News bits: Climate change update; The source of dark energy!; Book burning wars

The WaPo reports on what is going on in antarctica. It’s getting creepy scary. The WaPo writes:

Rapidly warming oceans are cutting into the underside of the Earth’s widest glacier, startling new data and images show, leaving the ice more prone to fracturing and ultimately heightening the risk for major sea level rise.

Using an underwater robot at Thwaites Glacier, researchers have determined that warm water is getting channeled into crevasses in what the researchers called “terraces” — essentially, upside-down trenches — and carving out gaps under the ice. As the ice then flows toward the sea, these channels enlarge and become spots where the floating ice shelf can break apart and produce huge icebergs. If the remaining shelf is further undermined, Thwaites Glacier will flow into the ocean faster and boost global sea levels on a large scale.

The results from overlapping teams of more than two dozen scientists, published Wednesday in two papers in the journal Nature, reveal the extent to which human-caused warming could destabilize glaciers in West Antarctica that could ultimately raise global sea level by 10 feet if they disintegrate over the coming centuries.  

The biggest revelation was that the ice melt is very uneven, with relatively slow loss in flat areas on the underside of the glacier. But the warm water entering Thwaites Glacier’s crevasses poses a serious threat, according to Britney Schmidt, a Cornell University scientist who is the lead researcher behind Icefin and deployed it with a group of 12 other researchers who encamped on the ice.

“The warm water is getting into the weak spots of the glacier, and kind of making everything worse,” Schmidt said.

“It shouldn’t be like that,” Schmidt continued. “That’s not what the system would look like if it wasn’t being forced by climate change.”  

There was some good news in the research: In areas measured beneath Thwaites that were not characterized by crevasses and terraces, the melt rates were fairly slow. That’s because cold fresh meltwater created a protective layer that insulated the ice from the warmer water below — which could mix up into the crevasses but was thwarted in the more linear environment. Thus, nearly a third of melting occurred in the crevasses, the scientists calculated.

And the slower melt rate outside of them is not much consolation, considering that this slow rate may not be characteristic of the faster-changing part of Thwaites, and at any rate does not change the fact that the glacier is losing ice and retreating.

A reasonable source of concern is knowing that we do not know a lot about this and some recent past predictions about climate change are turning out to understate the rate of climate change and its seriousness. Maybe we do not have centuries to continue to pollute, dither, blither, deny and downplay the climate change problem. 

Brass knuckles capitalism is working with the radical right Republican Party’s in staunch opposition to even try to deal with climate change. There is not much hope that the US will be able to proactively try to deal with crises before they hit us. Instead, we are going to pay far higher costs, trillions not billions, and hundreds of millions of people, including tens of millions of Americans are going to get financially damaged or completely wiped out.

2022: About 750 billion tons of ice melted

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Dark energy breakthrough:

CONTEXT

Huge news! Far bigger than the galaxy! As we all know, about 70% of the universe consists of dark energy. According to CERN, dark energy appears to be associated with the vacuum in space and is distributed evenly throughout the universe in both space and time. Because of that, dark energy effects are not diluted as the universe expands, meaning that it does not exert local gravitational effects. Instead, it exerts effects on the universe as a whole. The effects amounts to a repulsive force that accelerates the expansion of the universe until it rips itself apart into nothingness. 

Germaine’s handy end-of-universe safety tip: When that happens, people can simply open their umbrellas and wait for the storm to pass. 

THE NEWS BIT

Imperial College London News reports on new data that suggests the source of dark energy in the universe is supermassive black holes. ICLN reports:

Observations of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies 

point to a likely source of dark energy – the ‘missing’ 70% of the Universe.

The measurements from ancient and dormant galaxies show black holes growing more than expected, aligning with a phenomenon predicted in Einstein's theory of gravity. The result potentially means nothing new has to be added to our picture of the Universe to account for dark energy: black holes combined with Einstein’s gravity are the source.

Study co-author Dr Dave Clements, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: “This is a really surprising result. We started off looking at how black holes grow over time, and may have found the answer to one of the biggest problems in cosmology.”

Study co-author Dr Chris Pearson, from STFC RAL Space, said: “If the theory holds, then this is going to revolutionize the whole of cosmology, because at last we’ve got a solution for the origin of dark energy that's been perplexing cosmologists and theoretical physicists for more than 20 years.”

This is shocking. Nothing new has to be added to the theory of the universe because dark energy comes from pudgy black holes and that fits with Einstein’s gravity theory. We knew more more than we knew! 

Your favorite distant galaxy and mine, NGC524

One of the galaxies studied for this research

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The wars over banning and burning books, like the Nazis used to like to do to get their base all riled up, are intensifying. Book defenders are being smeared by the radical right as using naughty tactics to protect books. The Daily Beast reports on the intensifying kerfuffle in, where else but Florida:

DeSantis Now Says Teachers Are Shelving Books to Make Him Look Bad

The Florida governor now says that teachers are “manufacturing” a book ban to suit their “narrative.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is attempting to shift the blame after backlash stemming from a school district’s removal of baseball star Roberto Clemente’s children’s book.

Clemente’s book references racism he dealt with as a Black Puerto Rican baseball player, and has been removed from the district’s libraries for months pending review, in compliance with the state’s newly passed “Stop WOKE Act,” according to Duval County Public Schools.

The governor, who’s made removing “critical race theory” from education a key component of his platform, is now accusing the school district of trying to get publicity from their “outlandish” stunt in removing the book, claiming it has nothing to do with new laws.

“They're manufacturing that to try to create a narrative,” he said during a press conference Tuesday. DeSantis was backed by Florida’s Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz, who called the controversial rules that have forced costly reviews and book removals “fake news.”

The horror of those naughty teachers. Trying to make a jackass (DeSantis) look bad, something no Republican politician would ever do. They assert a narrative the jackass dislikes, so he deceives and deflects by calling it fake news. Ready or not, the 2024 election season is fully upon us.