Remember how during the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 Australia seemed like it was entirely on fire? Record wildfires spread throughout much of the continent, turning the skies red. In fact, at some point, it even rained fire. Then, back over in the United States, there were massive wildfires in Oregon, California, and Colorado. These also turned the skies red and I even saw video of a fire tornado. Yes, a fire tornado. It looked like something out of a movie. It also put enough smoke into the atmosphere that affected the color of the sunrise and sunset as far away as Michigan for a week. I don’t care who you are, that’s impressive.
Fortunately, there are some ways to bring at least a sliver of good out of all those fires. Researchers took advantage of the situation and studied how the smoke affected the light reaching the earth. Naturally, it was less. What was more surprising though was that the smoke didn’t so much absorb the light and thus keep the heat in the Earth’s ecosystem as much as it scattered the light. That allows the heat to dissipate, with some of it even going off into space. The net result of all those wildfires is therefore actually a net drop in temperature.
One of the really interesting things that the researchers found was that fires in different areas of the world created different kinds of smoke and therefore different scattering effects. For example, the fires in Oregon created darker smoke that scattered more light than the fires in Australia which was mostly burning dry brush.
This data is important in that it helps us refine our climate models. The net cooling effect was something that was unexpected, meaning that our climate models were off and needed to be refined based on the new data.
That discovery points to one of the more important philosophical underpinnings of science in general – the concept that we should question what we think we know, that we should always be searching for better data to improve our understanding. Perhaps that is nowhere more important than in the realm of climate since we are basing policy off of our climate models. Given the importance of government regulation to the environment and to the economy it is imperative that they continue to question what they think they know. In doing so, more research happens and people are able to find unexpected things, both good and bad, leading to models that more accurately reflect reality.
In other news on improving our data sets, a different group of researchers were having a problem tracking smelt populations. As scientists tend to do when they want to track animal movements and populations they tag the animals. The problem was, when they would check up on their tagged tiny fish, they found there were far more of them gone than they had predicted, without a corresponding population decrease. They were puzzled until they looked in the belly of a heron and found some of their tagged smelt. It turns out herons love the little fish and don’t discriminate based on whether or not the critters have a tag. The discovery solved the mystery of the missing tagged fish and helped the scientists better understand the local ecosystem.
What does all of this have to do with TARTLE? What is something that both anecdotes have in common? They both involve researchers solving a problem by getting as close to the source of the information as possible. That’s exactly what we advocate here at TARTLE. We want people to be able to get to the data’s source, you. That way, they can correct whatever assumptions and biases they might be starting out with and in the end make decisions that will actually make things better for everyone.
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