A colleague mentioned this website to me yesterday: Voting America.

Maintained by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond (Virginia), the website makes us of so-called "cinematic maps" which show how geopolitical data have changed over time for the lower 48 United States.

The different maps tell stories over time; I think it's a cool display of interesting information. However, a major omission is the exclusion of Alaska and Hawaii as contributing U.S. states. Check it out; let me know what you think.

Thanks Judith G. for alerting me to it!

Labels: maps, politics, virginia, websites

This week, New Scientist gives a rundown on how the two main U.S. presidential contenders compare on the issue of climate change. Check it out.

Labels: climate change, news, politics

On Saturday, I was due to take my Audubon class to the Billy Goat Trail. But, since we had so much rain earlier in the week, the Potomac was running higher than normal, and parts of the trail were flooded, so the Park Service closed it. I was ticked off that I couldn't take my students even on the non-flooded portions of the trail to show them pre-Taconian relict graded beds or Acadian lamprophyre dikes. But the NPS are sticklers for the rules, and there was one hyperenthusiastic volunteer standing guard to make sure we didn't venture onto the trail. So we didn't.

We walked another trail, the Berma Road, instead, which parallels the Washington Aqueduct from Great Falls down to the Old Anglers Inn. Along the way we saw plenty of metagraywacke, migmatite, and granite intrusions. Here's me pretending to 'hold up' up a massive metagraywacke xenolith in the Bear Island Granite:

We also saw a lot of structure, including boudinage, folds, and faults. While we didn't get to see some of the more striking features of the Billy Goat Trail proper, we made it work okay. And everybody in the class had a great sense of humor in regards to being kept off the BGT itself.

I thought this was a funny form of political protest:

Both photos by Audubon student Paula. Thanks, Paula!

Labels: granite, national parks, plutons, politics

Juliet Eilperin reports in today's issue of the The Washington Post about the Ken Caldeira study I mentioned a few days ago. She also mentions another recent modeling study by Andreas Schmittner, who wrote (with others) a February 14 article in Global Biogeochemical Cycles that suggests that if global emissions continue on a "business as usual" path for the rest of the century, the Earth will warm by 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Schmittner's study continues: If we don't get to zero emissions until 2300, the temperature rise at that point would be more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit. (FYI: I haven't yet read the Schmittner, et al., study myself.)

Anyhow, the Post article reminds me of something I've been mulling over, and meaning to post since then.

I view climate change from two main perspectives: (1) as an earth scientist, and (2) as a citizen. As a scientist, I find it fascinating to watch how all this plays out. As a scientist, it presents an opportunity for learning, for greater understanding of how the Earth works. You see, geologists are limited scientifically: we often don't have the option of running controlled experiments on our topics of study: continents are too big, the spans of time are too vast. But with global warming, we have a colossal experiment that's being run, even though no one intended it as such. I offered this quote back in January, and I think I'll put it up again to give some context to my "scientist views climate change" perspective:

• "Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries, we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years."

-- Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss, 1957

In other words: The timescale of carbon storage is ~7 orders of magnitude larger than the timescale of carbon release. That's a large difference. Humans are thus changing the atmosphere's composition; but what effect will it have on the climate? Those who practice science can make some logical predictions based on our understanding of the natural world:

(A) It has been demonstrated for over a century that certain gases, like CO2, absorb energy in certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. The gases that absorb in the infrared portion of the spectrum are the ones we call "greenhouse gases," since the majority of the energy re-radiated upwards from the Earth's surface is infrared, and absorption of this energy keeps the planet warmer than it would otherwise be.

(B) It has been demonstrated that in the presence of oxygen, biogenic carbon can be oxidized to release energy. Whether it's a campfire or gasoline (derived from petroleum derived from Paleozoic planktonic photosynthesis), organic carbon burns. When it does, carbon and oxygen combine, and CO2 is a product of the (exothermic) reaction.

(C) At numerous locations around the world, we have measured precisely the rising concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere. We have even measured precisely a corresponding decline in free atmospheric oxygen, as oxygen is consumed through the combustion of fossil carbon.

(D) These facts predict that the Earth's temperature will rise on average as a result of the greater concentration of greenhouse gases. That too can be measured, with multiple thermometers in multiple locations over a long period of time. What we find is that on average the temperature is going up (it's risen 0.7 of a degree Celsius, or ~1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century), as is logically predicted by (A), (B), and (C).

So, as a scientist, I think it's really interesting: Here you've got some knowns, and some unknowns, and a logical structure linking them. Hypotheses yield predictions, and those predictions are being tested. Wow, scientist-me thinks, it's fascinating to see how the Earth system works when you alter a variable like atmospheric CO2 concentration.

On the other hand, I'm not just a dispassionate observer watching this all play out on an experimental planet: I'm also a person who lives on that planet and will be subject to the consequences of the experiment. It's from that perspective, the "citizen" point-of-view, that global warming scares the hell out of me. The Earth's fate is not in question here: our planet has endured far greater fluctuations in the past (both warmer and colder). The issue is for those of us who live on the surface of the planet Earth (humans and other species): as conditions change, will we be able to adapt? I'm concerned that some of the consequences are potentially too large for ecosystems to maintain their coherency. I'm worried about the huge proportion of my fellow human citizens (of the Earth) who dwell on the low-elevation coastlines of the world. The Earth will endure quite a lot of temperature variation; but I'm not sure about the organisms on its surface (of which I am one).

Last week, one story in the news was about the opening of the "Doomsday" seed vault on Svalbard. I was struck by the scientific parallels between the seed vault story and global warming, yet how very differently people were treating it. Science suggests that biodiversity is declining, and is subject to numerous threats, and we humans depend on viable seeds for our survival as a species. So, we're taking action by making this vault to keep our seed stock safe. It's totally uncontroversial. You don't see any Seed Vault Skeptics publishing editorials or holding conferences. Yet with climate change, there is a substantial voice in public life suggesting that the science is flawed, and thus that no action is required. Obviously, there's a HUGE difference between the relatively simple matter of creating a seed bunker in the Arctic and retooling the world economy's energy source, but those are both matters of political action. The science underlying each issue is strong and compelling. Whether we choose to act on the conclusions of that science is another thing: do we take action only when it's easy? Or do we take action when the science suggests that, for our own benefit as a species, we must?

Perhaps this is the third perspective with which I view climate change: as a "social scientist" intrigued would how people sort out complex issues like this. Will we be able to pull if off, as a society? Maybe it's already too late.

Some quotes from the Post article:

• "People aren't reducing emissions at all, let alone debating whether 88 percent or 99 percent is sufficient. It's like you're starting off on a road trip from New York to California, and before you even start, you're arguing about where you're going to park at the end."

--Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

• "[Global warming] is a classic inter-generational debate, where the short-term benefits of emitting carbon accrue mainly to us and where the dangers of them are largely put off until future generations."

-- Steve Gardiner, University of Washington

• "Each unit of CO2 emissions must be viewed as leading to quantifiable and essentially permanent climate change on centennial timescales."

-- Damon Matthews, Concordia University

Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming, politics

Yesterday, Florida's state board of education felt obliged to stick the word "theory" into their description of the teaching of evolution. See this Reuters article for all the moronic details. Of course, evolution is a theory (i.e. well corroborated by many years of scientific testing & explanatory of a wealth of biological phenomena), so I don't have a problem with this definition per se, beyond exasperation with the motivations for its inclusion. I expect we'll see another lawsuit (a la Dover, PA) regarding this move, but in the meantime, it's an opportunity for science teachers to elucidate the difference between "theory" as it's used in science versus "theory" as it's used in casual conversation. So, the battlefield for teaching proper science shifts from Kansas to Pennsylvania to Florida. What would the Flying Spaghetti Monster say?

Labels: evolution, news, politics

Labels: art, dc, ethanol, global warming, humor, politics

In today's issue of the Washington Post, an article by David Fahrenthold reviews the mixed bag of results that the House of Representatives has achieved in making their half of Capitol Hill carbon neutral. In November, they spent about $89,000 to offset their unavoidable carbon emissions by paying for agricultural acts that sequestered an equal amount of carbon elsewhere. All well and good, at least in theory, but carbon offsetting is a new and weird commodity. It doesn't always work that well. Some of the money went to farmers in North Dakota, to pay them to practice a certain soil conservation technique they were already doing. Some other funds went to a power plant in Iowa that was supposed to produce cleaner energy -- during a trial run that ended a year before the money got there.

Driving around town, I see a decent minority of cars sporting a bumper sticker that says "This car's CO2 offset by TerraPass" or something similar. Despite my strong concern over climate change and the clear connection between CO2 emissions and global warming, I have yet to invest in one of these balancing schemes. I think it's just that it's an unproven system. Mainly through my own ignorance of their practices, I'm not convinced that companies like TerraPass aren't just taking people for a ride. I think that if the U.S. government had some sort of verification procedure whereby carbon offsetting companies could be certified, then I would be more inclined to trust them and get on board. But, as the Post article elucidates, we don't really regulate this business yet in America. They regulate the heck out of it in Europe, but also with mixed results.

It should be noted that despite these examples of offsetting "flubs," the House achieved some real progress with some simple acts that conserve energy: they switched to compact fluorescent light bulbs and ordered the Capitol Power Plant to burn natural gas instead of coal.

Labels: action, global warming, politics