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Science Alert has a story about a long running Lunar temperature measurement that apparently was lost and forgotten for decades.
Between 1971 and 1977, Apollo scientists conducting experiments on the Moon discovered that the surface of our li'l satellite buddy got mysteriously warmer. But the data from 1974 onwards went missing, and the strange warming phenomenon remained an enigma. The experiment was called the heat flow experiment, and it was designed to determine the rate at which the interior of the Moon loses heat.
Astronauts with Apollo 15 and 17 drilled holes into the lunar surface, up to depths of 2.3 metres, and probes measured the temperature at several depths in the holes.
These were long-term experiments, left in place after the astronauts departed, and transmitting data back to Earth.
The measurements revealed that the temperature of the moon at all measured depths got warmer from the date the experiment started in 1971 all the way till measurements ended in 1977.
That's a relatively short period of time on a planetary time frame. A rate of warming that rapid would have the moon surface incandescent well before we were began squabbling over who got to live in the best caves.
Various theories were put forth, but in the end people pretty much agreed it must be our fault.
In typical NASA fashion, the data was archived on tape, filed in the tape vault, and promptly forgotten, lost, moved, etc. Decades later, someone went looking for it. Some 440 tapes were found, (less than 10%) badly degraded over time. Some were recovered, Logs (written ones on that old unreliable medium: Paper) were found and when combined these sources recovered significant portions of the long lost data.
After 8 years of analysis, the data showed that the warming continued, all the way through until the end of observations in 1977. It also showed that, closer to the surface, the warming was more pronounced; and the warmth reached the shallower depths sooner, suggesting that the warming was occurring from the surface down, rather than radiating out from the Moon's interior.
So were the astronauts doing that? The researchers believe that their movements were disturbing the dirt on the lunar surface.
"Recently acquired images of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera over the two landing sites show that the regolith on the paths of the astronauts turned darker, lowering the albedo," they wrote in their paper.
"We suggest that, as a result of the astronauts' activities, solar heat intake by the regolith increased slightly on average, and that resulted in the observed warming."
In other words, when they stomped about and drove lunar rovers all over the landing sites, the Apollo astronauts overturned the topsoil, exposing darker regolith underneath. Darker surfaces don't reflect as much light; instead, they absorb it.
So this darker lunar surface at the Apollo sites absorbed more of the Sun's heat, raising the Moon's surface temperature by a few degrees.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @05:02PM (42 children)
The Global Warming Hoax is #FakeNews planted in the media by Crooked Hiliary.
MAGA!
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday June 11 2018, @05:07PM (41 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Monday June 11 2018, @05:20PM
The natural cooling cycles were pretty nasty too - just sayin...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday June 11 2018, @05:44PM (35 children)
Even if it's not man-made, we could still do something about it.
Let's say, for instance, that the Earth was warming up due to a change in solar emissions. We can't change what the sun is doing with our currently available technology. But we can take concrete steps to reduce how much of that solar radiation gets stuck in Earth's atmosphere by reducing the concentrations of CO2, because we can demonstrate that more CO2 in air causes it to warm up in fairly simple lab experiments [acs.org]. Which means we do some of the stuff those environmentalist types have been pushing us to do to reduce CO2 emissions and plant a bunch of trees, and that cuts down the the CO2 concentrations, which at least sorta counteracts what the sun is doing. And if for some reason the Earth started getting too cold, we'd be easily able to fix that by setting those newly planted forests on fire or burning coal and oil and putting CO2 back in the atmosphere.
And of course none of this has jack squat to do with the Moon heating up, since the Moon has very little by way of atmosphere. As best as I can tell, the claim is "NASA conveniently forgot measurements from the 1970's that the Moon was heating up, so therefor there's some sort of massive conspiracy involving NASA misreporting the numbers on Earth's temperature, so therefor the Earth isn't heating up." Which of course ignores all the other measurements done by lots of other organizations that support the claim that the Earth is heating up. And even if all those agencies were in some kind of grand conspiracy, you could also, y'know, take temperature measurements yourself using a simple outdoor thermometer, put them to a spreadsheet, and do the math yourself to see what was going on in your local climate, and share that information amongst others interested in the issue, but none of these opponents to the concept that climate change actually seem to be doing any of that.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday June 11 2018, @05:56PM (14 children)
Ah, but now we have a conspiracy theory clash: How could NASA hide inconvenient data collected by instruments installed by astronauts on the moon if we never have landed on the moon? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday June 11 2018, @05:57PM (3 children)
Because the moon is flat too.
That's how.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday June 12 2018, @03:40AM (2 children)
Many people forget that we are not denying the rocket launches by NASA. We all saw it, just like our uncritical peers. The rocket went up, and landed on the moon just like the dart in my hand goes ahead and lands on the board, right at the center - bullseye we call it - just like our theory.
It is obvious that a rocket landing like that will leave no survivors? So is NASA that/em? stupid? They would like us to believe that, but no. Even USSR wasn't that stupid and government knew it! So the "astro"-nauts were shipped instead to Area 51 and an elaborate moon landing forgery was committed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @06:46PM (1 child)
I hope you're trolling...
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday June 13 2018, @11:47AM
Of course. Only earth is flat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @06:08PM (9 children)
Its not that they didn't land stuff on the moon, its that there are a bunch of oddities surrounding the human moon landing videos and pics shared with the public. Almost like they did run a parallel "fake moon landing" project and then commingled the results with real moon landing stuff for whatever marketing or PR purposes.
Even this story notes how awful nasa was about saving the data from that time, almost as if they want it to go away. This has to be some of the most expensive and precious data on the planet? How can they treat it like this to the point it is "typical"?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 11 2018, @09:38PM (6 children)
Even some Doctor Who and Star Trek episohave been lost forever. Maybe nerds are just bad at long term storage.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @10:30PM (1 child)
Did those episodes cost 107 billion (2016-adjusted) dollars?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:51PM
People weren't interested in the same things back then that they are today. That includes the preservation of history, it just wasn't something that crossed people's minds. Not only that, it was more expensive and took up a lot more of people's time to do.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 11 2018, @10:50PM (2 children)
Long-term data storage is difficult.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:42AM (1 child)
No, it isn't.
Its just not a ONCE and DONE thing.
These tapes needed to be copied onto fresh tapes (or more permanent media) every 5 years or so.
Everybody knew this at the time. Recopying tapes to new media was one of my first tasks in my first job in a large data center.
New tapes were never put directly into production. They went into archive preservation, and the existing archival tapes (written once)
were copied to the new tapes, and then the existing tapes were rotated into production.
As a consequence we never had archival tape failures. We always got to them first with the preservation process.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @08:34AM
That works great for digital media, because the copy will be without noise (as long as the noise is small enough that it won't change any bits (after error correction, if any).
Now try the same with analogue. I suggest you find a couple of old VHS decks. Copying every five years since late 1960'es / early 1970'es is about ten generations. Let us know how much of the original video remains.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 12 2018, @04:49AM
And even some letters of your comment, it seems. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday June 11 2018, @11:45PM (1 child)
I'm pretty sure the 1960 Census happened, but when the agency I worked for tried to get copies of the original data around 1985 (to compare against the most recent data)...well, we'd lost our copies (800 BPI even parity...too many read errors to recover) so we tried to get copies from the Census Bureau...and they'd lost them too. I forget exactly which survey we were after, I think it might have been the blockface long-form, since the 1980 census tracts didn't match the 1960 census tracts due to shifts in population. I think we went from something like 1005 tracts to 1200. Those are extremely rough number, though, because I haven't looked at the records for about 30 years.
But losing archival records isn't as rare as one would hope it would be.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:30AM
This? https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2000/winter/1960-census.html [archives.gov]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday June 11 2018, @06:07PM (9 children)
a few years ago I came up with the idea of plotting the quantity and severity of wildfires vs. the date. I thought of this because that was a particularly bad year for fires in the west.
I asked an actual Fire Chief about this and he told me that someone is already doing it.
Sorry, didn't think to ask who it was.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Sulla on Monday June 11 2018, @06:13PM (4 children)
Wildfires are a tricky thing to use as evidence because of differences in how forests were managed over the decades. Wildfires were necessary to have on a small scale to clear the deadwood to keep massive fires from occuring, by cracking down and eliminating as many small fires as necessary it leaves our forests full of ready-to-burn fuel ready to go.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday June 11 2018, @06:16PM (3 children)
I Am Absolutely Serious:
Increased rainfall during the winter and spring led to increased undergrowth in Washington's and Oregon's forests a few years ago. When summer came much of that undergrowth dried out, resulting in lots of tasty fuel for hungry arsonists.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday June 11 2018, @11:47PM (2 children)
You left out the pine beetles.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Tuesday June 12 2018, @11:41AM (1 child)
Pine beetles don't burn particularly well. :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @09:49AM
Pine pitch in dead pines sure does, though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday June 11 2018, @08:34PM (3 children)
The fact that somebody else is doing that plotting doesn't automatically mean you shouldn't also do it on your own, especially if you doubted the results coming from the somebody else.
My point was that the people who are denying that the Earth is getting warmer almost definitely have all the equipment they would need to take their own measurements that would either confirm or contradict that claim. They aren't doing so, which means they either know they're wrong but are pretending they don't, are choosing to be ignorant of whether they're wrong, or too lazy to do the work to find out.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday June 11 2018, @09:06PM
I'll tell you what. I have an open mind to it. You can make lots of cases for different views. I have a totally open mind. Maybe there's global warming and maybe there isn't. If there isn't, we won't do anything about it. And if there is we won't do anything about it.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday June 12 2018, @03:57AM (1 child)
Eh? I thought the debate was whether it is man-made global warming instead of whether there is warming. The former is a lot harder to prove.
Regardless of either we _should_ do something about it - but the debate then becomes how much resource do we want to spend on this, which then becomes problematic depending on where one finds themselves in with regards to their place in the modern world, so it is next to impossible to get any sort of agreement as everyone has different things to lose. Add on the typical opportunistic vultures that will do anything to squeeze an iota of profit out of any endeavor on both sides of the divide, the problem space pretty much goes from improbable to impossible.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @08:39AM
That's one of the reason why it is so hard to convince global warming skeptics.
Skeptic: The sun is getting warmer, Mars is getting warmer, can you prove that the Earth getting warmer is caused by humans and not the sun?
AGW proponent: Look, the data shows the Earth is getting warmer, [these are not the droid you are looking for], ergo, man-made global warming.
Skeptic: I find your evidence lacking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @06:15PM (4 children)
The link (https://www.acs.org/content/dam/AACT/middle-school/gases/.../lab-greenhousegas.pdf) doesn't work:
Anyway we can guess what was there, I bet it measured the temperature of something in an enclosed insulated container. I would not extrapolate from that to a gravitating gas that can expand (eg troposphere height varies a lot between the poles and equator) and is in equilibrium with a high heat capacity liquid.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday June 11 2018, @08:36PM (3 children)
Sorry about that: correct link [acs.org]. This targets middle-schoolers.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @09:35PM (2 children)
Ok, the experiment is filling two 2 liters halfway with water stoppering the top and shining a heat lamp on them. Then you drop 3 alka-seltzer tablets into one, restopper it, and measure the temperature of the air in the upper half of both. Then at the end you use your chromebook to explain "How have humans contributed to an increase in carbon dioxide levels in the past 100 years?"
So what are we looking at here? Overall: NaHCO3(aq) + H20 -> NaOH(aq) + H2C03 -> NaOH(aq) + H20 + CO2(g)
The sodium bicarbonate is going to dissolve in the water and produce carbon dioxide gas which is net endothermic. This gas then effervesces into the air pocket in the upper half of the two liter and increases the pressure. So the water temperature will decrease due to a chemical reaction while the air temperature increases due to increased pressure. What does this have to do with the proposed "greenhouse effect"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @12:12AM (1 child)
If you can't work out a solution by yourself, you have no standing in criticizing the experiment.
(just in case you can't: just wait a bit before shining the light again for the temperature to become equal in the two recipients).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:35AM
Where is "wait a bit before shining the light again" in the procedure? It just has them "turn on the light" (step 6) and then leave it on for 40 minutes.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 11 2018, @09:39PM
Wait, wasn't there a story here on SN about a new paint/material that re-radiated solar Insolation directly to space bypassing the atmosphere?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2116040-future-air-conditioning-could-work-by-beaming-heat-into-space/ [newscientist.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday June 11 2018, @10:14PM (3 children)
As for the moon, it should be obvious I was replying to the coward's global warming statement.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday June 11 2018, @11:58PM (2 children)
IIRC, we're supposed to be in an inter-glacial period right now...and probably supposed to be just leaving it. So *some* global warming is desirable...but the amount is strictly limited.
And my guess is that in the hot periods you are talking about the continental plates were in a very different configuration. Pangaea type configurations tend to have extreme hot interiors. There are a few other hot periods, of course, but those are the really notable ones.
Also, yes, the sun is getting hotter, It's on its way to becoming a Red Giant. It's nearly half way there. But, IIUC, this is happening on a very long time period on the human scale. For shorter periods, the sun goes though an approximately 12 year cycle tied in with sunspots where the temperature also rises and declines. This is a somewhat irregular period, with notable variations. See http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/solact.html [gsu.edu] or check Google.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by EvilSS on Tuesday June 12 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)
Bad guess on your part then. Eocene epoch, for example, saw the continents in the same general areas as they are today, particularity Antarctica where the weather was more like southern California than, well, Antarctica. If anything they had more coast lines and separation than they do today.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday June 12 2018, @05:48AM
OK. When I looked that up most of the references talked about sea temperature, which is reasonable. In the Pangaeas it was the interior that got really hot.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by looorg on Monday June 11 2018, @05:54PM (3 children)
Considering how few people that have actually been to the moon that would be scarey then wouldn't it. There is only something like 12 humans that have ever actually been ON the moon, I could have missed some people. But if those 12 people can make the temperature increase by several degrees all by themselves. Then we are truly and well fucked on our planet with out 7.6 Billion people on it. There just isn't anything we can do then.
(Score: 2, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Monday June 11 2018, @07:00PM
The astronauts walked on the moon. And their footprints warmed the moon. If you believe the story.
Singapore, huge crowds, so many people walking, walking. To see me. And it's warm, it's in the 80s. Possibly there's something to the story. And we can cool our cities, our planet, by walking less. Driving more. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. But it'll save our precious body energy. I'm already doing it and I feel great!!!
(Score: 3, Informative) by tfried on Monday June 11 2018, @07:40PM
The difference is that these values are not global (lunar) measures at all, but just a few local probes at locations where - by definition - the astronaut had been active. Moon does not have an atmosphere to transfer heat over any significant range. Thermal transfer through the rock/dust itself will effectively be limited to a smallish range around the probe.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday June 11 2018, @10:08PM