Wine-tasting and Global Warming

I’ve been having good luck recently in meeting strangers at social events with super-relevant backgrounds and interests.  Sunday night’s wine-tasting event with friends was another terrific example.  I sat next to Bill Klipstein, Ph.D. in physics, who heads a team of about 20 people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory out here in Pasadena, CA that will soon send two missiles into space to help us learn more about global warming. 

The basic science centers around measuring gravitation to detect the differences in masses of ice just underneath various points on the Earth’s exterior.  The main issue is this:  where it’s easy to look at retreating glaciers and other melting bodies of ice that are visible by traversing the surface or flying over it in planes or UAVs, it’s not at all easy to know with any precision if there are vast holes within these huge pieces of ice.  We already have enormous bodies of evidence that they’re melting from the bottom up, as opposed to the top down.  But how fast?  To what end?

Bill told me that early experiments have shown that this phenomenon is quite pervasive, and that he and his colleagues are quite convinced it’s the result of human-caused global warming.  But the data made available by these missiles, scheduled for launch in May, 2017, will enable Bill and his team to understand climate change and the resultant sea-level rise far better than ever before.

Not bad for an event that was built around pinot noir.