Ouch. Rough stuff for those in-state students applying to in-state schools. (Out-of-state students pay more money...) from the Washington Post.

Labels: nova, politics, virginia

A trio of recommendations for a Tuesday morning:

• Thomas Friedman on the three bombs (nuclear, climate, debt). Wise words. (Hat tip to Cathy Manduca, via the Earth and Mind blog)
• Betsy Kolbert on how the Internet enables non-rational thinking, from last week's New Yorker.
• And another one from Ms. Kolbert, on the 'geoengineering solution' for climate change, from this week's New Yorker. (It's a review of both Superfreakonomics and Al Gore's new Our Choice, and guess how she feels about those two books? Hint: she uses the word "horseshit" several times, and she's not referring to Mr. Gore.)

Labels: blogs, climate change, economics, global warming, politics

I really enjoyed Freakonomics, and so it was disappointing to hear that the recently-released sequel, Superfreakonomics, had a section devoted to the suggestion that global warming was going to be imposssible to solve via cutting carbon emissions (with renewable energy sources) and so we should focus our efforts on geoengineering schemes instead. RealClimate has a well-written post up today showing just how sloppy the Superfreakonomics authors' thinking on this issue is.

Labels: books, climate change, global warming, politics, tech

Steve Fetter, former dean of public policy at the University of Maryland, came to NOVA to speak at our first annual Climate Change Symposium in 2008. He was our "headliner" act. Now, I learn from the University of Maryland alumni magazine Terp that Steve is now an assistant director in the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. Congratulations Steve!

Labels: climate change, maryland, meetings, politics

Awesome: right-handed Anomalocarids!
Elizabeth Kolbert on getting things moving re: climate policy.
The volcanological blogs are all agog over tephra and teeth.
Lockwood tears into sloppy "press release" style "journalism."

Labels: blogs, climate change, evolution, politics, science and society

Very clever! (a comparison of tobacco-doesn't-hurt-you and climate-change-denier arguments) Hat tip to Tamino.

Great resource. (For those who love to wallow in data and want the freshest graphs for their students.) Hat tip to ClimateSight.

Labels: climate change, global warming, politics

Bill McKibben on political conservatives and climate change. (Orion) - This addresses what I see as a fundamental contradiction in modern political discourse: the fact that a lot of "conservatives" aren't into conserving natural systems. It bugs me & McKibben both.

Weather vs. climate (Surprising Science, a Smithsonian blog)

The new Wooster Geologists blog, featuring some awesome imagery of the Canadian Rockies.

Some advice about finding the right geology grad program for you (from Christie at the Cape)

Labels: climate change, global warming, politics, websites

Working through my RSS feed from the past week when I was out of town: Sheesh, it sure builds up if you don't stay on top of it! A couple of notable items to share:

The geography of tapirs, from the Why Evolution Is True blog.

The declining emphasis on literacy in our society, from Alternet.

Women geoscientists who read and/or write blogs: complete this survey!, from Kim.

Outcropedia, a new web project to catalog and share key outcrops.

Climate change graph jam, from Tamino. (With follow-ups from Lockwood)

Skeptics & athiests visit the Creation Museum. (ABC News)

Labels: blogs, evolution, graphics, humor, maps, politics, websites

Here's what I've managed to read over the past month or so...

Al Gore's The Assault on Reason:
A scholarly work on the declining role of thoughtful, logical, reflective, searching thinking in the public sphere. Gore remains upbeat but flummoxed as to how many people buy into evidenceless claims, and pins a lot of the blame on TV, which is "a one-way medium." Gore's current gig (other than promoting awareness of climate change issues) is running a TV channel where users submit content, and he sees this as the modern-day equivalent to revolutionary-era pamphleteering. If Thomas Paine were alive today, Gore thinks he would opt to express himself on Current TV. The book is a good read (I'm a very sympathetic reader, it should be noted -- my opinion is that if the 2000 election had gone to Gore, the world would be in a much better place), but its pages feel a little dated, written as they were during the fifth/sixth years of the G.W. Bush presidency. There's an ominous undercurrent that has evaporated a bit in the present Obama era. Doubtless the book would read differently if it were penned today.

Alan Moore's & Dave Gibbons' Watchmen:
The graphic novel which provided the inspiration (and pretty much the screenplay/storyboards) for the recent blockbuster movie of the same name. I haven't read a comic book in a long time, and a graphic novel... Well, I think this was the first. [Does that make it the 'best graphic novel I've ever read'?] It was really entertaining and full of the same interwoven set of plot elements and 'easter eggs' that makes watching the television show LOST such an intricate, engaging exercise. If you're not already familiar with it, it envisions an alternate 1985 where Richard Nixon is still president of the US, and we're on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and costumed 'super'heroes (really just masked 'adventurers') are outlawed. Some of these 'heroes' are really psychos, and others merely emotionally/psychologically damaged goods. It's interesting to see these do-gooders wrestle with life's tricky bits, while simultaneously attempting to avert World War III.

I also read Tyler Volk's CO2 Rising, but that one deserves a blog post of its own to discuss... Stay tuned.

Labels: art, books, movies, politics

Heh! This "clean coal" debunking campaign is directed by the Coen Brothers.

And another:

Behind the scenes:

Labels: climate change, CO2, coal, global warming, humor, politics

Yesterday, four Honors students and I went out to West Virginia's route 55 (between Wardensville and Moorefield), to look at some sedimentary strata and associated tectonic structures. Our guide was my friend David Dantzler, an enthusiastic amateur geologist. Here's a map of the terrain we traversed:



As you can see, this is part of the Valley & Ridge province, an area of the country defined by Paleozoic rocks that were folded and thrust-faulted during the Alleghenian phase of Appalachian mountain-building. Recently, a new road has been constructed traversing these valleys and ridges. It's a bit of a boondoggle, a pet project of West Virginia senator Robert Byrd which funneled federal dollars into the Mountain State, ostensibly to make it easier for the chicken farmers of Moorefield to get their birdie bits to market on the east coast.

This image ought to give you a sense of the project's scale (big bridge), and how much use it gets (no one on the bridge):


But the U.S. taxpayer's loss is the geologist's gain... There are some pretty spectacular new exposures of Valley & Ridge rocks along the new route 55. Here's the NOVA van parked at an outcrop of Tuscarora Sandstone that is arched up into a broad anticline. Again, notice how few people are driving on route 55 here:


Ooh, look: heavy traffic!


Contact between the lower Tuscarora Sandstone (a Silurian-aged extremely pure quartz sandstone, variably fused to quartzite), and the overlying (darker-colored) formation, which is either the Rose Hill Formation or the Mackenzie Formation at this location:


We found oodles of cool trace fossils:







But it wasn't just sedimentary layers. There were also some cool tectonic structures, like this joint in the Tuscarora, showing a beautifully developed hackle fringe:



Here's some "pencil cleavage" where fine-grained shale develops cleavage that intersects the planes of fissility, causing it to fracture in long slivers:



I slammed on the brakes for this one: an awesome anticline...


I forced David and the students to act out the orientation of the bedding planes at this anticline:


Honors student Jason points out a small thrust fault in the outcrop above him: You can see the offset in a greenish/gray shale layer:


In case it wasn't obvious above, here's a zoomed-in shot, with the offset layer highlighted (the miracles of Photoshop!) and the fault labeled:


We all had a grand day outside, and the rain held off until our return trip, which was pretty great. Thanks to David for showing us these rocks, and thanks to my students for being smart and inquisitive and into field trips.

Labels: appalachians, devonian, field trips, fossils, mountains, nova, politics, primary structures, sediment, silurian, structure, teaching, valley and ridge, west virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia has put up a website soliciting suggestions for the expenditure of the state's share of the federal stimulus package. Got a good idea? Drop them a note.

(The Washington Post reports on a decaying bridge in Arlington County as a good candidate - I drove under this bridge on Tuesday morning. Thursday morning at 4am, softball-sized chunks of concrete fell off the bottom onto Route 50. Yikes.)

Labels: economics, politics, virginia

For those of you who missed it, here's video of Mike Tidwell's talk at NOVA last Thursday.

Labels: action, climate change, global warming, maryland, nova, podcasts and vodcasts, politics, virginia

Because he's coming to campus tomorrow (Thursday), last weekend I watched Mike Tidwell's movie We are all Smith Islanders. It's a 35-minute long documentary about how climate change is effecting the states of Maryland and Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Though it is a political document (and not a scientific documentary), I think it's a worthwhile enterprise because it connects the global to the local. We hear a lot about climate change, but when someone actually walks through Ocean City, Maryland, pointing out what three feet of sea level rise would look like, it fosters a connection based on shared landmarks.

Thanks to archive.org, you can actually watch the movie in low resolution on the Internet. Google video also keeps a copy available.

Or, if you'd prefer it in higher resolution (on DVD), you can find it at the NOVA library.

Labels: action, climate change, dc, global warming, maryland, movies, nova, politics, virginia

It was announced today that Dr. Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph Biden, is teaching as an adjunct professor of English for two classes this spring semester at NOVA's Alexandria Campus. Dr. Biden has a 28-year career as an educator, having held a 15-year appointment as a professor of English at the Stanton/Wilmington campus of Delaware Technical and Community College where she taught composition and developmental English. She holds a Master's degree in English from Villanova University and a Master's degree in reading from West Chester University. She earned a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware in 2007.

Welcome, Dr. Biden!

Labels: news, nova, politics

A bill working its way through the Senate right now, S-22, has some provisions you may be interested in. It's called the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009. Mainly, it sets aside a heckuva lot of wilderness areas. But the thing that brought it to my attention is that it sets aside some money to develop a "national geologic trail" focused on Glacial Lake Missoula, with an interpretive center to be located in Missoula, Montana. The Senate website describes it like this:

The Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail Designation Act (S. 268 and H.R.
450), would create a trail to document the catastrophic flooding that stretched
across parts of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington during the last Ice Age.
The designation of an Ice Age Floods Trail follows the recommendations of a 2001
study headed by the National Park Service which found the area suitable for
addition into the National Park System.

This part of the bill carries a possible pricetag of $12 million, with $2 specifically for the visitor center. Though there's no way the trail would be done by this summer, Glacial Lake Missoula's geologic signatures will be some of the highlights planned for this summer's Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rockies class.

Read more about it in this article in the Missoulian.

Hat tip to Babak R. for letting me know about this.

Labels: glacial landforms, glaciation, lakes, montana, national parks, politics

Those aren't insects swarming all over the ground: those are people!

From the GeoEye satellite, via Google Earth, via the Google Earth blog.

Labels: dc, politics, satellite imagery

Labels: dc, politics

Here's the view from my apartment yesterday (the day before Inauguration):



Happy Inauguration, everyone!

Labels: dc, politics

Recently, Andrew Alden compiled a list of state minerals and state rocks. A quirky piece in today's Washington Post explores what Maryland is urging its citizens to do with their state fish: eat them. The story also, somewhat randomly, includes a limerick composed by Virginia's former governor and current senator, Mark Warner:

We have a state dog and a fish and a bird.
And of the fossil I'm sure you have heard.
So why not a bat?
What's wrong with that?
The state beverage is no more absurd.

For some reason, I hear this limerick in my head in Carl Kasell's voice...

Labels: birdies, critters, fish, fossils, mammals, maryland, politics, virginia

This is pretty good... from the Coyote Crossing blog:

Labels: art, climate change, coal, environmental, global warming, politics

A quick note for fellow Virginians: CNN reports on the new efforts by the Bush administration to drill for oil offshore from the Old Dominion.

Labels: environmental, news, oil, petroleum, politics, virginia

Check this out: planners of next month's inauguration are using a giant map to figure all the logistics out.

Labels: dc, maps, news, politics

This just in from the office of Virginia's governor, Tim Kaine:

"In higher education, our October actions reduced schools' 2009 base budgets by 5 to 7%. For 2010, I have increased the reductions to 15% for all schools, except the community colleges and Richard Bland, which will have the reduction level increased to 10%."

Especially in light of what I posted earlier today, this does not bode well.

Full text of the governor's remarks here.

Labels: economics, news, nova, politics, virginia

The current issue of Newsweek features an article that quotes NOVA President Bob Templin on how more students are signing up for classes at community colleges like NOVA, just at the same time the state is cutting our funding.

Labels: news, nova, politics, teaching

Four years ago, this website gave me some solace in looking at the breakdown between "red" and "blue" states. Now the author, Mark Newman, has performed some similar cartography on the 2008 presidential election results.

Labels: maps, politics, websites

8:30am: Just got back from voting. As with 4 years ago, the line stretched around the block: awesome to see so many of my neighbors and fellow citizens participating. It gave me the warm fuzzies.

Today's the day, people! Let's make it happen.

Labels: dc, politics

Labels: climate change, environmental, global warming, humor, oil, politics

A reminder to NOVA students, faculty, and interested area geophiles: I'll be giving a talk entitled "Two Months of Rock and Road: A North American geological road trip" today at noon as part of the Science Seminar series. It's in the CE Forum on the Annandale campus. Free and open to the public; light refreshments served.

McCain and Obama having fun: After all the rancor, this makes me happy.

If you're planning on going on the GSW Fall Field trip, let them know ASAP. They need a headcount.

The slate of speakers has been announced for next week's GSW meeting: Leonard Konikow, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston: "Ground-water depletion: National assessment and global implications;" Dionysis Foustoukos, Carnegie Institution of Washington Geophysical Laboratory "Energy sources in dark abyssal waters;" and Igor Puchtel, University of Maryland, College Park "Re-Os isotope systematics and HSE abundances of the 3.5 Ga Schapenburg komatiites, South Africa." 8pm next Wednesday at the Cosmos Club. Free and open to the public; refreshing beverages served starting at 7:30pm.

Virginia's a swing state... unbelievable and amazing.

Radioactive granite countertops cartoon caption contest reminder.

JPL has launched a new climate site:

...And congratulations to Walter Alvarez for being awarded the Vetlesen Prize.

That's all I've got. Have a good Friday!

Labels: field trips, gsw, meetings, news, politics, travel

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