May 18, 1980 is when Mount St Helens blew its top.

I was newly married, in my first year in graduate school in Eugene, Oregon — far enough south that we saw little of the ash, typically only seeing cars filmed with gray every day. My in-laws, though, all lived right in the shadow of the mountain, in Longview and Castle Rock, Washington, so we got regular reports on days dark as night and shoveling paths through the mess.

National Geographic has a fine article on the recovery of the region. Biology is bouncing back in the few decades since the disaster.

As a natural lab to study the rebirth of ecosystems, the blast zone has no equal. “It’s the most thoroughly studied large-forest disturbance in the world,” says Crisafulli, examined from nearly every angle, at nearly every scale, from molecules to ecosystems, bacteria to mammals, steaming geothermal vents to waterlogged meadows. Almost daily, callers inquire about the lessons of St. Helens. One woman is interested in salamanders, another in toads. Officials in Alaska and Chile want to know what to expect after eruptions of their own.

There’s also the dramatic story of Spirit Lake:

Before the eruption Spirit Lake was, like many subalpine lakes, unproductive and nutrient-poor, with clear water and few shallow spots. When the volcano top slid into it at 150 miles an hour, it became choked with what Crisafulli terms “pyrolyzed forest constituents”–organic material burned in the blast. The water was warmed to body temperature, filled with dissolved carbon, manganese, iron, and lead. Visibility went from 30 feet to six inches. Bacteria flourished. The first scientists to take water samples came down with unexplained ailments. There was a rapid succession of microbes: aerobes, which quickly used up all the oxygen; anaerobes, which require none; then nitrogen-consuming bacteria; and then forms that fed on methane and heavy metals. For 18 months Spirit Lake was ruled by chemistry, home to “hundreds of millions of bacteria per milliliter,” Crisafulli says. Finally, the microbes had consumed so much that they began to die off, and streams and snowmelt came in, and the water cleared.

Once light penetrated Spirit Lake, algae and other phytoplankton colonized, followed by zooplankton, which fed on the phytoplankton, followed by aquatic insects and amphibians. By the early 1990s, macrophytes grew in shallow shoals–ideal trout habitat that didn’t exist before the eruption. Gorging on tiny midges and freshwater snails, the rainbows were reaching a record four or five pounds in two or three years. The post-eruption lake followed a pattern Crisafulli would see many times in the blast zone. New organisms colonize the virgin environment with dramatic success, only to burn themselves out or be checked by predators, parasites, or competitors. This was the second revelation of St. Helens: When there’s a blank slate, ecological succession is a cycle of boom and bust.

If you’d just like to see some dramatic photos of the eruption and aftermath, here you go.

If you’ve been following the climate change ‘debate’ at all, you should be aware of the excellent YouTube channel, Climate Denial Crock of the Week, which always has excellent take-downs of the denialists, professionally made and always devastating. Here’s one example:

The author is in a competition for a $5,000 grant. All you have do is register at that link and vote — let’s promote good science presented well!

The denialists are at it again in the comments, parroting the latest lie.

UEA CRU’s Dr Phil Jones agrees there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

Wow. You’d think they’d realize that twisting the words of a scientist around 180° from what they actually said is a very bad strategy — it would be like trying to claim that I’d decided evolution was false. This is no exception. Deltoid has a wonderfully clear quote:

This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995.”

Since I’ve advocated a more explicit use of the word “lie”, I’ll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since 1995 had not been a random fluke.

Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements. At a longer time interval, say 30 or 50 or 100 years, Mr Jones could obviously demonstrate that global warming is a statistically significant trend. In the interview he stated that the warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Everyone, even climate-change sceptics, agrees that the earth has experienced a warming trend since the late 19th century. But if you take any short sample out of that trend (say, 1930-45 or 1960-75), you might not be able to guarantee that the particular warming observed in those years was not a statistical fluke. This is a simple truth about statistics: if you measure just ten children, the relationship between age and height might be a fluke. But obviously the fact remains that older children tend to be taller than younger ones, and if you measure 100 of them, you’ll find the relationship quite statistically significant indeed.

What’s truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.

The country was hit hard with some loss of life, but so far seems to be handling it well — this is nothing like the Haiti disaster. Countries on the Pacific shore need to brace themselves for tsunamis. NOAA has published estimated arrival times. And just look at this amazing map of where the energy from this quake is going:

Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist,” has always bugged me as a rather shady character. Now Howard Friel started fact-checking Lomborg’s footnotes, and found them to be wanting.

But when Friel began checking Lomborg’s sources, “I found problems,” he says. “As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn’t support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern.” He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel’s conclusion, as per his book’s title, is that Lomborg is “a performance artist disguised as an academic.”

Read the rest. He seems to have had the habit of citing his sources as saying the exact opposite of what they actually said.