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January 10, 2012, 12:36 pm

What Can U.S. Universities Do About a Student Stampede in Johannesburg?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

A sad development in South Africa provides fresh support for my shift in this blog toward exploring ways universities can help create a global network for sharing and shaping ideas — what I’ve taken to calling the “Knowosphere.”

student stampede in johannesburgAdrian De Kock/Associated Press Prospective students darted through crowds at the gates to the University of Johannesburg.

Read the coverage of a deadly student stampede that just took place as thousands of applicants for hundreds of slots converged at the gates to the overburdened University of Johannesburg.

To me, there is nothing more tragic than seeing young people who are already eager to learn denied that chance — whether through inequity created by poverty or simply, as in this case, the lack of infrastructure. (I had that same feeling when I first saw photos of kids, lacking electricity in their slum dwellings, doing homework under the lights in an airport parking lot in Guinea.)

From South Asia through much of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, it’d be impossible to build schools or train teachers fast enough to keep up with the “youth bulge” that has given humanity more than a billion teenagers either to nurture or tame — the difference depending largely on access to education beyond elementary grades.

But in these same places, explosive expansion in mobile phone subscriptions and fast-dropping costs for smart phones provide the architecture for a partial end run around such bottlenecks. That’s why the decision by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to open more courses to online users is probably just a taste of what’s to come.

What’s needed now is the educational equivalent to Paul Polak’s work fostering progress in rural agrarian communities in poor places. His mantra is “design for the other 90 percent.”

Universities in the developed world seeking a place (and a business model) in a century in which knowledge is no longer cached in ivory towers would do well to find ways to “educate for the other 90 percent.”

What’s already happening along those lines?

January 10, 2012, 10:30 am

Other Voices: The Night it Snowed Grebes in Utah

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Suzie Gilbert, a friend and neighbor, has for many years been a hard-working bird rehabilitator, a career described beautifully in her recent book “Flyaway.” She also recently launched a blog, The Crooked Wing, and alerted me to a post on a remarkable occurrence last month in Utah, when thousands of migrating eared grebes, evidently disoriented by a storm, began crash landing on roads, parking lots and the like — surfaces they apparently mistook for water. They can only take flight from water, making such landings a death sentence for those that survived the impact.

Below you can read a brief note from Gilbert introducing her blog post on the incident, which shines a light on the country’s network of bird rehabilitators and the difficulty they have, at times, in working smoothly with state wildlife agencies: Read more…

January 9, 2012, 12:59 pm

Dot Shot: Newt Under January Ice

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

2:49 p.m. | Updated
My friends who are hockey players have been grinding their teeth in frustration with the lateness of the freeze here in the Hudson Highlands this winter. (That pre-Halloween snowstorm was a tease, with much of the United States similarly lacking much of winter’s kick so far.)

But ice is forming, in an off-and-on way, on the local ponds. During our dog walk this morning, I remembered to have a look through an open spot to see if the newts that I once noted were still active in a past November were similarly unfazed by winter under January ice. This brief, funky video snippet provides the answer:

What’s wriggling where you live? Post some video and provide the link.

In a few months, red efts, the terrestrial stage of our eastern red-spotted newt — a remarkable, and thankfully abundant, amphibian — will be on the move again, as was the case here:
Read more…

January 8, 2012, 1:09 pm

The Next Ice Age and the Anthropocene

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
DESCRIPTIONAndrew C. Revkin In Greenland, a caribou skeleton lies before the snout of a glacier. Can humans prevent the ice sheets from advancing?

Jan. 9, 11:45 a.m. | Updated
If you’ve wondered where to look for signs that Earth is entering a geological epoch of our own making, the Anthropocene, what’s a good place to start?

I’d suggest the growing body of research concluding that what was once seen as an inevitable descent into the next ice age has been put off for a very long time by the building blanket of greenhouse gases generated by humanity’s burst of fossil fuel combustion.

A new addition to that literature — “Determining the natural length of the current interglacial” – is being published today in the online edition of Nature Geoscience.

The research, led by Chronis Tzedakis of University College, London, examined similarities between the current warm interval between ice ages and a particular point, around 780,000 years ago, during a past warm period known as Marine Isotope Stage 19. Using a variety of methods, the authors conclude that the onset of a new ice age would likely begin about 1,500 years from now, if the concentration of carbon dioxide was back below the levels produced since the Industrial Revolution.

I first explored when the next ice age would begin, and whether humans had forestalled that transition, in a Science Times article in 2003. James Hansen of NASA already had concluded at that time that the heat-trapping property of humanity’s gigaton-scale emissions of carbon dioxide was swamping the slight flux in incoming solar energy from periodic changes in Earth’s orientation relative to the Sun. ”We have taken over control of the mechanisms that determine the climate change,” he said.

In a news release one of the co-authors of the new study, James E.T. Channell of the University of Florida, echoes that point, saying: “The problem is that now we have added to the total amount of CO2 cycling through the system by burning fossil fuels. The cooling forces can’t keep up.” (Click here to read two news releases summarizing the work; a Popular Science post has more.)

I circulated the paper, under the journal’s embargo rules, to a variety of researchers focused on this question, including Hansen. Here’s the roundup of reactions: Read more…

January 6, 2012, 5:53 pm

On Shale Gas, Warming and Whiplash

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Jan. 7, 10:04 p.m. | Updated below |
If you scan back you’ll see what’s becoming a pretty long series of headlines here dealing with a phenomenon I’ve noted since 2008 or so — a feeling of whiplash in tracking the flow of climate science and related news coverage. (One example is “On Plankton, Warming and Whiplash.”)

Here we go again. This time, the issue is the hydraulic fracturing of shale and similar rock to extract natural gas (and oil, as well). This technique, widely known as fracking, has raised environmental concerns while opening a vast new resource that is reshaping energy menus  from the United States to China.

Newly published research led by Cornell University scientists challenges the core calculations and conclusions of a paper by another Cornell researcher, Robert Howarth, that became a potent talking point for opponents of hydraulic fracturing last year. Here’s a link to the new paper, which was just published in Climatic Change.

The Howarth paper, “Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations,” had estimated that leakage of gas from hydraulic fracturing operations (given that natural gas is mainly methane, a potent heat-trapping substance) and other factors made the climate impact of gas from such wells substantially worse than that of coal, measured per unit of energy. The abstract was bluntly worded: Read more…

January 5, 2012, 3:25 pm

Still Searching for Republicans With Climate Concerns

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The Climate Desk, a collaborative journalism project of Mother Jones and several other publications, has produced a video searching in vain for a Republican presidential candidate willing to make any science-based statements on climate.

The punchy piece largely supports the conclusion of various analysts that global warming has matured as a litmus-test issue for conservatives, right up there with gun rights. In essence, you can’t be a Republican and be for action of any kind to stem greenhouse gases. (The inverse does not appear true for liberals. President Obama has certainly demonstrated of late that you can be a liberal, at least on social and fiscal issues, and be mute on what I last year called “the C word.”)

Toward the end of the video you hear from a truly rare species, a New Hampshire conservative who sees climate change as important.

Then comes Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who’s been studying possible impacts of greenhouse warming on tropical storms for decades – and who has lately been vocal about his longtime affiliation with the Republican Party.

“Responsibility is a big Republican theme,” Emanuel says. “Why should they not take responsibility for what we collectively are doing to the climate system?”

Oddly, the marching orders for Republican presidential candidates appear to be out of sync with attitudes of most members of their party, outside a small fringe that is obstructionist on anything smacking of an energy policy. This makes the field of candidates deserving of the 2011 Climate B.S. Award (B.S. for “bad science”) that they received today from the environmental analyst and blogger Peter Gleick.

I’m sure Marc Morano of Climate Depot will be able to keep collating, and taking credit for, Republican statements of climate doubt at least through the end of the primary season.

Perhaps once the silly season is over, and the surviving candidate starts seeking broader support, climate-smart energy policies could be mentionable once more. Until then there remains a “fundamental Republican science problem.”

January 4, 2012, 5:18 pm

‘Much Ado About Methane’

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

David Archer, the author of “The Long Thaw” and a Realclimate.org contributor, has weighed in at length on questions and assertions about the greenhouse risk posed by methane released from warming Arctic seabeds and tundra.

methane bubblesJosh Haner/The New York Times
In an Alaskan lake, bubbles of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, collect beneath the ice. More Photos 

I encourage you to have a look in relation to the string of recent posts here aiming to restore some scientific weight to an overheated debate that has even led one online community, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, to call for urgent geoengineering countermeasures.

Here’s one excerpt and a link to the rest of the piece, which concludes, as many climate scientists do, that CO2, not CH4, remains the key target if the goal is limiting disruptive greenhouse warming: Read more…

January 4, 2012, 3:14 pm

Building a ‘Knowosphere,’ One Cable and Campus at a Time

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Contractors laying fiber optic cable in Kenya. About 10 new undersea connections are expected to serve Africa within a year.Joseph Okanga/ReutersContractors laying undersea fiber optic cable in Kenya in 2009. Many more such cables are being laid.

As I wrote over the weekend, the transition to a new year has provided a valuable moment to review goals for this blog and, more generally, assess prospects that the human condition (including the quality of our relationship with our environment) will be improved by the planet’s fast-spreading web of communication tools. I looked at blogging on Dec. 30.

Now here’s my broader take on what I’ve begun calling the “knowosphere” — a word intentionally echoing the more allegorical “noosphere,” the “planet of the mind” of Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Whatever term you use, it’s clear that the world is quickly being knitted by new ways to share observations and shape ideas that are bound to have profound impacts on the quality of the human journey. (“Knowosphere” has also been used by Larry Kilham, an entrepreneur and inventor who has been writing about how to remain innovative in the age of Google.)

As recently as a year ago, I was thinking that something new had to be built — a kind of online hub and toolkit linking like-minded individuals, schools, businesses, museums and other institutions focused on collaborative learning and experimentation.

It’d include a Match.com-style portal for connecting, say, a harried teacher seeking an explanatory video on geo-engineering with student filmmakers eager to test their chops. It would help connect students from communities in different parts of the world pondering similar issues — like coastal changes from rising sea levels.

The reality is that the tools and initiatives are already out there. See this fun geo-engineering video on YouTube.

And the connections are being made. See the educational work on coasts and climate undertaken by the British group Atlantic Rising.

Some new technology and organization is surely helpful. Read more…

January 3, 2012, 8:38 am

Crowd-Sourced Science, 112 Years and Counting

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Scissor-tailed flycatcherBill Pranty, via National Audubon Society A scissor-tailed flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus) photographed in the 111th bird count in Alafia Banks, Fla., by Bill Pranty

Crowd-sourced science has a 21st-century feel, nicely described in a recent feature by Boston Globe science writer Gareth Cook. But there’s one such project, involving tens of thousands of amateur nature observers, that’s been under way for 112 years — the annual Christmas Bird Count of the National Audubon Society.

The results, collated year by year, offer a window on trends in the abundance and range of species ranging from the snow bunting to the sandhill crane. You can sift or graph the information by species or region. Here’s a brimming bibliography of studies using the bird count data. [8:42 a.m. | Insert | Rebecca Deatsman provides details on how the counts work in a guest post at Culture of Science.]

Below you can read a Dot Earth “postcard” in which David Yarnold, the president of the society, recounts his experience counting bald eagles along the Hudson River during this year’s count, which began on Dec. 14 and ends Thursday. Read more…

January 2, 2012, 2:26 pm

Science, Faith and Progress (With and Without a Capital ‘P’)

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Thomas M. Lessl, a scholar at the University of Georgia who has long studied the rhetoric and societal relationships of both science and religion, is well positioned to add to the recent discussion here over whether confidence in science as a source of progress is based on faith or fact.

The conversation was started by Pete Seeger’s ruminations on whether “an infinite increase in empirical information is a good thing.”

This discussion is relevant to Dot Earth because it’s clear that the quality of the journey toward and beyond “peak us” will be determined as much by values as data. I wrote here last year about Lessl’s exploration of global warming debates in relation to “scientism,” a presumption of some that science “brings clarity to all endeavors.”

Here’s Lessl’s “Your Dot” contribution: Read more…