What the Surface Stations Project found is deplorable. The report details, with lots of color photos of actual stations in the network, just how haphazard and inept our attempts to accurately measure the surface temperature record in the U.S. have been. For instance, there are guidelines for how close a measuring station can be to a parking lot or other “artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.” The Surface Stations Project surveyed 70% of the stations in the U.S. This is what they found: “(W)e found that 89 percent of the stations—nearly 9 of every 10—fail to meet the National Weather Service's own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source. In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.” (Pg. 1) The report concludes, “the raw temperature data produced by the USHCN stations are not sufficiently accurate to use in scientific studies or as a basis for public policy decisions.” (Pg. 17)
Obtain the report, read it, dissect it, and refute it if you can, or accept it if you can't. That's the honest thing to do. I have long wondered why most of my fellow physicists haven't been as skeptical of global warming alarmism as I have been. I think one reason, perhaps even more important than their politics affecting their judgment, is that they naturally assume other scientists are as careful in how they obtain data as physicists are. I've been a global warming skeptic for some time now, and it didn't even occur to me that most of the time the thermometers would be “sited next to a lamp."
What's really ironic is that, if someone claims to see a flying saucer, which hurts no one and costs nothing, debunkers come out in force. But let a former vice-president claim environmental apocalypse is upon us, and suddenly we're appropriating billions and changing our lifestyles.
Cripes.
Copyright © 2009 Jeffery D. Kooistra
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Short Story: THANKSGIVING DAY by Jay Werkheiser
People in an unprecedented situation will have to deal with problems both old and new....
Kev's stomach curled around emptiness, embracing it as a constant reminder that the colony's Earth food was almost gone. Another three months, four at the outside. Then what? How will we die?
He bent down to look into the nearest cage. “Maybe you'll tell us why the food here is poisonous,” he said to one of the rats inside. It rolled its dull eyes listlessly toward him. Rust-brown clumps matted its fur, and the metallic odor of dried blood hung in the air.
Is that how I'll go, clutching helplessly at alien dirt, coughing up blood? His gut clenched tighter.
"They are not going to tell you anything,” Ahmet said from across the toxicology lab.
Kev looked up from the cage at the short, dark-skinned man walking toward him. His circular glasses, perched atop a narrow nose, reminded Kev of an owl. “I thought I'd stop by on the way home from the analytical chem lab,” Kev said. “One of the grunts said you were looking for me earlier."
Ahmet nodded. “I was hoping you could run some samples for me. Give me a clue what's in them."
Kev frowned. “The biochem team has me running Bradford assays day and night, looking for alien proteins. Did you come up with a new lead?” Hope flared in his chest, then died with Ahmet's reply.
"I'm afraid I'm just grasping at straws. My subchronic rats keep developing the same symptoms—nosebleed, bloody stools, and ultimately internal hemorrhaging."
"Subchronic?” said Kev quizzically. “My field's spectroscopy."
"The subjects receive daily doses of an alien food source over 10 percent of their life span, about three months for rats."
"Three months?” Kev said. “The hydroponics tanks are dying, Ahmet."
"Yes, I understand that. You're not the only one living on short rations.” Anger flashed behind Ahmet's glasses, but quickly dissipated. “Toxicology is a slow business. I don't think we're going to have results in time.” Ahmet seemed to deflate with his anger. “We came all this way, spent all those years on the ship, to fail before we even get started."
Kev put his hand on Ahmet's shoulder. “We're not going down without a fight."
Ahmet nodded, his eyes downcast. “I have learned that mycowood produced the most severe symptoms in the rats."
"Mycowood? They're those mushroom-shaped tree things, right? Smell minty."
"Yes. The organic team tells me the smell comes from salicylate esters. All the local plants produce them."
Kev connected the dots. Salicylates. Aspirin. “Blood thinners?” he asked.
Ahmet's head bobbled up and down. “But only dangerous in quantities much larger than we find here. Still, I think it could be important."
"All right, send some of your mycowood samples over to the analyt lab. I'll squeeze them in first thing in the morning."
"Thank you. Thank you!” Ahmet's Turkish accent was normally muted, but it thickened when he was excited. “That will be most helpful."
"Save your enthusiasm for tomorrow.” A thin smile curled Kev's lips, his first in a long time. “It's nearly fourteen o'clock, time to head home for a few hours’ sleep."
The short walk across the colony compound felt longer because Epsilon Indi, settling low on the horizon at this late hour, cast bright sunbeams into his eyes. Two long shadows moved through the glare ahead of him. Kev shielded his eyes with his hand to see who it was—two grunts working late in the reactor building.
He hated the way the word grunt had become a part of the colony's lexicon. He cringed inwardly, remembering that he'd used it himself in the tox lab. It's hard to fight human nature.
But he could try. He waited until he could see the nearest worker. “Hi, Logan."
Logan lifted his form straight upright, elevating his square jaw so that it was level with the top of Kev's head. He looked down at Kev with disdain in his eyes.
Kev shook his head and continued walking.
The corrugated aluminum hut that Kev called home doubled as Mandy's office. Her attention didn't waver from her spreadsheet when he entered. Tension lines were clear in the screen's reflection of her gaunt face. Kev tried to remember her during the good times back on the ship, the carefree ecological engineer he'd fallen for before the dieback of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the hydroponics tanks. The memories of those days, only two years distant, felt like another life.
Did he dare say anything? Interrupting her carried serious risk. He settled on something noncommittal. “Why don't you take a break, hon? Maybe get some sleep."
She shook her head without turning to face him. “No time. Bad news from the soil tests."
His mood deflated further. “It's not going to be able to support Earth crops anytime soon?"
"Maybe not ever.” Kev caught the slightest quiver in her voice.
"Working yourself to death isn't going to help,” he said.
"Sleep isn't going to save the colony."
"You were elected mayor, not miracle worker."
"They elected a savior."
And that was the problem.
* * * *
The next morning she was still at her desk, slumped over the keyboard. Kev gazed at her, longing for the life they had planned, for the bright new world they were going to build together. The dieback changed everything. Through sheer will, Mandy had held the hydroponics tanks together long enough for the ship to reach New Hope. When the colony's mayor became the first to die on the new world, Mandy had been swept into office on a wave of adulation. Her dreams were on indefinite hold.
All Kev could offer her was sympathy. It wasn't enough.
He slipped out without waking her. He squinted in the early morning sunlight as he made his way to the analyt lab. Ahmet's samples sat on his workbench next to the UV-vis spectrophotometer. Kev shook his head and started extracting organics from the mash.
By noon his workbench was crowded with protein samples marked urgent. He ignored them. Ahmet's mycowood had his ful
l attention. There was no need to stop for lunch; that meal had vanished with the food reserves.
Better to focus on work than on hunger. The infrared spectrographs of the mycowood samples showed strong ester peaks as expected, but there was also a significant peak showing carboxylic acids that weren't involved in ester bonds. And it looked like there was a sulfate peak in there. The problem was that Ahmet's mycowood had been mashed up and dried to make rat food. Everything was jumbled together.
What Kev really needed was a fresh set of samples. But that meant leaving the colony compound. He blew out a long breath, purposely avoiding the protein samples with his eyes. There would be hell to pay.
He headed next door to the biology lab, looking for a travel partner. He found his target's scrawny frame hunched over a microscope, his clean and pressed white lab coat contrasting sharply with his mahogany skin. A half week's unruly growth lined his jaw.
"How about a trip into the wild, Ben?"
Ben jerked his head up from the microscope, a startled look on his face. “You know those flying bug things that occasionally buzz around the compound? I think they're actually seed packets from one of the forest plants."
"Why would you say that?"
"I got one under the scope,” Ben said. “Looks like their skin cells have cell walls."
"Humph. They sure look like bugs,” Kev said. “So are you coming?"
"What? Oh. You couldn't drag me out of here. You'll have to go without me."
"You know the rule. No one goes out alone."
"Take a grunt."
Kev sighed. “All right. But you owe me."
It was a bad idea anyway, he thought. He had too much work to do. He took a quick stroll to the mess hall first. No food would be available this early; he hoped to fill his stomach with some water.
Logan and his wife, Marta, were the only other people in the hall.
Take a grunt. He found himself standing beside their table before he was aware he had made the decision.
"I'm going off compound, and I need someone to go with me. Interested?"
Marta looked up at him. “I've got a work detail in an hour or so, but Logan's off today."
"Wasn't planning on going anywhere,” Logan said.
"Oh, go with him. You're always complaining about being cooped up."
Logan shot his wife a sharp look. “Sure. Anything for the mayor's fiancée.” He snorted.
The jab connected. Kev and Mandy were supposed to have married at planetfall, but by then she had taken the weight of the colony on her shoulders. Single-handedly holding a dying ecology together left no time for marriage.
Without a word, Kev walked away with what-ifs swirling around his mind. If only they had brought more soil bacteria. If the old mayor hadn't botched his first shuttle landing. He was surprised when Logan took up a position at his side. His long strides forced Kev to pick up his pace.
Once away from the cluster of corrugated aluminum structures of the colony compound, the hard-packed soil became spongy and loose. The planet's slightly above-Earth-normal gravity pressed Kev's boots deep into the soft loam. The ever-present noises of construction gave way to the sounds of alien wildlife.
A metallic click caught Kev's attention. His eyes snapped to Logan, who had just slapped a clip into his 9mm pistol.
"You won't need that,” Kev said. “Nothing on New Hope wants to eat us."
"Says you.” He waved the gun. “If the Army taught me anything, it's to trust this more than you techs."
Kev tried to put Logan out of his mind. Tendril-leaf sprouts were already encroaching on the bare soil surrounding the colony. Their whiplike tendrils waved in the breeze, luring unsuspecting prey. Humans had been on New Hope for three months, not enough time to learn much beyond the basics about the native ecosystems. The tendril-leaves seemed to be carnivorous plants that turned the tables on the small crawling animals that came to feed on them. A few mycowoods dotted the area, outliers of the forest that covered the hills a couple of kilometers ahead. Squat fernlike structures and low prickly bushes, members of several yet-unnamed species, surrounded the mycowoods.
Walking into an alien ecosystem filled Kev with a sense of discovery. He felt the tension in his gut dissipate, and soon he was absorbing the sights, sounds, and smells that mankind had never before experienced. The soft wintergreen aroma of mycowood bark hung in the air, mingling with the earthy smell of decaying tendril-leaves. A light wind carried clicking sounds from the distant forest, a scuttlebeast calling for a mate. The exobiologists had been hoping to get a close look at one of them since planetfall, but so far no one had found the time to set up a decent trap.
Kev reached out and touched the first mycowood he came upon, allowing his fingers to sink into the rubbery bark. The squat, barrel-shaped trunk recoiled from his touch, sending ripples through the translucent umbrella-shaped frond that formed its cap. Thigmotropism, Ben had called it, a plant responding to touch. On Earth the term more commonly applied to Venus flytraps and ferns whose leaves curl when touched. Here, just about everything responded to touch in some way.
A handful of small spongy fruits hung under the mycowood's frond. He was lucky; most had nothing more than unfertilized seedpods. The ship had arrived early in the mycowood's reproductive cycle, or so the exobiologists speculated. He plucked one of the green fruits as his first sample. He busied himself with collecting samples, bagging them, and labeling.
Logan radiated tension like a small sun. Kev worked in silence, absorbing stress through his skin. He couldn't wait to get back to the lab. Facing angry biochemists would be a relief.
* * * *
"Whew! Did you bathe in mouthwash this morning?” Kev spun around in time to see Mandy hurry past, her nose wrinkled. No time to stop and chat, just a quick one-liner and off she goes.
"Ethyl salicylate,” he said just before she reached the door.
She stopped and snapped her head back to face him. Her auburn hair whipped around her neck with the vigor of the action, coming to rest atop her shoulder. “Hmmm?"
"It's an ester.” Anything to get her attention, if only for a moment. “It's similar to methyl salicylate, which is used for mint flavoring of foods back on Earth. I extracted it from mycowood."
She walked back to his workbench, sat on a corner, and gave him a weak smile. It was the closest approximation to intimacy he had gotten from her since planetfall. The hint of the old Mandy awoke his desire for the giddy young woman she had once been. “Is that the toxin Ahmet's been looking for?” she asked.
"Well, anything's toxic in large enough quantities,” he said, “but no, this can't be our culprit. It's actually less toxic than most of the esters used as food additives on Earth."
She wrinkled her nose in displeasure, deflating his hopes. “So you found that mycowood tastes minty. Lovely. Do you have anything helpful?"
Two years earlier her scorn would have cut him deeply. Not anymore. He tapped his keyboard and brought up the infrared spectrograph he had been working on. “This is one of the water-soluble extracts I got from mycowood while trying to identify the salicylate ester,” he said. Keep your voice professional, he thought. Cold. “These peaks are fairly standard carbon and oxygen bond vibrations. Here is an amine absorption peak. That broad peak around eleven-micrometer wavelength is produced by a carboxylic acid group, but it generally only shows up there in polymers. If I had to guess, I'd say you were looking at a mucopolysaccharide.” He folded his arms over his chest and gave her a smug grin. Get snippy with me, will you?
"Um, okay. I know that a polysaccharide is a chain of sugar molecules, like starch,” she said. “What's the muco-part?"
"A long strand of amino sugars alternating with acidic sugars. Normally I wouldn't have thought anything of it; similar compounds are found in plant cell walls and pectin,” Kev said. “But this tiny sharp peak at nine micrometers really got my attention. It means that the thing is sulfated, but that usually occurs in animal tissues."
"T
hat's odd, all right,” she said, eyebrows pressed together in concentration. “I'll see if I can schedule you for some time on the electron microscope. Maybe a good look at its structure will help you out."
It was what he needed, at least professionally.
A shout cut off the thought. His head twisted around to the window cut into the corrugated aluminum shell of the lab. The dusk outside brought the startling realization that he had been immersed in Ahmet's mycowood mystery for the better part of New Hope's seventeen-hour day.
His back stiffened when a terrified shriek followed the shout. He leapt from his seat and followed Mandy outside into the crisp evening air. His breath came in ragged gasps. Not yet adjusted to the lack of light, his eyes caught mere glimpses of running figures. A string of rapid clicks amid the shouts told the story—a scuttlebeast had wandered into the colony compound.
A small crowd had the thing cornered against the sloping shell of the mess hall. Its spongy, hairless flesh was pressed against the aluminum wall. Its flat front teeth chattered together so rapidly that the clicks nearly merged into a single buzzing noise. The glassy black compound eye atop its head glistened in the sudden brightness of a flashlight beam. Kev snapped his head around and traced the beam back to its source. He found Logan aiming a flashlight—and his 9mm—in the direction of the cornered scuttlebeast.
Ben stumbled out of the biology building, most of his slight frame hidden behind the trap cage he carried. No one else seemed to see him as he staggered forward under the weight of the cage. Kev watched, transfixed by the impending conflict. By the time he opened his mouth to call out to Logan, it was too late. Pop, pop. Pop. The beast collapsed to the ground as the echoing reports from the gun faded. Ben dropped the cage and charged past Kev. As he passed, Kev could barely make out the grimace hidden beneath the stubble on his face.
Analog SFF, November 2009 Page 16