A group of expert climate researchers has rounded robustly on 16 scientists who complained in the Wall Street Journal (No Need to Panic About Global Warming) that presidential candidates should understand that the statement that “nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming” is not true.

New Zealander Kevin Trenberth

The complaint used Auckland academic Dr Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research — and a vocal critic of some aspects of climate change science — as a poster boy for its argument that “many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse”.

It said that when Dr de Freitas published a peer-reviewed article in 2003  “with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years” members of a “warming establishment”  mounted a determined — though unsuccessful — campaign to have him removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position.

It also re-visited “Climategate” allegations against another New Zealander,  Dr  Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the climate analysis section of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research.

A response — also published in the WSJ — was signed by Dr Trenberth and over 30 other scientists — from Australia, Canada, Britain, France and the USA — and referred to the group of 16 as the “climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology”.

“Most of these authors have no expertise in climate science,” it said. “The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert”.  Observations showed unequivocally that the planet was getting hotter, and computer models had shown that during periods when there was a smaller increase of surface temperatures, “warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean”.
It noted that a quote attributed to Dr Trenberth was used out-of-context and misrepresented .

Science clearly showed the world was heating up and that humans were primarily responsible: “It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses”.

The row has been followed-up on science news websites, such as Discovery.com, where the headline read:  Climate Scientists Occupy Wall Street Journal, and in mainstream media such as London’s  Guardian, and the New York Times.

Similar  issues have previously been canvassed by Physics Today.

New Kiwi research has found that biofouling mussels may be more likely to make their home on the hull of  noisy ship than on a quiet one. 

The research, recently published in the journal Biofouling, reported that mussel larvae settle faster on surfaces when exposed to underwater noise. Scientists from NIWA and Auckland University undertook the research to learn more about what factors are involving in biofouling, a phenomenon which costs the shipping industry millions of dollars.

Biofouling occurs when organisms, such as algae or shellfish, accumulate on wet surfaces. This accumulation of living material  is a problem particularly for ships as the layer of organic matter causes drag and may carry invasive species between ports.

The specific noise used in the experiments was an underwater recording of a ship docked with the on board generator running. The recording was played to tanks of green lipped mussel (Perna canaliculus) larvae at either high or low volume, or not all in the case of the control group. The researchers found that the larvae exposed to the loudest playback of the noise through submersible speakers were the fastest to settle on a surface and start growing.

The authors of the research noted possible implications of their findings, stating in the article:

“If vessel sound is found to be an important factor in promoting hull fouling by mussels, then dampening or eliminating sound production in vessels, such as by switching to a shore-based electrical supply whilst vessels are at berth, would have the potential to reduce the extensive range of problems that fouling and translocation of mussels creates.”

The research has been noted by several media outlets:

MSN NZ News: Noisy ships attract fouling: NZ research

Radio New Zealand: Noise draws mussels to ships

TV3 News:  Noisy ships attract fouling – NZ research

The original NIWA release can be found here.

LanzaTech, a producer of low-carbon fuels and chemicals from waste gases, has closed its latest funding round with investments totaling US $55.8 million.

Dr. Jennifer Holmgren, chief executive of LanzaTech, said this funding will accelerate the development of next generation integrated biorefineries using the LanzaTech technology platform for the production of sustainable low carbon chemicals as well as fuels. To date, the company has raised more than $85 million.

Founded in 2005 in New Zealand and headquartered in the US, LanzaTech has developed a novel gas-liquid fermentation process that produces low carbon fuels and chemicals from waste gas resources (see video here).

The announcement of LanzaTech’s latest success in securing capital has made headlines both in NZ and abroad.

Bloomberg News: LanzaTech Gets Malaysia Investors for Waste Gas-to-Fuel Process

Forbes: LanzaTech Gets $55.8 Million To Convert Carbon Monoxide To Fuel

Business Day: LanzaTech raises US$55 million

New Zealand Herald: Bio-fuels pioneer Lanzatech raises US$55.8m

National Business Review: LanzaTech raises $US55m as Malaysian oil money flows in

TVNZ News: Lanzatech raises $69m from investors

Radio New Zealand: More funding secured by LanzaTech

A campaign has begun in Britain for a memorial there to the scientist who led  New Zealand’s contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY), 1957-58,  which enabled  scientists from around the world to take part in coordinated earth science studies.

Dr Trevor Hatherton

A British geophysicist who later became a noted  scientific administrator, and Antarctic researcher,  Dr Trevor Hatherton won the New Zealand’s first national research scholarship offered to overseas scientists to work here and joined the DSIR in 1950.

Dr Hatherton made a December 1955 reconnaissance on foot over the sea ice of McMurdo Sound to select a site for New Zealand’s base. The inital  six huts at Scott Base were to house both the support party for the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and Royal Society International Geophysical Year Expedition.

Sir Edmund Hillary was the first Scott Base commander and Dr Hatherton the scientific leader from December 1956 to February 1958. He published work on the aurora australis, glaciology and the seismicity of the Ross Sea area.

As president of the nation’s science academy, the Royal Society, from 1985 to 1989, Dr Hatherton argued that its scientists should involve themselves in matters of public concern, a view that led to reports on problems of lead in the environment, on climate change, science education, and the issue of drugs and medicines in sport.

In Britain, Dr Hatherton’s cousin, Richard Burrough, is campaigning to get a “historic place” plaque erected on the scientist’s boyhood home in Yorkshire, and Dr Hatherton’s  daughter Kate Carnaby said: “As a young boy he read about Scott and Ross and Shackleton. “The heroic age when people went exploring in the Antarctic and I think it fired his imagination. He decided when he was quite young that he would quite like to get down to the Antarctic.”

Mr Burrough told the BBC:  “It’s important that this community know about Trevor. That somebody who is the son of a miner can get so far in life.”

After his return from the South Pole Dr  Hatherton continued his distinguished scientific career, with a series of fellowships — including one as a visiting professor of geophysics at Stanford University — and he later became a hugely-productive director of the DSIR’s geophysics division.

Dr Hatherton was appointed an OBE by the NZ Government,  and had an Antarctic glacier named in his honour, and in 1989 the refurbished physical laboratory at Scott Base was renamed the Hatherton Geomagnetic Laboratory in his honour.  He died in New Zealand in 1992 at the age of 67.

Radio New Zealand’s Kathryn Ryan recently traveled to Antarctica, producing a series of  podcasts, including one on Antarctic history. You can listen to them here.

- Kent Atkinson

New research published today in the New Zealand Medical Journal has highlighted the link between unhealthy behaviours like drinking and smoking. NZ Newswire’s David Williams covered the story.

An excerpt (read in full here):

Hit booze in smoking battle: experts

The government should consider alcohol law changes as part of the battle against smoking after studies show New Zealand smokers are two-and-a-half times more likely to be binge drinkers, the researchers say.

They say “hazardous” or heavy binge drinking makes it harder for people to quit smoking and more alcohol control, while reducing the damage done by booze, could also help the government’s commitment to make the country smokefree by 2025.

The study was conducted by Otago University’s Nick Wilson, along with experts from Australia and the US, and will be published in the Medical Journal as part of the International Tobacco Control Project.

It surveyed 1376 smokers and found a third of them had a hazardous drinking pattern, much higher than that of non-smokers in the survey – 13.1 percent.

Heavy drinking was more common in younger, male and Maori smokers.

Waikato University researcher Nicky Cameron has proven that new technology could be used to help pin down the origins of many preserved Maori heads.  She has tested  the enamel on the teeth of a model species, brushtail possums, to show that the technology could be used to compile a database for identifying the geographical origins of Maori remains — including those stored at  Te Papa.

Preserved heads — known as toi moko  or upoko tuhi — and other human remains such as skeletons and bones, known as koiwi tangata, are kept at the Museum of New Zealand, which actively pursues repatriations from museums and other institutions in Europe and North America.

The museum has had as many as 500 koiwi tangata and has recovered about 85 of the hundreds of preserved heads thought to have been kept in foreign museums. There have been 360 returns of remains from 13 countries and another 20 toi moko from French museums are expected to be handed back to Te Papa staff in Paris on Monday.

Some bones have been relatively easy to return to their iwi because they were labelled by colonial collectors who took them from caves and burial grounds. But most of the preserved heads were not identified, partly because many were captive slaves taken from other tribes, so the distinctive regional patterns in tattoos do not provide a reliable guide to origins. Ngapuhi and their allies in the Bay of Islands raided as far south as Hawke’s Bay.

“The means by which the regions from which the upoko tuhi originated, and to which they will be subsequently returned, is the subject of debate,” said Ms Cameron, a chemistry student who wrote her masters thesis on the research. She collected possum teeth from trappers and farmers around the country, because enamel on teeth is laid down in the first few years of life for most mammals, then stays mostly unchanged. Many pre-European Maori and Moriori lived all their lives in the one area and ate only local food — as possums do now — so she investigated to see if comparable minerals in the tooth enamel could  be matched to geological records.

Her method of analysis, Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) has been widely used by forensic scientists for the direct surface analysis of solid samples, and is increasingly being used by archeologists, such as in tracking voyaging of the Lapita people thought to be the ancestors of modern-day Polynesians.

Tiny samples from the teeth can show variations in the enamel of trace minerals such  as sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, calcium, manganese, zinc, strontium and barium. Because possums rarely move more than 5km from where they were born, the same patterns of trace elements in human remains could mean the person grew up in the same area.
“This methodology shows considerable potential for use in identifying geographical origins of human remains with in New Zealand alone or as an adjunct to other techniques,” Wrote the authors of a  paper, based on her research, just published in the Journal of Pacific Archeology.

“However a greatly expanded database, both geographically and numerically is required to clarify points of overlap and to ensure that traditional regional groupings are adequately represented”. The initial analysis was simplified by excluding results from the Christchurch, Ohkuru and West Coast  regions, where there were overlaps.

Samples listed as from Auckland actually fell on a boundary beteween Tai Tokerau and Tainui iwi groupings, and the former regional grouping would take in samples from Whangarei as well. There were also ovelaps between Taupo and Taumarunui, which fell into Arawa and Whanganui groupings, but researchers said these problems could be addressed by epanding the numbers of samples.

Ms Cameron’s supervisor, the university’s School of Maori and Pacific Development Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku — also listed as one of the authors of the research –  has previously described it as “really important and exciting” because it could help return “items of a sensitive nature”  from overseas museums to particular areas, and iwi.  Professor  Te Awekotuku said in her 2007 book, Mau Moko, that the colonial trade in human remains began when Captain Cook’s botanist, Joseph Banks, swapped some second-hand underpants for a Maori teenager’s head in the summer of 1770.

At one stage, during the Musket Wars, two tattooed heads bought one musket and many slaves were tattooed only to be killed so that their heads could be sold as that of a distinguished rangatira. Traded heads were typically cut off below the jawline, the brains and eyes removed and the eyelids sewn together, the lips cut off and the teeth exposed. They were dried in the sun and over fires. The trade continued  until the 1830s.

Registered journalists can contact the SMC for details of the published paper.

The Green party has called for the Ross Sea in Antarctica to become a marine protected area, in the wake of several fishing vessels running into strife in the region.

Korean vessel Jung Woo 2 was evacuated on Wednesday in the Antarctic Ross Sea following a fire which broke out aboard ship. It has been reported that three crew members died in the fire.

Today the Green party issued a press release calling on the Government to close off the Ross Sea – a prime location for catching highly valued Antarctic toothfish – as a Marine Protected Area.

“In little over a year three fishing vessels – the Jung Woo 2, along with the Sparta and Number 1 In Sung which sink with 22 lives lost – have come to grief in the Ross Sea,” Green Party Oceans spokesperson Gareth Hughes says.

“This pristine environment must not be put at risk by old, single-hulled unsuitable fishing boats like these”

The Green party’s views echoed those of esteemed conservation biologist Prof Steven Chown, who made a similar appeal during a visit to New Zealand last year.

Speaking to the SMC in September, Prof Chown said:

“The whole Southern Ocean is already being exploited — there is exploitation of toothfish. But (New Zealand’s) Ross Sea area really could serve as an example.  It hasn’t been heavily fished yet and its fish stocks are in good order.

“I think that is an area that could really be set aside as an ecosystem that is free of direct human intervention as is possible, given our global changes to the environment. I really think that would be a good thing to aim for. Of course, there is a fishery industry there, and by all accounts it’s worth about $US50 million or so — that’s really not a large amount of money.

“Wouldn’t it be good, if maybe NZ said: `We have to do this’ and again led the way?  You have a long record of leading the way on issues such as human rights, so why not lead the way here?”

Media coverage of calls for Ross Sea to be protected:

New Zealand Herald: Toothfish scramble ‘too risky’

TV 3 News:  Block off the Ross Sea: Greens

Radio New Zealand: Ross Sea ‘should be made marine reserve’

Press (and other Fairfax papers): Korean fishing boat tragedy a ‘wake-up call’

The stranded container ship Rena has finally broken apart after grounding on the Astrolabe reef several months ago. Although most of the fuel oil carried by the ship has been removed, the broken vessel still presents a variety of hazards.

The ship, which grounded on the reef in October 2011, was torn in two by high seas and rough weather sometime Saturday night.

Recovery workers estimate that between 200 and 300 containers of the approximately 830 remaining on the Rena were lost overboard when the two sections of the ship separated, of which 30 had been identified. However due to poor visibility and the rough conditions around the Rena, it was difficult to gain a more accurate count.

Debris from the ship and lost containers have begun landing on the coast (see media coverage below).

Over the last few months, the Science Media Centre has collected a wide range of expert commentary and analysis regarding the unfolding Rena situation.

Not long after the grounding of the Rena, experts contacted by the SMC warned of the risks poses by floating containers:

Professor Nigel Barltrop,  Research Director at University of Strathclyde’s Engineering Department noted the variety of hazards a grounded ship like the Rena presents, saying, “Apart from oil leaks there is the possibility of chemical contamination from cargo. The containers themselves are a collision hazard, especially to fast craft and smaller vessels.”

Dr. Simon Boxall, National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton, commented, “[Loose containers] are potentially more worrying now than the fuel oil leaking from the ship.  Once they break away from the ship they present a hazard to shipping – often floating just below the surface and difficult to see and track until they finally fill with water and sink.  Containers can remain afloat for weeks at a time.  There should also be concern as to the contents of the containers. This could range from household good to chemicals and in the case of Napoli there were several tonnes of herbicides amongst other materials.”

Oil risk remains

Maritime New Zealand has stated that National Response Team has been mobilised, which includes trained oil spill response and wildlife experts, who were preparing for the likelihood of more oil coming ashore.

National On Scene Commander Alex van Wijngaarden said  “While reports at this stage indicate there has not been a significant release of oil, with the Rena in its current fragile state, a further release is likely. While it is unknown at this stage exactly how much oil may be released, teams have been mobilised and will be ready to respond to anything that may come ashore.”

Expert commentary on oil risks to coastal ecosystems and wildlife recovery, collected by the SMC previously, is available here. To talk to experts about any aspect of the Rena grounding, please contact the Science Media Centre.

Selected media coverage of the Rena break up:

Bay of Plenty Times: Rena: Ship’s stern will be left to sink

SunLive: Rena: debris field warning

Stuff.co.nz: Reports of thefts as Rena cargo washes ashore

Radio NZ: Rena debris now coming ashore

Otago Daily Times: Stricken vessel breaks up in high seas

TVNZ News: Containers from split Rena reach shore

3 News: Up to 300 containers lost from Rena

A New Zealand researcher who showed pigeons can be as good as rhesus monkeys at sorting images of shapes into numerical order has made news around the world, with reports of of the former racing pigeons in Dunedin popping up in the New York Times,  Scientific American and a swathe of TV channels.

Though the ability to order things numerically is technically not the kind of complex counting  that  requires specific tags for each number, Otago University psychologist  Damian Scarf successfully tested his pigeons with the same number-recognition tasks completed by rhesus moneys 15 years ago to show the pigeons can put images in order based on the number of objects pictured in each.

Psychologist Dr Damian Scarf told the SMC that he now plans to test kea, which have been claimed to have some of the intelligence of a six-year old child. “I am currently setting up a project that will utilise the 2 keas and other parrot species housed at the Dunedin Botanic Garden aviary,” Dr Scarf said in an email. Though some media  disparagingly referred to the pigeons as “rats with wings”, Dr Scarf told the SMC: “They really are the perfect subjects and work diligently for their wheat reward.”

Not that his feathered friends made life easy for him, he said on his website: “I actually started with chickens. I was trying to compare them with some previous work on how pigeons learned to use touch screens to access food. But it was hopeless. Chickens are totally impulsive, they just peck at anything.” That was a year and a half gone.

“I thought we needed a smarter bird. So I tried again with magpies from a farm. After five months of spending 12 hour days with them, grinding livers to feed them and constantly smelling like a meat processing plant, I never got them to do anything. They just wouldn’t habituate to a lab environment.”

The pigeons rivaled the rhesus monkeys previously on numerical order — using the same tests –  Dr Scarf and his colleagues reported today in the journal Science.

The results “suggest that despite completely different brain organization and hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary divergence, pigeons and monkeys solve this problem in a similar way,” a coauthor of the original study of numerical order in monkeys, Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University, told the Science News website. Pigeons were trained to attempt Dr Brannon’s numerical-order test — which baboons and lemurs as well as some other monkeys have passed — on computer screens displaying sets of three images, each with one, two or three shapes. The shapes varied so that a bird couldn’t get the number order right just by pecking at increasing surface area: they were rewarded  for pecking in one-shape, two-shapes, three-shapes order.

The toughest test came when a pigeon had to peck pairs of unfamiliar images in ascending numerical order — they were correct 74 percent of the time matching the monkeys. Seeing such similarity on the same task “helps us with the puzzle of identifying the origins of numerical ability,” said Dr Scarf.

Media coverage

The research has cause quite a flutter among overseas media outlets:

New York Times: How Smart Is This Bird? Let It Count the Ways

CBC News: Pigeons’ math skills are as good as monkeys’

MSNBC: You do the math — because that pigeon over there can

Science News: Pigeons rival primates in number task

LiveScience: Are Pigeons as Smart as Monkeys?

Scientific American: Pigeons Can Follow Abstract Number Counting Rules

ArsTechnica: Pigeons match primates in number sense

The Otago research has also gained recognition closer to home:

TV 3 News: Research proves pigeons can count

TVNZ News: Pigeons proved equal to monkeys in math

Radio New Zealand: Rats with wings may just be flying Einsteins (listen below)

The top award in the  2011 Prime Minister’s Science Prizes, $500,000, has been awarded to a team of scientists from Otago University and NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) for research which debunked proposals  to use geo-engineering to manipulate algal blooms in the Southern Ocean to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The nine-member team under the aegis of the Centre for Chemical and Physical Oceanography at Otago University of Otago, investigated the central role the ocean played in influencing climate over the past million years. And it steered New Zealand to a leading role on geo-engineering with evidence that fertilising the iron-deficient Southern Ocean to create huge phytoplankton growth would not remove enough carbon dioxide from the air to mitigate or solve global warming.

The team experimented in the Southern Ocean and the Gulf of Alaska by pouring an iron solution on the sea to fertilise blooms big enough to be seen from space, but the algae took up less CO2 than expected, and the costly work had side effects, including the release of other more potent greenhouse gases.

“Around the world, there is a growing lobby, which includes influential people like Bill Gates, for using geo-engineering to claw back some of the carbon dioxide humans are emitting,” team leader Professor Philip Boyd said today. “Our research has shown that adding iron to the ocean is not going to be an effective way to do that.”

“We are … increasingly aware that careful stewardship is needed. If we are going to pass on a pristine environment to future generations, we have to understand why the climate is changing and what effects it will have on the ocean”. The team plans to use $400,000 of the prize to study Southern Ocean phytoplankton.

Other members of the team were Dr Evelyn Armstrong and  Dr Kim Currie of NIWA’s research unit, Associate Professor Russell Frew and Professor Keith Hunter, Dr Sylvia Sander, and Dr Robert Strzepek (all of Otago University),  Dr Cliff Law NIWA principal scientist, and Dr Rob Murdoch, NIWA’s general manager of research.

Another $100,000  went to University of Canterbury geologist Dr Mark Quigley, who won the PM’s science media communication prize, which included $50,000 to develop his skills. He published seven peer-reviewed research articles, delivered more than 40 lectures on the Christchurch quakes and ran a website while living in a condemned red zone house surrounded by liquefaction and with no sewerage, water and power.

And a glacial sedimentologist at Victoria University’s Antarctic Research Centre, Dr Rob McKay,  won the PM’s 2011 MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize, worth $200,000 for using marine sedimentary records and glacial deposits to reconstruct episodes of melting and cooling in Antarctica over the past 13 million years and show how they influenced global sea levels and climate.

You can read a press release, detailing the prizes and winners, here.

Examples of media coverage:

National Business Review: Victoria researcher wins top science prize

Dominion Post: Antarctic researcher among top science award winners

Idealog: Prime Minister’s Science Prizes doled in out in praise of climate change, eyes and earthquakes

Stuff.co.nz: PM announces science prizes

Radio New Zealand: Top science award awarded to NIWA and Otago University