artifacts in their homes?

And so an archaeologist named Andreas Lotucha Kozab did two excavations in upstate New York, one in Niagara Falls and one in Binghamton, where they were going through an outhouse, which is a place where Victorian-era people, they didn't just throw out their chamber pots there. It was just all the stuff in your house. You threw away old bottles and cans and threw away. you know, ashes and things. And so you find a lot of material stuff in there that tells us how people lived. And in two of these outhouses, she discovered the remains of miscarriages,

which was a big mystery. Why would women do that? It seemed like it spoke to secrecy, some kind of clandestine activity. And in the Binghamton House, what she found revealed why it was that these were hidden, which is she found a little bottle

of Claire's female, Clark's female pills, and Clark's female pills were a mail-order product that contained a juniper, a product from a juniper bush that was known to be an abortifactant. So this was a pill that you took to induce an abortion. And so what it seems, yeah, and so it seems as if the woman in this Binghamton House, who, the thing that's interesting and the thing that we learn from it is that this was a middle-class woman who had a family, she was married, she would have, to her neighbors, been viewed as a very respectable lady. And previously, archaeologists had believed that really only desperate women or

prostitutes were getting abortions at this time. And so now we see that really women from all walks of life were doing this. And also, even under very difficult circumstances, because abortion was illegal at this time. It had been made illegal about a couple decades before. And so she was really taking her life in her hands by doing this. She could be arrested. And so women went to, women from all walks of life were going to great lengths to engage in family planning, even at that time. So it's a really fascinating look at what private lives were like in the 19th century. And finally, California should get ready for another whiplash weather event. That's right. I love the name of this weather.

event. I live in California, so this is very dear to my heart. It's called whiplash precipitation. And it's what happens when you have a very intense drought followed by incredible amounts of rain. And we've just seen this happen in California over the past year where this kind of event causes mudslides. It's often accompanied by wildfires. Because, of course, when the land gets really dry and then you soak it with water, that water doesn't always soak in. It just runs over the surface of the ground. So what we can be expecting, according to new models developed by scientists at UCLA, is more of these events, as many as 100% more, or as little as 25% more, which is kind of

what I'm hoping for. But, yeah, we're going to be seeing more rain and more drought coming right next to each other. Good luck to you. So California goes, right, so there's the rest of the country. And I only knew it's the culture editor for all. Ars Tactica, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks very much. And now it's time to check in on the state of science.

This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local stories of national significance. Anyone who lives near the Great Lakes will surely tell you they are a gem of a natural resource. They support fishing and recreation. They offer a channel for shipping, fresh drinking water for millions of people. Which is why 10 years ago, the governors of the Great Lake States created an agreement

to protect the lakes from excessive new withdrawals of water. It's called the Great Lakes Compact. The agreement prioritizes residential users. Most water utilities must request access. So on a large multinational company comes to town, should they have access to the Great Lakes water too? That's the conversation in Wisconsin this week after the State Department of Natural Resources

granted a request for millions of gallons per day on the behalf of the Taiwanese company Foxcon, maker of iPhone screens and other high-tech parts. Here to explain why this could have national or even international repercussions, Scott Gordon, associate editor of WISContext, the long-form reporting arm of Wisconsin Public Media. He joins us from their studios in Madison. Welcome to Science Friday, Scott. Thanks for having me.

So what does the compact say about the withdrawals, like the one Foxcon was just granted? Well, the compact is very much born of this awareness that, like you said, this is a precious resource, and people know that folks from outside the region want in on it, especially as the world becomes more and more precarious in terms of water access in a lot of areas. And basically, the idea is for withdrawals to largely kind of keep the water in the basin and for people outside the basin to only be able to access it under certain limitations, like, you know, agreeing to send a fair amount of it back, sometimes all of it back, and, of course,

agreeing to adhere to a lot of water quality standards. So Foxconn wants to take it, what, something like 7 million gallons? That's correct. A day out of it. And is anyone worried about that amount of water that Foxcon is asking for? People are worried about the amount of water. You know, you have to keep in mind that, yeah, 7 million gallons is a lot of water, and manufacturing electronics is an,

an incredibly water-intensive process. But in the Great Lakes, there's about six trillion gallons of water. And the impact that one user has on the overall water level, even a large user like this factory or a city, is only going to be so big. Most hydrologists and so forth who look at this will say that. The kind of problem is people are worried about the precedence that it sets and the terms of access and the possibility that, you know, letting more and more people in will have a cumulative impact over time. So it's not going to ship the water back across the world. It's going to build a factory there that's going to employ a lot of people, too, right?

That's correct. And so they're worried, well, if Foxconn comes and does this, other people are going to come and possibly take advantage of our water. Does the Great Lakes compact help to solve that problem? Well, it does and it doesn't. There's a lot of wording in there that is pretty general. One thing that is being really fought over now in Wisconsin is that the compact is worded so that the water is supposed to be for largely residential purposes.

So, you know, most of the users are supposed to be people using it for their drinking water and bathing and cooking in their homes. Of course, there's an allowance for industrial users to get that water to. but what's happening here is that it's being sent to an area of the Foxcon plant that's outside of the Great Lakes Basin, and really this whole water diversion, as it's called, is for an industrial purpose. There's none of it that's going to residential uses. And basically it's being argued that this is allowable under sort of a technicality, but it sort of begs the question of how do you actually go about interpreting that residential

requirement in a messy kind of real world situation. So people will be watching this decision to let them take the water closely? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, in the process of our state government approving this, other states have kind of weighed in with their questions. It's not clear to me yet whether they're going to try to launch some kind of formal complaints. But this specific issue, the residential use, is something that, for example, the state of

New York raised in a letter to our state environmental regulators. All right, Scott. We're going to watch it along with you. Scott Gordon, Associate Editor for Wisconsin, and you can read this report on the Great Lakes Compact at Science Friday.com slash great lakes. Thank you, Scott. Thank you so much. We're going to take a break when we come back, a brief history of the Earth's weather, all four and a half billion years of it,

with climate reporter Andrew Repkin, author of the new book, Weather and Illustrated History, from Cloud Atlases to Climate Change. Did you realize you had to invent the temperature? I didn't realize that. You know, think about it. see what I mean. Stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. That's a Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. These days, it is not uncommon to hear scientists and journalists say that our planet is breaking records due to climate change. But what they're

really talking about is a small part of Earth's history, and that's human history. The story of Earth's climate contains much more than what humans have recorded. For example, sometime around 4.3 billion years ago, it rained for a million straight years. Poof, mind blown. And scientists say about 2.9 billion years ago, the sky was most likely pink due to all the methane in the atmosphere. Those weather events were happening on timescales that are hard to get your head around, but

my next guest has, for the last 30 years, been thinking about the Earth's weather and climate before and after humans appeared on the scene. He's written a new book that condenses the vast range of Earth's climate history. into a digestible timeline of 100 weather-related events, like the invention of temperature. Yes, temperature had to be invented, not discovered. Think about that. We will with Andrew Revkin,

who's a strategic advisor for science and environmental journalism at the National Geographic Society. His new book is Weather and Illustrated History. Always good to see you. It's great to be back. It's nice to have you. You've been reporting on climate change for 30 years. Why did you decide to write a book about the history of weather?

Well, you know, I'm at a stage of my career in my life when it's, you tend to reflect a little bit. Well, what have I learned? What have I unlearned going back and forth in time, looking at my own stuff? And I was just noticing recently on eBay, I got one of the original copies of just my Discover magazine debut, my cover story on Global Warming, 1988. And there's cigarette advertising on the back. Oh, is that right? That's how long I've been at this. But that also says, wow, so back then you could work. at a science magazine and that could be kind of normal. And that's got me, that got me,

there's so many aspects of this that have gotten me thinking about the history of when an idea emerged. Right. 1896 is when Svante Arrhenius, this chemist in Sweden, was famously just calculated how much the climate might warm from burning a certain amount of coal. You know, back then, coal was the boom time for coal. And at that time, he wrote that this would be good. It would be warming the world, and he was in Sweden, you know, not a place where heat would be helpful, and he's talked about bountiful crops. But they were thinking about it that far back. Oh, yeah. So the science. Fossil fuels would warm the planet. The science was there, but the perception of it was at that time, industrial revolution, you know, boom, boom,

we're great, you know, was kind of positive. And then 50, 60 years later, the science emerged more toward the concerns that we now are exploring. Let's talk about the weather a little bit. What is What is the oldest sign of weather? Well, sorry. No, go ahead. Yeah. The oldest physical thing you can actually look at was these 2.7 billion-year-old raindrop marks. It blew me away.

I saw the illustration in the book of little holes in rock that are raindrops? How do you know that they're raindrops? Well, a lot of geologists looked at them carefully, and the photographs have a mere cat sitting on one. You know, this is in South Africa. and the depth of the rain mark was used by some scientists recently at NASA trying to calculate how dense the atmosphere was. How fast was that raindrop falling when it hit that mud to make that mark? Amazing. And to me, again, going back in time, and my wife helped me write the book, Lisa McKayley, we just were probing into stuff we thought we knew and kept coming up with stuff we were saying, wow, did you hear that?

It's amazing. Our fall number 844-724-8255, if you'd like to talk about the weather. What's the old saying? Who doesn't like to talk about the weather? Or you can tweet us at Cy Fry. You know, we talk about extreme weather today, but we forget what was going on, what, two, three billion years ago. I mentioned this at the beginning.

I was surprised to learn it rained for a million straight years. First, how do we know that, and why did it rain for a million years? Well, the atmosphere we know now has a biography to it. Actually, even earlier than that, it's thought that the moon, the collision that formed the moon, there was an earlier atmosphere right at the very beginning, 4.5, 6, 7 billion years ago. And it looks like it got ripped away completely. So it was like a reboot and had to start all over again. The moon, that collision that made the moon. But there's also a lot of uncertainty going back in time.

Some of these interpretations are made from looking at things like a certain kind of zircon crystal that you or I or anybody who doesn't know isotope chemistry will never find an answer in. But that's where they're looking for these clues to the atmosphere of the earlier ages. So why would it rain for a million years? What caused that? Water. Water vapor. It was emerging from the forming Earth.

You know, a lot of water came to the planet from, in the form of all this stuff colliding together in the early stages of the solar system. So sort of an outgassing? Yeah, outgassing. What about the theory that comets brought all that water? Well, that's part of it. Yeah, sure, that had to come from somewhere. And then as you were saying in your introduction, one of the other surprises was, to me, something you would never think about, which is the invention of the concept of temperature. through this whole process of elucidating answers from evidence around us.

And that was Galileo. And that was right when these things called thermoscopes, I'm sure some of your listeners have had a toy one, where you could get a rough sense of the temperature. But it was Galileo, according to this fantastic historian, Albert Van Helden, who had been at Rice University. There's a great website, the Galileo Project, that I stumbled on, you know, looking at these facts.

and he's quoted in the book of talking about this idea that Galileo was the guy. Before him, people said it's warm, it's warmer, it's really warm. But how warm is it? But measurably, having a quantitative way to break that into fragments. And then that led, of course, to Fahrenheit and Celsius. So Fahrenheit came first? Well, no, Galileo came first. Or Galileo came first?

Well, what was the order? Galileo. Galileo. Yeah. And then the... Did he create a temperature scale? He and there was this whole... ferment in Italy around that time.

Galeigh was part of a group of men. There are other parts of the book where the history has women who emerge, but they were experimenting with ways to measure temperature, Torcelli, the barometer, and those were the earliest days of really starting to standardize these kinds of things. And why was Celsius? And he came along. Why did Celsius, hey, we got to come up with a new scale?

I just make it easier to make it zero and 100 instead of all those, you know, 200, whatever it is? I'm trying to think of a contemporary comparison of when you're, when you have a new phenomenon, a new way to measure it, mercury and a tube. No one has a standardization yet for how to do that, and they were sort of early stage competitors in a sense, not directly competing, but trying to come up with a way to go forward. How far back did humans in our culture?

Any cultures start to think about trying to understand the weather. How far back? Well, there is this juncture that both Greece, ancient Greece, and China seem to go through roughly within a few hundred years. So in the history of human experience, a few hundred years difference between China and Greece is minor. But around 300 BC and a little bit after, that was when Aristotle, and Wang Chong in China were both writing about the hydrological cycle. So until then, there was a moment in the book where there's a transition from mythology to meteorology. It wasn't called meteorology quite.

Well, it was by Aristotle. It was like they both wrote these passages about the water cycle that were really kind of very similar. You see the mist rise off the land in the morning and it comes down as rain. and it's not some function of the gods. They're actual physical forces. And of course, sailors would have to know about winds blowing and different times of the year when they would change. Yeah, and there's one item on sale, just the history of sail.

One thing about the book, we decided early on to make it not just about sort of concrete things, like the worst storm or the discovery of X. It's about a relationship. And so it's just as much about us harnessing weather as it is about or dealing with it is about the scientific discoveries. And wind, the age of sail goes back right through to the Egyptians and earlier in terms of having a boat that could be moved by sail. But then the wind turbine, the idea of getting electricity from the wind,

as opposed to the windmills in the Netherlands, which were harnessing it for physical work, 1888, 1887, in both Scotland and Cleveland, Ohio, there were these tinkerers who came up with these amazing things. The one in Ohio blows my mind. The picture in the book is unbelievable. Yeah. He was an inventor. He had Charles Brush, and he had this 40-ton, I think it's 150-foot-wide wind turbine, generating electricity for his mansion in his backyard.

And it's amazing. It's amazing. You know, we think we know what, for example, I always uncover these things. The fuel cells are very big now. Fuel cells were invented in 1839 patented, you know. Older than batteries. All kinds of stuff was going on. It's great to discover these things.

It's a lot of fun. Speaking of discovery, tell me about James Crowell. Who was he? He was a janitor in a library in Glasgow. He was clearly a brilliant man. He got the job there, trying to remember the dates in the mid-1800s, because he was fascinated with physics and astronomy. And he befriended, he started writing about,

Well, I think many listeners would know about the Malankovic effect, the idea that little wobbles and changes in the Earth's orbit over tens of thousands of years are part of that clock driving ice ages and warm periods. But he was, this is decades before Malankovic. That was more 1912-ish. And this guy in a library figured out on his own some of the aspects of this. And he wrote a book about time and ice. and he befriended Charles Lyle and other more prominent scientists of the time and played a role in setting the stage

for something that we now think of that came around in the 20th century. A lot of tweets are coming, and let's see if we can go to a couple of tweets. Just if you're joining us, I'm talking with Andrew Rivkin, author of Weather and Illustrated History, it's really well done

because you have little small snippets at one time everywhere in the book. It sort of is very interesting and easy way to read it. Let's see. Let's see. Evan Mathis writes, if it rained for a million years, is that what filled the oceans? Yes.

Yes. Yeah. That's an easy one. Mr. Shepi says, how accurate are the current projections of global warming, also known at as what is the margin of error? Oh, well, that's something I've been writing about for a long time. One of the interesting issues is that while the basic idea of greenhouse gases warming the planet is bedrock. It happens. It's the reason we're here, and there's an equitable climate. The work that began really in the 70s going forward on how sensitive is the climate system to this push from these heat trap and gases.

The range is about the same as it has been since then. It's between, well, let's say, three and seven degrees warming. That would be, that's Fahrenheit. So it's a pretty wide range. Essentially, it's the range between something that would truly be calamitous and lead to rapid ice loss and raging high sea levels and crop failures and something that is probably within the range of manageable. And how we deal with that robust uncertainty is a really part. It's why some people feel empowered by the uncertainty to say we don't need to do anything. And some people feel freaked out by the uncertainty and say, that's the reason we do need to do something.

But it's one of the known, basically one of the most profoundly known things about global warming is that we don't. know how hot it's going to get. It makes it tough. Mara Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC studios, talking with Andrew Rifkin and also his wife, Lisa McKayley, right? Author of the book, A Weather and Illustrated History, how has your view about climate change evolved and talking to people about it because that's what you've done? You've had blogs and articles and things. Yeah, 30 years ago. How has it evolved? I think I have a piece coming out National Geographic in the July issue laying out a few things, I think. One, I'm quite convinced that I misinterpreted it. When the issue emerged in the 80s, we had gone through the Clean Air Act.

We had pollution here in this country, and we kind of fix it. There's still issues with the air quality. But the country in a very bipartisan way passed a bunch of bills that really made a change in pollution levels. And then the Montreal Protocol was a treaty to manage a global chemical, chemicals that were threatening the ozone layer, this protective shield of the planet. And then along comes global warming, which is carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat.

We're part of industrial processes. So it made sense that, well, okay, it's another one of those. So we just pass another law or have another treaty and we're done. What's happened since then is, I think, the dominant concern for energy,

for societies around the world, it basically enables everything about modern life and mobility and climate control and refrigeration and so many other things. That's the implicit real-time need. Climate change is there in the midst that's this background forcing on the system behind all the variability we have

that gave us a cold winter here in the northeast and a hot time at the North Pole comparatively this winter. So that becomes kind of a tertiary. thing. Even in the run-up to the last presidential election, I wrote on when I was doing my daughter's blog at the Times, on a study that said even liberal Democrats had climate as number six on their list of concerns going into that election. So it's not like still not near the top. No, no, and that's what makes it. There's a piece in this book on science of why we, why people

look at the same body of evidence and can come away with completely different interpretations of it. Have you concluded that it's how hard it is to change people's minds no matter how much evidence you throw with them? Well, then you have to ask, do you need to change their minds? And this is something that I think I've written quite a bit about. You can have people who will diverge forever on global warming. How dangerous is it? What should we do about it? Because there are people who will resist a top-down kind of a government solution.

But there have been these great situations where you see. people, even in Oklahoma, a county that was identified by Yale and some other researchers, it was Woodward County, Oklahoma. It was the most skeptical county in America on global warming. And they interviewed CNN, a friend of mine, John Sutter at CNN, interviewed a man from an oil company there who said, in one line, he says, only God controls the environment. And in another line, he says, we have half of our roof covered with solar panels, and we want to do the rest, because we want to get off the grid entirely. And I guarantee you, If you go to Woodward County and you try to engage him on a debate over global warming as your predicate for doing something meaningful on clean energy, you'd be wasting your time.

But here he is getting off the grid. But it's because it's the same reasons he would never vote for a Democrat or whatever. He doesn't want to be beholden to government or a utility. But he realizes the practical side of him. And he likes solar power. So why change his mind if he's doing the right things, any? That's it. And there are people working around the country, I think, who are starting to build it from that standpoint. That's why I don't wake up every morning completely bummed out.

All right. We'll come back and talk about not being bummed out. Talking with Andrew Rivkin, author of Weather and Illustrated History from Cloud Atlases to Climate Change. Our number 844-8255, you can also tweet us at Cy Fry. We're going to take a short break and talk lots more about the weather, the climate, and other stuff you would like to talk about. So stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If you're just joining us, we're talking this hour with Andrew Revkin, author of the new book,

Weather and Illustrated History, All kinds of stuff about the weather. Our number 844-825, lots of tweets coming in also today at SciFry. You know, there's a lot of talk about California these days. We talked about it earlier in the program about, and what people are not worrying about out there is not that big one earthquake, but the big next-rength. but the big next rainfall season. You talk about that in your book. Yeah, there was this history, this moment in weather and climate history back in 1861, 1862.

That winter, there's a woman, a researcher named Lynn Ingram from Berkeley who helped with an item in the book on this incredible flood. It's this atmospheric river phenomenon that a lot of Californians know by heart now. Pineapple Express, you look at these aerial shots of this satellite views of these. streams that looked like a fire hose. And there was one that year that just got stuck, pointed at the Central Valley of California. And you had steamboats running up and down areas in the Central Valley that were fields and farms. And it was incredible, costly. It would have been, and there's no reason why it couldn't happen now. It could happen in the past. So you're talking about learning from history. Yeah. And there's so many sobering lessons in history. We also talk

about space weather, the Carrington event in the 1859. Very similar, just a few years from when that giant flood happened. That was when telegraph lines caught on fire because of this solar flare coming toward the earth. And both of those things, now that I think of it together, I think the estimates are that if they happen, either one happened today, you'd have a trillion-plus dollar disaster. And that's amazing. Let's see if we get a phone call in here. Let's go to Regina in Sonoma, California. California is waking up. talking about hi there. Go ahead. Hi there. How are you? Fine. Go ahead. Yes, hi. Yeah. My question is I'm, I'm located in Wisconsin. My name's Amanda. I have actually, I've also lived in Texas. And my question is I actually,

when I lived in Texas, got to speak with their Channel 5 weatherman. And I asked him, I said, you know, before, you know, he had mentioned after 9-11 when the planes were not flying in the air for a while, that he noticed an impact with leather. And a conspiracy theory that some would debate wouldn't be a conspiracy theory with the use of geoengineering, barium and aluminum in the atmosphere to create a block from, you know,

whatever the climate is doing in regards to warming. Do you feel that, you know, the public should be concerned about geo? engineering? This is a great question. Before I get into it, I got to mention that Wisconsin had the worst wildfire in the history of the United States. In 1871, Pestigo, and no one knew about it because of the same week that the

great Chicago fire happened. There's millions of acres and a couple thousand people. But now, back to geoengineering. This is a question that is emerging more and more, as I said earlier, as it's become clear that there's no simple fix for global warming in terms of shutting down our energy or systems quickly. And that's led some very serious scientists since 2006, the item in the book, to be talking about what can we do to manage the heating at the upper end.

We're using things that volcanoes do routinely. Sulfurous particles high in the atmosphere can cool, block sunlight. And there is a kind of a, well, there's a conspiracy. theory for everything out there, as you know. Chemtrails is this phrase that's come up off and on. It's not, this is a different thing. It won't happen in any secret way. Whatever happens will be highly visible,

and it involves airplanes and testing. But we won't know until they do it. Well, we'll know because we live in a very, sort of the ability to impose transparency on any activity now is there. And it is a question to ask, is there a way to feather our response? Can we, can we, meaning scientists and governments, think about ways to at least test the idea, can you modulate this, while we get our energy transition into gear? And people at Harvard and many other places around the world are asking these questions. None of it has moved to the

point of releasing something in the atmosphere. One quick question for you, because we're running out of time. Your last entry in the book is a prediction of what the climate will be like 100,000 years. Why did you put that there? Well, you know, how do you end a book on the history of our relationship with climate? Right now, we are

charting the history of climates to come. That's one of the paradoxes of our time. CO2 lasts a long time once it's liberated from the ground, added to the atmosphere, and this, David Archer, University of Chicago and others have said there's a hundred thousand year tale

of impact already in the works. And it's a question of how big and how bad and what do we do to mitigate the effects. And actually, Andre Berger and others, who I met him at the North Pole, believe it or not. This old, very old scientist from Belgium was at the North Pole on a tourist thing when I was there in 2003. We talked about his research, which way back in the 70s, he was writing that there's enough in our greenhouse. Right, it's there, right. Our greenhouse influence is already going to, enough to sort of take away that malign. Wankovich Wobble Influence.

And we've probably staved off the next Ice Age. Well, there you go. If you want to read more about it, it's a great book. Andrew Revkin is author of Weather and Illustrated History. And if you want more weather, check out the latest macroscope video on hurricanes. See how researchers create and study category five storms inside a box. We have how they're doing that. It's on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash hurricane box.

Thank you, Andrew. Always good to see you. Great to be with you. Good luck with the book. It's Weather and Illustrated. history. Of all the predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity was that gravity, you know, of massive objects like the sun, would warp and deform space time and therefore deflect passing sunlight, wrenching into, turning into sort of a curved path. Well, that

prediction was famously verified during a solar eclipse in 1919, when a photograph of the eclipse disk of the sun revealed that certain stars seemed slightly out of place due to the gravitational warp of the sun fit right into what Einstein had predicted. And then that same phenomenon can also reveal one galaxy behind another through something called gravitational lensing. It helps us see what we might otherwise not see invisible behind one star. And sometimes you citizen scientists, this is something you can help professionals detect. We've teamed up with the Citizen Science Group, Zuniverse, to launch a new challenge for

amateur astronomers, it's called Space Wharps. And joining me to talk about it are Laura Chui, vice president of citizen science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and co-leader of Zuniverse. Welcome to Science Friday. So glad to be here. Thank you. You're welcome. And Projita Verma is a senior researcher in astrophysics at the University of Oxford in England and co-founder of Space Wharps. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much. So, Pradja, tell us more about gravitational lensing. How can we see a galaxy hiding behind another galaxy? It sounds crazy, right? You wouldn't think that you'd be able to see such things,

but it's literally, you know, one of the most direct predictions of general relativity, as you mentioned earlier, that space time gets warped or light gets bent under the influence of a massive galaxy and lying behind it, if you're lucky with alignment, you can have a distant galaxy that basically gets magnified and amplified.

So the galaxy in front is like acting, much like a magnifying glass you would have to look at letters in more detail, you can see galaxies in more detail in the same way. All right, so let's talk, Laura, about space warps. Tell us what people are going to be looking for in the space warps project. So we're inviting your listeners to join us in a one million classification challenge. And what they'll be doing is looking at images of, as Abrageta mentioned, these potentially lens galaxies.

And they'll just mark whether they see a lens or not. And the hope, the expectation is that by next Friday, we'll be able to come back to your show and say, hey, from these one million classifications, your community was able to find maybe a half dozen new gravitationally lens galaxies. And that will be a huge boost to this area in research. So it's possible for non-scientific people, for a citizen scientist to actually look at the photos and say, hey, there's lens warping, there's not lens warping? Yeah, so on all Zuniverse.org projects and spacecorps.org, you can, if you're a five-year-old to a 95-year-old, it's just about this really wonderful capacity for our human eyes to recognize patterns. So it's just looking at the images and looking at the guiding images and seeing whether you see one of these lens characteristics. How many of these gravitational lens galaxies do we know about already, and how many more do you think you might find? in this project?

Well, we kind of know, let's say we've confirmed about five to 700 of them, but there's probably another factor of two to three kind of candidates, and we should expect in this search to find, you know, another, when we've completed the whole thing, at least another hundred or so. So you can see that's quite a significant step change. And, you know, they're really rare events, so only one in a million galaxies, will act as a lens. And so finding these rare sources is really like finding a needle in a haystack, but doing it with citizen power.

And as Laura mentioned, you know, this human ability to recognize patterns and to adapt and be creative are all kind of things that machines or algorithms find really hard. So this is really where the citizen scientists can contribute and help with our research in a really constructive and hopefully fun way. I think it's a great idea, but I'm wondering in this age where we have facial recognition and artificial intelligence, Laura, why do we still need people? Why can't we train your cell phone to look at a picture and say, hey, it's, you know, it's a warp? So part of it is that the human pattern recognition are creating training sets for machine automated routines to do this type of work.

But as Aprageta mentioned, for projects like this where the shapes are quite unusual, tricky to discern. Human eyes are really best at doing this. And then they train the automated machines to do this from that information. And how many people do you want for this project? So if every one of your listeners went on tonight or right now and just did one classification, we could reach our one million classification goal. But the idea is that for all Zuniverse projects, we have thousands to tens of thousands of people who participate. who contribute through classifications, and then in the discussion forums. And we have 1.6 million people around the world who are part of Zuniverse.

And so it's a neat opportunity for your listeners to join this very science-oriented community online. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you just joined us, we're talking about a SpaceWRPs project, a citizen science project with Laura Trujee and a Projada Verma. I mentioned dark matter before. What role does dark matter play in this? You can think of dark matter like the fabric of our universe.

So we think that galaxies formed in clusters of galaxies in these concentrations of dark matter. Now, that sounds really great, but it's really hard to find. So we can think of the light we see from galaxies as kind of pinpointing these areas of dark matter concentration. But we can't actually see the dark matter. matter obviously because it's dark, but gravitational lensing gives us an extra handle in that the way it works is that it's sensitive to the total matter. So that's the dark plus the light matter.

So it's actually one of the most direct ways of measuring the dark matter content around galaxies. And that's not just how much there is, but also how it's distributed. And that's what dictates these kind of lensed images and patterns that we see. So you can see it's a really direct means of measuring this elusive substance that pervades the universe. So if you see the amount of lensing that takes place and you know the amount of visible matter there, if you subtract the visible, you are left with how much dark matter is there? Is that over simplification? No, no, no, that's exactly right.

So basically we use this assumption that light traces the matter, but that's the visible matter. and the lensed images trace the total matter. So what you just said is perfectly right. Boy, it's nice to be perfectly right every once in a while. Okay, so let's say I'm excited about this. I want to get involved in this. Now, will people who classify these images end up as co-authors, let's say, if you discover something on the papers, anything like that?

Yeah, I mean, in our previous runs, we've had the citizens, some citizens who've participated very strongly as co-authors, but more importantly, what we see is this kind of classification exercise is a community effort. So absolutely everyone who places any kind of classification on the system, their Zuniverse ID will be part of our website and shown in our papers. So every classification counts and every person that makes them count. Yeah, we have a tweet coming in for.

Ashley Miller says, thank you for the citizen science project. My 10-year-old did her Science Fair project on gravitational lensing, and she will be so excited to participate this weekend. So tell us how to participate. Go ahead. Definitely head to spacewarpes.org online or on your phone. You can also download this Universe mobile app on Android or iPhone, and go participate there.

It's really just as simple as just opening up that you're. URL and clicking on start classifying and right away you're contributing to science, you're helping these researchers unlock their data. And so we will be coming back next week to follow up to see how well we did? Yes, definitely.

We're looking forward to that. Absolutely. People are going to be fearful. They're going to say, hey, I'm not good enough to do this, but you're saying anybody can participate in this. Anybody's good enough and every classification counts and even people who are habitually wrong

contribute as much. power in the way we've set up the analysis to people who are always right. So everything, everything count. Right. And importantly, for every image, multiple eyes, many people classify the same image. So even if you're a little unsure, know that there's between five to 25 other people who will classify that same image. And then the researchers use that whole spread of classifications to have confidence in the final classification result. That's great. That's great. Okay. We're going to get, send everybody there. I want to thank

both of you for taking time to be with us today. Laura Truy, vice president of citizen science at the Adler Planetarium, great planetarium in Chicago, co-leader of Zuniverse, and Pradjita Verma, who is a senior researcher in astrophysics at the University of Oxford in England,

co-founder of Spaceworks. Thanks again for joining us today. Thanks so much. You're welcome. I want to give out that URL. If you want to get involved, do some of this astronomy work yourself, go to ScienceFriiday.com slash spacewarks, science Friday.com slash spacewurps. One last thing. I've got a pop quiz for all of you, New Yorker listeners.

What has science beer and yours truly making bad science puns all night? Science Friday trivia. Join us Wednesday, May 9th at the Bell House in Brooklyn for a laugh-filled night of geeky science trivia. If you've been there before, you know how much fun we have. Get your team or come solo and to compete for the title of The Geekery Grand Master champion. I'm going to be there and hope to see all of you. So reserve a spot for your team early. Go to Science Friday.com slash trivia

for tickets. That's at May 9th at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer, Christopher Taliatta. Producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Heilier. We have technical help from Rich Kim, Sarah, Fishman, and Jack Horowitz. And of course, we're active all week, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all the social media. So every day now is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato in New York.