1:48 p.m. | Updated
I’m looking forward to visiting Ira Flatow and his crew at Science Friday this afternoon to discuss notable developments over the past year and peek ahead. Also on board will be the writer and author Paul Raeburn, Robin Lloyd of Scientific American and Ron Cowen of Science News.
Managing risk on an increasingly crowded and human-exploited planet will surely be a prime theme, with the avoidable Gulf of Mexico oil gusher being a prime example. In many instances, science increasingly delineates dangers, but societies choose to ignore the information.
We’ll touch on the devastation wrought in Haiti by a not-very-massive earthquake, and the lessons that disaster holds for many other crowding places with vulnerable structures — including adjacent sections of Port-Au-Prince. I’ll be writing more soon about worrisome signs there, including reports from earthquake engineers that, for a bribe, some building owners are getting the color code changed on some buildings marked for demolition so that they can instead be repaired.
J. Craig Venter Institute Colonies of replicating Mycoplasma mycoides with a completely synthetic genetic code.Then there was the advent of what amounts to synthetic life. We’ll touch on both the opportunities such work holds in fields from energy to agriculture as well as questions of how to track risks without stifling innovation.
What’s on your list of events and ideas that illustrated the power and limits of science in 2010, and what do you see ahead this year?
There’s more on the year in science from the BBC, Wired, NPR and Scientific American.
In particular, what do you see as important that is not gauged by media headlines?
After all, there are plenty of momentous issues that simmer away in plain sight that rarely make news — until they do, in a very big way. In that sense, one of the biggest science “stories” of the year, to my mind, was Congress cutting federal support for a sustained and intensified push on innovation in energy. Despite President Obama’s pledges, that puts us back in “trance” mode.
Whatever you think of global warming, it’s clear that humanity doesn’t have the energy menu it needs to have a smooth ride in this century.
Speaking of global warming, this was the year in which the recent burst of coverage of global warming — which, despite its significance to some was a tiny blip in the flow of news — ebbed to a dribble. [1:48 p.m. | Updated My apologies, but a section here on television coverage of climate change was posted prior to an embargo. I completely forgot about the embargo note on the original e-mail advisory. I'll update when the embargo lifts.]
As I’ve said before, the last few years of public discourse on climate has been akin to water sloshing in a shallow pan. The public has never been deeply engaged on this issue, and almost surely won’t be, with or without sustained media coverage, in time to be the factor that drives shifts in energy norms that are needed in the next few decades for many reasons.
I’ll soon be posting a video interview I did with Brulle at the climate talks in Mexico in which he gives his forecast for how this will play out, given his insights into how the human mind, and human communities, absorb information and act, or fail to act.
In the meantime, best wishes for the new year to you, and thanks for reading Dot Earth.