The AP reports, “Astronomers say Pluto is not a planet.”

Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

Textbooks will need to be rewritten.

“Faithful to God, Science,” by Stephanie Simon is a great story in today’s Los Angeles Times about Francis Collins, the scientist who headed the Human Genome Project. He is also a devout Christian, believing in both the God of the Bible and evolution, for which he draws heat from all sides. I find I resonate greatly with Collins.

He urges his fellow scientists to give up the arrogant assumption that the only questions worth asking are those science can answer. He entreats his fellow believers to recognize it’s not blasphemous to learn about the world.

One day last summer, in the basement office of his suburban home here, Collins dictated this manifesto into a tape recorder: “Science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.” It became the central thesis of his book — with this addendum: “Abandon the battlements.”

These statements are somewhat reminiscent of something Dieterich Bonhoeffer wrote (I read this in A Year With Dieterich Bonhoeffer, 214):

Weizsacker’s book The World View of Physics is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that’s bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize the divine presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. That is true of the relationship between God and scientific knowledge, but it is also true of the wider human problems of death, suffering, and guilt.

We could have three more planets in our solar system according to the AP story, “Plan would add planets to solar system”:

The universe really is expanding – astronomers are proposing to rewrite the textbooks to say that our solar system has 12 planets rather than the nine memorized by generations of schoolchildren.

Much-maligned Pluto would remain a planet – and its largest moon plus two other heavenly bodies would join Earth’s neighborhood – under a draft resolution to be formally presented Wednesday to the International Astronomical Union, the arbiter of what is and isn’t a planet….

If the resolution is approved, the 12 planets in our solar system listed in order of their proximity to the sun would be Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon, and the provisionally named 2003 UB313. Its discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, nicknamed it Xena after the warrior princess of TV fame, but it likely would be rechristened something else later, the panel said.

I find it strange that there has never been an official definition of what constitutes a planet. Scientific fields are usually pretty clear on defining and classifying the physical universe. Anyway, it’s fun to have astronomy in the news.

Check out Google Mars for amazing maps of the fourth planet’s surface. Type in “Valles Marineris” to see the longest, widest, and deepest canyon in the solar system.

According to the Wikipedia entry for Valles Marineris:

At 4,500 km long, 200 km wide and 11 km deep, the Valles Marineris rift system is ten times longer, seven times wider and seven times deeper than the Grand Canyon of Arizona.

Beyond cool.

Check out “Powers of Ten” for a visual trip through the universe beginning at 10 million light years from Earth and ending at quarks. (HT: PCWorld.com)

Point-Counterpoint has been one of my least-used categories and usually I designate silly posts in it. Today, I’d like it to be a bit more substantive.

Point:

On July 2, MIT professor of atmospheric science, Richard Lindzen, published an opinion in The Wall Street Journal stating, among other things, that there is no consensus in the scientific community about global climate change. His opinion, “Don’t Believe the Hype: Al Gore is wrong. There’s no ‘consensus’ on global warming,” can be read here.

Counterpoint:

UC San Diego professor of history of science, Naomi Oreskes, offers her rebuttal to Lindzen’s primary claim in today’s Los Angeles Times. Lindzen’s opinion critiqued Oreskes’ work and she has decided to defend herself. She claims that there actually is consensus among the majority of scientists that there is global warming and that human activities are at least partly responsible. You can read her piece, “Global Warming—Signed, Sealed and Delivered: Scientists agree: The Earth is warming, and human activities are the principal cause,” here.

My two cents:

I hesitate to present the material in such a binary fashion since from what I’ve read, the views on climate change are rather diverse. A continuum of views with differences in degree is probably more accurate than simply breaking the debate into two clearly delineated camps. I chose to post this as a point-counterpoint becuase these two scientists are directly addressing one another. Finally, I wish that scientists had better public-relations firms. As it stands, it seems most of Americans receive the news about scientific research concerning climate change through politicians and pundits, who though they may be right, can easily be cynically dismissed as having an agenda. I appreciate that scientists don’t want to dumb down their work, but I would hope that they would be able to put it in language most of us can understand.

Randy Dotinga of Health Day reports:

Over the past 17 years, successive generations of AIDS drugs have restored a total of three million years of life to HIV-positive Americans and prevented an estimated 2,900 infants from becoming infected, a new study finds.

Now let’s get those treatments out to the rest of the world.

The National Research Council (NRC) released a report to Congress today that says,

There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, retreating glaciers, and other ‘proxies’ to say with confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years. Less confidence can be placed in proxy-based reconstructions of surface temperatures for A.D. 900 to 1600, said the committee that wrote the report, although the available proxy evidence does indicate that many locations were warmer during the past 25 years than during any other 25-year period since 900.

It was a report done in response to claims made by Michael Mann and his research group in the 1990’s. The NRC was less confident than Mann and his colleagues in their findings as data before the years 1600 becomes scarce, though the NRC did find the large-scale reconstructions helpful.

Also of note:

The committee pointed out that surface temperature reconstructions for periods before the Industrial Revolution—when levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases were much lower—are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that current warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence.

(The full news release can be found here. The full 155-page report can be found here. The quotations above are taken from the news release.)

On page 94, the report states:

• Greenhouse gasses and tropospheric aerosols varied little from 1 A.D. to around 1850. Volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations were likely the most strongly varying external forces during this period, but it is currently estimated that the temperature variations caused by these forces were much less pronounced than the warming due to greenhouse gas forcing since the mid 19th century.


• Climate model simulations indicate that solar and volcanic forcings together could have produced periods of relative warmth and cold during the preindustrial portion of the last 1,000 years. However, anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases are needed to simulate late 20th century warmth.

An AP story reports that during the briefing to Congress:

The National Academy scientists concluded that the Mann-Bradley-Hughes research from the late 1990s was “likely” to be true, said John “Mike” Wallace, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a panel member. The conclusions from the ‘90s research “are very close to being right” and are supported by even more recent data, Wallace said.

I find this news story in today’s Los Angeles Times encouraging. “Western Governors Take Aim at Global Warming: Bipartisan group passes a resolution calling on states and cities to reduce human-caused emissions. But it fails to detail specific action.” Of course I would have preferred some specific recommended actions, but a bipartisan statement from state executives may mean some progress on the issue of global warming.

Today HIV/AIDS turns 25.

From a story in today’s New York Times:

On June 5, 1981, in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, brief note was taken of a peculiar cluster of pneumonia cases in five otherwise healthy gay men.

The item was the first official mention of a scourge that had no name, no known means of transmission, no treatment and no cure.

AIDS, as it would eventually be called, was already spreading fear in America’s gay enclaves, where before long half the young men who came of age at the dawn of the gay liberation movement would be infected, stigmatized, ravaged by rare infections and cancers, and die. It soon reached into neighborhoods already burdened by poverty and drug abuse.

For years after that federal report, one of the few certainties was that this disease, to quote other reports, was “invariably fatal.” The United Nations estimates that today, H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, has infected more than 65 million people, 25 million of whom have died.