A study published today in the journal Nature brings big bad news about the state of life on our planet. Researchers from Nova Scotia conclude that levels of phytoplankton have fallen by about one percent per year for the last several decades. That decline is correlated with rising water temperatures. Add it up, and that’s a significant decline.

Phytoplankton are the base of most of the oceans’ food webs. If they were to go away, much life in the ocean would be unable to survive. Nobody knows what might happen then.

There are still a few Cold Earthers out there, insistently pushing narratives that the Earth is cooling, rather than warming. A lengthy annual review conducted by hundreds of scientists from around the world and just published by the American Meteorological Society, however, doesn’t support the Cold Earthers’ contentions. The review concludes that:“Global average surface temperatures during the last three decades have been progressively warmer than all earlier decades, making 2000-09 (the 2000s) the warmest decade in the instrumental record.”

The review examines 10 different indicators of global temperature:

air temperature over land
sea-surface temperature
air temperature over oceans
sea level
ocean heat absorption
humidity
tropospheric temperature
Arctic sea ice
glaciers
spring snow cover in the Northern hemisphere

The review found that all of these 10 independently-measured indicators show that global warming is taking place. Take note, Cold Earthers: This review provides a model of global warming held up at 10 points. If you’re going to knock it down, you’ve got to take out more than just one point.

What do you call a mineralogist who got fired from the University of Ottawa after he stopped teaching the subject matter of the science courses he was assigned and let his students talk about whatever they wanted in class and gave them all an A+ anyway, who declared that physics is a scientific scam out to get you and that students should refuse to read scientific course curricula, who got arrested when he refused to leave campus, and who blamed the whole episode on “the Israel lobby”?

If he has announced that he thinks global warming is a hoax, and if you are global warming denier Jo Nova, you call him a “physicist” and “former professor and environmental science researcher” and laud his expert opinion. You also treat this as a new scientific defection when actually the story’s kind of old. Anything to make it look like serious science says global warming isn’t real.

The results of the annual bottlenose dolphin count along the Maryland coast, conducted by the Baltimore National Aquarium, have been released. 117 dolphins were counted this year. That’s compared with 344 dolphins counted last year.

Those numbers sound like bad news for bottlenose dolphins in the Atlantic, but they might not actually be, given the longer patterns of observations over the last 13 years of the citizen science count. In 2007, only 17 dolphins were counted. In 2002, only 9 were found.

It turns out that this count of bottlenose dolphins is highly variable from year to year. So, it’s only over the very long term that the citizen science effort will reveal meaningful understanding of population trends.

That doesn’t mean that the project isn’t worthwhile. However, there’s no reason to panic because of a change over just one year.

When I saw the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center presentation of Arctic sea ice volume last month, I thought that perhaps its latest reading might be a transient graphing error:

But a month later, Arctic sea ice volume remains down after a staggering drop:

The astute among you may notice that the y-axis measures an anomaly in ice volume: specifically, deviation from the 1979-2009 average for the calendar day on which measurement occurs. If you’re a climate change skeptic, you might think, “Aha, I bet that the change in Arctic sea ice volume is nothing compared to the magnitude of the sea ice that is there.”

Given the appearance of the graph, that might be a reasonable suspicion, but it would also be wrong. At its nadir last September, the volume of Arctic sea ice was 5,800 cubic kilometers, a value 67% lower than the September Arctic sea ice volume in 1979. At the latest assessment made as of July 17, the volume of Arctic sea ice was more than 10,000 cubic kilometers below the average July volume from 1979-2009, and the 1979-2009 average July Arctic sea ice volume is only about 19,000 cubic kilometers:

In short, more than half of the Arctic sea ice volume you would have seen in a late 20th Century July is gone now.

Last year, Cold Earthers reacted with huge laughs when Energy Secretary Steven Chu proposed a program of moving to light-colored roofs as a way to combat global warming. Chu’s idea was that roofs with light coloring would reflect more solar enery back into outer space instead of absorbing it, but the industry-aligned pundits who don’t believe global warming is real declared the proposal to be merely spacey.

A commenter at the Global Warming Hoax site called Chu’s roof proposal “rather silly”. “It’s ridiculous,” said Cold Earther Steven Milloy.

The Cold Earthers didn’t have any particular scientific research to back their disdain of Chu’s proposal. They just glanced at the idea and dismissed it as a matter of reflex. They used any argument they could think of, no matter how absurd, to argue against Chu’s idea. Milloy even suggested that reflecting some of the sun’s energy back away from the Earth could damage the sun. He asked, “What if we do this, and solar activity decreases?”

Climatologists, on the other hand, didn’t waste their time with idle speculation. They dedicated themselves to empirical study of the premises of Steven Chu’s suggestion. This week, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released the results of its research of the concept. Their work found evidence that Chu was on the right track after all – that light colored roofs could result in a cooling effect on a global scale. The impact could be enough to negate two years of current carbon dioxide emissions.

188 years ago today, Gregor Mendel was born. Mendel performed scientific experiments on garden peas that uncovered the concept of genes linked to specific physical traits inherited across generations.

Mendel’s work was among the first research that would eventually form a body of work providing evidence for the specific mechanisms of biological evolution through natural selection. Without these concepts, modern biology wouldn’t be possible.

So, let’s all show some gratitude to Gregor Mendel today, and eat some peas in his memory.

My favorite attempt by the Cold Earthers to cling on to their faith that global warming is not taking place comes from Men’s News Daily, which argues against the report, as it quotes, that “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported Thursday that the January-June period was the warmest worldwide on record, based on average land and ocean temperatures.”

Robert F. Gay, writing for Men’s News Daily, attempts a tricky rhetorical maneuver. He uses the structure of critiques of Cold Earth ideology, saying of NOAA’s data, “This is summer, and what they’re talking about is weather, not climate change.”

If Gay had actually read the report he’s arguing against, he would have seen that the data cover the period from the beginning of January through the end of June, which actually include only one and a half weeks of summer and two and a half months of winter. It’s little mistakes like this, calling January and February summer, that are leading the majority of climate scientists to reject Cold Earther arguments. Besides that, the NOAA report compares current temperatures to well over 100 years of temperature records from the past. That makes the work a clear measure of climate trends, not just the weather.

It looks like a Celtic labyrinth motif – but it’s not. Can you name this thingy?

Here’s a hint which won’t help you much: Experts refer to it as a “broad-collared enteropneust”.

The Smithsonian can help you understand them a bit. An encyclopedia won’t help much, but the University of Washington goes a bit further… but you can also find out a little more about some recent collections of these sorts of… thingies.

Bad news comes today from the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling site continues to spew crude oil unchecked in spite of BP’s new cap. That’s because of growing concerns that the disaster has triggered areas of instability beneath the sea floor that could burst outward in new ruptures if pressure is suddenly restored to the system by the closure of the cap. So, scans are being conducted, and in the meantime, the pollution grows.

A new kind of victim of the oil spill has been found as well: Pyrosomes, floating dead in large numbers on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

If you don’t know what a pyrosome is, don’t feel bad. I’d never heard of them myself, before this morning. What I’ve discovered suggests that they’re both aesthetically and ecologically remarkable.

Pyrosomes are chordates, like us, though they don’t look like any vertebrate. Larval pyrosomes have a nerve cord running down their backs, suggesting a common ancestry with all vertebrates in a long distant past.

Pyrosomes are small, individually, but when pyrosomes grow up, they don’t live alone. They join together into colonies, fused together into tube-like structures, with a gelatinous glue holding the individuals together, throbbing in collective rhythm to move the mass forward.

They’re pretty too. Pyrosomes are bioluminescent, meaning that the produce their own light. They glow in the dark.

The pyrosome you see here, photographed by Nick Hobgood, is small, but pyrosome colonies grow larger than human beings. Some sources say that they grow much larger, several feet in circumference and between 12 and 50 feet long.

Pyrosomes also play a fundamental role in the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. They’re eaten by a wide range of animals, which are then in turn eaten by other animals. If the pyrosomes of the Gulf of Mexico are being killed en masse by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a major food source is being removed from our nation’s coastal waters, and the marine food web of the region may come undone.

When George W. Bush ignored science to push for the implementation of pre-determined policies, American liberals condemned the practice.

Before Barack Obama became president, he promised to respect the integrity of the scientific process and allow scientific results to inform our policies in an unperturbed fashion:

From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way: leaders like President Kennedy, who inspired us to push the boundaries of the known world and achieve the impossible; leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process.

Because the truth is that promoting science isnt just about providing resources – its about protecting free and open inquiry. Its about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. Its about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when its inconvenient – especially when its inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States.

Now the Los Angeles Times reports that scientists are being pressured by Obama administration appointees to change their results in order to streamline approval for environmentally destructive projects, just as they were pressured by the officials of the Bush administration:

“We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration,” said Jeffrey Ruch, an activist lawyer who heads an organization representing scientific whistle-blowers….

interviews with several scientists — most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation in their jobs — as well as reviews of e-mails provided by Ruch and others show a wide range of complaints during the Obama presidency:

In Florida, water-quality experts reported government interference with efforts to assess damage to the Everglades stemming from development projects.

In the Pacific Northwest, federal scientists said they were pressured to minimize the effects they had documented of dams on struggling salmon populations.

In several Western states, biologists reported being pushed to ignore the effects of overgrazing on federal land.

In Alaska, some oil and gas exploration decisions given preliminary approval under Bush moved forward under Obama, critics said, despite previously presented evidence of environmental harm.

The most immediate case of politics allegedly trumping science, some government and outside environmental experts said, was the decision to fight the gulf oil spill with huge quantities of potentially toxic chemical dispersants despite advice to examine the dangers more thoroughly.

And the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based organization, said it had received complaints from scientists in key agencies about the difficulty of speaking out publicly.

“Many of the frustrations scientists had with the last administration continue currently,” said Francesca Grifo, the organization’s director of scientific integrity.

Will we react the same way to this news as we did when the president’s name was George W. Bush?

This morning, some visiting extended family members and I took a trip to the little-known pocket beach called Goodies Beach in Rockport, Maine. It was a sunny day, the water was warm enough to swim in with a bit of pluck, and we were all having a blast noodling about with buckets, shovels, splashes, hermit crabs and the rising tide that swamps all castles. A nice older fellow came by in his rowboat and gave the kids some rides.

We had quite a time day until someone came hustling up to us from the harbormaster’s house next door. “I hate to tell you this,” a very nice young man told us, “and really I’m even on my day off, but you probably shouldn’t be swimming on this beach today. It might be contaminated from runoff.”

I was a bit perplexed, because I’d seen a sign on entrance to the beach declaring it to be open for use. I’d also checked the Maine Healthy Beaches Initiative website for Goodies Beach earlier and had seen this update:

But the nice guy from the harbormaster’s house explained that even though updates are posted for beaches every day on the Maine Healthy Beaches website, actual water samples for the beaches are only collected once a week. And by gum, when I came back home and clicked through on “monitoring data,” I found he was right:

I’ll have to wait until later this week to figure out if the water today was all right.

“See, it rained yesterday,” explained the nice young man who ran down to us, “and there was a law that got passed a while back to have people fix the runoff from their septic systems up the hill. But some of them still are a bit, well, they’re maybe not right. When it rains hard like it did yesterday, sometimes you get a bit of a wash into the harbor. So it’s not official, but I’d be careful. There’s a hose up at the harbormaster’s, and a sink, if that would help.”

It did help, and I’m grateful for the advice from the friendly harbormaster’s staff (and nobody’s puking, at least not yet). Today’s experience reinforces a lesson that I abide by in principle but need to implement better in practice: when it really matters, don’t be satisfied with aggregated indications of data. When something’s on the line, I should check at the raw data myself if I can.

I’m having an absolutely fabulous time reading The Trees In My Forest, by Bernd Heinrich, who lives up in the backwoods in Maine, where he manages and scientifically studies a particular patch of forest over several years.

The book provides some great material to provoke long consideration about the nature of trees, but one particular passage struck me because of its relationship to the nature of human beings:

“If arranged end to end, about 2,000 cellulose chains, each one of them comprised of about 1,000 glucose or sugar units strung together, would equal about one tracheid length. There are about 2 billion (2,000,000,000) cellulose chains in one tracheid or wood fiber. Each tracheid cell thus contains the equivalent of 2,000,000,000,000 sugar molecules, which are the primary product of photosynthesis. Most of a tracheid’s growth occurs in about thirty days, thus one tracheid cell will add an average of 2×10[to the 12th power] glucose units / (2,592,000 seconds/30 days) = 771,600 glucose units per second per tracheid cell for the entire thirty days. Glucose is a sugar comprised of six carbons, requiring six carbon dioxide molecules to make, hence one growing tracheid cell takes up the equivalent of 776,600 x 6 = 4.6 million carbon dioxide molecules per second.”

We human beings are all-too-efficient producers of carbon dioxide. We’re pretty lousy at creating industrial carbon sequestration devices, though. Trees, on the other hand, are exceptionally efficient at sequestering carbon.

The message: If you can, plant some trees, for goodness sakes.

This afternoon, the Goddard Institute at NASA released its global temperature data for the month of June 2010. If you look just at temperatures over the Earth’s landmasses, June 2010 reached record hot levels for available global data stretching all the way back to June of 1880. If you look at measurements of global temperature over both land and ocean, June 2010 ranks as the third hottest June on record.

Temperature for any one month is weather; long-term trends in temperature are a demonstration of climate change. So let’s look at temperature trends for June in the long term. In order from hotter to not quite as hot (working with combined land and ocean temperatures to be the most inclusive) the following are the top ten hottest Junes on record in NASA’s data:

1. 1998
2. 2009
3. 2010
4. 2005 (tied with 2010)
5. 2006
6. 2007
7. 1997
8. 1991
9. 2001
10. 2002

And in order from coldest to not quite as cold, the following are the top ten coolest Junes on record in NASA’s data:

1. 1907
2. 1913
3. 1885
4. 1894
5. 1903
6. 1890
7. 1880
8. 1909
9. 1911
10. 1916

For the 131 years of direct temperature measurement in the Goddard NASA data, here’s a graph of the rankings, from hottest (1) to coldest (131):

And here’s a scatterplot from the Goddard NASA data of the June heat rank by year.

The black curve you see is a plot of the best-fit trend line described by the equation Heat Rank = -7902.3 + (9.0598*year) - (0.0026*year*year). That line signifies that as the years progress from 1880-2010, the month of June is getting hotter, and it’s getting hotter at a slightly increasing rate. The R-Squared for the trend line, 0.7512, can be interpreted to mean that 75.12% of variation in heat rank is accounted for by the progression of the years.

That’s a pattern. That’s climate change. Speaking more specifically, that’s global warming.