Argonaut Planet

“Earthquakes? Tsunamis? Those things seem inevitable, accepted as acts of God. But an invisible, man-made threat associated with Godzilla and three-eyed fish? Now that’s something to keep you up at night.”

That was a great representative line from an article recently published in Discover magazine (July/August 2011) about risk perception entitled “What You Don’t Know Can Kill You” by Jason Daley.  Although climate change is only mentioned in the article briefly, naturally my mind made that extension right away.

I had just finished my Master’s thesis, which was an analysis of Chinese state media coverage on the effects of climate change on China’s food and water security.  Climate change, media programming, and educational communications have constantly been on my mind.  So this very topic – trying to understand why people aren’t as worried about the risks of anthropogenic climate change as the scientific data show we should be – is something that keeps ME “up at night.”

Something I’ve been concerned about regarding the messages the scientific community manages to get out to the public about environmental issues in general, and climate change in particular, is that scientists are not trained to “sell themselves,” especially not to non-scientists.  It has always seemed obvious to me that generally people aren’t interested in things they aren’t already interested in, to be glib.  So if we try to serve a hot steaming dish of threatening-sounding FACTS and DATA to a public a) not interested in science, b) heavily influenced by politics in

Ice, and particularly that of the Greenland Icesheet, can be compared (perhaps tritely) to a canary in a coal mine. The retreat of our Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine icesheets and glaciers can be one of the most useful signals in our studies of the effects of global warming, and one of the most illustrative tools in the process of making predictions on future ice retreat, the subsequent rise of sea levels, and compounded temperature increases due to Albedo Effect and the thawing of the permafrost (which releases sequestered methane gas, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases). Aside from the disastrous effects on the terrestrial biosphere, the melting of the Arctic places a real and serious financial burden on the global economy.

Is Arctic Ice Melting?

National Snow and Ice Data Center. This graph shows the extent of the Arctic with normal warm-season sea ice coverage for 2007, 2010, and the average of all years from 1979-2000. It is obvious that Arctic sea ice coverage in 2010 has been significantly spottier this year than in previous decades.

Outside the Arctic and Antarctic, the Greenland Icesheet is the largest concentration of glacial ice on our planet. Over the last ten or twelve years, the Greenland Icesheet has fallen out of equilibrium (or a phase where yearly averages for ice coverage remained roughly steady with no major or long term perturbations). Since the late 1990s, the yearly averages for Greenland’s total ice cover have decreased exponentially every year. This ice-loss

NPR just featured a fascinating story about Colorado’s populations of Yellow Tailed Marmots. Apparently, scientists have correlated an increased size in the average marmot specimen in Colorado to the localized effects of global climate change.

Odd, since we thought increased marmot size was due to graham crackers.

We came up with a really interesting idea the other day. We’ve been thinking about the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and the way they publish their findings, which is every 6 years. The last report was published in 2007. Something that is problematic with this structure is that once the information is published, some of the data used in the reports is 3 or 4 years old. Consequently, policies made using this data are outdated from their very outset; policy-makers in 2010 are using the 3 year-old 2007 IPCC report, which itself contains 3-4 year-old information. So we’re now lagging behind by 6-7 years from the latest science. This is an alarmingly significant lag time considering how quickly the world around us is changing specifically due to climate change. We talked about how this problem could be addressed….

The initial idea was to figure out how we could get rid of lag in the scientific process. How to decrease the time between when information is discovered and the time it is used, in politics, economics, etc. Most of the information used by politicians comes from the reports by the IPCC, because they are the largest and most globalized organization of climate scientists working collaboratively in the world. So, if the information published by the IPCC could be made available more quickly and transparently, then it follows that it could be used when it’s still fresh (not 3 and 4 years old).

So, here’s what we came up with. What if the IPCC findings could be published in “real time,” and separate pieces were made available for peer review immediately, instead of waiting to publish ALL the findings all at once, every 6 years? We discussed 2 ways to go about this. …read more

One of the objects of our blog is to have a place to “write down” the conversations we have, and this post is about a topic we discuss regularly: how to transform education to prepare future generations to deal with and reverse the effects of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

“Sustainability Education” is the subject of a lot of debate amongst environmentalists, activists, and academics. It could be defined in a lot of ways by lots of different people, but basically it is the idea of teaching students, starting in grade school, to innately understand how to help our species and the other organisms with whom we share our planet to survive and thrive in the future. In short, if we want to be around in 300 years we need to learn how to change the way we live…and the earlier we begin teaching our children these ideas, the higher our chances of survival.

(Something to note going into this: we’re not really trying to talk about what should be taught, but how it could be taught. There are people who write whole books about what the content of sustainability education should be, so that’s not what we’re really interested in here. We’re just throwing around some idealistic ideas about how to go about doing it at all…)

So, what do we do now? How do we get there? We have some ideas. …read more

Things are exciting here at the Maher household. Aside from having a genuine Franken-kitty on the premises, neighbors who apparently self-identify as guitar hero virtuosos, and new-found addictions to “tweaking the website,” we actually have some very promising events on our horizons:

I am preparing for my final year in my Master’s program at Prescott College, and by that I mean I am frantically trying to organize my extremely over-broad and sometimes scattered thoughts into something that resembles a paper of reasonable length. I am very happy to have finally narrowed my scope to focus on Environmental Crisis —-> China —-> China’s national media representation of said crisis —-> Specifically, what’s going on with the melting and drying in the Himalayas and the associated river systems in China —-> How will this affect future international relationships? Phew! Sound broad? You shoulda heard what it sounded like before yesterday…

Anyway, I’m very excited to get started. Aside from my concern that my thesis could easily balloon into a 600 page monster, I am also worried I will be unable to find many primary sources translated into English (I am learning Chinese, but so far my scope doesn’t extend a whole lot farther than “I like to read books and watch TV. What time is dinner?”). I am also worried that May 30, 2011 will roll around and I’ll be all self-congratulatory and lazed out, expecting my beautiful diploma in the mail any day, and I’ll get an email from