Rising SeasLikelytoFloodU.S.History
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.
In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.
Global warming -- through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding -- is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.
Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.
Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians -- the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.
That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.
Sea level rise is ''the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist,'' says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
''We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it,'' said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. ''It's going to happen no matter what -- the question is when.''
Sea level rise ''has consequences about where people live and what they care about,'' said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. ''We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost.''
This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations on Monday, world leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At week's end, leaders will gather in Washington with President Bush.
Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.
And it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes an even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms and regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher and more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.
All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states would put about 25,000 square miles under water, according to Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. That's an area the size of West Virginia.
The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.
The Environmental Protection Agency's calculation projects a land loss of about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland areas like Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers of at-risk land, according to the EPA.
This past summer's flooding of subways in New York could become far more regular, even an everyday occurrence, with the projected sea rise, other scientists said. And New Orleans' Katrina experience and the daily loss of Louisiana wetlands -- which serve as a barrier that weakens hurricanes -- are previews of what's to come there.
Florida faces a serious public health risk from rising salt water tainting drinking water wells, said Joel Scheraga, the EPA's director of global change research. And the farm-rich San Joaquin Delta in California faces serious salt water flooding problems, other experts said.
''Sea level rise is going to have more general impact to the population and the infrastructure than almost anything else that I can think of,'' said S. Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey coastal geologist in Woods Hole, Mass.
Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.
Williams says it's ''not unreasonable at all'' to expect that much in 100 years. ''We've had a third of a meter in the last century.''
The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.
''It's like sticking your finger in a pot of water on a burner and you turn the heat on, Williams said. ''You kind of get used to it.''
NASA Presents Details of Plans for Moon Base
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NASA announced new details yesterday about its plans for a Moon base that included a pair of small, pressurized rovers with a range of nearly 600 miles.
The space agency plans to return astronauts to the Moon around 2020. Agency officials first described proposals last December for a polar lunar base powered by near constant sunlight on solar panels.
Earlier proposals to carry small habitation modules to the Moon in stages might be supplanted by a proposal that would heave a single large module to the Moon on an unmanned cargo ship, Doug Cooke, the NASA official leading the lunar study group, said.
The new rover would not be much larger than the buggies the Apollo astronauts drove, but would be pressurized so that astronauts could drive in shirt sleeves and be protected from radiation — probably by a layer of water in the rover’s body, said Geoff Yoder, an official working on the lunar plans. To explore on foot, astronauts would put on spacesuits and leave the vehicle, Mr. Yoder said. The cost? “More than a Ferrari,” he joked.
The scientists said they had also discussed nuclear energy as a power supply for the habitat, since that might be necessary for building a successful encampment on Mars. But, Mr. Cooke said, the initial power source for the lunar base “should be solar.” They have also discussed making the lunar lander and habitat mobile so that the base could be moved for exploration of other areas in what is being called “super sortie” mode, he said.
The updated plans were discussed at a conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics on Thursday in Long Beach, Calif.
King Algorithm
An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine
By GEORGE JOHNSON
IN the 12th century A.D., when the Arabic treatise “On the Hindu Art of Reckoning” was translated into Latin, the modern decimal system was bestowed on the Western world — an advance that can best be appreciated by trying to do long division with Roman numerals. The name of the author, the Baghdad scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, was Latinized as Algoritmi, which mutated somehow into algorismus and, in English, algorithm — meaning nothing more than a recipe for solving problems step by step.
It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence. Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can’t visit Amazon.com without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends.
Its intuitions, of course, are just calculations — given enough time they could be carried out with stones. But when so much data is processed so rapidly, the effect is oracular and almost opaque. Even with a peek at the cybernetic trade secrets, you probably couldn’t unwind the computations. As you sit with your eHarmony spouse watching the movies Netflix prescribes, you might as well be an avatar in Second Life. You have been absorbed into the operating system.
Jonathon Rosen
Last week, when executives at MySpace told of new algorithms that will mine the information on users’ personal pages and summon targeted ads, the news hardly caused a stir. The idea of automating what used to be called judgment has gone from radical to commonplace.
What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms — those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language — have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net.
Go to Google Image Labeler (images.google.com/imagelabeler) and you are randomly matched with another bored Web surfer — in Korea, maybe, or Omaha — who has agreed to play a game. Google shows you both a series of pictures peeled from the Web — the sun setting over the ocean or a comet streaking through space — and you earn points by typing as many descriptive words as you can. The results are stored and analyzed, and through this human-machine symbiosis, Google’s image-searching algorithms are incrementally refined.
The project is still experimental. But the concept is not so different from what happens routinely during a Google search. The network of computers answering your query pays attention to which results you choose to read. You’re gathering data from the network while the network is gathering data about you. The result is a statistical accretion of what people — those beings who clack away at the keys — are looking for, a rough sense of what their language means.
In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification — human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are being amplified. Unlike the grinning cyborgs envisioned by science fiction, the splicing is not between hardware and wetware but between software running on two different platforms.
Several years ago, SETI@home became a vehicle for computer owners to donate their spare processing cycles for the intense number-crunching needed to sift radio-telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life. Now a site run by Amazon.com, the Mechanical Turk ( asks you to lend your brain. Named for an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that turned out to have a human hidden inside, the Mechanical Turk offers volunteers a chance to search for the missing aviator Steve Fossett by examining satellite photos. Or you can earn a few pennies at a time by performing other chores that flummox computers: categorizing Web sites (“sexually explicit, “arts and entertainment,” “automotive”), identifying objects in video frames, summarizing or paraphrasing snippets of text, transcribing audio recordings — specialties at which neural algorithms excel.
(Not all of these Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, as Amazon calls them, involve serving as a chip in some entrepreneur’s machine. Hoping to draw more traffic to their sites, bloggers are using the Mechanical Turk to solicit comments for their online postings. In some cases you get precisely 2 cents for your opinion.)
In his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. What he may not have envisioned is how thoroughly the boundary would blur.
How do you categorize Wikipedia, a constantly buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts? Submit an article or change one and a swarm of warm- and sometimes hot-blooded proofreading routines go to work making corrections and corrections to the corrections.
Or maybe the mercurial encyclopedia is more like an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes guarding its integrity. (Biology too is algorithmic, beginning with the genetic code.) When the objectivity of Wikipedia was threatened by tweaking from special interests — a kind of autoimmune disease — another level of protection evolved: a Web site called WikiScanner that reports the Internet address of the offender. Someone at PepsiCo, for example, removed references about the health effects of its flagship soft drink. With enough computing power the monitoring could be semiautomated — scanning the database constantly and flagging suspicious edits for humans to inspect.
No one but a utopian would have predicted how readily people will work for free. We’re cheaper than hardware — a good thing considering how hard we are to duplicate.
Richard Paey Is Free
By John Tierney
Amazing news from Florida, courtesy of the Miami Herald:
DAYTONA BEACH — A victim in the war on drugs, Richard Paey was just wheeled out of prison by a guard, a free man for the first time in 3 ½ years thanks to an immediate and unexpected pardon by Gov. Charlie Crist and the Cabinet this morning.
‘’I feel pretty good. I feel pretty good,'’ he said, squinting in the sunshine from his wheelchair. “Today was the day for miracles. I didn’t think this day would come.'’
Mr. Paey, who was serving a 25-year sentence in connecton with prescription for painkillers, became a rallying cause for chronic-pain patients and doctors across America. (You can read more about his case in this column about my visit with Mr. Paey in prison, as well as another column about the prosecutor in the case.) After hearing his case presented to the state clemency board, Gov. Crist said: “We aim to right a wrong and exercise compassion and to do it with grace.”
Richard Paey's wife, Linda, reacts to his pardonLinda Paey, right, reacts to her husband’s pardon by hugging Catherine, one of their three children. (Photo: AP/Phil Coale)
Then, according to the St. Petersburg Times, “Paey’s wife Linda, their three children, a family friend and attorney John Flannery II hugged and cried at the podium, the entire cabinet meeting room erupting into applause at 9:40 a.m.” The story continues:
It was a stunning turn in the long saga of Paey, a 48-year-old Hudson man who suffers debilitating pain from a 1985 car wreck, botched back surgery and multiple sclerosis that has left him needing the use of a wheelchair in prison.
He was first arrested in 1997 and convicted on the third try in 2004 of possessing, trafficking and illegally obtaining the medication he needs for the searing, fiery pain in his back and legs.
His supporters still contest every bit of the state’s case and today, they finally found sympathetic ears eager to help. His medical condition is real, they told the cabinet, evidenced by the amount of painkillers the Department of Corrections itself now gives to Richard Paey every day.
What makes Thursday’s development all the more surprising was that the Florida Parole Commission actually recommended against commuting Paey’s sentence to time served.
But then Crist allowed Flannery to speak for nearly 30 minutes — much more than the 5-minute limit. Then the governor allowed Linday Paey, their three children and even a family friend to speak.
After their emotional presentation, the first comments from the dais came from the governor:
“I want to move that we grant a full pardon.” All three cabinet members agreed.
The family had never hoped for a full pardon or even thought to ask. It was just the start of a day of surprises for Linda Paey and her children.
“I grabbed John’s hand, we came into this so scared, trembling,” she said. “I was so fearful when I heard the parole commission did not support his application.
“It was a complete shock,” she said of Crist’s recommending a full pardon and ordering her husband’s release today. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
I understand Mrs. Paey’s shock at something going right with the legal system in dealing with chronic-pain patients — but then, this is one part of the legal system beyond the reach of prosecutors and narcotics agents who have appointed themselves judges of what medicine is proper. I just wish that more governors would review the cases of the doctors who have gone to prison for prescribing pain-killers.
Germs Taken to Space Come Back Deadlier
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- It sounds like the plot for a scary B-movie: Germs go into space on a rocket and come back stronger and deadlier than ever. Except, it really happened.