Peter Kalmus | |
---|---|
Born | May 9, 1974 |
Education | Harvard University (BS) Columbia University (PhD) |
Awards | NASA Early Career Achievement Medal, Transition US Walk the Talk Award |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Climate science, ecological forecasting, science communication |
Institutions | Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, University of California, Los Angeles |
Website | peterkalmus |
Peter Kalmus (born May 9, 1974) is an American scientist and writer based in Altadena, California. He is a data scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an associate project scientist at UCLA's Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering.
In addition to his scientific work, he is the author of the book, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution. [1] [2] A documentary by the same title complements the book. [3] In addition to authoring articles about climate change, he is the founder of the website noflyclimatesci.org [4] and co-founder of the app, Earth Hero: Climate Change.
Kalmus attended Harvard University, where he received his Bachelor of Science in physics in 1997. [5] At Harvard, he used Fourier-transform microwave spectroscopy to discover and categorize the quantum-mechanical rotational spectra of several cyanopolyynes which were subsequently found in interstellar clouds. [6] He then taught high school physics in Massachusetts and wrote software in New York City. [5] In 2004 he enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University and received his PhD in physics in 2008. [5] His PhD work involved searching for gravitational waves as a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (thesis: "Gravitational Waves Associated with Soft Gamma Repeater Flares"). [7] He continued his work with LIGO as a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, leading major full-collaboration searches for gravitational waves from magnetars, [8] [9] [10] gamma ray bursts [11] and supernovae [12] and contributing to the precise calibration of the world's gravitational wave observatories. [13]
After focusing on LIGO related work for several years, Kalmus's focus transitioned into earth and climate science. Kalmus's recent research centers on cloud physics, specifically improving basic understanding of marine stratocumulus clouds [14] and severe convective weather such as tornadoes [15] with the goal of improving projections of how these phenomena will change as the planet heats, using remote sensing data, in situ data, and models. Marine stratocumulus clouds reflect incoming sunlight, cooling the planet, and are difficult to model accurately in climate models; this makes them a major source of uncertainty in climate projections. [14]
A common thread in his research is improving the utility of satellite observations of the Earth. His work on severe weather unlocks the potential of polar orbiting satellites to observe rapidly changing convective environments by using air parcel trajectory modeling to span the temporal gap between satellite overpass and convective initiation. [15] He has used in situ data from a ship-based campaign to bias-correct the CloudSat warm rain retrieval. He also uses in situ data to validate retrievals from the AIRS instrument on the Aqua (satellite). [16]
Recently, Kalmus has begun to work in the nascent field of ecological forecasting. He is the principal investigator on a NASA grant to study the projected future of the world's coral reefs with greater accuracy and higher resolution. [17] Coral reefs are rapidly succumbing to ocean heat waves and ocean acidification. [18]
He has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles in physics and Earth science, with a majority having come from his previous participation in the LIGO Collaboration. [19]
Kalmus is a science communicator whose efforts center on shifting culture away from fossil fuel acceptability. He tweets as @ClimateHuman and as of April 2022 is the most-followed climate scientist on Twitter. [20] He focuses in particular on encouraging the Earth science and other academic communities to speak out with greater urgency on the need for climate action. [21]
He has been featured in many media outlets, including Mother Jones , [22] PRI's The World, [23] CBC Radio, [24] Deutsche Welle, [25] BuzzFeed, [26] The Intercept , [27] and Quartz, [28] and most often speaks to the need for an immediate and massive climate mobilization and how individuals can "vote" for this mobilization through their actions, via both activism and emissions reduction. He frequently speaks to the need for a carbon fee and dividend policy as part of the mobilization, in which fossil fuel becomes increasingly costly as the carbon fee rises every year and 100% of the net revenue is returned equitably to the people, making the policy fiscally progressive.
Kalmus lives on approximately one-tenth the fossil fuel of the average American. [29] He says this has made his life more satisfying and meaningful. In 2010, Kalmus realized the flying in planes accounted for roughly 3⁄4 of his greenhouse gas emissions, and he has not flown on a plane since 2012. [30] Kalmus believes that anyone can contribute to cultural shift by conspicuously modeling the change that needs to happen. He has stated that by "walking the talk" his advocacy has become more effective. [31]
Kalmus is a columnist and regular contributor at YES! magazine. [32] His writing has also appeared in The Guardian , [33] Eos, The Washington Post , and Grist.
On September 14, 2019, Kalmus tweeted "Never give up" and referenced his latest article, "How to live with the climate crisis without becoming a nihilist". [34] [35]
Kalmus has been associated with the Movement for a People's Party, a progressive organization positioned as an alternative to the Democratic or Republican Party. After the first presidential debate of the 2020 election, Kalmus participated in a four-person response to the debate. [36]
In late‑2021, Kalmus likened his own experiences pushing for greater recognition of the climate problem with those of the two fictional astronomers portrayed in the comedy film Don't Look Up. He also compares absurd events in that film with a series of equally absurd and elusory events in our own world. [37]
Kalmus, along with other climate activists, chained himself to the main doors of the Charlotte Douglas International Airport private jet terminal on November 10, 2022. He was charged with trespassing. [38]
In December 2022, Kalmus and climate scientist Rose Abramoff briefly showed a banner at the eve of a plenary session of the American Geophysical Union's annual Fall Meeting with a call for scientists to engage in protest against climate change: " Out of the lab and into the streets » . AGU removed their research presentations from the meeting, banned them from participation, launched a misconduct inquiry, and complained to Abramoff's employer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kalmus and Abramoff further claimed that AGU threatened to have them arrested if they returned to the meeting. [39] Abramoff was subsequently fired by Oak Ridge. [40] In January 2023, 1500 scientists signed an appeal to object to what happened to their colleagues. [41]
On April 6, 2022, Kalmus was arrested, along with a physicist, an engineer and a science teacher, [42] for chaining himself to the door of the JP Morgan Chase building in Los Angeles, protesting the bank's investments in new fossil fuel projects. [43] Writing in The Guardian in April 2022, Kalmus advocated civil disobedience following the release of the final IPCC Working Group III report. In the article, Kalmus says "It's now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. [...] But I'll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse". [43]
Kalmus is the founder of the website noflyclimatesci.org and a leading voice in the #FlyingLess movement. [44] He is pushing for the American Geophysical Union to support earth scientists who choose to fly less out of climate concerns, with remote participation options at conferences. [45]
Kalmus was a lead organizer on two letters written in support of school striking youth, one from US Earth scientists [46] and one from international scholars. [47] His two sons have been regularly school striking on Fridays since 2018 as part of the Fridays for Future movement. [48]
To help users track carbon emissions, Kalmus co-founded the smart phone app Earth Hero. It aims to help users reduce their emissions, shift culture with their reductions, and engage in other forms of climate activism such as protest and civil disobedience. [49]
Kalmus has won numerous awards both for his science and activism. He received the NASA Early Career Achievement Medal and three Jet Propulsion Laboratory Voyager Awards for his work in Earth science. [5] He is also a recipient of the inaugural Transition US Walking the Talk award. [50] He is a 2018 "Grist 50" fellow, one of the ten 2018 fellows classified as "Visionaries". [51]
His book, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution won an IPPY Outstanding Book of the Year Award, [52] the Nautilus Book Award,[ citation needed ] and the Foreword Indies Book Award.[ citation needed ]
In physics, gravity (from Latin gravitas 'weight') is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things that have mass. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the strong interaction, 1036 times weaker than the electromagnetic force and 1029 times weaker than the weak interaction. As a result, it has no significant influence at the level of subatomic particles. However, gravity is the most significant interaction between objects at the macroscopic scale, and it determines the motion of planets, stars, galaxies, and even light.
The following is a timeline of gravitational physics and general relativity.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. Two large observatories were built in the United States with the aim of detecting gravitational waves by laser interferometry. These observatories use mirrors spaced four kilometers apart which are capable of detecting a change of less than one ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton.
Rainer "Rai" Weiss is a German-born American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT and an adjunct professor at LSU. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.
Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project that searches for signals from spinning neutron stars in data from gravitational-wave detectors, from large radio telescopes, and from a gamma-ray telescope. Neutron stars are detected by their pulsed radio and gamma-ray emission as radio and/or gamma-ray pulsars. They also might be observable as continuous gravitational wave sources if they are rapidly spinning and non-axisymmetrically deformed. The project was officially launched on 19 February 2005 as part of the American Physical Society's contribution to the World Year of Physics 2005 event.
Ronald William Prest Drever was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment. This work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015.
The gravitational wave background is a random background of gravitational waves permeating the Universe, which is detectable by gravitational-wave experiments, like pulsar timing arrays. The signal may be intrinsically random, like from stochastic processes in the early Universe, or may be produced by an incoherent superposition of a large number of weak independent unresolved gravitational-wave sources, like supermassive black-hole binaries. Detecting the gravitational wave background can provide information that is inaccessible by any other means about astrophysical source population, like hypothetical ancient supermassive black-hole binaries, and early Universe processes, like hypothetical primordial inflation and cosmic strings.
The Virgo interferometer is a large Michelson interferometer designed to detect the gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. It is located in Santo Stefano a Macerata, near the city of Pisa, Italy. The instrument's two arms are three kilometres long, housing its mirrors and instrumentation inside an ultra-high vacuum.
Gravitational waves are waves of the intensity of gravity that are generated by the accelerated masses of binary stars and other motions of gravitating masses, and propagate as waves outward from their source at the speed of light. They were first proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and then later by Henri Poincaré in 1905 as the gravitational equivalent of electromagnetic waves. Gravitational waves are sometimes called gravity waves, but gravity waves typically refer to displacement waves in fluids. In 1916 Albert Einstein demonstrated that gravitational waves result from his general theory of relativity as ripples in spacetime.
David Howard Reitze is an American laser physicist who is professor of physics at the University of Florida and served as the scientific spokesman of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment in 2007-2011. In August 2011, he took a leave of absence from the University of Florida to be the Executive Director of LIGO, stationed at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. He obtained his BA in 1983 from Northwestern University, his PhD in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, and had positions at Bell Communications Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, before taking his faculty position at the University of Florida. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A neutron star merger is the stellar collision of neutron stars.
The first direct observation of gravitational waves was made on 14 September 2015 and was announced by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations on 11 February 2016. Previously, gravitational waves had been inferred only indirectly, via their effect on the timing of pulsars in binary star systems. The waveform, detected by both LIGO observatories, matched the predictions of general relativity for a gravitational wave emanating from the inward spiral and merger of a pair of black holes of around 36 and 29 solar masses and the subsequent "ringdown" of the single resulting black hole. The signal was named GW150914. It was also the first observation of a binary black hole merger, demonstrating both the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems and the fact that such mergers could occur within the current age of the universe.
GW151226 was a gravitational wave signal detected by the LIGO observatory on 25 December 2015 local time. On 15 June 2016, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations announced that they had verified the signal, making it the second such signal confirmed, after GW150914, which had been announced four months earlier the same year, and the third gravitational wave signal detected.
GW 170817 was a gravitational wave (GW) signal observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017, originating from the shell elliptical galaxy NGC 4993. The signal was produced by the last moments of the inspiral process of a binary pair of neutron stars, ending with their merger. It is the first GW observation that has been confirmed by non-gravitational means. Unlike the five previous GW detections—which were of merging black holes and thus not expected to produce a detectable electromagnetic signal—the aftermath of this merger was seen across the electromagnetic spectrum by 70 observatories on 7 continents and in space, marking a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy. The discovery and subsequent observations of GW 170817 were given the Breakthrough of the Year award for 2017 by the journal Science.
NGC 4993 is a lenticular galaxy located about 140 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra. It was discovered on 26 March 1789 by William Herschel and is a member of the NGC 4993 Group.
PyCBC is an open source software package primarily written in the Python programming language which is designed for use in gravitational-wave astronomy and gravitational-wave data analysis. PyCBC contains modules for signal processing, FFT, matched filtering, gravitational waveform generation, among other tasks common in gravitational-wave data analysis.
Karan Jani is an Indian astrophysicist working on black holes, gravitational waves, and testing Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. He is currently an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt University, and holds the endowed position of Cornelius Vanderbilt Dean’s Faculty Fellow. He has worked at the LIGO Livingston Observatory in the US, the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. He is a member of the Indian Initiative in Gravitational-wave Observations effort to build a gravitational wave detector LIGO in India.
Peter Reed Saulson is an American physicist and professor at Syracuse University. He is best known as a former spokesperson for the LIGO collaboration serving from 2003 to 2007 and research on gravitational wave detectors.
Rana X. Adhikari is an American experimental physicist. He is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an associate faculty member of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ICTS-TIFR).
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