Political philosophy has a legitimate role in policy debates, but not in the underlying climate science. There are no Democratic or Republican carbon dioxide molecules; they are all invisible and they all trap heat.

On June 13 a larger group of Australian scientists one-upped that American letter by publishing their own open letter with even more uncharacteristically blunt statements of scientific fact. Besides direct calls for media accountability, the Australians are taking their letter one step further by following it up with a two-week series of statements titled “Clearing up the Climate Debate.” Each statement in the series explains a basic science concept that the media gets wrong again and again, such as: why we know the greenhouse effect is real, why we know humans are contributing to it, and the difference between peer review and rhetoric.

Below is the text of the initial letter (emphasis is ours). At the bottom you can find a list of all of the signatories and links to each of the daily statements. Now to be fair, not everyone on the list is a “climate scientist.” In July 2010 a group of 31,000 purported climate scientists was slammed for inflating its numbers with nonscientists in a similar short petition stating that there is “no convincing scientific evidence” for anthropogenic climate change.

But here’s the difference. That petition had only 39 actual climate scientists among its 31,000 signatories, and scarcely more than a quarter of the total had doctorates in any field at all. The signatories of the Australian letter by contrast at least seem to all hold professorships, and have published in the peer-reviewed literature. Some of them can even be found in the interactive climate science literature graphic we featured last week. And let’s also not forget that while a National Academies study found that 97 percent of climate experts agree that climate change is “very likely” caused by human activity, in the end science is–thankfully–not decided by majority vote.

Here’s the Australian letter from June 13:

The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes.

Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now.

Like it or not, humanity is facing a problem that is unparalleled in its scale and complexity. The magnitude of the problem was given a chilling focus in the most recent report of the International Energy Agency, which their chief economist characterised as the “worst news on emissions.”

Limiting global warming to 2°C is now beginning to look like a nearly insurmountable challenge.

Like all great challenges, climate change has brought out the best and the worst in people.

A vast number of scientists, engineers, and visionary businessmen are boldly designing a future that is based on low-impact energy pathways and living within safe planetary boundaries; a future in which substantial health gains can be achieved by eliminating fossil-fuel pollution; and a future in which we strive to hand over a liveable planet to posterity.

At the other extreme, understandable economic insecurity and fear of radical change have been exploited by ideologues and vested interests to whip up ill-informed, populist rage, and climate scientists have become the punching bag of shock jocks and tabloid scribes.

Aided by a pervasive media culture that often considers peer-reviewed scientific evidence to be in need of “balance” by internet bloggers, this has enabled so-called “sceptics” to find a captive audience while largely escaping scrutiny.

Australians have been exposed to a phony public debate which is not remotely reflected in the scientific literature and community of experts.

Beginning today, The Conversation will bring much-needed and long-overdue accountability to the climate “sceptics.”

For the next two weeks, our series of daily analyses will show how they can side-step the scientific literature and how they subvert normal peer review. They invariably ignore clear refutations of their arguments and continue to promote demonstrably false critiques.

We will show that “sceptics” often show little regard for truth and the critical procedures of the ethical conduct of science on which real skepticism is based.

The individuals who deny the balance of scientific evidence on climate change will impose a heavy future burden on Australians if their unsupported opinions are given undue credence.

The signatories below jointly authored this article, and some may also contribute to the forthcoming series of analyses.

Signatories

Winthrop Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Australian Professorial Fellow, UWA

Dr. Matthew Hipsey, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, Centre of Excellence for Ecohydrology, UWA

Dr Julie Trotter, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, UWA Oceans Institute, UWA

Winthrop Professor Malcolm McCulloch, F.R.S., Premier’s Research Fellow, UWA Oceans Institute, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Professor Kevin Judd, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr Thomas Stemler, Assistant Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr. Karl-Heinz Wyrwoll, Senior Lecturer, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Dr. Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleoclimate scientist, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research School of Earth Science, Planetary Science Institute, ANU

Prof Michael Ashley, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof David Karoly, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Prof John Abraham, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, University of St. Thomas

Prof Ian Enting, ARC Centre for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, University of Melbourne

Prof John Wiseman, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne

Associate Professor Ben Newell, School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Matthew England, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Alex Sen Gupta Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof. Mike Archer AM, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Steven Sherwood, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr. Katrin Meissner, ARC Future Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Jason Evans, ARC Australian Research Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Global Change Institute, UQ

Dr Andy Hogg, Fellow, Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU

Prof John Quiggin, School of Economics, School of Political Science & Intnl Studies, UQ

Prof Chris Turney FRSA FGS FRGS, Climate Change Research Centre and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW

Dr Gab Abramowitz, Lecturer, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Andy Pitman, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, University of Adelaide

Prof Mike Sandiford, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Dr Michael Box, Associate Professor, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling, The Environment Institute, The University of Adelaide

Dr Paul Dargusch, School of Agriculture & Food Science, UQ

Prof Nigel Tapper, Professor Environmental Science, School of Geography and Environmental Science Monash University

Prof Jason Beringer, Associate Professor & Deputy Dean of Research, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Neville Nicholls, Professorial Fellow, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Dave Griggs, Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University

Prof Peter Sly, Medicine Faculty, School of Paediatrics & Child Health, UQ

Dr Pauline Grierson, Senior Lecturer, School of Plant Biology, Ecosystems Research Group, Director of West Australian Biogeochemistry Centre, UWA

Prof Jurg Keller, IWA Fellow, Advanced Water Management Centre, UQ

Prof Amanda Lynch, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

A/Prof Steve Siems, School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University

Prof Justin Brookes, Director, Water Research Centre, The University of Adelaide

Prof Glenn Albrecht, Professor of Sustainability, Director: Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy (ISTP), Murdoch University

Winthrop Professor Steven Smith, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, UWA

Dr Kerrie Unsworth, School of Business, UWA

Dr Pieter Poot, Assistant Professor in Plant Conservation Biology, School of Plant Biology, UWA

Adam McHugh, Lecturer, School of Engineering and Energy, Murdoch University

Dr Louise Bruce, Research Associate, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Are you a scientist? Do you agree? If you’d like to add your name to the list, send an email to megan.clement@theconversation.edu.au

This is the first part of our series Clearing up the Climate Debate. To read the other instalments, follow the links below:

• Part Two: The greenhouse effect is real: here’s why.
• Part Three: Speaking science to climate policy.
• Part Four: Our effect on the earth is real: how we’re geo-engineering the planet
• Part Five: Who’s your expert? The difference between peer review and rhetoric
• Part Six: Climate change denial and the abuse of peer review
• Part Seven: When scientists take to the streets it’s time to listen up on climate change
• Part Eight: Australia’s contribution matters: why we can’t ignore our climate responsibilities

This article is adapted from a Climate Progress post by Joe Romm.

In many cases, wild fisheries around the world have reached or exceeded their maximum sustainable harvest; the United Nations is projecting a 40 million ton seafood shortage by 2030. The $50 billion worldwide marine aquaculture industry— the deliberate farming of ocean species that provides half the world’s edible seafood—is the fastest growing form of food production in the world. Seafood provides a valuable supplement for a diversified and nutritious diet. It provides not only high-value protein, but also represents an important source of a wide range of micronutrients, minerals, and fatty acids and amino acids. Since few precious and finite freshwater resources are required for farming fish from the ocean, seafood could be a solution for global food and water security.

Open-ocean marine aquaculture, the free range of the sea

Marine aquaculture has several advantages over traditional capture fisheries. Since cultured fish are kept in a relatively controlled environment, it is possible to monitor production and predict the output and harvest. This makes it possible to adapt the harvest according to market demand and ensure the right size, quality, and volume of the fish at the most opportune time. These factors result in lower production costs and higher profits.

Conventional aquaculture, however, has numerous challenges that must be addressed as well. Penning lots of fish together in farms generates waste from feces and unconsumed commercial feed. These wastes can carry disease and the phosphate and nitrates in the mix can cause algal blooms that suck oxygen from the water, leaving it uninhabitable. Conventional near-shore cages presently used in salmon farming have become excessively dependent upon pesticides and antibiotics to combat diseases that are rampant in highly concentrated farming conditions—not unlike industrial-scale hog, poultry, and cattle farming on land.

Shrimp farms similarly are frequently overharvested and depleted within in a few years in many developing countries, leading to a continuum of destruction of coastal areas. They also depend on staggering amounts of antibiotics, fungicides, algaecides, and pesticides, and are polluting and water intensive. Nearly half the loss of mangroves in the world has been attributed to unsustainable shrimp farming.

But new techniques being developed in open-ocean fish cultivation can address many of these problems. “Open-ocean” aquaculture is an emerging concept that uses submersible cages deployed in deep water to produce farmed seafood while minimizing the environmental footprint. Farming locations are sited where optimum currents and other favorable conditions soften the footprint on the sea. One might think of open-ocean aquaculture as analogous in some ways to free range in terrestrial farming.

Modern open-ocean techniques use integrated multitrophic aquaculture, or IMTA, to address several of the problems of conventional aquaculture. IMTA uses waste from one species, salmon and shrimp for example, as the food or fertilizer for other species such as shellfish and seaweed. Data show that when seaweed or kelp are grown near fish cages it absorbs much of the excess dissolved inorganic nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and increases its biomass 46 percent faster than when grown about a mile away from the reference site. Meanwhile bivalve shellfish feed on the organic particulates and grow 50 percent faster. This accelerated growth turns the natural recycling into an economic benefit. Despite concerns that the shellfish and seaweeds might be reservoirs for diseases that could affect the fish, scientists in Norway and Canada have observed that, to the contrary, mussels act as a bio filter, destroying the viruses responsible for fish diseases, such as infectious salmon anemia.

Critics also assert that aquaculture doesn’t alleviate pressure on fish feed stocks because many species of farmed fish are fed fishmeal and fish oil. In response to this concern, many farming operations are using plant-based protein sources as a sustainable and cost-effective substitute or supplement to traditional fishmeal protein. Soy-based protein, for example, is a promising substitute because of its nutritional profile, low cost, and consistent availability.

Alternative protein sources already provide from one- to two-thirds of the dietary protein in commercial feed that is supplied for the cultivation of fish. Soy-based protein can provide up to 40 percent of dietary protein in fish feed without significantly affecting the feed conversion ratio, the protein efficiency ratio, or the net protein utilization—in essence, without impacting the health or nutritional value of the fish. In the laboratory, 100 percent replacement of fishmeal protein in feed has been achieved, but it is not yet considered cost effective for commercial-scale production.

In sum, when properly designed, open-ocean marine aquaculture has the potential to make aquaculture a sustainable source of protein for our globally growing population. The “Blue Food Revolution” published in Scientific American February 2011 provides a balanced view for sustainably feeding a future population of 9 billion.

“The reality begs for a comparison rarely made: fish farming versus terrestrial farming. Done right, fish farming could provide much needed protein for the world while minimizing the expansion of land-based farming and the attendant environmental costs.”

Indeed, according to Neil Anthony Sims, the founder of Kona Blue Water Farms, sustainably designed marine aquaculture systems have the potential to produce staple fish species with the same ecological impact as anchovies, which have minimal environmental impacts because they are very low on the food chain. The Scientific American article also quotes Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association:

“One of my goals has been to get to a position where, when people say food security, they don’t just mean grains and livestock but also fisheries and aquaculture.”

A sustainable food source for the Arabian Gulf

Open-ocean aquaculture could play a big role in addressing the pressing food and water needs of the Arabian Gulf region. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, or IFAD, Arab Gulf countries account for more than 5 percent of the world’s population but less than 1 percent of global water resources. Because of the arid desert climate, which is not conducive to large-scale farming, the region imports more than 80 percent of its food.  Furthermore, water used in agriculture consumes up to 80 percent of the total water supply; therefore, subsidized agriculture schemes are unfeasible and unsustainable on a large scale.

The Arabian Sea has great potential for open-ocean marine aquaculture development. With 1,700 kilometers of coastline, Oman has untapped potential to exploit this valuable resource with the development of a marine aquaculture industry. The 200-mile exclusive economic zone, extending seaward into the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea, presents a promising proposition for diversifying and augmenting Oman’s oil-based economy. Moreover, there is a strong commitment from the sultanate to develop the aquaculture sector in a competitive and sustainable manner in harmony with the social, economic, cultural, and historic values of the country.

With nearly 2,000 kilometers of coastline contiguously south on the Arabian Sea, Yemen is also endowed with rich and bountiful fishing grounds for feeding its burgeoning population. Like Oman, the fisheries sector lags far behind the oil and gas industry, suffering from lack of infrastructure, proper organization, and modern technologies.

Yemen could be the first nation to completely run out of water in a few years and Sana’a could be the world’s first capital city to go dry as people flee from the parched outer reaches of the country. Water available across Yemen amounts to 100 to 200 cubic meters per person per year, far below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic meters. Groundwater reserves are being used faster than they can replenish themselves, especially in the Sana’a basin, where water once found 20 meters below the surface is now 200 meters deep. The government is considering a desalination plant for seawater, an expensive solution that may come too late. Another option is to cut down on the agriculture industry and import even more food than its current 85 percent. The best option would be the development of a marine aquaculture industry.

Growing the marine aquaculture industry in these countries must leverage modern scientific knowledge and engage in diligent monitoring in order to avoid the ecological pitfalls that have plagued conventional fish farms around the world. The governments in Yemen and Oman have been actively engaged in ensuring both aquatic and terrestrial development is done sustainably, and both countries have frameworks that require environmental monitoring prior to licensing. “Oman’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Affairs in particular is known for its strict enforcement of environmental regulation,” says Tim Huntington, who works with the sultanate frequently as founding director of Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management LTD.

Done sustainably, a marine aquaculture industry for the Arabian Sea would increase food security and mitigate the depletion of sparse water for agricultural resources. It would also create jobs, generate income, and help increase nonpetroleum exports, while resuscitating local fish stocks to revive the livelihoods of fisher folks in coastal communities.

Phil Cruver is a progressive social entrepreneur and president of KZO Sea Farms.

The islands, populated by 263 hardy souls, have no airport, and the sea voyage to reach them takes nearly a week from Cape Town, South Africa, roughly 1,500 miles to the east. They are the needle in the haystack that is the South Atlantic Ocean. So the chance that a freighter, not bound for the islands’ port, would somehow manage to run aground was as slim as the islands are tiny. And yet, there are now approximately 300,000 gallons of crude oil spoiling what had been one of the most pristine ecosystems on the planet. To put this event in perspective, recall the spill that occurred in San Francisco bay in 2007 when the cargo ship Cosco Busan collided with a bridge abutment, spilling approximately 58,000 gallons of its fuel oil—less than 20 percent of what was released on Nightingale Island.

Spills of this magnitude happen all too often. A 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office found that from 1990 to 2005 there were 51 oil spills from vessels in U.S. waters causing damages exceeding $1 million. The cost of the Cosco Busan spill has not yet been determined, but estimates place the amount in the neighborhood of $60 million.

The same report found that the three main factors affecting the cost of a spill are remoteness of location, the type of oil spilled, and the time of year the spill occurs. Clearly, locations don’t get more remote than Nightingale Island. And crude like the kind spilled in this case is described by the GAO’s report as likely to impose “severe environmental impacts” and harm “waterfowl and fur-bearing mammals through coating and ingestion.” Which brings us back to Nightingale’s reputation as an avian paradise. Tragically, this event also checked the timing box, as many of the birds that nest on the island are molting, meaning they’re spending more time on shore, preening their feathers—one of the behaviors that causes them to ingest oil.

Dr. David Guggenheim, commonly referred to as the “Ocean Doctor,” was at the midway point of his Cape to Cape Expedition and arrived at Nightingale Island the night before the spill. He and his crew were in position to jump directly into the recovery effort, and he has since returned to the U.S. to tell the story and plead his case for assistance. As of April 3, about 5,000 oiled birds had been transported to Tristan da Cunha from Nightingale and Inaccessible Islands, but many more are still waiting to be rescued.

The immediate concern about the situation at Nightingale Island is the effect the oil will have on the “uncountable” number of birds, including half the world’s population of the endangered Northern Rockhopper Penguin. There’s also the question of whether rats—frequent stowaways on cargo vessels and the proverbial first to leave a sinking ship—may have found their way from the hold to the shore. As a non-native species on Nightingale with no natural predators, rats could devastate the ecosystem if they manage to establish a population.

The bigger take-home lesson is that once again we have proven no spot on the planet, no matter how remote, is safe from the dangerous risks of our fossil fuel economy. As a culture, we have become inured to the constant occurrence of oil spills. On average, three times per year oil spilled from ships causes more than a million dollars in damage to our coastlines, but unless that accident happens in the harbor of one of the world’s most environmentally conscious cities, or the sheer magnitude of the spill exceeds anything we have ever experienced, no one bats an eye.

For the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha who proudly tout their existence “far from the madding crowd in the South Atlantic Ocean” and for the endangered seabirds of Nightingale Island, this spill is the tragedy of a lifetime. For the rest of us, it’s little more than business as usual.

National Geographic Photographer Andrew Evans arrived on Nightengale Island shortly after the spill occurred. Watch the video he put together:

Michael Conathan is the Director of Oceans Policy and Lee Hamil is an intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team.

Japan’s recent 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the tsunami it caused together killed 9,737 people and left an additional 16,501 missing. The destruction left millions homeless and caused almost $200 billion in damage.

These natural disasters caused severe damaged to 4 of the 6 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leaving them without functioning primary, secondary, or tertiary cooling systems. The resulting partial meltdown of the core at one reactor and of a waste fuel rod storage tank in another has resulted in the release of radioactive material into the atmosphere, soil, and water, forcing the evacuation of what was at first a 12-mile radius and now a 19-mile radius surrounding the facility.

Though reactors in the United States are built to strict safety standards, they are nevertheless vulnerable to any number of natural and manmade disasters, from earthquakes and tsunamis to flash floods, droughts, and hurricanes. U.S. reactor safety standards have been effective in preventing catastrophe, though a recent report highlights 14 “near misses” where improperly implemented safety protocols nearly caused major problems. More troublingly, many of these standards were based on an understanding of our climate system that is now 40 years out of date. Today we know that climate change is making floods, droughts, and hurricanes stronger and more frequent, which means we must ask whether our safety standards, even when followed perfectly, are enough to prevent disaster.

As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducts its review of U.S. nuclear safety in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, they need to be sure they are doing a thorough review of all possible risks, and should not ignore recent science about how climate change could increase those risks.

Current state of US nuclear plant safety

The United States currently has 104 functioning power reactors at 65 sites around the country, roughly a quarter of which use the same “Mark 1” containment vessel design used in the failing Japanese reactors. They supply roughly 20 percent of the country’s total electricity needs. Nuclear plants demand large sources of water in order to cool and control the core temperatures of the reactors that power them. To meet this inevitable requirement, nuclear plants are situated in low-lying areas near rivers and lakes, and many others are built on the coasts. This proximity leaves these plants vulnerable to floods and other water-related disasters.  (See our map below.)

(click for a high res version.)

Many regulations are already in place to ensure that nuclear energy remains safe from floods, surges, tsunamis, and droughts. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, oversees licensing applications, reactor specifications, and radioactive waste disposal. The Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, or ACRS, also reviews the adequacy of proposed safety standards and creates individualized specifications to withstand the projected worst-case disasters for each plant location. Nuclear facilities are initially granted a 40-year license that must be renewed after 20 years. They then have the opportunity to extend their license for additional 20-year increments.

The problem is that our nuclear reactors are all old. Thirty years old on average in fact, since political will for new nuclear reactors has weakened since the 1979 Three Mile Island incident. Seven operating reactors have eclipsed their original 40 year lifespans and been permitted to operate for another 20 years. This makes them vulnerable to problems, like stronger floods caused by climate change, about which we had considerably less knowledge three to four decades ago when the plants were built.

Climate change will increase certain risks

Climate change will compound existing weather-related risks. In the years since most of our nuclear reactors were built, we’ve learned that climate change is increasing the risk profile of many kinds of extreme weather. Two scientific studies published this year in Nature have supported this. Large and destructive floods once thought likely to happen only once in 100 years on average are now expected to happen every 20 years: a five-fold increase. Similar trends hold for droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires. Droughts and heat waves can impact nuclear reactors because they use large amounts of water in the power generation process. If water levels drop too low, or the temperature of adjacent water bodies rises too high, the ability of the reactors to operate can be impaired. Sea-level rise is also of particular concern, since many of our nuclear facilities are located on the coast.

In response to this growing awareness of disasters that can result from climate change, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, released a safety guide in 2003 detailing flood-related hazards to nuclear power plants on coastal and river sites. The safety guide suggests that newly constructed plants should account for several consequences of climate change over the lifespan of the plant:

• Rise in mean sea level: 35-85 cm
• Rise in air temperature: 1.5-5 ⁰C
• Rise in sea or river temperature: 3 ⁰C
• Increase in wind strength: 5-10 percent
• Increase in precipitation: 5-10 percent

Higher sea levels, in combination with the warmer air, water, and sea temperatures will produce larger, stronger waves, increase the flow rate of rivers, and alter the dominant wind patterns, according to the report. The IAEA recommendations offer a good framework for assessing siting of new nuclear facilities, but current safety standards at the 104 operating nuclear reactors in the United States remain in question. Are they sufficient to deal with the increased risks caused by climate change?

This is a question we must answer, and soon. As we have written at Science Progress before, climate change creates considerable uncertainty for businesses and governments who must make difficult decisions that will affect the way we do business over the next 10, 20, or 40 years. In making long-term decisions about policy and business, decision makers need to have all the data they can get. The problem is that extremely rare events by definition provide us with little opportunity for study, even though their impacts can be catastrophic.

The seawalls at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex, for example, were designed to withstand an 18-foot wave, though the tsunami that caused the eventual nuclear meltdown was estimated to have been more than 40 feet high. Japanese engineers simply didn’t have enough data to accurately predict just how big a tsunami could be. Could this happen in the United States? For reference, the San Onofre reactor in California is built right on Pacific coast, with a sea wall of only 23 feet.

The bottom line is that sometimes, what we think to be a “worst case” scenario is not really the worst case. Just because there is uncertainty about how climate and weather will affect our nuclear reactors does not mean we should ignore the issue. Quite the opposite; it would be negligent to ignore this uncertainty as we continue to assess our nation’s nuclear safety standards.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken some steps to incorporate current climate science into its standards, but it has not gone far enough. In 2009, the NRC released an information notice that suggested plants re-evaluate flood protection measures, but they did not require action. To make matters worse, the guidelines in use were established in 1977, with the latest updates occurring in 1984. As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducts its review of U.S. nuclear safety in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, they need to be sure they are doing a thorough assessment of all possible risks, and should not ignore recent science about how climate change could increase those risks.

Countries around the world have already begun to take increased risks from climate change into account in their nuclear safety protocols.  It’s high time the United States follows suit. The United Kingdom has insisted that new nuclear plants demonstrate countermeasures taken to prevent damage from more extreme floods, France has begun reviewing all 58 of its reactors to check how much flooding they can handle, and Austria has even called for nuclear “stress tests” similar to those banks undergo. Germany has even ordered all reactors built prior to 1980 (all American reactors would qualify) to be shut down for three months.

The disaster in Japan has afforded the United States the opportunity to re-examine the safety of its own fleet of nuclear reactors. Given how often we underestimate the “worst-case” scenario, this is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.

Sean Pool is Assistant Editor for Science Progress, Elaine Sedenberg is an Intern with Science Progress, and Matt Woelfel is an Intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team. The authors would like to thank Kate Gordon, Richard Caperton, and Valeri Vasquez, and Evan Hansleigh for their invaluable contributions to the article.

Take a look at our map, based on new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which shows just how much worse our forecasting would be without polar-orbiting environmental satellites.

For 2010′s “Snowmageddon” storm, without the satellite data, NOAA’s forecasts would have lost as much as 50 percent of their accuracy, underforecasting snowfall in Washington, D.C. by almost foot, and rainfall in the Gulf by up to an inch.

The resulting failure to prepare for flash floods, roadside strandings, air traffic delays, and transit interruptions could halt all commerce. Even worse, failing to maintain our satellite network, according to NOAA, would reduce future flood preparedness time from days to mere hours, putting human lives at risk.

We here at CAP and Climate Progress have been keeping close tabs on House Republicans’ efforts to make the country more vulnerable to extreme weather events. If Congress refuses to fund new environmental monitoring satellites to replace aging spacecraft that could fail at any time, it will undoubtedly expose Americans to increased risk from storms, floods, blizzards, and hurricanes. Meanwhile, more and more science is emerging that strengthens the link between unprecedented weather phenomena and human-caused global climate change.

The GOP-controlled Congress took steps to eliminate $700 million in funding for NOAA’s satellite program in its bill to fund the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year (until October 2011). Though that bill is still being negotiated, the three-week continuing resolution that keeps the government open until April 8 also contained cuts to NOAA’s vital satellites.

As I have written, making these short-sighted cuts now will force taxpayers to spend three to five times as much to buy exactly the same equipment 18-months down the road—a delay extremely likely to leave the nation without coverage since our current satellites are approaching the end of their projected service lives. Failing to replace these vital sources of data is simply not an option. This is because these satellites are critical to our ability to predict and prepare for high-impact weather phenomena.

How critical? The graphics below show a “with” and “without” comparison of how forecasts for the “Snowmageddon” storm of 2010 would have been impacted by the loss of NOAA’s satellites. The first set of maps shows actual rainfall experienced in the central Gulf Coast; NOAA’s rainfall predictions; and the predictions that would have been filed without satellite data. The second set shows the same progression for the snowfall forecast in the mid-Atlantic region.

(click to enlarge)

Without the satellite data, NOAA’s forecasts lose as much as 50 percent of their accuracy, underforecasting snowfall in Washington, D.C. by almost foot, and rainfall in the Gulf by up to an inch. The resulting failure to prepare for flash floods, roadside strandings, air traffic delays, and transit interruptions could halt all commerce. Even worse, failing to maintain our satellite network, according to NOAA, would reduce future flood preparedness time from days to mere hours, putting human lives at risk.

Does it snow where you live? Does it rain? The GOP wants you to wait a year and a half and then pay five times as much to eventually get a reasonable estimate of how much wet stuff is going to fall from yonder cloud. Apparently their intention is to boost the economy through sales of bottled water, batteries, and toilet paper so everyone is prepared when the next big storm hits. Absent a substantial investment to maintain our environmental satellite network, it could happen any time—without warning—so you better start shopping.

Michael Conathan is Director of Ocean Programs at American Progress. This article is cross-posted at Climate Progress.

On Tuesday, in its latest three-week extension of government spending, the GOP, apparently not content with the depth of its evisceration, upped the ante by voting to cut an additional $115 million from NOAA’s Acquisition account.

As we wrote in February after the initial cuts passed the House:

At least an 18-month gap in coverage will be unavoidable without adequate funding for new polar-orbiting satellites this year. More troubling, taking an acquisition program offline and then restarting the process at a later date would lead to cost increases of as much as three to five times the amount the government would have to spend for the same product today.

So here’s the choice: Spend $700 million this year for continuous service or $2 billion to $3.5 billion at some point in the future for the same equipment and a guaranteed service interruption.

The tragic events in Japan serve as the most recent reminder that betting against Mother Nature is a losing proposition, yet House Republicans seem intent on insisting they can protect Americans without adequate information. They know the hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods are coming. Apparently we simply can’t afford to know when.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Oceans Policy at the Center for American Progress. This is cross-posted at Climate Progress.

Efforts to improve climate literacy may prove ineffective because they don’t reach their intended audience, or perhaps because those people who disagree with conclusions from climate scientists need more than explanation. People don’t want to be told that they are science illiterate. They may disagree with the scientific consensus because of misconceptions about the process of science or because of distrust. They want to see the data for themselves and make their own conclusions.

We at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC, think we should help them do just that. Scientists and writers at the NSIDC have been experimenting with such an open approach to data sharing since 2006. Through the Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website, we not only make near-real-time data available to the public, but also explain it in basic terms. The project is a collaboration between scientists and science writers at the center, and made possible by our access to near-real-time data.

The decline of Arctic sea ice extent is one of the most visible signs of climate change. Since satellite records started in 1979, Arctic sea ice has declined more than 30 percent at the end of summer. Researchers expect the trend to continue, with the Arctic Ocean becoming ice-free in summers well before the end of the century.

NSIDC archives and distributes data related to snow, glaciers, sea ice, and other elements of the cryosphere, or frozen regions of the Earth. And since we provide satellite data on sea ice extent, we have become a go-to resource in recent years for both journalists and the general public who want to know more about the changes in the northern polar region.

The white Arctic sea ice cover reflects sunlight that would otherwise warm the frigid ocean waters beneath the ice. As the ice cover declines in summer, more heat accumulates in the ocean, which leads to further melting and amplifies climate warming.

The Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website started out of a need to efficiently convey information. In 2006, overwhelmed with questions about shrinking Arctic sea ice extent, our data center started a simple web site to share updates on conditions at the end of the summer melt season. Then in 2007, Arctic ice extent fell to a record low, covering just 4.28 million square kilometers for the month of September. That record low fostered an explosion of interest in sea ice data from the general public as well as journalists, and that attention spurred us to turn our simple site into a year-round project.

The site, now partially funded by a NASA grant, includes daily updates of sea ice data, along with monthly to weekly posts written by scientists in collaboration with science writers. The posts provide context for the data—scientists compare the current extent to previous years and discuss the weather contributing to current conditions. We also address questions brought up by readers.

Making data available to the public is a popular idea, but simply providing access to data is not enough. Most NSIDC data were publicly available before we started the Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website—they were just difficult for a nonscientist to find and interpret. Scientific terms such as bias, statistical significance, and error can be easily misinterpreted and need explanation.

In addition, data documentation for scientific users sometimes assumes basic knowledge that nonscientists lack—for example, where the data come from in the first place, how they are obtained, and what conclusions one can make from the data. We learned this lesson after a sensor degraded on a satellite, yielding erroneous sea ice extent. Scientists quickly caught the problem and had another data source lined up, but the erroneous data led to pointed questions and even accusations of malfeasance from readers of our site. Although our site provided links to technical documentation that explained the glitch in the satellite data, most readers didn’t read it, or didn’t understand it. We ended up explaining the issue with a series of special posts that started with the basics.

People have responded both positively and negatively to the Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website. We receive a surprising amount of criticism, often from people who disagree with mainstream climate science and see our site as biased. At the same time many journalists, teachers, and others have written in to commend the site. By explaining our data and science to the public we open ourselves to greater public scrutiny, but we also facilitate better communication and understanding of sea ice and climate.

Government and science organizations are increasingly pushing the idea of free and open access to data. But in order to make those data useful and clear, we also need to provide people with the tools to understand and work with the data. The Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website is doing just that for ice data. We hope others will join us in making climate change data more transparent and available to all.

Katherine Leitzell is a science writer at the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder Colorado.

Weather predictions used to be a frequent punchline but they have improved dramatically in recent years. More often than not you’ll need an umbrella if your local television channel or website of choice tells you to bring one when you leave the house. But we could take a huge step back to the days when your dartboard had a reasonable chance of outpredicting Al Roker if House Republicans have their way with the 2011 federal budget.

The House of Representatives is debating the Full Year Continuing Resolution Act (H.R. 1) to fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011. The Republican leadership has proposed sweeping cuts to key programs across the climate change, clean energy, and environmental spectrum. They have also decided that accurate weather forecasting and hurricane tracking are luxuries America can no longer afford.

The GOP’s bill would tear $1.2 billion (21 percent) out of the president’s proposed budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. On the surface, cutting NOAA may seem like an obvious choice. The FY 2011 request for the agency included a 16 percent boost over 2010 levels that would have made this year’s funding level of $5.5 billion the largest in NOAA’s history.

Even this total funding level, however, is woefully insufficient for an agency tasked with managing such fundamental resources as the atmosphere that regulates our climate, the 4.3 million square miles of our oceanic exclusive economic zone, the ecological health of coastal regions that are home to more than 50 percent of all Americans, response to environmental catastrophes including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and fisheries that employ thousands of Americans and annually contribute tens of billions of dollars to the national economy.

More than $700 million of the president’s proposed 2011 increase in NOAA funding would be tagged for overhauling our nation’s aging environmental satellite infrastructure. Satellites gather key data about our oceans and atmosphere, including cloud cover and density, miniscule changes in ocean surface elevation and temperatures, and wind and current trajectories. Such monitoring is integral to our weather and climate forecasting and it plays a key role in projections of strength and tracking of major storms and hurricanes—things most Americans feel are worth keeping an eye on.

In fact, NOAA has been making great strides in hurricane tracking. The average margin of error for predicting landfall three days in advance was 125 miles in 2009—half what it was 10 years prior. This data translates into a higher degree of confidence among the public in NOAA’s forecasts, which means individuals will be more likely to obey an evacuation order. Further, since evacuating each mile of shoreline costs approximately up to $1 million, greater forecasting accuracy translates to substantial savings.

The United States needs these satellites if we’re to continue providing the best weather and climate forecasts in the world. The implications of the loss of these data far exceed the question of whether to pack the kids into snowsuits for the trip to school. The concern here is ensuring ongoing operational efficiency and national security on a global scale. In some cases it can literally become a question of life and death.

Consider the following numbers:

• The $700 billion maritime commerce industry moves more than 90 percent of all global trade, with arrival and departure of quarter-mile long container ships timed to the minute to maximize revenue and efficiency. Shipping companies rely on accurate forecasts to set their manifests and itineraries.
• Forecasting capabilities are particularly strained at high latitudes and shippers have estimated that the loss of satellite monitoring capabilities could cost them more than half a billion dollars per year in lost cargo and damage to vessels from unanticipated heavy weather.
• When a hurricane makes landfall, evacuations cost as much as $1 million per mile. Over the past decade, NOAA has halved the average margin of error in its three-day forecasts from 250 miles to 125 miles, saving up to $125 million per storm.
• Commercial fishing is the most dangerous profession in the country with 111.8 deaths per 100,000 workers. A fisherman’s most valuable piece of safety equipment is his weather radio.
• When disaster strikes at sea, polar-orbiting satellites receive emergency distress beacons and relay positioning data to rescuers. This resulted in 295 lives saved in 2010 alone and the rescue of more than 6,500 fishermen, recreational boaters, and other maritime transportation workers since the program began in 1982.
• Farmers rely on NOAA’s drought predictions to determine planting cycles. Drought forecasts informed directly by satellite data have been valued at $6 billion to 8 billion annually.
• NOAA’s volcanic ash forecasting capabilities received international attention last spring during the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull. The service saves airlines upwards of $200 million per year.
• NOAA’s polar-orbiting satellites are America’s only source of weather and climate data for vast areas of the globe, including areas key to overseas military operations. Their data are integral to planning deployments of troops and aircraft—certain high-atmosphere wind conditions, for example, can prohibit mid-air refueling operations.

All of these uses will be compromised if the Republicans succeed in defunding NOAA’s satellite program. At least an 18-month gap in coverage will be unavoidable without adequate funding for new polar-orbiting satellites this year. More troubling, taking an acquisition program offline and then restarting the process at a later date would lead to cost increases of as much as three to five times the amount the government would have to spend for the same product today.

So here’s the choice: Spend $700 million this year for continuous service or $2 billion to $3.5 billion at some point in the future for the same equipment and a guaranteed service interruption.

Environmental satellites are not optional equipment. This is not a debate about whether we should splurge on the sunroof or the premium sound system or the seat warmers for our new car. Today’s environmental satellites are at the end of their projected life cycles. They will fail. When they do, we must have replacements ready or risk billions of dollars in annual losses to major sectors of our economy and weakening our national security.

That’s an ugly forecast. Tragically, it’s also 100 percent accurate.

Michael Conathan is Director of Oceans Policy at American Progress. This is cross-posted at the Center for American Progress.

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In The Inquisition of Climate Science, former Reed College president and National Science Board member James Powell elucidates the landscape of climate denial; diagrams, analyzes, and debunks the most frequently used denier arguments; and advances a progressive vision for what science communication could become in the 21st century. Prepublication reviewers summed up the book: “A devastating, crushing blow against the deniers. I would not want to meet Powell in a dark alley.”

At once a quick read and an informational reference guide, The Inquisition of Climate Science is a must for climate science advocates as well as casual readers. Powell’s meticulous research makes the book a useful all-in-one guide to the science, politics, messages, and media coverage of climate change. At the same time, his engaging narrative style grabs the reader and makes the pages seem to fly by.

From the very first chapter, The Inquisition makes crystal clear the distinction between science and pseudoscience, and arms the reader with the tools to dispel common misconceptions. Powell opens the book with accounts of two dichotomous climate change conferences that exemplify the difference between legitimate, fact-based debate, and political demagoguery. The first, held by the American Geophysical Union, consisted of presentations by scientists about new data and findings about climate change.

In contrast, the second conference, organized by the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank, had a very different goal. Rather than bringing together scientists to discuss science using scientific evidence, the Heartland conference brought together “scientists, economists, legislators, policy activists, and media representatives” to repeat a set of talking points about the dangers of “climate alarmism.” Not only were no peer-reviewed scientific findings presented at the conference, but almost none of the speakers were published climate scientists. Instead, the Heartland Institute invited such figures as a former astronaut, the president of the Czech Republic, and an MIT meteorologist, almost the sole speaker to be a practicing scientist.

What Powell shows with such clarity is that the so-called climate “debate” is not a scientific one. In example after example he illustrates the lopsided nature of the climate discourse: with scientists using scientific evidence on one side, and political activists using knee-jerk imagery and philosophical misdirection on the other. In his analysis, Powell breaks down some of the most common hallmarks of the denier movement. “They:

• Engage in publicity stunts designed to gain media attention and that promulgate disinformation.
• Repeat claims long after scientists have shown them to be false.
• Make assertions without presenting any evidence to back them up. Had a speaker at the AGU meeting said that carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, the audience would have demanded to see the evidence.
• Have no scientific findings that falsify global warming.
• Have opposed global warming for twenty years. True, back then, many scientists were also skeptical, but as the evidence mounted, they changed their minds. Deniers do not change their minds, a sure sign that they base their denial not on science, but on ideology. To paraphrase Richard Lindzen, ‘global warming denial has always been about politics, not science.’”

The book also examines the connections between antiscience front groups and the fossil fuel interests that fund them. And with rigorous research, Powell shows how the same tactics of science denial have shown up again and again over the years, from the tobacco industry-orchestrated denial of the health effects of smoking, to groups who deny that HIV causes AIDS, to evolution denial, to the organized denial of the harmful health effects of toxic substances like asbestos and chromium hexafluoride.

The solution? In my interview with him, James Powell summed up his simple advice for scientists fighting for truth:

“It’s time for scientists to stand up and be counted. Not be reticent. Not be cautious. Not say for instance that there’s no way to tell whether Katrina was caused by global warming, but to say very forcefully that Katrina is exactly the kind of thing we can expect more of under global warming.”

Powell’s comprehensive book is a welcome addition to the growing literature debunking fossil fuel-funded, antiscience disinformation.

Sean Pool is assistant editor for Science Progress and Climate Progress. You can download or stream the whole interview above. You can order the forthcoming book here.

Today, science policy analysts often assume a standard narrative about the controversy over genetically engineered crops and animals intended for use in agriculture or food. It goes something like this: GE products were introduced with little notice or public protest in the United States, but Europeans took a more precautionary approach, alleging a host of environmental and food safety risks. European precautionary attitudes launched a global controversy of GE crops that, depending on one’s perspective, is a tempest in a teapot—a great deal of worry over very little actual risk—or is a signal event that has exposed grave weaknesses in the U.S. regulatory approach.

From this starting point, proponents and critics of GE crops and animals commence their mudslinging. More generally, scholars of science and technology cite this narrative as evidence of the need to conduct public consultations in advance of introducing a potentially controversial technology.

Although the standard narrative has a germ of truth, it is in two respects quite mistaken. For one thing, early GE products were subjected to significant debate in the United States, concluding with an unprecedented congressionally imposed moratorium that only expired after the completion of an equally unprecedented study conducted by the executive branch Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1992.[i] For another, the U.S. biotech industry did in fact conduct extensive public consultations between 1988 and 1995. These consultations revealed the potential sensitivity of points that eventually became deeply controversial, but they also convinced mainstream U.S. environmental organizations that issues in agricultural biotechnology were not the most important fish they had to fry.[ii]

There are many lessons that might be inferred from these correctives to the standard narrative, but in the present context the point is simply this: What everyone knows is sometimes wrong.

The first genetically engineered microbe intended for use in agriculture or food production were bacteria that had been modified to produce bovine somatotropin, a hormone secreted naturally by lactating dairy cows. The synthetic version made by GE microbes could be produced at a scale and cost that made it feasible for dairies to administer shots of the hormone in order to increase milk production, particularly in cows nearing the end of a lactation cycle. The second microbe, however, was recombinant rennet, the complex of enzymes (traditionally derived from the entrails of slaughtered calves) used to turn milk into cheese. Although recombinant bovine somatotropin was one of the most controversial technologies ever to move through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, recombinant rennet elicited not a peep of protest. It was, perhaps, unseemly to suggest that we should keep slaughtering baby calves in order to make cheese.

The silence that accompanied the introduction of recombinant rennet in the mid-1990s led some scientists to think that the hubbub over genetic engineering was already over when the first GE crops were introduced a few years later. Indeed, as implied above, regulatory actions at the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service announcing the first generation of herbicide-tolerant soybeans hardly generated any protest at all from the environmental community. Pest-resistant varieties of cotton and corn that produce a toxin specific to caterpillars (bacillus thuringiensis, colloquially Bt) were also approved at the EPA with little public note.[iii] These GE crops were picked up in record time by the vast majority of U.S. farmers, but when biotechnology companies attempted to introduce them into Europe, they botched the job badly.

Soon the boomerang struck: European resistance was covered in the press and soon, GE crops were controversial everywhere. This is the part of the standard narrative that is correct, and reporter Dan Charles’s book Lords of the Harvest tells the story with aplomb. His book is still recommended reading for science buffs of all kinds.

In a political world where even the announcement of the first organism with an entirely chemically synthesized genome is already so last month, all this would seem like ancient history. Yet biotechnology continues to be a polarizing technology in agricultural and food science, and in rural America, generally. The recent NRC report “Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States” released in May will not settle the controversy. This report is remarkably thorough in documenting the way that GE crops have affected pesticide use as well as analyzing the economic fate of mainstream American farmers.

For the most part, the report characterizes these impacts in a positive light:

• Herbicide-tolerant or Bt varieties of corn, soybeans, cotton, and sugar beets have led to a reduction in both the amount and toxicity of agricultural chemical use in comparison to conventionally grown non-GE varieties of these crops.
• Use of GE crops is associated with other conservation practices such as reduced tillage, and public or worker health benefits have been observed in connection with the reduction of chemical use.
• Neither the movement of genes to wild or weedy relatives of these crops nor toxicity to nontarget species has occurred in a manner that raises concern.
• Farmers have achieved greater cost efficiencies in the production of GE crops, even after user fees for GE technology are included.
• The contracts and licenses introduced to protect companies’ intellectual property have not had an adverse economic impact on farmers.

But the report does document some negative consequences. Crops tolerant to the relatively benign glyphosate herbicides—Roundup is Monsanto’s version—have resulted in so much reliance on these chemicals that weeds are now becoming resistant. This may precipitate a switch to more environmentally harmful methods of weed control. Scientists have been more successful in forestalling insect resistance to Bt. In fact, Bt crops in particular have been responsible for reducing the unwanted effect of pesticides on species of insects such as bees or other pollinators, that not only do not damage crops, but may be beneficial.

The report is also quite candid in stating that the research needed to determine impacts on social capital and the quality of life in rural America has never been done, despite early warnings that these would be the areas in which biotechnology would pose the greatest threats to the sustainability of U.S. agriculture. Although processes of gene flow or environmental consequences have been studied with respect to impacts on native flora and fauna and with respect to ecosystem processes, they have not been studied with respect to their impact on other farmers who may be trying to grow organic or non-GE crops for the European market.

It is economically unimportant whether the commodity grades of corn and soybeans that are being used domestically are “contaminated” by pollen from neighbors’ fields. But the report notes unsubstantiated reports that farmers targeting “non-GE” markets may suffer economic losses from the effects of pollen drift. The reports are unsubstantiated because scientists at the USDA and in agricultural universities simply have not conducted the research needed to evaluate these claims. In this respect the report testifies to a gap between scientific work that gets done and scientific work that is constantly underfunded and deferred. This gap is arguably itself an “impact of genetically engineered organisms” and one of the main sources of continuing tension in rural America.

This research gap began to have real-world implications when organic growers started experiencing contamination from the GE crops being grown by their neighbors. The conflict between farmers using GE and non-GE organic growers is complex and lies at the heart of the issues that the NRC report identifies as insufficiently understood and under-researched. Organic standards prohibit the use of genetic engineering. This was a choice made by the organic growers themselves, albeit with considerable support from their customers. The big problem with GE pollen or seeds that blow across the fencerow is that they are simply not supposed to be there in an organic crop. Organic rules permit some contamination, so long as the organic certifier states that the GE pollen and seeds were not intentionally introduced, but neither growers nor buyers of organic crops are happy with this situation. The contamination problem is especially serious for those who produce organic seed. Small levels of contamination will be multiplied as the crop is grown out, and the value of an organic seed crop so contaminated can be substantially reduced.

In response to this problem, organic growers in some states lobbied for and in a few cases successfully passed local ordinances banning GE crops, generally on a countywide basis. This was, not surprisingly, resisted by those conventional farmers who wanted to grow GE crops in those counties. It was also seen as a threat by biotechnology companies and by conventional farmers in other areas who felt that their crops were being irresponsibly maligned by people who were campaigning for these ordinances. I’m sure that readers will be shocked, shocked to discover that getting voters to support such ordinances provoked statements on both sides that are not strictly true. In some states such as Michigan, statewide laws were passed to block efforts to enact these local ordinances. These fights caused bitter divisions in many rural areas, and in some cases, pitted university researchers who do work with organic growers against their colleagues who work with biotechnology.

The ante was raised even higher as a result of few legal actions taken by Monsanto, the leading biotechnology company, against farmers who stated that their crops had been contaminated by GE seed. The most celebrated case occurred in Canada, and concerned a farmer named Percy Schmeiser. Monsanto alleged that Schmeiser, who has never purchased Monsanto’s herbicide-tolerant canola seed nor signed Monsanto’s license agreement, was, in fact, growing Monsanto’s patented variety of canola, and sued him for infringement of their patent. Schmeiser claims that his fields were inadvertently contaminated. Canadian courts upheld Monsanto’s claim, holding that Monsanto’s patent was valid and that Schmeiser had intentionally violated it.[iv]

What may be more important than the facts of this case is the way that it has reinforced the view among opponents of GE that pollen drift is actually a conspiracy of the biotechnology industry to damage organic markets or even claim ownership of non-GE crops of all kinds. This view was promulgated among Mexican corn growers following the alleged discovery of transgenic maize (illegal in Mexico) in a sample collected from peasant fields near Oaxaca in 2002.[v] While this generated some controversy and a hearing of the Commission on Environmental Cooperation, a side treaty of NAFTA, the inability of either side to provide concrete evidence ultimately left the dispute unresolved.

The bitterness and distrust that has been sown in rural America over these disputes does not come through in the bland prose from the NRC report:

Anecdotal stories suggest that the crops of U.S. organic growers are being screened in the marketing chain for the presence of GE material and are being rejected if levels exceed market-determined levels. We do not have evidence to judge how widespread such testing is in the United States. This issue deserves more investigation.[vi]

The report is much more profuse (and should be strongly commended) in its presentation of evidence showing that, on balance, the impacts of GE crops have been positive when viewed from an environmental or public health perspective, at least over the short run. This evidence is especially important in light of continued allegations on the part of GE opponents that these crops are unhealthful and environmentally damaging. Schmeiser’s own website at www.percyschmeiser.com contains many links to others who make such allegations.

The report does discuss the complex economic causality that makes calculation of total impact difficult and inherently controversial. If, for example, farmers start using less of a toxic chemical, the makers of that toxic chemical may well lower the price, which may lead farmers to start using more of it. Should biotechnology be given credit for the initial decrease? Should it be blamed for the later increase? Questions like this have given those who would wrangle over “real” impact of biotechnology much fodder to chew on.

The NRC report may not silence those debates once and for all, but it does provide a very detailed analysis that should become the standard for contending parties who want to continue them. More importantly, to claim biotechnology has achieved environmental benefits involves an implicit comparison. Benefit relative to what was being done in mainstream agriculture before biotechnology is, in some respects, a very unambitious comparator. Benefit relative to what might have been accomplished had a significant fraction of the research funding that went into genetic engineering been dedicated to alternative agricultural technologies is so speculative as to be virtually meaningless.

Yet certainly some of the organic farmers who feel that the USDA and land grant universities abandoned them are thinking in just such terms. For them, it is a case of the road not taken, and that has made all the difference.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University.

[ii] Thompson, P. B. 2008. “Nano and Bio: How are they Alike? How are they Different?” in  K. David and P. B. Thompson, eds, What Can Nanotechnology Learn from Biotechnology? Social and Ethical Lessons for Nanoscience from the Debate over Agricultural Biotechnology and GMOs (Burlington, MA: Academic Press, 2008) p. 125–155.

[iii] Frederick H. Buttel, “The Environmental and Post-Environmental Politics of Genetically Modified Crops and Foods.” Environmental Politics 14 (3) (2005): 309–323.

[iv] Bruce Ziff, “Travels with my plant: Monsanto v. Schmeiser revisited.” University of Ottawa Law and Technology Journal 2 (2) (2005): 493–509.

[v] Abby J. Kinchy,  “Genes out of place: Science, activism, and the politics of biotechnology.” Ph. D. thesis, (University of Wisconsin, 2007).

[vi] National Research Council. The Impact of Genetically Engineered Corps on Farm Sustainability in the United States (2010) 3–33.

Additional Reference Materials:

Charles, Dan. 2001. Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

Buttel, Frederick H. 2000. “The recombinant BGH controversy in the United States: Toward a new consumption politics of food?” Agriculture and Human Values 17 (1): 5–20.

Those wishing an excruciatingly detailed overview of social and ethical issues associated with agricultural biotechnology might wish to consult:

Thompson, Paul B. 2007. Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective. 2^nd ed. Dordrecht, NL: Springer.

Glaciers such as those spread across Greenland hold almost 70 percent of the world’s freshwater. If all of the world’s glaciers were to melt, the sea level would rise approximately 230 feet. Although this extreme scenario is unlikely, the panel concluded that it would not be off base to link the latest ice island to embark into warmer waters with human-caused global warming.

This is the second major iceberg to break off, or calve, from glaciers this year, the first being the Merz Glacier Tongue in Antarctica in March. The new floating ice island is the largest iceberg in the northern hemisphere, and the freshwater contained in it is enough to supply the entire U.S. population with public tap water for 120 days, according to Dr. Andreas Muenchow, an associate professor of physical ocean science at the University of Delaware who testified before the subcommittee. Dr. Muenchow also noted in his testimony that the ice island was the largest piece to break from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier in 50 years.

If you have ever poured a cup of water over a glass of ice, you know how much more quickly the ice melts when it is in contact with water than when it sits in an empty cup. The same is true for glaciers. Once they break free from land and plop into the ocean, they can melt up to twice as fast, according to Dr. Rober Bindschadler, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, who also testified before the subcommittee. Land ice entering the sea and melting is the largest contributor to rising sea levels.

This event is consistent with scientists’ recent findings that sea level is expected to rise at least one meter (about three feet, three inches) by the end of the century due to global temperature increases but possibly by much more. These more recent projections far exceed the 0.6 feet-to-two-foot rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The scientists at the emergency briefing last week said the IPCC presented “underestimates.”

A 2008 study in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience, for example, showed that glacial melt could cause the sea level to rise by as much as five feet by 2100. A more recent study in Nature showed that catastrophic sea level rise of 20 inches per decade for five straight decades occurred during the last interglacial period when the world was 2 degrees warmer. Since human-caused global warming is expected to cause an increase in temperature by at least 2 degrees this century, the authors conclude that such a drastic jump in sea levels could happen again:

“…the potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability at the close of the last interglacial.”

“When the world warms, the Arctic warms more. When the Arctic warms more, Greenland melts,” explained Dr. Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University.  In his testimony, he noted that both Greenland and the Arctic are losing mass.

Greenland’s ice sheet alone holds 10 percent of the world’s ice.  If the whole of it were to melt, the scientists told the subcommittee that the global average sea level would rise 23 feet. Rep. Markey pointed out that water heights in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were almost this amount. Such sea level rise would drastically change the coastlines of each of the world’s continents, undoubtedly with severe social, economic, and security consequences.

Dr. Ally warned that it is possible that Greenland could completely melt by the end of this century. The scientists on the panel believe that a “tipping point” will be reached in one decade, where global temperatures become too high for Greenland’s ice sheet to remain frozen. Their claims are consistent with another study in Nature showing that the combined melting of Antarctic and Greenland coastal glaciers could create a “runaway effect” that would be difficult to reverse.

The panel of informed scientists that testified before the Select Subcommittee on Energy Independence and Global Warming agreed that this year’s melting in the polar regions is an early warning of future calamity. The scientists confirmed that this new ice island should be added to the snowballing narrative of global climate change.

Sean Pool is Special Assistant for energy, science, and technology policy at the Center for American Progress. Sarah Busch is a junior at Smith College and an intern at the Center for American Progress Energy Opportunity Team.

This coalition, promoting disinformation while claiming to be dedicated to science, is nothing new. In fact, today’s climate deniers are using the same playbook used by supporters of Ronald Reagan’s failed “Star Wars” program in the 1980s, and by the tobacco industry to avoid regulation of secondhand smoke in the 1990s. Indeed, science denial, free-market fundamentalists, and big industries have a long and sorry past together.

Let’s start with secondhand smoke. In the 1950s, scientific evidence demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the tars in tobacco smoke caused cancer. The tobacco industry responded by trying to get science on its side, pumping money into scientific and medical research that might show that tobacco was all right after all. It didn’t work. Despite decades of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the industry was losing the public relations battle, and, more important, customers. By the 1980s, smoking rates had decreased dramatically.

In the early 1990s, things got even worse for the industry, as science showed that secondhand smoke was deadly, too. Philip Morris executives decided then that science itself was their enemy. In 1993 they created an organization called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASSC, and a website, junkscience.com, which claimed that the science surrounding secondhand smoke was “junk.”

Soon, TASSC was making that claim about the science related to the ozone hole and global warming as well, and Philip Morris was recruiting third parties—mostly libertarian think tanks and antitax groups, such as the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, and National Empowerment Television, a conservative TV network—to join the effort.

It is perhaps not surprising that the tobacco industry found antigovernment groups willing to make common cause. But it is a bit more surprising that they found reputable scientists—indeed, some exceptionally distinguished ones—willing to help them. As we document in our new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming—the tobacco industry and libertarian think tanks knew that to make their claims seem credible, they would need scientists to make them.

In the 1950s, the Tobacco Industry had recruited C.C. Little, a prominent geneticist (and one-time eugenicist) to direct a “research program” to challenge the mainstream scientific position that tobacco was deadly.

In the 1970s, after Little retired, R.J. Reynolds created its own Biomedical Research Program, and recruited former National Academy of Science president Frederick Seitz. From 1979 to 1985, Seitz (by this time retired from the presidency of Rockefeller University) ran a research program for Reynolds that served to generate results and experts that could be deployed to defend smoking.

How did Seitz segue from defending tobacco to attacking these other lines of scientific inquiry? Well, in 1984, Seitz had joined forces with Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and William Nierenberg, retiring director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, to create the George C. Marshall Institute. The goal of the new organization was to defend President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (also known as “Star Wars”) from attack by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and in particular by the equally prominent physicists Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, and astronomer Carl Sagan.

Between 1984 and 1989, the Marshall Institute focused on defeating communism by emphasizing the Soviet threat and the defensive possibilities of Star Wars. In hindsight it is clear that they greatly exaggerated both. One 1987 piece by Jastrow thundered that “America had five years left” before the Soviet Union became so superior it would achieve world domination without firing a shot. The collapse of the Eastern Block only two years later proved them wrong, yet the Marshall Institute didn’t go out of business for its inaccurate advocacy.

Instead, they found a new enemy to fight, an internal enemy they perceived as the next great threat to liberty—environmentalism and the science that supported it.

During the 1988 election, candidate George H. W. Bush had promised to address climate change—pledging to meet the “greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” But soon after Bush took office, Nierenberg presented a briefing to the White House staff that claimed global warming was caused by the sun, not greenhouse gases, and that as solar irradiance declined during the 1990s, the Earth would begin to cool.

Despite a complete lack of evidence that the sun actually had increased in brightness during the previous few decades, Nierenberg’s briefing was taken seriously. One White House staffer commented on the written report that accompanied it, “Everyone has read it.” And it strengthened a faction within the White House, led by Chief of Staff John Sununu, which opposed environmental regulation.

Alan Bromley, appointed a few months later as the president’s science advisor, realized how the White House staff had been misled. After some effort, he managed to restart discussion of the pros and cons of carbon taxes and cap and trade systems within the White House. In 1992 President Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change despite continued opposition inside his own administration. But the Framework Convention was only a promise of intent—it set no binding limits on greenhouse gases. That was supposed to be done later, in what became the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in the mid-1990s. By then, the Marshall Institute had forged links to the American Petroleum Institute and to Republican leaders who now controlled Congress.

Meanwhile, Seitz and Nierenberg had joined forces with another Cold War physicist, S. Fred Singer, one of the original rocket scientists of the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1990, Singer had established the “Science and Environmental Policy Project” in office space shared with the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, a think tank financed by the strongly anticommunist Unification Church. In editorials published by the Washington Times (owned by the Unification Church) and in many other venues, Singer now took on the issue of the ozone hole, insisting that the problem was being exaggerated, and that there was no scientific consensus on the issue, and it would be premature to regulate chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC’s.

Of course, in retrospect scientists from around the world decisively and conclusively determined CFC’s to be a major threat the ozone layer, which is the planet’s natural line of defense against cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. Thankfully, world leaders listened to the urgency of the actual science, and in 1987 signed the Montreal Protocol, which set a declining cap on ozone-depleting pollution. Kofi Annan hailed the treaty as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date,” and thanks to swift political action, scientists believe the ozone layer will recover fully by 2050.

Undeterred by overwhelming scientific evidence, Singer also defended tobacco. In the mid 1990s, finding all avenues for legitimate scientific debate about the effects of second-hand smoke exhausted, he turned to   attacking the Environmental Protection Agency’s review process. His work was extensively cited in a handbook of antiscience circulated by the industry in 1993: Bad Science: A Resource Book. The two-hundred page collection of opinion pieces and quotations was designed to make mainstream science appear corrupt and unreliable. But legitimate scientific debate occurs in the pages of academic journals, not in op-eds or in industry-circulated handbooks.

Then, in 1996, Singer joined Seitz and Nierenberg in attacking a young scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Benjamin Santer, over his leadership of one chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report.  In the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, they attacked Santer, and claimed that he had altered the report to fit U.S. climate policy (as if there even was one!). The attack on Santer in op-eds and other non-science fora presaged last year’s assault on climate science, the theft of email from the University of East Anglia, and subsequent media feeding frenzy.

The attack also presaged Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s recent threat to indict climate scientists, and the witch-hunt by Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli focused on climate scientist Michael Mann, who had previously taught at the University of Virginia, and who has been exonerated by four separate panels. All these events are consistent with a longer history of attempts to undermine science and scientists to prevent government regulation of harmful industrial products and activities.

The New York Times recently declared the East Anglia affair a “manufactured controversy,” but this is just the most recent in a pattern of manufactured controversies spanning decades, a product of the ideology that George Soros has called “free market fundamentalism.” It is an ideology that rejects the idea that government regulation is ever appropriate.

Over the past half century, science has demonstrated that many industrial activities and consumer products are damaging to the natural environment and to human health: tobacco, DDT, acid rain, ozone depletion, and the burning of fossil fuels. These activities have unintended consequences that the marketplace did not anticipate, and did not succeed in preventing. Because these unintended consequences are “market failures,” it is reasonable to conclude that something needs to be done, something that creates a “price” for bad behavior that markets can recognize.

That something could be a carbon tax, or it could be a cap and trade system, or it could be some other form of regulation or prevention. Yet some people have continued to insist—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that all problems can and should be solved in the marketplace and no government action is needed. Because science suggests that government action is needed to protect the common good, free market fundamentalists have come to see science itself as their enemy.

The efforts of these free market ideologues to undermine legitimate scientific debate in the popular media helps to explain why, 18 years after President Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention, people are still confused about the science of climate change. It also helps explain why the federal government has taken no action to reduce emissions while nearly every other major economy puts together climate action plans. Meanwhile, the ice caps continue to melt, the permafrost thaws, and weather events become more extreme.

Ironically, worsening climate change and the increasing risk that we are approaching irreversible tipping points make it more likely that the heavy-handed government intervention that conservatives dread will actually be required. The longer we wait, the harder the problem of climate change will become to solve—and the more likely it is that climate change will become not just inconvenient, but very destructive, and perhaps catastrophic.

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history of science and provost of Sixth College at UC San Diego. Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology, living in Pasadena, California.

President Barack Obama appointed former U.S. Navy Secretary and former Mississippi Governor Ray Mabus to “restore the unique beauty and bounty of this region.” Mabus’s task demands the full resources of the scientific community of the gulf region, as well as specialists from around the globe. What’s more, British oil giant BP will be held liable for damages resulting from the spill, but many of these damages will require scientific research in order to understand and quantify. Without coordinated leadership from the government, the ecosystems and communities of the gulf may be suffering damages without reparation for years.

To meet this challenge, the administration must establish a clearinghouse for gulf region science as soon as possible, led by a scientific leader like Dr. John Holdren, the Presidential Science Adviser, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director, or Dr. Subra Suresh, the incoming director of the National Science Foundation. This effort must have a clear sense of urgency, with flexibility for rapid response. In the words of Sustainable Ecosystems Institute director Deborah Brosnan, we need a “science war room” for the Gulf of Mexico, including “ecologists, wildlife biologists, oceanographers, fisheries scientists, toxicologists and ecological economists.”

This gulf research war room should be an interagency effort, including NOAA, the Department of Interior (National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and Fish & Wildlife Service), Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Energy, NASA, and state agencies. The initial actions of the federal government to comprehend this catastrophe are a good foundation for such a coordinated effort:

Funding research: The National Science Foundation has taken the lead in soliciting academic research on the BP spill, requesting proposals for grants from its Rapid Response Research program on May 27. Since then, NSF has already awarded 44 grants worth nearly $5 million. Funding for this national priority should be multiplied at least a hundredfold and billed to BP. Program leadership should rapidly and transparently establish a strategic mission and a process for utilizing the best science to direct remediation efforts.

Data publication: The government has begun the effort of compiling and publishing the reams of scientific data relevant to the BP disaster online. Data.Gov/restorethegulf links to dozens of datasets and agency websites. GeoPlatform.Gov/gulfresponse includes multiple layers of geospatial data. All the data being collected by the government, BP contractors, and the academic community on this disaster should be brought together as rapidly and transparently as possible.

Scientific symposia: The government has begun convening scientific symposia on the BP spill. On May 27, Environmental Protection Agency, NOAA, and the University of New Hampshire Coastal Response Research Center convened a meeting to “study dispersant use and ecosystem impacts of dispersed oil.” NOAA, NSF, U.S. Geological Survey, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership (a group of oceanographic institutions) held an emergency Gulf Oil Spill Scientific Symposium on June 2 and 3 at Louisiana State University. Lubchenco outlined the work NOAA is conducting, as did USGS director Marcia McNutt. Clear lines of inquiry should be established for future conferences, and much greater outreach needs to be made to the scientific community.

One of the most critical roles for the gulf research war room will be the long-term monitoring of health impacts of this toxic event. Center for American Progress health experts Ellen-Marie Whelan and Lesley Russell recommend that the Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary for health “be designated to launch and oversee the coordinated response plan implemented whenever a situation arises that can threaten public health.” The assistant secretary  “would have responsibility for ensuring—in conjunction with other federal, state, and local agencies, academics, and the private sector—that needed services are delivered and information is collected, and that data, information, and resources are transferred to the responsible HHS agency or agencies.”

In the wake of the Exxon-Valdez disaster, criticism was leveled against the oil company and the federal response for ignoring the need to do long-term monitoring of health effects of the toxic spill. The government should learn from these mistakes.

The leader of this public effort must face the challenging but critical task of resolving conflicts with the scientific investigations now enmeshed with the foreign oil giant BP. As established by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, BP is liable for any damages to public natural resources, and government officials are now working with BP contractors on the natural resource damage assessment process, as required by 15 CFR 990.14(c). But quantifying exactly what those damages are will require unbiased scientific research.

BP is hiring as many scientists as possible to join its private contractor army and influence the research. The U.S. government must move quickly to protect the integrity of this process.

How quickly? Well, BP already is doling out grants from its $500 million Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, a Tobacco Institute-like program managed by a BP-picked panel to disburse scientific research grants in the coming years. In an environment of declining federal funding for the sciences, many research institutions have become dependent on private sources of financing to fund their research, and many are clamoring to get a piece of BP’s money. Louisiana State University, University of Florida’s Florida Institute of Oceanography, and Mississippi State University’s Northern Gulf Institute have already accepted $10 million each.

Currently, there is no mechanism to ensure that this BP-funded research remains impartial to the interests of the funder. In a foreshadowing of future conflicts, the Obama administration stands accused of “political intervention” for attempting to establish even moderate oversight over BP’s private slush fund. BP’s emerging control of the science behind its own natural resource damage assessment and resulting liability stinks of the same self-regulation that helped cause this disaster in the first place. It is the responsibility of the federal government to act on behalf of the public good and protect the integrity and transparency of the science surrounding the gulf disaster.

The Senate should take note of this pressing need as they debate a new oil regulation package over the coming week.

Brad Johnson is the Think Progress Climate Editor at the Center for American Progress.

Not surprisingly, environmentalists detest MTR, and have been outraged to watch it gain momentum thanks to regulatory policy changes made by the Bush administration. In fact, greens aren’t very happy with the Obama administration’s environmental regulators on this topic, either. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently granted a permit for another mountaintop mine in West Virginia, arguing that the environmental impacts of the project would be adequately mitigated.

But now, a group of prominent environmental scientists are lending their expertise to the case against MTR and, further, are questioning the very idea that mitigation of its damaging impacts is possible—or in other words, whether there is any such thing as a “mild” or “safe” mountaintop removal. In a recent “Policy Forum” article in the journal Science, a team of twelve environmental researchers survey MTR’s many nasty effects, which range from the destruction of ecosystems and the attendant reduction in biodiversity and species endangerment, to stream pollution, fish deformation, the befouling and dangerous pollution of human drinking systems, the increased risk of flooding, and so forth. Then, at the end of the paper, the scientists step beyond the mere “facts” of the case to denounce MTR in uncompromising terms, calling for policy changes to prevent its further use. What started out as pure science became, for these researchers, a clarion call to action:

Clearly, current attempts to regulate MTM/VF [“mountaintop removal mining with valley fills”] practices are inadequate. Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for losses. Considering environmental impacts of MTM/VF, in combination with evidence that the health of people living in surface-mining regions of the central Appalachians is compromised by mining activities, we conclude that MTM/VF permits should not be granted unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems. Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science. The United States should take leadership on these issues, particularly since surface mining in many developing countries is expected to grow extensively.

Such outspokenness is hardly typical, even for a “Policy Forum” in Science. In general, the standard scientific mode is to provide factual analysis, and then to step back and let policymakers process its implications and proceed, on that basis, to action. We report, you decide. Anything else, it has long been thought, means crossing over into the dreaded realm of “advocacy” and undermining a scientist’s claim to the coveted mantle of objectivity.

And yet there can be little doubt that, in part because it is so outspoken and so direct, the Science paper has had a major media impact. Indeed, the paper has put the Obama EPA in the hot seat: On the one hand, the agency seemed to embrace the latest findings (for how could it argue with the best available science?); on the other, it had just let another MTR permit go through. It suddenly seemed caught in an embarrassing contradiction.

Granted, there were also predictable swipes at the outspoken scientists from the right wing. An American Spectator writer even gloried in this YouTube clip of an MTR explosion. (Yay, destruction!) Scientific outspokenness will always trigger brush-back pitches from those adversely affected by it—that’s an unavoidable consequence of being out in the public arena.

But to me, the most intriguing question is this: How did the 12 environmental scientists on the Science paper managed to achieve such an impact? Did they plan for it, or was it just fortuitous?

So I called up Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the article’s lead author. I was something like her 30^th media interview on the topic, but unlike other journalists, I didn’t want to ask about either the policy or the science of MTR. Rather, I inquired about the communication strategy that had been employed to disseminate news about her paper. And thus unfolded a striking story of a group of scientists, with extremely important research in their hands, doing everything pretty much right to ensure its maximal impact.

As Palmer explained, the project out started as pure science. Her team of researchers began by synthesizing a wide array of data from different scientific fields on the consequences of MTR, in a more thorough way than had ever been done before—a process that consumed many months in the peer review process. But as the truly alarming results started to manifest, members of the scientists’ group soon coalesced around a strong, unanimous position about what they were finding. “Rather than just reporting the science,” says Palmer, “we all agreed that the consequences were so huge, we were very comfortable saying, ‘This just has to stop.’”

Resolved upon its message, the team then sought to disseminate it. They booked the National Press Club, bringing along 6 of the most media-savvy members of the 12-scientist group to make the case. And their message, as in the paper, laid out plainly the policy changes they felt needed to happen on the basis of their work, and upbraided the current administration for ignoring science.

“What’s significant about this article,” Palmer remarks, is “the overwhelming nature of the findings, the demonstration for the first time really clearly the cumulative impacts—but also, scientists making a policy statement. It’s not that common.”

And then came fortuity: Almost simultaneous with the paper’s release, the EPA permitted another MTR project, as mentioned before. That gave journalists double the angle they might have had otherwise, and boom: The result was overwhelming press attention to the case, made by scientists, for why this destructive procedure must end. Scientists made a very positive media splash, and one whose policy effects are likely to long reverberate.

“We’re at a point now where we really can’t afford not to speak up,” Palmer concludes of her efforts. “We’ve got too much at stake.”

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

A right-wing attack on presidential science adviser John Holdren earlier this year scratched the surface of a long-running conversation about population and the environment. After the Senate confirmed Holdren for his dual post as the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, conservative bloggers, pundits, and the Washington Times railed on him over sections of a 1977 textbook, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment, for which Holdren was the third author, with Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

The critics focused on portions of one chapter in the 1051-page book describing various population control measures tried or proposed around the world—some of them extreme and coercive. Cherry picking language from the text, they claimed that Holdren’s aim was to corral population growth through forced abortions or mass sterilization. As Chris Mooney explained after retrieving a copy of the book from a university library, describing such measures does, of course, not amount to endorsing them. Moreover, the authors in fact concluded that the best way to slow population growth was to increase access to family planning resources like birth control. Just as he did during his confirmation hearing, Holdren explained in response to the attacks that he rejects the idea of government-enforced population controls. In fact, what he said during the hearing was this: “When you provide health care for women, opportunities for women, education, people tend to have smaller families on average,” and in reference to global climate change, “it ends up being easier to solve some of our other problems when that occurs.”

The attacks on Holdren eventually dissipated, but the whole kerfuffle did raise the question of how best to talk about the complex relation between population and environmental sustainability. According to Shira Saperstein, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Deputy Director and Program Director for Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health at the Moriah Fund, many debates over the issue since the 1960s have been simplistic. She summarizes the thrust of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, as “more people equals more damage—and the answer to that is fewer people,” a conclusion she rejects. There is a relationship between population and environment she says, “but it is far more complex than people have acknowledged in the past. I think partly because we looked at these simplistically in the past, we made a lot of mistakes.”

Saperstein spoke with Science Progress about a new framework for thinking about population and sustainability based on social justice in a recent podcast conversation. Joining her were Laurie Mazur, director of the Population Justice Project and editor of the new book, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge, and Brian O’Neill, a scientist with the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “So much of the resistance to talking about population issues comes from a fear of where it’s headed,” Mazur acknowledges, “So many people are legitimacy concerned that concern about the global environment will take us back to the bad old days of population control.” For a full recording of the conversation, please see the audio available at the top of the page.

Population programs of the past, Saperstein says, “were too often focused on demographic targets, on limited births, on controlling population, rather than empowering women to make their own autonomous choices.” The worst programs following this logic resulted in sterilization campaigns in India and policies for forced abortions in China. The proper approach, the three experts say, is to realize that there is a significant unmet demand for family planning and reproductive health services around the world. Providing women with the opportunity and resources to make meaningful decisions about when and how many children to have gives them more control over their economic future while protecting their human rights. Given those choices, women tend to have smaller families. And over the next century, a secondary result of slower global population growth could be a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the three experts explain.

“Population matters,” says O’Neill, “It is not the largest impact on emissions—it’s not zero either.” He admits that while that sounds like a wishy-washy middle-ground conclusion, it’s important because of long-running debates between those arguing that population is the most important consideration for evaluating human impact on the environment and those who say it has nothing to do with it at all. “You’re not going to solve he climate problem—or probably any other environmental problem—just by slowing population growth,” he says. But development pathways and the nature of economic growth around the world provide the context in which societies must address climate change. As Mazur and Saperstein explained in a recent column, “In developing countries, urbanization is associated with rising per-capita emissions; as populations age, their per-capita emissions decline.” So population is one part of that social context.

Explaining the scientific research on the relationship between population and environment is one thing, O’Neill says, but the context for these conversations is equally important. A growing body of technical research helps, but he emphasizes that experts must understand the history and the legitimate concerns that people have about raising the issue of population-related policy as a means to environmental or even other development ends. “I think that a lot of time scientists get in trouble on this issue—and these are scientists who don’t work on population and environment,” he says, “because for some reason they feel free to talk about it as if they know what they’re talking about when they actually don’t.”

O’Neill says this is incongruous because in the case of climate change, “Someone who studies sea level rise would be pretty careful talking about ecosystem change because they know they’re not an ecologist and maybe they don’t exactly know what they’re talking about. But all of a sudden it’s a population issue and they feel free to say anything that comes into their head.”

Scientists, he says, are learning that an informed conversation more attuned to the social justice goals of population advocates is important. “Population, demographic change, does have consequences for emissions—and it’s okay to raise that,” he says, “It does not mean necessarily that it follows that demographically related policies are the best way to respond to climate change.”

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

Geoengineering proposals are usually divided into two categories. The first category, solar radiation management, or SRM, is a variety of techniques that decrease the absorption of incoming solar short-wave radiation. This is possible by either increasing the reflectivity of the Earth, an approach called albedo enhancement, or by diverting the incoming solar radiation. The most prominent techniques proposed so far are stratospheric aerosol injections, cloud-albedo enhancement, space-based sunshields, and increasing of the reflectivity of the environment. The second category, carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, aims to reduce the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases by removing them from the atmosphere. The most-discussed methods so far are improvements in land use and afforestation—the process of creating or rebuilding forests—as well as carbon capture from ambient air and ocean fertilization. Some of these methods, for instance reforestation, are already in use although not currently seen as geoengineering. The American Meteorological Society recently added a third category of geoengineering proposals, which includes vertical ocean pipes that increase downward heat transport.

Geoengineering shares with standard climate policies the aim to diminish the risks of climate change. Whereas adaptation activities increase our capacity to cope with the effects of climate change and mitigation measures reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, geoengineering differs from them as it is a deliberate attempt to exercise control over atmospheric phenomena. Geoengineering techniques do not detract all of the serious consequences from increasing GHG emissions and therefore cannot moderate climate change alone without proper mitigation and adaptation strategies. As well, the climate modification proposals do not approach the root of the problem: the ever-growing greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, solar radiation management methods would allow ocean acidification to continue unchecked, and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations would not diminish any way.

Geoengineering proposals can be loosely grouped into “soft” and “hard” proposals, both of which fall into solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal categories. While soft proposals might have less long-term effects, their implementation could be terminated more easily and the uncertainties are minor in comparison with hard proposals. Soft proposals include, for instance, land use management, afforestation, and albedo enhancement by painting some parts of urban areas white. The hard proposals involve termination problems, environmental, legal, and ethical issues, and a vast array of uncertainties and risks with regard to implementation, control, side-effects, and research. Hard proposals include albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulphur injections, space-based mirrors, and large-scale ocean fertilization. A report from the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, Geoengineering the Climate, which was released in September 2009, elicits a whole range of open questions with regard to the subject. For instance, a hard radiation management proposal, stratospheric sulphur injection, would have adverse effects on stratospheric ozone and would have a negative impact on the biological productivity, including food production. In this case, the cure could be at least as bad as the disease.

These are just some of the reasons for being cautious about geoengineering, even in the early phases of research and development. Another point of concern is the risk that the public might have unrealistic expectations about the plan B and consider it an easy technological fix to control climate change. Furthermore, its attractiveness increases the perception that, if there is a technological fix, then there is no need to transform carbon-intensive lifestyles in the affluent countries and elsewhere. Geoengineering can also obtain some support from those who believe that mitigation strategies have largely failed although investments in clean energy production might turn out to be fruitful in the long run.

However, most opinions on geoengineering proposals present mitigation and geoengineering proposals combined. One proposed compromise is to bring together mitigation and geoengineering undertakings in order to buy time with stratospheric sulphur injections.[2] On top of this we must consider the governance of geoengineering implementations since for the time being, there is neither an authority with appropriate global oversight, nor have the fairness issues been thoroughly scrutinized. If these projects actually made the planetary thermostat adjustable, major disagreements could arise. Even if some of the proposals could be implemented unilaterally the effects exceed national borders and require fair international agreements on the common means and targets of geoengineering.

It is inevitable that this plan B would give a rise to numerous controversies that are extremely difficult to solve. Further relevant questions include the reversibility of the methods, compensation, and fairness in the face of environmental, legal, political, ethical, social, economic, and technological consequences. Finally, we must consider national security concerns under geoengineering implementations, and especially the potential for global conflicts without proper international agreements on the appropriate use of geoengineering methods.

The general tone of Royal Society’s report is cautiously positive. Although it recognizes a number of uncertainties, it does not see them entirely as obstacles to carrying out various experiments or conducting a research program. All the geoengineering alternatives we have at hand are risky, particularly the hard proposals. The problem with the soft proposals, more than being unsafe, is that they are insufficient for working our way out of the climate change problem. Our understanding about the climatic system is far from complete, which restrains our ability to predict the outcomes. Even though it is possible to detect signals of climate change the question of planetary control is wholly separate—reading the signs is distinct from dominating them.

Professor Andrew Feenberg, a philosopher of technology, raised this point in his keynote speech at the conference of Society for Philosophy and Technology in July 2009 in the University of Twente, the Netherlands, when he was asked about the feasibility of geoengineering.[3] He replied that although it might be possible to implement some of the proposals and have the desired effects for a while, the side effects are unpredictable because of the incomplete understanding about the climatic system. It would be the height of human hubris to imagine that the immensely complicated systems we don’t fully understand would obey our will. Feenberg’s comment suggests that the bigger the intervention into nature, the more we should worry about our own ignorance. Even if we could buy some time with hard proposals, the side effects could turn out to be even more detrimental than the outcome of runaway climate change. Therefore, the idea of a plan B focused on planetary control through geoengineering might turn out to be nothing but a mistaken notion.

Sanna Joronen, Master of Social Sciences, is a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Turku, Finland. Her thesis focuses on the ethical implications of geoengineering. Dr. Markku Oksanen is currently an academy research fellow, based at the University of Turku. He is also a university lecturer in philosophy at the University of Kuopio, Finland.

Notes

[1] Keith, David. Annual  Review of Energy and the Environment 25(2000): 245-84.

[2] Wigley, Tom. “A Combined Mitigation/Geoengineering Approach to Climate Stabilization.” Science 314(2006): 452-454.

[3] Feenberg, Andrew. “Ten Paradoxes of Technology and the Transhuman Illusion.” Keynote speech at the conference of Society for Philosophy and Technology 9 July, 2009, The University of Twente, the Netherlands.

The young Bernard could little have imagined that his early experiments in cloud seeding were laying the groundwork for a far more ambitious project to affect not just the weather, but to radically reshape the earth’s climate. Earlier this summer scientists and policymakers gathered at a National Academy of Sciences meeting to discuss a suite of options and technical solutions to the climate problem. One of those options was ocean fertilization, a geoengineering technology aimed at grabbing the climate reins from their feckless trajectory and steering atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations back down to historical levels.

There are many compelling scientific arguments both for and against geoengineering via ocean fertilization, which is probably why it was discussed in earnest at the National Academy of Sciences. But even if our best science indicates that ocean fertilization will succeed, there are clear ethical reasons to rule it out, as it can never meet with the scrutiny that most of us take to be emblematic of justified, right action.

The proposal, first advanced in the 1980s by Woods Hole oceanographer John Martin, is to dump several tankers of iron filings into the sea in order to manufacture a mid-ocean algae bloom. Researchers project that such an algae bloom might then suck carbon out of the atmosphere, much like a ShamWow^® sucks soda from the moldy underbelly of your basement carpet. All of this sounds mighty enticing when you consider the unpleasant climatological upheaval that is slowly unfolding and that will fundamentally change the world in which our children live. On the other hand, given the complexity of ocean ecosystems and humanity’s reasonably embarrassing failure rate with ambitious engineering projects—the Panama Canal mosquito eradication project, the Everglades restoration project, the Project Stormfury attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by seeding them with silver iodide, to name just a few such failures—there’s plenty of reason to worry that tinkering with nature in this way may be ill-advised.

Rainmakers like Vonnegut were mere redistributive Robin Hoods, stealing rain from the rich and giving it to the poor. But the latter-day heirs to such research propose no simple redistributive deckchair shuffling. They aim to fix one mess not by straightforwardly cleaning it up, but by introducing another mess. In doing so, they threaten either to sink or to save our ship. Fertilizing the oceans runs a real risk that the citizens of this planet could fall victim to the same fate that eventually nailed the old lady who swallowed a fly: we could get caught up in an endless chain of curatives, repairing one problem only to introduce another. But that’s only if we blow it. If we get the science right, we could break the chain. We might have at our fingertips a relatively cheap way of reversing the atmospheric concentrations of carbon that the past hundred years of industrialized recklessness have left hanging over our heads.

Enticing though this gamble may be, focusing strictly on risk to the oceans and the planet is shortsighted. In a recent paper that I co-authored with my colleague Lisa Dilling, we pointed out that most of the arguments against ocean fertilization only paint half the picture: by focusing so strongly on risk, they underemphasize the extent to which rights and respect are in play. Their shortcomings stem from their openness to the possibility that getting the science right means that the technology is a “go.”

Sure, risk is a major concern with these technologies. We should all be worried about the implications of our actions, about the risks of destroying, or at least dramatically altering, the oceans and the climate. If ocean fertilization will create a scenario in which the oceans become uninhabitable to most fish and wildlife, this is clearly an unacceptable outcome and we ought not to proceed. But the science is unclear on this outcome, and there is strong evidence to suggest that we can fertilize the oceans without making a mess of things.

We argued instead that even if ocean fertilization were to yield a far more palatable outcome—say, perhaps, by producing enough algae to generate a banner fish harvest, thereby not only reversing climate change, but also feeding the world’s hungry—there are still strong ethical reasons not to use it as a method for reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

Consider, for starters, how slippery the term “pollution” is. It depends on your perspective whether it should be considered pollution at all. To most farmers, for instance, increased organic compounds are a gift from the gods, dramatically improving crop growth and foliage. Too many of these compounds however, and uh-oh, the crops die. In one case they’re essential; in the other, they’re a pollutant. The reason for this terminological slipperiness is that pollution is typically framed in terms of harms and benefits, making its categorization entirely contingent upon whether the affected party will be made better or worse off. Carbon dioxide is the same way: essential to plant life, but when enormous concentrations of it invade the atmosphere, it has the undesired effects that we are witnessing now.

Problem is, we don’t really know how welcome these harms and/or benefits will be. One farmer may need more of one compound for some future undisclosed project; another may need less. It is presumptuous and morally suspect to make assumptions about the extent to which those harms and benefits are really what is good or right for them. Moreover, it is flat wrong to assume that just because a particular action may confer overall benefits, that therefore that action is ethically permissible.

Consider: If I wake from knee surgery to a smiling surgeon who enthusiastically informs me that—“While you were asleep, we went ahead and added a pacemaker to your heart, just to be on the safe side”—I might have great reason to feel that I have been wronged, even if the pacemaker is 100 percent safe, and even if I am physically better off. Or consider this: If I return from vacation to learn that my neighbors—college students—have repaired the walls and furniture in my house, perhaps after they and 100 friends of theirs have had a raucous party during which my property was damaged, I may again feel wronged. Perhaps my neighbors have made me better off than I was before, maybe even by making improvements to my property. One would think I’d be grateful for such free labor. But there is a strong sense in which I would feel that they have heaped one wrong on top of another.

What makes an action right is not just whether that action makes the world better, but also whether those affected can agree to having their world made better by others. If my house was trashed due to this party, perhaps there are other remedies that I would like to explore that would be more appropriate for me, my family, and my property. If my neighbors take the initiative to repair my belongings without consulting me, they usurp my control over these possibilities, and in doing so, disrespect me and violate my right to do otherwise. They suddenly bear the responsibility for having changed something in my house that may have been reversible in another, more palatable way.

Just so with many geoengineering technologies: even though ocean fertilization might in fact make the world better, we need to ensure that the people who will be affected by these improvements could all agree to them. If, say, this giant algae bloom generates enough food to spark wonderfully delicious and nutritious new fisheries, that may be very good for the world, insofar as it may yield extraordinary benefits; but there are still strong rights- and respect-related ethical objections to aquaforming our oceans in this way.

What it would take for ocean fertilization to be justified, it seems to me, is that all affected parties, including non-human populations of animals and plants, could or would assent to allowing such a thing. This is a pretty tall order in the case of ocean fertilization, since the number of affected beings, human and non-, just about fills the set of all existing living things. We’re talking about engineering the climate, after all. We’re not just removing rain from one bucket and putting it in another.

It is my view that such a requirement is inordinately steep—so steep as to make such technical fixes ethically impermissible, particularly when there are other options available to us. Far better, for instance, would be to reduce our emissions, to find non-polluting energy sources, and/or to remove carbon and other greenhouse gasses through reversible means, like air capture or other secure sequestration methods. These projects have a much lower threshold of justification. The smaller the scale of a project, the fewer number of affected parties, and therefore, the fewer channels through which the project stands to trample the rights of those affected.

Perhaps you object. Maybe you think that we’ve already altered the climate such that many humans and non-humans will be affected by climate change against their wills. Most of those affected couldn’t or wouldn’t (or at least, didn’t) assent to the current changes that we’re experiencing now. Maybe because of this, we should be less concerned about what future generations can assent to and instead just focus on digging ourselves out of this hole. This is all compelling. But the way in which humans have altered the climate has been willy-nilly. It hasn’t been deliberate. Billions of people have acted independently, according to their own interests, to force the climate away from stability. Anthropogenic climate change is a colossal tragedy of the commons, a major failure of governance. We can’t point the finger at any one individual, or even at any very large group of individuals, and say that they’ve done something impermissible or disrespectful.

By contrast, geoengineering is very deliberate. For us to move forward with a technology that will orchestrate and steer our climate away from this tragedy, to a—fingers crossed—better outcome, is not simply for us to act on our planet, but to react—to react to the negative impacts of an uncoordinated and chaotic multitude. It is to accept the tragic transformation of the climate and to patch it over with a collective curative. It is to inject climate change with our collective culpability. Whatever happens after that point, after we have dramatically altered the flora, fauna, and chemical composition of our oceans, we will collectively be to blame.

If we move forward with projects to geoengineer the climate away from the mistakes of our predecessors, then the engineers of such a mammoth project will have to accept responsibility for the outcome. They (we) as a collective will be to blame. They (we) as a collective will have to own up to it. They (we) as a collective will really have to apologize to our children if we trash the earth for good. I think that’s unacceptable. We need to do something about climate change, yes; but we need to do something that only reverses what we’ve done, not that puts us on an uncharted climate path, forever lashing our collective responsibility to a policy that cannot possibly meet with the agreement, hypothetical or actual, of the billions that it will affect.

Benjamin Hale is assistant professor of philosophy and environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, resident faculty at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, and affiliated faculty at the Center for Values and Social Policy.

This morning, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and Subcommittee on Oversight held a joint hearing on “Scientific Integrity and Transparency Reforms at the Environmental Protection Agency,” which included discussion of the new procedures. Lisa Jackson, administrator of the EPA, testified on how the new IRIS process will help fulfill President Obama’s memorandum on scientific integrity by increasing transparency in science-based regulation.

EPA will now manage the entire IRIS review process, rather than the Office of Management and Budget, Jackson said. Dr. Francesca Grifo, Senior Scientist and Director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, discussed the importance of this change in control in a Science Progress podcast last month. The OMB previously had the power to change scientific advice, Grifo said, and described the problematic regulatory process under the Bush administration. “What we saw in the past was, rather than be courageous and come out and talk about which parts were policy and which parts were science, we saw changes in the science to cover up an often unpopular policy decision,” she said. Grifo explained in that interview that administration policy could break with the scientific advice, but the reasoning had to be clear, rather than resorting to an obfuscation of the data. “The key here is for all of us to see the scientific basis,” she said.

The new IRIS process requires that all written scientific comments on IRIS drafts provided by federal agencies be made public. Furthermore, most contaminant evaluations will be available on IRIS within two years of the review start date, Jackson said. The condensed process not only presents health-related information to the public more quickly, but also eliminates steps agencies could potentially use to inhibit the process, explained John B. Stephenson, director of natural resources & environment at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Under the old rules, agencies could declare a need for additional research to suspend the IRIS process and prevent or delay a substance from being added to the database. This gave agencies time to present studies that conflicted with the original “best available science,” Stephenson said.

Image: AP

A new paper in the April 24 issue of the journal Science, for example, concludes that scientists have greatly underestimated the impact that deforestation brought on by fires has on climate change. On a global scale, fires release into the atmosphere about half of the carbon dioxide that is contributed by the use of fossil fuels.

Fire season is a perennial reminder of how climate change is making life more dangerous for Americans right now. Steve Woodruff wrote about research on trends in western fires over the past decade last year here on SP, noting that climate scientists cited in a National Wildlife Federation report “project global climate change will bring summertime temperatures in the region that run 3.6 to 9 degrees higher than what’s now considered ‘normal,’ and that precipitation will decline as much as 15 percent by the middle of this century. The result will be a climate even more conducive to wildfire.”

Fortunately, the new research illuminates the complex relationship between fires and increased emissions—which in turn can allow for better fire management strategies. But as Chris Mooney explained in 2007, that process is behind where it could be on account of the Bush administration’s years of delay on producing national assessments of the impact of climate change around the country.

Find more information on wildfires on the interactive Human Toll of Climate Change map.

Image: AP/Keith Cullom

John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

Update: Holdren is doing rounds of interviews, including one in which he spoke to ScienceInsider about former SP advisory board member Tom Kalil, who has joined the office as deputy director for policy.

Update 2: ScienceInsider reports on the disproportionate focus given to Holdren’s comments about geoengineering, with this note:

(Update 6pm: In light of headlines like this and this, Holdren spokesman Rick Weiss emailed ScienceInsider to say: ”There was nothing in Dr. Holdren’s comments to the AP to suggest that the administration is actively pursuing or even currently envisioning a geo-engineering approach. The administration’s primary focus is still to seek comprehensive energy legislation that can get us closer to a clean energy economy, create green jobs and reduce dependence on foreign oil while reducing the risks of climate change.”)

The AP may very well have guessed its coverage would generate such headlines. Good way to grab attention; a questionable way to effectively communicate science policy.

The Omnibus Public Land Management Act is a collection of 170 different bills that includes the largest expansion of the nation’s Wilderness System in 15 years, as well as special provisions for management of national forests, scenic rivers, and other natural treasures throughout the country.

In signing the bill, President Obama declared his intention to fulfill Teddy Roosevelt’s vision:  “a vision that sees America’s great wilderness as a place where what was and what is and what will be—all are the same; a place where memories are lived and relived; a place where Americans both young and young at heart can freely experience the spirit of adventure that has always been at the heart of the rugged character of America.”

These are lofty sentiments, worthy of a historic moment such as this. But signing this bill is only the first step in addressing the diverse and vexing challenges facing our 700 million-acre public land estate—the approximately one-third of our nation’s landscape owned in common by all Americans. This estate includes national forests, national parks, national wildlife refuges, and lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Today’s land stewards face uncertainties and conflicts never imagined when Teddy Roosevelt appointed his friend Gifford Pinchot as the first chief of the Forest Service. Imagine their surprise at the responsibilities of modern resource managers to address accelerating energy development, invasions of exotic plant and animal species, fierce recreation conflicts, and hazards posed by sprawling subdivisions in the “wildland-urban interface.”

These challenges are outlined in a recently released report of the National Advisory Board of the Public Land & Resources Law Review at the University of Montana. “A Federal Public Lands Agenda for the 21^st Century” identifies urgent issues and proposes a menu of options to address them (see sidebar). This diverse group represented all points of the political spectrum, including former Clinton and Bush administration officials, academics, and prominent advocates. They agreed that it is time for innovative public lands policies that address the new issues that have arisen this century—climate change, energy development, wildfire concerns, and conflicts between recreation and other resource priorities.

“The American people,” concluded the National Advisory Board, “as trustees of the public lands, have always had a prominent voice in any discussion about the future of these lands and resources. We hope to engage them, through the new administration and the next Congress, in this important and perhaps overdue conversation.”

Others are calling for a reinvigorated conversation about public lands as well, and are not hesitating to offer their own suggestions of new directions to address these pressing issues. Here’s a sampler:

• In an article in Ecology Law Currents, a group of public land law experts convened by the California Center for Environmental Law and Policy identify 10 key public land issues demanding attention from the new administration, urging President Obama to “move beyond the traditional clashes between environmentalists and industry, restore balance to the management of the federal public lands, and give a more powerful voice to the local communities that live near and depend upon the federal lands for far more than just their livelihood.”
• A report released by the Western Landscape Conservation Series in Northern Arizona just before the November presidential election summarized ideas presented by leading scholars of public land policy in a seminar series hosted earlier in 2008. “Conservation and sound stewardship depend on an integrated, landscape-scale perspective to drive appropriate policy,” the report argues. “No longer can public lands management proceed in a piecewise manner, with different states, communities, and public agencies acting independently, limiting their focus to particular resources or jurisdictional boundaries.” The recommendations in this report are organized around the broad themes of water, forests, and tribal partnerships.
• A gathering in the winter of 2006 sparked publication of a report focused on Forest Service reform, available for purchase in hard copy only from the Center for the Rocky Mountain West. The contributing authors of “Challenges Facing the U.S. Forest Service: A Critical Review” don’t agree on everything, but editor Daniel Kemmis concludes that their commentaries “present a compelling case that the now well-established practice of on-the-ground collaboration across ideological lines is the best hope for the future of the public lands.” He argues that the diverse issues facing public land managers warrant a hard look at the institutional structures within which they operate—including the possibility of merging the Forest Service (now within the U.S. Department of Agriculture) with the Bureau of Land Management and the other public resource agencies housed in the U.S. Department of the Interior.  That perennial suggestion was the subject of a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee last month, as well as the focus of a related GAO report.

What conclusions can we draw from these (and other) pronouncements on public land policy reform? It is interesting to note that all these groups identified the lack of a coherent mission for public land management—a clearly articulated set of public values for which these lands have been retained in trust for future generations—as an obstacle for rational planning, development decisions, and conflict resolution. Consistent, too, are calls for progressive fire management policies, meaningful engagement of affected communities in development proposals, and proactive steps to deal with the predicted impacts of climate change.

Perhaps we are ready to recognize that our public lands—this great reservoir of biological diversity, connectivity, and renewal—are more than the sum of their exploitable resources. President Obama has an opportunity to fulfill the promise of his presidential campaign by moving boldly to protect and restore the integrity of our public lands and the institutions that govern them. After all, this is the landscape that Wallace Stegner so famously described as “the native home of hope.”

Sarah Bates is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy (formerly the Public Policy Research Institute) at the University of Montana, where she serves as an advisor to the National Advisory Board and the student organizers of the annual Public Land Law Conference. She previously served as the Deputy Director of Policy and Outreach at Western Progress, and has written extensively on natural resources law and policy.

I’m not personally scandalized to learn of DARPA holding a conference or having a discussion. One thing about geoengineering, after all, is that not only may we want to do it, but we might also have reason to be concerned about someone else doing it—so the more dialogue, the better.

Indeed, I suspect that at some point soon this topic, currently off the radar of most Americans, is going to come up in a very big way, whether through politico-media scandal or, very preferably, otherwise.

Why? Put simply, because at least in some versions, geoengineering is likely to be cheap, and likely to work. These two attributes are already proving intellectually irresistible to many climate scientists, who at minimum call for geoengineering to be “studied,” and who are already doing so themselves in climate models. At some point, as we continue to struggle to get a handle on the global warming problem, they may also prove practically irresistible to politicians and governments.

In a story in Wired magazine last year, I explained the most likely geoengineering scenario to get serious consideration: Infusion of the stratosphere with sulfate aerosol particles, which will reflect sunlight and cause global cooling. This we know with something bordering on certainty: It’s precisely what volcanic eruptions do. Our planet has already run the experiment. What other environmental side effects would occur is not nearly as certain, of course—this is where the real scandal and controversy kicks in—but in a situation of climate crisis, we might not have the luxury of worrying about them.

Indeed, a group of experts—Stanford’s David Victor, Carnegie Mellon’s M. Granger Morgan, and others—recently made roughly this case in Foreign Affairs (subscription required). It’s just the latest in a series of articles by major climate researchers, or policy wonks, essentially sounding the alarm about geoengineering: This is real, this is very possible, this is scary, this requires attention.

The question to my mind is when the broader political discourse will catch on to what these experts are already realizing. We pay vastly too little attention to global warming in the media; geoengineering is nowhere on the news agenda at all. Yet it’s one of many examples of a coming scientific controversy that is reasonably forseeable in advance—at least to those who are paying attention—but nevertheless seems doomed to catch the broader public unawares at some undetermined point in the future (think of cloning and the Raelians). Whereupon, a reasoned dialogue about the pros and cons of climate control, which is increasingly coming within humanity’s grasp, will probably be the last thing we see.

What would I propose instead? That some important figure in the media or our government broach a dialogue on this topic now, at the very highest of levels. That everyone find some way of going to see the documentary Owning the Weather, which is about this subject and will be premiering at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on April 3^rd. That Congress hold serious hearings. And so on. We must try in all conceivable ways to create a broader dialogue, one that goes far beyond the scientific, expert community.

I’m perfectly aware of the counterargument to this stance: Some worry that the more we discuss geoengineering and give people the idea that it could be a panacea—a faster, cheaper way of averting global warming—then the more likely we could be as a society to go for the easy “techno-fix,” rather than take the hard steps needed to really cut down our emissions. It’s a serious concern, but I believe it must be weighed against several others.

First, science and technology could make geoengineering a foregone conclusion before we’ve even had a chance to determine what we think about it. That will hardly lead to the best societal decision-making. And second, everything I know about global warming suggests that having a backup plan does make a lot of sense. We don’t know how bad it’s going to get, or how fast, or how effective (or ineffective) our eventual climate policies will be. And we only have one planet.

Sadly, there could come a time when nothing is off the table.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

For Immediate Release – January 14, 2009

Author Chris Mooney Honored by American Meteorological Society

Chris Mooney, author of Storm World:  Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming, has won the 2009 Louis J. Battan Author’s Award by the American Meteorological Society, the nation’s leading professional society for those working in the atmospheric and related sciences.

Mooney’s book is being honored as “an accurate and comprehensive overview of the evolving debate on the impacts of global warming on hurricanes that illustrates the complexities of this significant scientific problem.”  The award, named for Louis J. Battan who contributed outstanding research efforts in radar meteorology and wrote several books aimed at nonscientists, was presented on January 14 at the 89th AMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix.

Mooney is journalist who focuses on science in politics. He is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a contributing editor to Science Progress, and an occasional contributor to many other scientific and news magazines.  Additionally, he maintains a weblog, “The Intersection,” with Sheril Kirshenbaum, and gives public lectures.  He is the author of The Republican War on Science (2005). His second book, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, was released in 2007.

Mooney graduated from Yale University in 1999, where he wrote a column for the Yale Daily News. Before becoming a freelance writer, Chris worked for two years at The American Prospect as a writing fellow, then staff writer, then online editor, where he helped to create the popular blog Tapped.

The AMS, founded in 1919, is a scientific and professional organization that promotes the development and dissemination of information on atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrologic sciences.  The Society publishes nine well-respected scientific journals, sponsors scientific conferences, and supports public education programs across the country.  Additional information on the AMS, the Annual Meeting, and other award winners is available on the Internet at http://www.ametsoc.org

Contact:
Stephanie Kenitzer
(425) 432-2192
kenitzer@ametsoc.org

Ethically Challenged
One Quarter of Stem Cell Lines Eligible for Federal Funding Fail Ethics Guidelines
By Rick Weiss
An expert panel at Stanford University determined in July that nearly one quarter of the colonies of human embryonic stem cells that the Bush administration had approved as ethically derived and eligible for study with federal funds did not meet Stanford’s ethics standards.

Enormously Pathetic Agency
The Evisceration of the EPA
By Chris Mooney
There was a near-complete breakdown at our central environmental regulatory agency under the Bush administration. And that was just what things looked like in April.

The Halfway House Between Science and Secrets
An Interview With Bruce Schneier on Science and Security
By Jonathan Pfeiffer
A National Research Council report recognized that the 9/11 attacks provoked counter-productive security measures that stifle access to fruitful scientific research. Security expert Bruce Schneier talked with Science Progress about the science that makes us smarter and the security that makes us safer.

Minding Mental Minefields
How to Stockpile the Neuropharmacological Arsenal
By Rick Weiss
Another report from the National Research Council argued that the military should harness the power of neuroscience research to amplify the cognitive prowess of U.S. military personnel and make foreign soldiers, um, less smarter.

Plight of the Postdoc
Is Modern American Science Strangling Its Young Talents In the Cradle?
By Sheril Kirshenbaum
Colleges and universities are graduating more science and engineering PhDs, but diminishing opportunities are derailing young scientists from future careers as scientific leaders.

Hearts and Minds
Expelled Suggests Defenders of Evolution are Losing Them
By Chris Mooney
The successful right-wing documentary demonstrated that science needs a loud, accessible, entertaining, mass media response to creationist nonsense.

The Staggering Cyclone Nargis Catastrophe
A Disastrous Convergence of Variables
By Chris Mooney
The alarming death tolls from the storm were a product of poverty, poor infrastructure, and a negligent government. Better forecasting for the North Indian region would be a start for protecting citizens from future cyclones. Democracy in Burma probably wouldn’t hurt, either.

Manufactroversy
The Art of Creating Controversy Where None Existed
By Leah Ceccarelli
Contemporary rhetorical tactics designed to confuse politicians and the public about scientific issues are as old as antiquity. The methods are just as disingenuous 2,500 years after their invention.

Contraception Is the New Abortion
The Latest Right Wing Trend? Attack Birth Control
By Jessica Arons
An HHS rule was just the most recent attempt in a longstanding campaign by social conservatives to turn discomfort with abortion into opposition to contraception.

Ubiquity Requires Redundancy
The Case for Federal Investment in Broadband
By Mark Lloyd
The attacks of 9/11 and body blow of Hurricane Katrina highlight for all but the most doctrinaire advocates of free markets that there is an exceedingly strong case for direct government investment in the deployment of advanced telecommunications services to build a safe, strong, and resilient America.

Science Under Obama
Next Administration Would Chart a Dramatic New Course
By Chris Mooney
The day after the historic election, Mooney wrote that there’s much for scientists to like about Barack Obama’s plans for science policy. But, Mooney asked, will the president-elect make it a priority, and what about the money?

Wikipedia and the New Curriculum
Digital Literacy Is Knowing How We Store What We Know
By David Parry
Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities. Just check the entry on Global Warming. This article generated a spirited discussion on Science Progress and around the blogosphere.

You would be wrong.

“Junk science jihadist.” “Ecofascist.” These are some things right wing sites have to say about Harvard physicist John Holdren, who will head up a newly reinvigorated White House science office under Obama. Such noises from the ideological extremes, a kind of last hurrah for the conservative war on science, won’t have much influence. But when we move closer to the political center and read editorials in Investor’s Business Daily and the Rocky Mountain News also criticizing Holdren and his approach to science policy, it becomes apparent that there’s still a lot of denial out there about the reality of our massive climate/energy problem. Mountainous evidence aside, accepted scientific findings about the frightening sensitivity of our climate system remain difficult for many people to swallow.

Investor’s Business Daily, for instance, calls Holdren (and NOAA administrator nominee Jane Lubchenco, also a distinguished scientist) a “global warming true believer.” Well, actually, he’s a renowned scientist who served, in 2006, as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the leading member organization for this nation’s scientific community and the largest general scientific society in the world—not a post usually handed to “true believers” in anything other than the scientific method. Granted, Investor’s Business Daily thinks it’s actually cooling, not warming, globally. Perhaps it’s also telling readers to buy and hold coal and auto stocks for long term gains.

The Rocky Mountain News, meanwhile, suggests Holdren “lacks the temperament to be a fair arbiter when disputes arise about the economic and social trade-offs of environmental policies.” For instance, the paper charges that Holdren supports drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2050—precisely the position supported by the incoming president, though the paper doesn’t mention this, thereby making Holdren’s stance sound far more extreme than it actually is. The Rocky Mountain News further charges that while this would result in “big-time increases in energy costs,” Holdren “has never suggested that those higher costs should be offset by lowering taxes elsewhere.” Well, I don’t know if Holdren himself has suggested it or not, but I would fully expect to see provisions to protect average citizens from rising energy prices included in any cap-and-trade greenhouse gas regime supported by the Obama administration (such protections could come through tax cuts or direct checks from the government the so-called “cap-and-dividend” approach). And I sincerely doubt Holdren would have a problem with that.

Perhaps it is becoming apparent that there’s plenty of misinformation, and incomplete or just plain biased thinking, to be found in these attacks on Holdren, and on the policies that he and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be tasked with implementing. Many of the circulating critiques seem inspired by blog sources, most prominently a a post written just after the announcement of Holdren’s appointment by New York Times science contrarian John Tierney, who made much hay of a ten-year bet Holdren made in 1980 (along with Paul Ehrlich) about natural resource scarcity with the libertarian economist Julian Simon, and lost; and an August post by University of Colorado political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. (written before Holdren’s appointment), which critiqued a Holdren oped about human-caused global warming and those who continue to deny or reject its existence.

Because such critiques, once launched, tend to be repeated and circulate widely, I want to spend a bit more time answering some of them. But let me first disclose that I have met Holdren on several occasions, interviewed him, spoken with him, and always been very impressed by him. I also gave a talk in 2005 at the Woods Hole Research Center, where Holdren serves as director (a post he will presumably step down from to go to Washington).

An Ancient Bet. First, who cares what John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich bet about the price of chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten in 1980, or whether they won? It’s 2008. I’ve never talked to Holdren about the bet, but I’m sure he learned something from it. Pick any scientist with a long, influential career and you’ll find something he or she has at one point or another been incorrect about. Or if you can’t find it, be worried.

Use of the Term “Denier.” Holdren’s aforementioned op-ed, published in the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, is strongly worded about the problem of global warming “skepticism” or “denial”—and rightly so. It prompted a large volume of response, and Holdren has, in turn, answered his critics. It’s important to note that the op-ed wasn’t written when he was a representative of the president, and I would imagine that his language might not be as strong in the future. But in any event, I want to defend his, and anyone’s, right to use the term “denier” in a global warming context, something The Rocky Mountain News (among others) objects to. I am continually baffled by attempts to rule a perfectly good word out of bounds under the strange pretense that any use of it implies some type of connection with the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, which is the central complaint that global warming “skeptics” tend to make.

“Denier” is defined in the dictionary as meaning “one who denies.” You will note that there are no Holocaust references. The verb “deny” means (among other things) “to refuse to recognize or acknowledge; disown; disavow; repudiate.” It does not specifically refer to the Holocaust either. Perhaps that’s because the word is massively older: As Dictionary.com notes of the etymology (relying on the online etymology dictionary):

c.1300, from O.Fr. denier, from L. denegare, from de- “away” + negare “refuse, say ‘no,’ ” from Old L. nec “not,” from Italic base *nek-”not,” from PIE base *ne- “no, not” (see un-).

Why should we not properly use this time honored word? In particular, the idea that calling someone a “global warming denier” is an implicit comparison with Holocaust denial is absurd. When one uses words like “denier,” “denial,” and “deny,” there is no necessary reference to one particular species of the broader phenomenon, and thus no more invocation of Holocaust denial than of those who denied Christ or those who are in denial about their crumbling marriages. Global warming deniers do not have the power to redefine words that long preceded them, and that will long outlive them.

The Difference Between Science and Policy. Many of the anti-Holdren commentators want you to think he’s just as bad a politicizer of science as the Bush administration has been. Here the critics rely strongly on Pielke, Jr., who in his post quotes Holdren stating the following—“the science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going”—and so proceeds to characterize Holdren as someone who thinks that information gleaned from science “compels political outcomes.” Or as Pielke puts it elsewhere in his post: “The notion that science tells us what to do leads Holdren to appeal to authority to suggest that not only are his scientific views correct, but because his scientific views are correct, then so too are his political views.”

I don’t know where this is coming from. But I do know that I interviewed Holdren for my book The Republican War on Science, and quoted him on this very question: Does the information gleaned from science—e.g., greenhouse gases are causing global warming—necessarily compel a particular political solution—e.g., a cap and trade bill? Here’s Holdren, from page 23 of my book: “I don’t think there are very many scientists naive enough to think that science should always determine outcomes, but you shouldn’t defend outcomes by distorting the science.” I like much of Roger Pielke, Jr.’s work, and relied on it heavily in my second book Storm World, but I just don’t get the above criticism. Obviously Holdren is not such a naif about the relationship between science and policy—how could he be? Obviously he knows, just as everyone does, that economic, political, and other considerations weigh very heavily on policymaking, which is rarely or never driven solely by scientific information (and nor should it be). Indeed, the quotation of Holdren above came from a part of our interview in which he was getting a very elementary distinction that we all recognize out of the way, so that our conversation could then proceed to discussing matters of actual interest.

I would very much like to have used this column to explain to you what John Holdren actually knows, and thinks, about climate, and about energy—two of the most massive intertwined issues of our time, and one upon which he’s a consummate expert. Alas, these various attacks prevent that; but I’m still glad to join the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Joe Romm, Tim Lambert, and others in answering them.

The nature of politics in the United States may be changing for the better, but there are also a lot of old habits that die hard.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Having spent the last few decades piecing together the different components of the global carbon puzzle, scientists now have a good idea of how the planet’s natural carbon sinks (or reservoirs) work—primarily these sinks are plants and the oceans. But when it comes to pinpointing the locations of all the sources (areas or organisms which release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere), there remains a lot of ambiguity—mostly because climate change is constantly changing the picture of how the sources work (and it’s usually changing for the worse). Indeed, scientists are only beginning to understand how the behavior of sinks and sources will shift as atmospheric CO₂ levels continue to increase. And they do not like what they see. What many scientists are now worried about is the degree to which carbon sinks could shrink, or carbon sources could grow, in response to the rapid increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

The easiest way to think of the global carbon cycle is as the sum total of different reactions—primarily those resulting in the destruction or formation of calcium carbonate or organic matter like carbohydrates—between and within the planet’s major carbon repositories: the ocean and terrestrial biosphere.^[1] The ocean is by far the larger one—estimated to hold about 38,000 petagrams (1 petagram equals one trillion grams); the land plants and soils that make up the terrestrial biosphere store only about 2,000 Pg.^[2]

Scientists are beginning to come to grips with the realization that many erstwhile sinks, primarily plants and soils, could lose their ability to draw down CO2 in a warming world.

Carbon transport between and among the reservoirs is primarily accomplished via CO₂ gas exchange. The two types of processes that affect the flow of the global carbon cycle are “long-term” fluxes—those that operate on the scale of millennia (anything having to do with weathering, or the decomposition of rocks, minerals, and soils)—and “short-term” fluxes—which are driven by natural reactions like photosynthesis and respiration (when plants absorb carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, for instance). These help control the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Together, the ocean and land absorb roughly 2.1 petagrams of carbon every year; that number is the difference between the average amount of fossil fuel emissions produced, about 5.4 Pg of carbon per year, and the growth in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, around 3.3 Pg per year. These numbers are based on measurements taken during the 1980s, one of the most recent decades for which researchers have an estimate of all sources and sinks.

So how do scientists distinguish between the contributions made by each sink? Until the mid-1990s, that question was still very much in doubt. Though researchers knew about the major sinks and sources, they were unsure as to the magnitude of the terrestrial sources—particularly the one associated with tropical deforestation (which, for a long time, they thought accounted for 10 and 50 percent of all fossil fuel emissions). Their calculations seemed to suggest that there was an additional “missing” sink somewhere, but they couldn’t put their finger on it.

In a landmark study published in 1996, Ralph F. Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (the son of Charles D. Keeling, the man behind the famous “Keeling Curve”) and colleagues showed that it was possible to determine the difference between the two sinks by examining the partial pressures—what scientists describe as the pressure exerted by each of the constituents of a mixture of gases—of CO₂ and O₂ in the atmosphere.^[3]

Scientists already knew that an increase in atmospheric CO2 corresponded to an equivalent decrease in atmospheric O2 (because of photosynthesis and respiration). Keeling’s breakthrough was demonstrating that the ocean, though a crucial sink (and source) for CO2, did not release much O2 in response to a decrease in atmospheric O2. This meant that any change in atmospheric O2, other than that resulting from fossil fuel use, had to be attributed to a terrestrial source. Working backwards, they were able to quantify the importance of the different sources and sinks.

As most climate scientists will tell you, though, there is always a large degree of uncertainty implicit in these measurements so they could, in reality, be very different. Moreover, because the carbon balance—the difference between the amount of emissions released to the atmosphere and those taken up by sinks—is never static, year-to-year variations can be significant. These can usually be attributed to fluctuations in the response of the terrestrial biosphere to the climate—often because of increased land-use or changing water availability. The oceanic response, by comparison, is typically muted.

These sinks currently absorb around half of all the carbon dioxide emitted through fossil fuel combustion.^[4] Around 85 percent of new anthropogenic CO2 ends up in the ocean, where, after slowly dissolving into the surface waters, it gets trapped in the “conveyor belt” (also known as thermohaline circulation), the large-scale movement of currents driven by density gradients in the deep. Almost half of the total amount of anthropogenic CO2 that has been added to the atmosphere since pre-industrial times has gone into the ocean.^[5]

Indeed, as I wrote about in a recent column, scientists are beginning to come to grips with the realization that many erstwhile sinks, primarily plants and soils, could lose their ability to draw down CO2 in a warming world—with a worst-case scenario being that they would turn into sources.

Steven W. Running of the University of Montana at Missoula’s College of Forestry crunched the numbers in an article for Science a few months ago and was dismayed by the results.^[6] Though several of the 11 land models he ran projected that photosynthesis rates would dramatically increase under conditions of doubled atmospheric CO2 levels, he found that most did not incorporate land-use variations or episodic disturbances like wildfires and insect epidemics.

Those are crucial omissions, he says, since a recent FLUXNET synthesis determined that disturbances often caused sinks to turn into sources. (FLUXNET is a global network of micrometeorological tower sites which measure the exchanges of CO2, water vapor, and energy between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere.) With droughts, wildfires and insect invasions, such as the mountain pine beetle epidemic, on the rise, Running cautions that many important terrestrial sinks could soon become sources.

The ocean, of course, faces its own litany of problems. As I’ve written about in the past, ocean acidification is a major concern—and one that has only become more acute in recent months. A study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that increases in acidity are happening over 10 times faster than previously thought. This is a major problem, as lead author Timothy Wootton of the University of Chicago’s Department of Ecology and Evolution explains, because, as the ocean’s natural carbonate buffering system weakens—the direct result of millions of tons of CO2 lowering the pH of seawater—it will no longer be able to absorb as much atmospheric CO2. And that could spell big trouble for all of us.

One tool that promises to make scientists’ work much easier in the near future is NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a satellite that will track the geographic distribution of atmospheric CO2—and thus help pinpoint the exact locations of all the sinks and sources. While not a solution in of itself, the OCO will help researchers refine their models, making them more useful for policymakers, which, in turn, should lead to the creation of more effective, targeted mitigation strategies.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is a contributing writer for The Huffington Post, Discover Magazine, DeSmogBlog, and TreeHugger.

Notes

^[1] Sarmiento, J. L. & Gruber, N. (2002). Sinks for Anthropogenic Carbon. Physics Today, 30 – 36.

^[2] Emerson, S. R. & Hedges, J. I. (2008). Chemical Oceanography and the Marine Carbon Cycle. Cambridge University Press: New York, NY.

^[3] Keeling, R. F., Piper, S. C. & Heimann, M. (1996). Global and hemispheric CO₂ sinks deduced from changes in atmospheric O₂ concentration. Nature, 381, 218 – 221.

^[4] Schimel, D. S. et al. (2001). Recent patterns and mechanisms of carbon exchange by terrestrial ecosystems. Nature, 414, 169 – 172.

^[5] Emerson, S. R. & Hedges, J. I. (2008). Chemical Oceanography and the Marine Carbon Cycle. Cambridge University Press: New York, NY.

^[6] Running, S. W. (2008). Ecosystem Disturbance, Carbon and Climate. Science, 321, 652 – 653.

University of Richmond, SP

Top: the University of Richmond historical voting map for 1980. Bottom: the Science Progress “human toll of climate change” mapping project.

Open access publishing is great, but what if you can’t capture your research in words? Over at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, Jeffery Young reports that in order to expand the reach and accessibility of their historical elections mapping project, digital historians at the University of Richmond moved their data from an in-house system to two platforms familiar to many web surfers: Google Maps and Google Earth.

The election maps for today’s results aren’t likely to change until after dinner time, but until then, you can explore what happened in previous elections going back to 1980. The original U of R site has data stretching back to 1840.

The project demonstrates the immense power of using free mapping utilities for presenting academic research. Science Progress took the same route in building its map project tracking research on the human toll of climate change.

But Young’s point isn’t just about communicating and collecting research–it’s about thinking of open formats like Google’s mapping system (which stores data in a special flavor of the eXtensible Markup Laguage, or XML, called KML) as new frameworks that can shape the research product itself. He asks whether open platforms like Google should be the tools of choice or whether home-grown systems are the better way to go.

The time, effort, and expertise necessary to build custom a mapping system are just some of the reasons to think about open systems that boast an every-increasing number of customizable features. But another consideration is accessibility. In-house systems, or ones built on expensive, professional geographic information system platforms, may not allow for easy information sharing, third-party mashups, or even visibility to non-academic readers.

So would it make sense to consider stipulating that some map-based research end up in an open, accessible format? The current National Institutes of Health policy on open-access publishing mandates that research funded with NIH dollars published in peer-reviewed journals must also be submitted to the PubMed database within 12 months. An agency like the National Science Foundation could experiment with providing incentives or tools to research grantees doing mappable work to provide their research in open formats. What do you think?

Interactive Map: The Human Toll of Climate Change

Explore the new interactive map tracking scientific research on the impacts of climate change on human populations around the world.

Global surface temperature, now about 1 degree fahrenheit higher than 20th century averages, is expected to rise between 3.2 and 7.2 degrees fahrenheit by the end of the 21st century, with even greater increases in North America. This spike in temperature, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, endangers populations in the United States and around the world. In particular, scientists project more frequent and severe natural disasters, including hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires; the spread of infectious disease such as the West Nile virus; rising sea levels that could wipe out coastal cities and towns; and declines in crop production and fish catches.

This new map provides scientific information on these threats, compiled from a variety of sources, and plots this information geographically to show areas of concern. To view this information, select the desired category or categories from the key beside the map. This will display icons on the map in locations where scientific research indicates there may be problems. Click on an icon and a box will appear providing relevant data, as well as the source for the data.

From this information, you will be able to see, among other things, that:

• The Midwest and Great Plains can expect severe spring flooding and summer droughts, decreasing crop yields in the American breadbasket.
• Stronger storms and hurricanes in the Southeast will test the resilience of homes and infrastructure.
• Disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks will thrive in the warmer temperatures of the Northeast.
• Drier conditions in the West will significantly increase the risk of wildfires.
• Alaska is threatened by landslides and sinking land levels as arctic permafrost melts.
• Countries around the world face similar consequences as the United States, and over the long run, some may have to contend with threats to their very existence

This sort of information is essential in developing a response. Of course, we must adopt measures to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But as the map makes clear, there is also an urgent need to strengthen infrastructure and disaster preparedness, among other steps, to account for the likely consequences of global climate change. The Center for American Progress recently urged efforts to prepare for hurricanes. To this point, however, very little has been done to protect ourselves against new weather-related threats.

The map also includes data on weather-related disasters since 2000. It cannot be known if any one of these examples is the direct result of global climate change. There is evidence, however, that such incidents are already becoming more frequent and severe. This information is provided to give a sense of the damage that can result from extreme weather events.

Outside users are also able to plot icons and add text directly to the map by clicking on the “Add a Point” button below the key. Changes to the map will appear immediately, although Science Progress reserves the right to remove or edit new points. To help take advantage of this function, we will be recruiting scientists and other experts to contribute information to the map.

If you would like to see changes to points already plotted, or if you have general suggestions, please email climatemap@scienceprogress.org. We appreciate your feedback.

Finally, it should be noted that global climate change is also expected to have severe consequences for the natural environment and other living things. Those consequences are not captured by this map. Rather, the map more narrowly focuses on dangers to people and economic well-being.

Reece Rushing is the Director of Regulatory and Information Policy at the Center for American Progress.

flickr.com/morganmorgan

In a surprising move last week, the Environmental Protection Agency sided with science, environmentalists, and America’s children. It has been 30 years since the United States saw a reduction in lead emissions standards, but on October 15, EPA reduced the limits from 1.5 micrograms per cubic meter to 0.15. The move will force smelters, metal mines, and waste incinerators to reduce their emissions of the toxic metal. Since 1990, over 6,000 studies have confirmed the dangerous effects of lead, especially on children, as it lowers their IQ and damages learning and memory abilities. In adults, lead can cause brain, kidney, and cardiovascular damage.

The move garnered praise from bloggers at The Pump Handle and Switchboard, usual critics of the Bush administration’s environmental policy. But even with the new limits, the number of emissions monitoring stations has dropped from 800 in 1980 to around 130 stations currently, according to both blogs. The EPA plans to add or relocate 236 monitoring sites to meet requirements, still less than half of the previous number. Additionally, polluters will not need to comply with the new .15 μg/cubic meter standards until 2017. Gina Solomon at Switchboard writes: “That’s too late! We’ve already waited 30 years for this new lead standard, and it’s crazy to wait almost 10 more years for it to come into effect.”

But the history of lead in human civilization goes back even further. There have been several phases in the regulation of lead-based paint and leaded gasoline, taking nearly a century for public policy to catch up with scientific warnings. David Michaels, in his book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, describes the history of the battle between the paint and gas industry’s PR machines and public health advocates and environmentalists. Here’s a timeline of what’s happened in the United States over the past 100 years:

1900s: Lead was regarded as a highly toxic chemical, with lead-based paint regarded as the most identifiable hazard. If a child ate paint chips, people recognized it could cause seizure, coma, and death. If it didn’t traumatically harm the child, he or she may have learning and behavioral disabilities.

1922: Lead was first introduce into gasoline, immediately drawing headlines concerning public health. The form of lead in gasoline was known as tetraethyl lead and it raised the octane level of gasoline, resulting in “premium” gas for high-performance engines.

1924: Five workers at a New Jersey plant died, with four of them going “insane” before their death. The New York Times (subscription) covered the story, and New York City, Philadelphia, and other jurisdictions banned the sale of leaded gasoline.

1930s: The industries rejected scientific evidence, claiming there was no proof of causation and tried to blame the children and families as being irresponsible for allowing children to eat the paint chips, claiming that they were “sub-normal to start with.”

1965: A geochemist named Clair Patterson in Greenland brought the airborne lead issue into American consciousness. Until then, industry experts claimed only workers were at risk for lead poisoning, and that because lead has always been naturally in the air, it must be safe. Using ice core samples, Patterson found that higher levels of lead existed in recent samples than older ice. He further concluded that the amount of lead Americans had in their blood was 100 times greater than natural levels.

1970: Nixon signed the Clean Air Act of 1970 into law on December 31st, and the Environmental Protection Agency, formed on December 2, had a task worth attacking. “Year of the Environment came to an end on an extremely upbeat note with the signing of a major piece of environmental legislation. The Clean Air Act (CAA) of 1970 was the perfect bookend to balance the National Environmental Policy Act the President had signed with such a flourish on New Year’s Day,” states the EPA. Along with lead, the EPA was required to lower emissions of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides by 90 percent in only a few years.

1971: President Richard Nixon signed the Lead-Based Paint Poisoning Prevention Act, which restricted the lead content in paint used in housing built with federal dollars and provided funds for states to reduce the amount of lead in paint. Subsequent legislation created the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which effectively banned leaded paint in 1976.

1984: The U.S. Senate considered banning the use of lead in gasoline, with Vernon Houk, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Center for Environmental Heath, reporting that “if no lead had been allowed in gasoline since 1977, there would have been approximately 80 percent fewer children identified with lead toxicity.”

1985: The EPA discussed a total ban on leaded gasoline by 1988.

1990: In amendments to the Clean Air Act, lead was banned from gasoline. The measures would take effect in 1995, giving gasoline companies five more years to completely phase out lead.

2002: According to a study, levels of lead found in human blood were reduced more than 80 percent from 1976 to 1999 in American children one to five years old, and these children had IQs that were, on average, 2.2-4.7 points higher than comparable groups in the 1970s. In terms of economic impact, the authors estimate that each IQ point raises worker productivity 1.76-2.38 percent. The estimated economic benefit for each year’s newborns ranges from $110 billion to $319 billion.

2008: EPA tightens air emission rules for lead, requiring industries to reduce levels to .15 μg/cubic meter. The new standard is 10 times greater than previous requirements set 30 years ago.

2013: States are required to submit state implementation plans outlining how they will reduce pollution to meet the standards no later than June.

2017: States are required to meet the new standards no later than January.

Come again?

Their logic goes something like this: Because plants require carbon dioxide to do photosynthesis, wouldn’t it make more sense to allow atmospheric levels to further increase beyond their long-term average—rather than reduce them—so as to make more available for the planet’s flora, thus ensuring a lush supply of greenery? In other words, pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and, ipso facto, you’ll have more plants doing more photosynthesis—naturally taking care of any pesky (supposed) warming problem that might arise. Or so skeptics and their allies in the energy industry would have you believe.

Ecosystems are already struggling to keep up with the meteoric growth in emissions over the past few decades.

I have to admit that, to a certain audience, that logic must have a distinct appeal. It effectively removes much of the burden of emission regulation from our shoulders and places it squarely on those of the planet’s ecosystems. While it does not necessarily give us carte blanche to continue emitting at an unabated rate, it seemingly provides some measure of relief: the knowledge that Mother Earth will take matters into her own hands should we fail to do so ourselves. If only that was the case. Thanks to evidence from several recent studies, scientists now know that, far from helping ecosystems, higher emission levels could actually harm their short- and long-term ability to take up and store carbon dioxide—producing, in effect, a so-called climate “double whammy.” That is, as emissions rise due to human activity, some plants will naturally absorb less of that CO2, which will in turn further accelerate atmospheric concentrates because those very same plants will no longer be able to move the greenhouse gas from the air to the soil.

Because plants and soils act as major carbon sinks, any reduction in their ability to draw down and store CO2 could have dramatic consequences for the climate. As things stand, ecosystems are already struggling to keep up with the meteoric growth in emissions over the past few decades; placing any further undue stress would only make matters worse—and, at the same time, make our efforts to fight climate change that much harder. A warmer world in which plants, one of our first-line defenses against rising CO2 levels, become impotent would force us to drastically revise our current emission scenarios and make it much more difficult for us to mount an effective response in time. A study published in a recent issue of Nature suggests that we may be approaching this dangerous tipping point.

A large team of researchers, led by Jay Arnone of the Desert Research Institute, organized a four-year study to track the response in CO2 uptake and loss in ecosystems during abnormally warm years.^[1] To do so, they sealed large plots of native Oklahoma tall grasses inside simulated environment chambers in which they were able to replicate daily and seasonal temperature and rainfall changes. After letting the plots condition for the first year, the scientists exposed half of them to a range of temperatures typical of a regular year and exposed the other half to temperatures on average 4°C higher (in line with the predictions made by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). These anomalously high temperatures were turned down during the third year to match those in the control plots.

Arnone and his colleagues found that the plots exposed to the higher temperatures experienced a net reduction in CO2 uptake for at least two years; furthermore, they only captured and stored about one third as much carbon during those two years as did the control plots. They attributed this to two main causes: a suppression of net primary productivity, which refers to the amount of CO2 absorbed by a plant during photosynthesis minus the CO2 it emits during respiration (the process by which plants break down sugars into useable energy) induced by the drought-like conditions and higher respiration rates by the soil’s microorganisms during the second year. The authors conclude that, “more frequent anomalously warm years, a possible consequence of increasing anthropogenic carbon dioxide levels, may lead to a sustained decrease in carbon dioxide uptake by terrestrial ecosystems.”

These grim findings echoed the results of an earlier study done this year in which a team of scientists investigated the ability of northern ecosystems to store carbon in response to autumnal warming.^[2] Using data from past atmospheric records to examine year-to-year variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and ecosystem CO2 fluxes, they found a trend over the last two decades that pointed to an earlier autumn-to-winter build-up, suggesting a much shorter net carbon uptake period. They then combined this data with observations gathered from a terrestrial biosphere model and satellite imaging to further study the ecosystems’ response to autumnal warming, which revealed that both photosynthesis and respiration increased during that period—though respiration did so at a faster rate. In other words, the plants were emitting more CO2 than they were storing—resulting in a net release of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Shilong Piao, the lead author, and his colleagues conclude that the loss in carbon uptake during this period could offset as much as 90 percent of the increased carbon uptake witnessed during spring warming. This means that if future autumnal warming continues to outpace spring warming, the ability of northern ecosystems to take in and store CO2 could be sharply curtailed much sooner than previously expected.

Now, granted, we may still be a ways off before global temperatures rise another 4°C (though we’ve already seen some isolated incidents). And, admittedly, much more work needs to be done in more locations before we can truly accept these findings as fact. Indeed, a study done in 2001 suggested that grasslands could act as potent carbon sinks under conditions of elevated atmospheric CO2 levels because higher levels would inhibit microbial respiration—at least for the short term.^[3]

Yet, as with much environmental science, what really matters here are the general trends—and these mostly point to a warmer climate in which ecosystem carbon uptake will be significantly reduced. For an indication of what may be to come, it helps to look at a recent real-life example: the European heat wave of 2003. That year, temperatures during the summer surged above their long-term means—July temperatures alone were up to 6°C higher—resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. Scientists who studied the impact of the continent-wide drought on primary productivity discovered that it caused a significant drop in CO2 uptake and reversed the effect of four years of net carbon sequestration.^[4] Of particular note was their conclusion that future drought events could turn Europe’s temperate ecosystems into carbon sources—not sinks—thus contributing to the onset of intense climate change. Could the same happen in southwestern states such as California and Arizona, which have been battered by a wave of severe droughts in recent years? Only time will tell of, course—there are many factors at play—though I can’t say the European example fills me with much confidence.

In the end, what all of this tells us is that we can’t take it for granted that plants will always be there to bail us out. Though they will remain a major carbon sink for the foreseeable future, we may not have the luxury of relying on them as much if we don’t start taking responsibility for our actions soon.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is a contributing writer for VentureBeat, DeSmogBlog, and TreeHugger.

Notes

[1] Arnone, J.A. et al. Prolonged suppression of ecosystem carbon uptake after an anomalously warm year. Nature, 455 (2008): 383—385.

[2] Piao, S. et al. Net carbon dioxide losses of northern ecosystems in response to autumn warming. Nature, 451 (2008): 49—54.

[3] Hu, S. et al. Nitrogen limitation of microbial decomposition in a grassland under elevated CO2. Nature, 409 (2001): 188—191.

[4] Ciais, Ph. et al. Europe-wide reduction in primary productivity caused by the heat and drought in 2003. Nature, 437 (2008): 529—533.

As a climate modeler, you are always working with the best of what’s available—whether that means the best data, best infrastructure, or best science.

To be fair, “denigrate” might be a little too strong of a word to use to characterize the often-legitimate criticism that has come climate modeling’s way. The critics’ main point of contention? Quite simply that models cannot—and likely never will—accurately represent the whole climate picture. There are simply too many known unknowns and unknown unknowns—pardon the reference—for even the most skilled modeler to wrap his head around. On a more basic level, does anybody really think that a collection of models, let alone a single model, can fully reproduce Earth’s complex inner workings? No, of course not, and that’s a point any climate modeler will readily concede.

As a climate modeler, you are always working with the best of what’s available—whether that means the best data, best infrastructure, or best science. And since all those variables are subject to frequent revision, it’s rare to find a robust model that is able to withstand years of new findings. Scientists often relish poking holes in them, using the results from a recent research expedition, for instance, to undermine a single component—regardless of how well the model otherwise captures the environment. While some of this criticism may seem gratuitous, or even childish at times, it is often done with good reason.

Take a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, whose findings risk invalidating over 60 percent of the so-called “climate envelope” studies. Climate envelope models help predict where species will live under conditions of future climate change by using their current distributions to make up a set of climatic conditions—the “envelope”—that closely approximate their needs.

In the past, these models have come under withering criticism for failing to take into account a number of other factors, such as anthropogenic activity or species-species interactions, that figure as prominently, if not more so, as climate change in influencing species distribution. Despite some of their limitations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put its stamp of approval on their use in its 2007 report, noting that they “offer the advantage of assessing climate change impacts on biodiversity quantitatively.” Colin Beale of the United Kingdom’s Macaulay Institute of Land Use Research, the PNAS study’s lead author, found that the models performed no better than a simple roll of the die—pure chance—in approximating several bird species’ natural habitats.

To be clear, Beale’s study would not be the first to take such a dismissive view of climate envelope studies—many scientists argue that they still play an important role in predicting future species abundances, if not their exact distributions—and should therefore be taken with a grain of salt. In other words, the pretext of the study is not to invalidate the findings of the IPCC or to cast doubt on the link between climate change and species. Beale is quick to point out that his study did find a significant relationship between the climate and a third of species—and that he is concerned his findings could be misused as evidence that there is no link between climate change and species extinctions.

Other scientists have been critical of the IPCC for seemingly lending too much credence to models’ predictive abilities. While several existing models, especially the so-called “coupled” models (which consider the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, sea ice, and other physical characteristics in conjunction to project future climate trends), have become advanced enough to yield valuable insights on current and past climate patterns—almost matching the accuracy of conventional atmospheric observations—most fall woefully short when it comes to answering the most important question: What will our future climate look like?

One big problem, some argue, is that many current models suffer from oft-debilitating inconsistencies—in their representations of observed changes in global mean surface temperature or in their range of sensitivities, for example—that could significantly diminish their capability to reduce uncertainties in Earth’s climate dynamics and, thus, to predict future changes. As a result, they suggest that international organizations like the IPCC, which have a lot of clout in the scientific and political communities, tamp down some of their expectations—lest they invest too much credibility in models that could very well turn out to be wrong.

If there’s one issue on which most scientists—modelers included—agree, it’s that climate modelers need more: more research funding, more powerful computers to run their “petascale” models (which can make a whopping 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second), and more time to meet ever-rising expectations. With the IPCC shifting its focus to examining the community and state-level impacts of various climate change scenarios (so as to impart more actionable information for policymakers) for its 2013 report, the pressure is on climate modelers to redouble their efforts to come up with more powerful and accurate global models. The bottom line is that we should by no means abandon modeling, but do need to help improve it.

Already premier research institutions like the Breckenridge, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, the originator of one of the most widely used coupled models in the United States, is falling behind on meeting an October 1 deadline to update it. Even legislators who tend to only focus on the short-term—in other words, most of them—should see the wisdom in supporting work that could also lead to better hurricane research, an outcome that would yield immediate, and very tangible, benefits.

Perhaps Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney put it best in framing his argument for more research funding by tying together hurricanes, climate change and what he calls the “next” New Orleans:

“Which inevitably brings us to contemplating the future—one in which we will be even more exposed to hurricane risks. While it remains hard to predict precisely what global warming will do to hurricanes, we know that it will raise sea levels, and probably intensify storms on average, not to mention increasing their rainfall rates. No matter how you slice it, then, global warming worsens hurricanes—and, accordingly, hurricane-related insurance costs—which makes it a more-than-legitimate topic to invoke in the context of this year’s hurricane threats and landfalls.”

The impacts of climate change are predictable, but the task will be difficult without the additional resources to build more accurate models and adapt to an altered planet.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is a contributing writer for VentureBeat, DeSmogBlog and TreeHugger.

(NASA/GSFC)

Comparison of Minimum Sea Ice between 2005 and 2007. California outline shown for comparison. Modified from NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli.

In the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, tidal waves the size of skyscrapers hurtle toward New York City. This fantastic envisioning of abrupt climate change bears no resemblance to what could happen in reality, but abrupt climate change could potentially raise sea levels by meters in the span of a century. One of the most well-studied examples of extreme climate change occurred 12,800 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, in an event known as the Younger Dryas. During this time temperatures warmed and the glaciers receded, but scientists speculate that the thermohaline circulation, or THC, the ocean current which transports warm and cool water, shut down, causing a mini, 1,200-year-long ice age. The Younger Dryas ended just as abruptly as it began, with temperatures rising 10°C in just 10 years.

So abrupt climate changes happen. To better understand these potential threats to humanity, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research, or OBER, launched the Investigation of the Magnitudes and Probabilities of Abrupt Climate Transitions program.

Science Daily reports on the laboratories across the nation (Argonne, Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest) which will work with IMPACT to develop the computer models necessary to understand this complex phenomenon. OBER launched the program through its Climate Change Prediction Program. IMPACTS will study four possible causes of abrupt climate change:

1. instability among marine ice sheets, particularly the West Antarctic ice sheet
2. positive feedback mechanisms in subarctic forests and arctic ecosystems, leading to rapid methane release or large-scale changes in the surface energy balance
3. destabilization of methane hydrates (vast deposits of methane gas caged in water ice), particularly in the Arctic Ocean
4. feedback between the biosphere and atmosphere that could lead to megadroughts in North America, perhaps even greater than the 1930s Dust Bowl.

Each of these “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” could dramatically change the globe, with one potential impact being ocean level rise 13 to 20 feet. The computer model will help predict environmental shifts and provide information to scientists, government, and business leaders on strategies to prepare for or prevent extreme changes.

One significant a fear is that slowly rising temperatures could warm the methane-rich permafrost, releasing the greenhouse gas, which is has heat-trapping properties 26 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term. As the permafrost melts, the organic material trapped in its warming soil will begin to decompose and release its stored methane and carbon, rapidly increasing temperatures and melting more permafrost, creating a feedback loop.

But a two-week-old study in Science suggests that the ancient permafrost may be more resilient to rising temperatures than previously thought. The study reports that a 700,000 year-old chunk of ground ice, buried in the Yukon permafrost, has survived some of warmest periods of the earth’s history. Scientists believed everything would have melted 120,000 years ago, but this piece of ice questions that theory.

This study shows the complicated nature of global climate modeling. As Jeremy Jacquot wrote in Science Progress, scientists didn’t expect the Arctic ice cap to melt as quickly as it has, with some new estimates predicting it will be gone by 2013.

The point being that climate scientists need the resources to study these potentially disastrous consequences of global warming before the “day after tomorrow” becomes today.

In his September 15 decision, Judge Sullivan, of the Washington, D.C. district court, wrote that the Park Service’s own studies had shown that a plan to allow 540 snowmobiles a day in the park would “increase air pollution, exceed the use levels recommended by [agency] biologists to protect wildlife, and cause major adverse impacts to the natural soundscape in Yellowstone.” Yet, he added, the Park Service had “found that the plan’s impacts are wholly ‘acceptable,’ and utterly fails to explain this incongruous conclusion.”

As is sometimes the case with incongruous conclusions, this one involved politics trumping science and a federal agency reversing course in response to a change in administrations.

“[T]he court finds that NPS has failed to articulate why a plan that will admittedly worsen air quality complies with the conservation mandate.”

A little history. At the very end of the Clinton administration in early 2001, in response to a settlement of a 1997 lawsuit by environmental groups, the Park Service completed a new winter use plan for Yellowstone and Grand Teton. The service concluded that snowmobile use was harmful enough to park resources that it violated the Organic Act, the 1916 statute establishing the national park system.

The Organic Act defined the central purpose of America’s national parks: “…to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

In its 2001 rulemaking, the Park Service called for phasing out all snowmobile use, replacing it with mass transit snow coaches, essentially multipassenger vans and buses that have treads instead of wheels. Published the day after President George W. Bush took office, the rule was immediately blocked by the incoming administration. In 2003, responding to lawsuits by the snowmobile industry and individuals who use them, a new environmental impact statement was finished that would have allowed 950 snowmobiles per day in Yellowstone.

Other lawsuits followed, and the Park Service then settled on a temporary three-year plan: allow 720 snowmobiles per day, require that the machines be less polluting and noisy, and that snowmobilers be accompanied by trained commercial guides. The Bush administration’s current winter use plan, just overturned by Judge Sullivan, replaced those temporary rules.

As with so many disputes involving the national park system, this one has always been about how to balance the Organic Act’s directive to both conserve park resources and allow people to enjoy them. Many court decisions have affirmed the primacy of the conservation mandate, yet there are constant disagreements over what kind of enjoyment is acceptable and what kind of enjoyment undercuts conservation.

As Thomas C. Kiernan, president of the National Parks Conservation Association, testified before Congress in 2006: “Over the 90-year history of the NPS, there has been much debate over whether the NPS is achieving the proper balance between uses of the parks for today, and conserving them unimpaired for future generations….(T)here is no credible debate over whether parks should be used by the American people, the debate centers on how the use occurs, or sometimes when or where.”

In his decision Judge Sullivan rules that the Bush administration plan “clearly elevates use over conservation of park resources…” in violation of the Organic Act. The directive to provide for the use of parks, he wrote, “is not blanket permission to have fun in the parks in any way the NPS sees fit.”

The Park Service in hearings before the judge argued that the Organic Act allows adverse impacts if they are unavoidable and appropriate. Citing the Park Services own research into the effects of snowmobiling on air quality, noise and wildlife, Sullivan found the agency’s logic and reasoning twisted. “As with soundscapes and wildlife, the court finds that NPS has failed to articulate why a plan that will admittedly worsen air quality complies with the conservation mandate,” he wrote.

For those involved in the longstanding dispute over snowmobiling in Yellowstone and Grand Teton, there will likely be no rest. The International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association, in a statement on its website, called Judge Sullivan’s decision “the first round of what is likely to be a busy fall of litigation.”

Indeed. A related case is before the U.S. District Court in Wyoming, where snowmobilers have found more judicial favor in the past than they have in the federal court in Washington.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at Western Progress.

(Use the scroll bar at the bottom of the timeline to scan backwards in time all the way to the opening days of the Bush administration’s environmental failures in 2001. Click on the photos accompanying the events for more information.)

UPDATE: This seemed apropos:

(From the Cartoonist Group.)

Around 90 percent of the ocean’s largest fisheries species have now been extinguished, and live coral cover has been reduced by up to 93 percent on some reefs.

It’s time to face up to the facts: If we continue to ignore the terrible plight befalling our oceans for much longer, we risk losing what makes them such a unique and valuable natural resource: their rich biodiversity. With most large fisheries stocks now in decline, and with what is left over besieged on all fronts by global warming, ocean acidification, pollution and habitat destruction, it is only a matter of time before our fragile ocean ecosystems complete the long and painful transition from lush, species-rich habitats to barren deserts. But don’t take it just from me. Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the world’s preeminent experts on the impacts of human activities on the ocean, has written what can only be described as a disturbing diagnosis of our ocean’s health. In his article, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jackson warns that the ocean stands on the brink of a mass extinction—one that could just as easily be precipitated by our actions as by the impacts of climate change. Taken together, these problems risk “transforming once complex ecosystems like coral reefs and kelp forests into monotonous level bottoms, transforming clear and productive coastal seas into anoxic dead zones, and transforming complex food webs topped by big animals into simplified, microbially dominated ecosystems with boom and bust cycles of toxic dinoflagellate blooms, jellyfish, and disease,” Jackson writes.

As fatalistic as this may sound, Jackson’s prognosis is given all the more weight because many of the earlier predictions he made a decade ago—though greeted with snorts of derision and loud skepticism at the time—have largely been vindicated. Around 90 percent of the ocean’s largest fisheries species have now been extinguished, and live coral cover has been reduced by up to 93 percent on some reefs. Record amounts of agricultural runoff, fuelled by poor farming practices and our overreliance on industrial fertilizers, are choking our oceans—sparking mass toxic algal blooms and turning once vibrant ecosystems into lifeless dead zones. Sea-surface warming, by increasing the stratification of the oceans (preventing the mixing of deep, nutrient-rich waters with shallow, depleted waters), has caused the ocean’s least biologically productive areas—the so-called ocean “deserts”—to expand much faster than originally predicted, putting the populations of many fish species at risk of extinction. And, if we are to believe his most gloomy prognostications, the worse has yet to come: a future in which the “mass extinction of multicellular life will result in profound loss of animal and plant biodiversity” and lead to the rise of “slime” (what he calls microbes).

The best way to ensure the successful restoration of threatened habitats, the authors explain, is to devolve more authority to local communities, which are naturally more invested in them.

Yet, despite the severity of the situation, not all is lost. In addition to dispensing the usual set of solutions—reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving ocean and coastal management policies and establishing more marine protected areas, or MPAs—Jackson also suggests switching from wild fisheries, which he claims will not be able to sustain growing global demand (regardless of how well they are managed), to a sustainable form of industrial aquaculture. With the right environmental standards in place, and the requisite political will, he argues that aquaculture will be compatible with a policy approach focused on habitat preservation and pollution mitigation. Another interesting idea would be to eliminate the subsidies that have sustained the excessive consumption of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and to tax their use. This would help greatly reduce the number of hypoxia and eutrophication events that have contributed to the formation of over 400 dead zones—affecting an area of more than 245,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Oregon)—worldwide.

In another article recently published in PNAS, Stanford University ecologists Paul Ehrlich and Robert Pringle prescribe a series of simple, commonsense solutions, which they whimsically call “a hopeful portfolio of partial solutions,” that, while not specifically targeted at the oceans, could easily be applied to just about any ecosystem. Encouraging ecotourism and placing an accurate value on the services ecosystems provide—such as natural water filtration, flood mitigation by plants and carbon sequestration and storage by trees—would help individuals, governments and businesses appreciate them more and make them more likely to integrate these ecosystem-service values into future policy and land use decisions. This is an idea that has long been advocated by economists: reduce the overconsumption of natural resources by making people pay the full price for their use (hence their overwhelming support for water pricing and a carbon tax scheme). The best way to ensure the successful restoration of threatened habitats, the authors explain, is to devolve more authority to local communities, which are naturally more invested in them. Poor communities in developing countries, which depend on their habitats for food, shelter and other resources, will be much more likely to protect their surroundings if they are made aware of the consequences of habitat degradation. Furthermore, imbuing local leaders with the knowledge and skills to manage and preserve their habitats will build local capacity and generate more grassroots support for conservation planning—an enthusiasm that is likely to be passed on to future generations.

Perhaps the simplest, and most obvious, solution the authors suggest is to get biodiversity back onto the “cultural radar screen”—to convince people that it is not their large homes, SUVs, clothing, and big screen TVs that they should value most, but the beauty and plentiful ecosystem services offered by nature. A herculean task, to be sure, but one that should be vigorously pursued by all educators and policymakers. Only by instilling in our children and grandchildren an appreciation for nature that can “rival virtual reality as a source of entertainment, intrigue, and inspiration,” can we make sure that the biodiversity crisis is eventually resolved.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is the Los Angeles correspondent for TreeHugger.com.

Indeed, 2008 is proving to be somewhat of an aberration—a fairly mild fire year across a Rocky Mountain West where massive, sometimes uncontrollable fires have become commonplace in recent decades. Last winter brought ample snow across the mountainous West, and helpful rains have fallen through the spring and summer. Abundant moisture has helped limit the size and severity of fires.

Withholding fire is as powerful an ecological act as applying it.

A new report, however, warns that this year’s conditions are far from typical. The study by the National Wildlife Federation, “Increased Risk of Catastrophic Wildfires: Global Warming’s Wake-Up Call for the Western United States,” documents how the frequency and severity of wildfires have increased dramatically in recent decades. The upshot: “Warmer springs and longer summer dry periods since the mid-1980s are linked to a four-fold increase in the number of major wildfires each year and a six-fold increase in the area of forest burned, compared with the period between 1970 and 1986,” the report says. Today’s fire season is 78 days longer than a generation ago.

Statistics compiled by the National Interagency Fire Center illustrate the trend well: In 1997, fires burned some 2 million acres in all; in 2007 the total was more than 9 million. As the National Fire Protection Association’s Jim Smalley writes, the potential for “mega-fires” is increasing, and nearly every year to come promises to become “the worst fire season ever.” This year notwithstanding, the unmistakable long-term trend is toward a warmer, drier West. Climate scientists cited in the National Wildlife Federation report project global climate change will bring summertime temperatures in the region that run 3.6 to 9 degrees higher than what’s now considered “normal,” and that precipitation will decline as much as 15 percent by the middle of this century. The result will be a climate even more conducive to wildfire.

Across the West, forests have become less healthy and productive—with far, far more potential for larger and often unnaturally intense wildfires.

Of course, we’ve always had wildfires across the West. Over the past 10,000-15,000 years, fires sparked by lightning have shaped our forests; over the past few centuries, human-ignited fires have also had a significant impact on natural systems. Some (mostly lower elevation) types of forests evolved amid frequent but low-intensity wildfires. Other forest types have evolved to accommodate more intense but less frequent fires. The natural role of fire is generally beneficial—clearing out underbrush, holding disease and insect infestations in check, and aiding the regeneration of some types of trees.

Humans, however, have interrupted natural fire cycles. After massive wildfires swept the Northern Rockies in 1910, federal and state land management agencies adopted a policy of aggressive fire suppression with a goal of quickly extinguishing fires wherever and whenever they occur. And they were remarkably successful. The U.S. Forest Service, for example, maintains better than a 90 percent record of stopping fires when they’re small. But as ecology and fire historian Dr. Stephen Pyne explained in Forest History Today, “withholding fire is as powerful an ecological act as applying it.”

In recent decades, it’s become clear that interrupting natural fire cycles has allowed forests to grow unnaturally dense without periodic fires to clear out underbrush and smaller trees. Lack of fires have allowed species of trees not adapted to frequent fires to out-compete thicker-bark tree species that thrive with frequent fires. Without fires, smaller trees now create “fuel ladders” to carry flames into the crowns of larger trees that otherwise might not be scathed by fires burning along the ground. Without fires, insect infestations have begun to reach epidemic levels, creating forests of dead, standing trees. Colorado, for example, has some 1.5 million acres of pine beetle-killed forests primed for burning. In Montana, a fir beetle epidemic more extensive than any other documented in history has killed Douglas firs over hundreds of thousands of acres. Across the West, forests have become less healthy and productive—with far, far more potential for larger and often unnaturally intense wildfires.

As the Government Accountability Office put it in a 1999 analysis, “The most extensive and serious problem related to health of national forests in the interior West is the over-accumulation of vegetation, which has caused an increasing number of large, intense, uncontrollable and catastrophically destructive wildfires.”

Compounding matters, the forest fringe remains an attractive place for people to live. The Rocky Mountain West has become one of the fastest-growing parts of the country, and much of that growth takes place in the form of residential development in proximity to our now-overgrown, fire-prone forests.

This combination of factors—a warming climate, unhealthy forests and rampant development—sets the stage for wildfires of great size, intensity, and danger.

The potential for large fires places tens of thousands of homes and entire communities in harm’s way throughout the region. Protecting lives and property has become hugely expensive for local governments, states, and the federal government. Annual federal firefighting expenses have risen more than six-fold over the past decade and now exceed $1 billion in a typical fire year—nearly $2 billion last year—with more than half that money spent to protect homes and communities, a form of mission creep for agencies primarily responsible for land management. The U.S. Forest Service now burns nearly half its entire annual budget on wildfire suppression at the expense of other needed forest management—including measures that could reduce fire danger over the long-term.

The West’s growing fire danger defies simple solutions. One thing is clear, however: The health of our forests—and our own health, safety and prosperity—depends on managing fire rather than strictly suppressing it. In forest ecosystems that evolved with frequent, low-intensity fires, for example, land managers can use “prescribed” or controlled burning to replicate nature in a relatively safe way. In a report commissioned by Western Progress, W. Wallace Covington and Diane J. Vosick of Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute make a compelling case for actively managing fire danger and restoring forest health and productivity through restoration forestry.

We’ll have difficulty managing fire—learning to live with fire—as long as the buildup of forest fuels around houses, neighborhoods and communities leaves too much potential for the loss of property and lives. Before we can make greater use of controlled fires as a management tool or allow more wildfires to burn naturally, we have to do something about the condition of today’s forests. We have to reduce the amount of accumulated fuels. Costs of doing so vary, but $750 to $1,000 an acre is a good ballpark figure. Whatever the cost, it’s massively expensive work to do over the 73 million acres of national forests and 397 million acres in total deemed a high priority for fuel reduction. What’s more, fuel reduction involves tree thinning, which is logging, and that remains a hugely contentious issue in the political arena and courtrooms, at least whenever national forests and other public lands are involved.

But broad consensus does exist among land managers and the public over the merits of forest fuel reduction in proximity to homes, neighborhoods, and communities—an area best known by its bureaucratic moniker: the wildland-urban interface. Aggressive fuel reduction in the wildland-urban interface will make people and their property safer. It won’t fireproof neighborhoods, but it will make the fires less threatening when they reach the thinned-out areas. It will make firefighting safer and more effective, generally resulting in less-intense fires approaching homes and communities. And it will give land managers more flexibility as they work to reduce fuels over a broader swath extending into the national forests. For example, it should be safer and easier to use controlled fire elsewhere in a national forest if thinning has removed excess fuels near communities. As a fringe benefit, fuel-reduction work over the millions of acres that comprise the wildland-urban interface in the West has the potential to employ thousands of workers in rural communities across the West as part of the region’s emerging Restoration Economy.

The value of fuel reduction in proximity to homes and communities is well understood by land-management agencies and, increasingly, by the public. But funding for such work is grossly inadequate—and often diverted to pay for fire suppression. That rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul approach has made it impossible for federal and state agencies to proactively reduce forest fuels on a large scale. As a result, they—and taxpayers—spend increasing sums reacting to growing wildfires. With current Western burn rates, alongside the sluggish pace of fuel reduction, the region’s forests will burn over before thinning work gets done. What’s needed—from Congress and state legislatures—are new streams of dedicated funding that can ensure steady progress toward meaningfully managing the region’s fire risk.

Steve Woodruff is the Northern Rockies deputy director for Western Progress, a nonpartisan regional policy institute dedicated to advancing progressive policy solutions for the Rocky Mountain West.

Water shortages are all measured in relation to the choices we make about how we use this resource.

Granted, we are periodically reminded that water is a limited resource. In recent years, residents of Georgia learned that their water supplies might not be up to the challenge of meeting projected growth demands. California’s Governor Schwarzenegger recently declared a statewide drought emergency. And, although this year’s snowpack has relieved the Colorado River system’s most immediate shortages, thirsty cities such as Las Vegas continue their quest for distant and increasingly expensive water supplies.

Last May, the House Science and Technology Committee held a hearing on “Water Supply Challenges for the 21st Century,” which included thoughtful testimony from one of the lead authors of last year’s influential report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Drought is not a purely physical phenomenon,” remarked Dr. Roger Pulwarty, “but is an interplay between water availability and the needs of humans and the environment.”

In other words, water shortages are all measured in relation to the choices we make about how we use this resource. And, as with all value-laden public policy choices, science and technology will not tell us how to make our decisions. But improved scientific understanding and a broader array of technology tools can help us sort through the challenges of water management and allocation.

In response to these and other observations about water supply challenges, Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah introduced H.R. 3957, which would establish a research, development, and demonstration program within the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development aimed at encouraging water conservation and efficiency improvements. The bill passed the House and was referred to the Senate at the end of July.

The EPA recently concluded a public comment period on its National Water Program Strategy: Response to Climate Change. In comments submitted to the agency and outlined in a previous Science Progress column, Western Progress praised the report’s acknowledgment of the important role that water conservation will play in both mitigating the production of greenhouse gases and in adapting to the changes already underway as a result of climate change. Thus, it is encouraging to see congressional movement to give a boost to the agency’s work on this subject.

Another piece of legislation, currently in discussion draft, would attempt to coordinate federal water research efforts through establishment of an interagency committee charged with implementing a “National Water Research and Development Initiative.” Introduced by Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee, the bill would provide additional support for increasing water supplies through greater efficiency and conservation.

Calls for conservation and efficiency improvements are not new, but the pressures to stretch our limited water resources are becoming more intense as we face the dual challenges of population growth and climate change. The private sector is responding with innovative new technologies to reclaim wastewater and treat brackish groundwater for domestic uses. It only makes sense that the federal government steps up to encourage and, in some cases, mandate improvements that meet growing human needs while protecting the important values of water in our environment.

Sarah Bates is the deputy director for policy and outreach at Western Progress, a nonpartisan regional policy institute dedicated to advancing progressive policy solutions for the Rocky Mountain West. She has written extensively on western water and natural resources law and policy, and was a contributing writer to the congressionally chartered Western Water Policy Review Advisory Commission.

The Bush Administration has proposed new rules that allow federal agencies to assess on their own threats to endangered species, side-stepping scientific review of environmental impacts for regulatory decisions. With the new rules, decisions will not require consultation with other federal agencies, and environmental concerns will be secondary to the independent concerns of the agencies. The Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, requires that federal agencies consult with independent wildlife specialists, but experts suggest that the administration seeks to undermine the authority of the ESA by preventing scientists from using it to justify reduced carbon emissions. These new rules, set to go into effect immediately, directly contradict that law which has helped save countless endangered species from extinction.

Here’s what some experts have been saying in the mainstream media and blogosphere over the past few days about the proposed rule change:

“This is the fox guarding the hen house. The interests of agencies will outweigh species protection interests…What they are talking about doing is eviscerating the Endangered Species Act.”
— Eric Glitzenstein, attorney representing environmental groups in a lawsuit over wildfire prevention regulations, August 11, 2008

“Informally known as ‘self-consultation,’ this policy is designed to vitiate the checks-and-balances that have made the Endangered Species Act so successful… The insidiousness of self-consultation is especially plain once you consider that many federal agencies are deeply committed to either certain kinds of projects or are entirely sympathetic to particular industries.”
— Andrew Wetzler, director of the Endangered Species Project, Chicago, Natural Resource Defense Council, August 11, 2008

“This proposed regulation is another in a continuing stream of proposals to repeal our landmark environmental laws through the back door… If this proposed regulation had been in place, it would have undermined our ability to protect the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the gray whale.”
— Sen. Barbara Boxer, (D-CA), August 12, 2008

“It’s ridiculous to admit that something is endangered because of climate change, and then say the [ESA] doesn’t apply to climate change.”
— Noah Greenwald, science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, August 12, 2008

“[The new regulations] would, in effect, greatly reduce the impact of the independent reviews government scientists have been carrying out over the last 35 years.”
— Jeremy Jacquot, graduate student in marine environmental biology, University of Southern California, August 11, 2008

“[This rule change] gives those agencies carte blanche to do what they want…The Bush Administration is trying to do by regulation what they can’t do by legislation.”
— Karla Raettig, legislative representative for wildlife conservation at the National Wildlife Federation, August 12, 2008

“History will judge this Administration as the most anti-environmental Administration in the history of the U.S.”
— Bob Irvin, Defenders of Wildlife, August 12, 2008

Image source: AP.

This year, after a late snowpack and cooler temperatures that delayed the annual melt, Rocky Mountain rivers are flowing a little higher and cooler than last year, so perhaps the trout are a little more cheerful. But anyone following the growing scientific consensus on climate change impacts on western rivers has to be concerned that the long-term trends are not good for western trout and the coldwater rivers that sustain them. (See the sidebar for a summary of projected impacts.)

Two reports released last week highlight significant changes already underway in this region. The first, “Low Flows, Hot Trout,” focuses on the Clark Fork River basin, of which the Blackfoot is an important tributary. Produced by the Missoula-based Clark Fork Coalition in partnership with National Wildlife Federation, this report features compelling stories from individuals living and working in the river basin, describing how changes in snowpack, runoff, and stream temperatures will limit their economic, recreational, and other opportunities. “Low Flows, Hot Trout” was featured in a recent column in the Rocky Mountain West’s leading online news source, Headwaters News.

The second report, “Trout in Trouble,” emerged from a partnership between the Natural Resources Defense Council and Montana Trout Unlimited. It describes similar impacts throughout the interior West, and suggests both policy reform and specific steps anglers can take to reduce their impacts on coldwater fish.

These publications are significant for their approach as well as for their important messages. Most commonly, conservation groups present the threats of climate change with a wide angle of reference. We often hear how difficult it is to project impacts on the finer scales necessary to know the specific changes coming in any given river basin. Unfortunately, when the impacts come across as global or continental in scale, individuals may have trouble relating to what it means for them or the lands and waters they know and enjoy. It is easy to be paralyzed by inaction when the problem seems too big to tackle, or when one’s own role in responding appears insignificant.

For the past year or so I’ve been participating in a collaborative group called Carpe Diem: Western Water and Climate Change, which has explored both policy options and messaging opportunities to bridge scientific knowledge and political responses. In our regional gatherings in Seattle and Albuquerque, we were impressed with the value of local knowledge, the power of storytelling, and the need to combine both to compel effective action.

These two new reports address this need, in complementary and mutually reinforcing ways. “Low Flows, Hot Trout” introduces us to the people who live in one western watershed and illustrates their connection to high-quality, living rivers. While acknowledging the uncertainties of regional climate change science, it makes a strong case for acting now on what we do know and what we can observe. Similarly, “Trout in Trouble” takes the compelling message about climate change impacts and western water presented in last year’s “In Hot Water” and applies it to specific western rivers, looking at innovative measures to save and restore trout habitats in a warming, drying region.

In short, this is the kind of information we need—straightforward, factual, and identified with known people and places—in order to build a constituency for action on climate change.

But, although reports such as these are critical steps in sparking citizens to demand policy change, we also need to be talking with our political leaders about the necessary next steps. Thus, it is encouraging that advocates and policy makers will gather this fall at a results-oriented workshop on water and climate change in the northern Rockies states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. The Headwaters Summit, which will take place in Missoula, Mont. on Sept. 15-17, will address opportunities for outreach, incentives, and policy change. Participants will share strategies, resources, and discuss possible partnerships to deal with shared challenges.

Even if all the recommended mitigation measures are implemented immediately to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the changes already underway will continue to impact water-challenged western states. So, while taking every possible step to reverse climate change, the time is ripe to look at changes in water and land use policies and management practices to deal with both the impacts that will come and those already underway. We owe it to the frowning trout in the Blackfoot River, and we owe it to future generations who deserve healthy, flowing rivers for centuries to come.

Sarah Bates is the deputy director for policy and outreach at Western Progress, a nonpartisan regional policy institute dedicated to advancing progressive policy solutions for the Rocky Mountain West. She also serves on the board of the Clark Fork Coalition. Western Progress, Clark Fork Coalition, and National Wildlife Federation are jointly organizing the Headwaters Summit referenced here.

But as I’ve watched Hurricane Dolly form in the Gulf of Mexico and careen towards the Texas-Mexico border—rapidly intensifying into a Category 2 storm just before landfall–I can only think one thing. If we’re worried about gas prices now, what will we do if (God forbid) at some point over the next several months, one or more Gulf hurricanes knock out oil production infrastructure and refining capacity?

Such a hypothetical disaster has already been discussed this year, based upon our alarming experience from the mega hurricane year of 2005. The Gulf of Mexico provides 30 percent of U.S. oil production and 45 percent of its refining capacity, according to the American Petroleum Institute. No wonder that after Hurricane Katrina shut down virtually all Gulf production in 2005, we saw average gas prices jump above $3 a gallon for the first time, climbing from $2.65 to $3.11 in the space of a week. (At the time, such a price was considered shocking.)

It’s worth raising questions like these in order to get a true and full assessment of our economy’s vulnerability due to our staggering dependence upon oil.

And then a month later came Hurricane Rita, another Category 5 aimed at oil rich Gulf waters and coasts. Taken together the two storms damaged 457 oil pipelines, destroyed 113 platforms, and most important, temporarily shut down oil production entirely. As the U.S. Minerals Management Service puts it, Katrina and Rita represented “the greatest natural disasters to oil and gas development in the history of the Gulf of Mexico.” Overall roughly three-quarters of total Gulf oil platforms were in the path of one or both storms, as were two-thirds of the region’s miles of pipeline.

To be sure, after the storms passed gas prices once again declined steadily, as production capacity in the Gulf gradually came back online and President Bush released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The American Petroleum Institute assures us its companies worked as hard as possible to recover quickly.

The vulnerability of our economy to oil price spikes at that time, however, was nothing compared to what it is now. Today we would kill for $3 a gallon at the pump, and the entire stock market swoons over any increase in oil prices. Some forecasts suggest price spikes in the event of another well-targeted Gulf hurricane could be as high as $5 to $6 per gallon. We’re much more panicky now: Could we really withstand a price blip like the one that occurred after Katrina?

That’s something to consider, because every indicator right now is that this hurricane season is something to worry about. We’re not in the August-October peak of the season yet, but we’ve already seen four named storms this year and two strong hurricanes—far ahead of the typical schedule. In particular, although the recently dissipated Hurricane Bertha didn’t ultimately cause much impact upon any land areas, it showed record longevity and near-record intensity for a storm occurring so early in the year. Bertha could represent a harbinger of a still-more active season once Atlantic sea surface temperatures reach their peak. The calling card of the deadly 2005 hurricane season, after all, was a hyperactive month of July.

Meanwhile, Dolly has already required a few platforms to be evacuated, although most recently oil prices have declined, based in part upon the anticipation that the storm’s track will not pose a severe danger to production. But another storm this year certainly might.

Granted, we shouldn’t get too alarmist: Neither 2006 nor 2007 saw anything like the hurricane destruction that befell the U.S. in 2005. Hopefully we’ll be spared this year too—but we won’t be forever. And so I believe it’s worth raising questions like these in order to get a true and full assessment of our economy’s vulnerability due to our staggering dependence upon oil.

And for that matter, why only focus on the danger to our economy posed by Gulf of Mexico hurricanes? Last year, a rare Arabian Sea cyclone, Gonu, very nearly made its way into the Persian Gulf—if it had, a true oil economy disaster could have been in the offing. And in fact, some climate models now suggest that global warming ought to increase the occurrence of hurricanes in the Arabian Sea.

For indeed, oil production and hurricanes may ultimately be linked via climate change—the burning of oil warms the climate, which provides more ocean heat for hurricanes, which can then (as we’ve seen) temporarily wipe out production of the oil. We’re still waiting for a definitive understanding of the precise hurricane-climate relationship, but it remains a reasonable assumption that the storms will get worse on average.

None of which is to say that we ought to burn less oil to prevent global warming so as to (in turn) prevent hurricanes. That’s strained logic indeed, given the amount of warming we’re already committed to and the fact that hurricanes will always be with us, irrespective of what the climate is doing.

However, it is perhaps to say that burning less oil in the future—and instead turning to alternative power sources—would reduce the impact of inevitable hurricane catastrophes on our wallets. And these days, that kind of reasoning sounds more and more compelling.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

This remarkable fish has an impressive ecological link. Like salmon, it migrates from its saltwater ocean home to fresh river waters to spawn. The shad’s oscillating presence reflects both the health of the water and the accessibility of a river’s passageways. And today’s continuing efforts to protect shad provide a good example of the long-lasting impact of expert studies by the former congressional Office of Technology Assessment.

A voluminous report prepared by OTA on fish passage technologies just before former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich shut its doors in 1995 has gained prominence in the current crisis. The report, titled “Fish Passage Technologies: Protection at Hydropower Facilities,” prepared for the House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, and Oceans, provides the kind of analysis that could potentially help Pennsylvania officials prevent the demise of the shad population, which at the time of its release was quite healthy due to earlier federal efforts to help the shad amid the growth of hydropower plants.

The old OTA often found clarity and presented policy options by gathering up and synthesizing existing studies. Today, no such agency exists to do this.

Today, however, things have taken a turn for the worse. Shad showing up in rivers each spring have mysteriously dropped by more than 90 percent since the mid-1990s. “Although this particular OTA report focuses more on hydropower plants, I would have found this information very useful [today] in our efforts to improve passages here in Philadelphia’s waterways,” says Philadelphia Water Department aquabiologist Joseph Perillo. “Putting these reports online follows a real trend among scientists forming listservs and other online networks to share credible, relevant peer-reviewed reports, like this one.”

Indeed, this particular report is available today for researchers, policymakers, and the public to access for free, alongside 719 other comprehensive, technical analyses originally provided for Congress. Thanks to the efforts of the Federation of American Scientists, more than 100,000 pages of the best available analyses of the scientific and technical policy issues of the 1970s to 1995 are available online in a user-friendly, searchable format at www.fas.org/ota.

It took less than $1,000 for FAS to create an online home for the formally issued reports of the OTA. It evolved from the efforts made by Princeton University to archive OTA’s reports in the late 90’s, and features information about how OTA prepared the reports, and supplemental archival materials not previously available to the public documenting the history and impact of the agency.

On the site, FAS will also track attempts by the scientific community and members of Congress to restore OTA, highlighting policy discussions about OTA taking place today—more than a decade after the office closed its doors. “Its existence brought a healthy balance to the analytical resources available to both the executive and legislative branches of government,” says Michael Stebbins, director of biology policy at FAS.

“By publishing the OTA’s legacy in electronic form, we are preserving the investment made in its work for future users and as a demonstration of the value of the agency,” says Stebbins. “The OTA reports collected here are widely acknowledged to be nonpartisan, objective, and thorough and in many cases, they have also proven to be of enduring interest and relevance.”

From 1972-1995, the Office of Technology Assessment provided comprehensive, technical analysis for Congress on a broad range of policy issues, including addictions, workplace safety, hospital technologies, and technology transfer to China. Efforts are mounting for Congress to appropriate funds to open a revitalized OTA. If it did, the OTA could delve into (among other things) the mystery of the disappearing shad before federal tax dollars are spent on speculative approaches based on perhaps poor science.

So what is happening to Pennsylvania’s shad? It is not at all clear why shad are not spawning. Pollution? An increase in commercial fishing? “Heck, it could even be global warming as it affects ocean currents,” says Scott Carney, another fisheries biologist. “I think everybody’s just speculating now.” Adds Mike Hendricks, a Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission fisheries biologist in trying to account for the recent and alarming decline: “It is depressing.”

The old OTA often found clarity and presented policy options by gathering up and synthesizing existing studies. Today, no such agency exists to do this. Yet despite inconsistent science on the shad’s problems, people are still investing considerable amounts of money and energy in protecting shad and other fish. In Philadelphia, for example, a consortium of local, state, and federal organizations is constructing rock ramps to permit fish, including shad, to pass around river.

“Long-term restoration of recreational fisheries in Pennsylvania has a potential economic impact of $36 million and the potential to change lives,” states American Rivers’ President Rebecca Wodder. What’s more, federal efforts to protect the shad go back a half century. In the 1960s, the number of shad returning to rivers plummeted, sparking a movement to save this fish. With the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972, rivers began to recuperate, dams were removed, and a series of fish ladders and lifts were constructed to help shad navigate around barriers in the rivers and tributaries.

These efforts paid off. In the 1990s record numbers of spawning shad returned from the Atlantic Ocean to their birth rivers. Even though it no longer exists, the OTA’s reports could play an important part in crafting successful environmental policy like this. Congress should ensure a new OTA can make similarly important contributions in the future—before federal tax dollars to save the shad are spent on more speculative approaches.

Darlene F. Cavalier (Darlene@sciencecheerleader.com) is a former Philadelphia 76ers cheerleader who studied the role of citizens in science policy as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Professionally she creates public science programs for Discover Magazine, Disney, Space.com and the National Science Foundation and is the voice of the ScienceCheerleader.com.

Conference attendees also called for funds to keep top computer programmers in climate modeling, as many are finding it more difficult to resist the financial rewards and job security that companies like Google can provide. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, told summit attendees that if climatologists hope to secure federal funding, they must be able to answer key questions about climate change that politicians would find useful in policy making. As conference chair Jagadish Shukla put it, “If we just ask for enhanced understanding, then we have very little chance of getting the necessary funding.”

Chris Mooney recently explained how Cyclone Nargis demonstrated the need to understand and predict meteorological phenomena around the world—better modeling can protect settlements and save lives. Policy makers can provide scientists with the necessary tools.

He went on to emphasize the importance of identifying capable individuals who can fill science policy positions in advance of the next administration, and ensuring a smooth transition. “There is often a great mutual incomprehension between people who run the machinery before,” and those who subsequently assume those roles, he said.

Despite the fact that new advisors and administrators will assume roles as science policy makers, Marburger said that the landscape of science policy will not change. “The future is likely to be very similar to the past, regardless of who the President is, who the administration is,” he said. Broad changes in science policy values take substantial effort by many people over time, he said. To support this, he referred to stability of non-defense R&D as a total percentage of non-defense discretionary spending over the past several decades:

(Source: “Does Science Policy Really Matter?,” Daniel Sarewitz; AAAS, based on Budget of the U.S. Government FY 2007 Historical Tables.)

Marburger went on to discuss the increases in R&D funding during his tenure. “There’s a much greater amount of research money on the table than there was at the beginning of this administration,” he said.

The Bush Administration has indeed supported important areas of science funding. His slides showed the upward incline of funding since 2001. According to the AAAS, “overall federal investment in R&D would increase $4.9 billion or 3.5 percent to $147.4 billion” in the administration’s FY2009 budget. But AAAS and Science Progress advisor John Irons point out what Marburger failed to mention: despite these increases in dollar amounts, boosts to federal research funding have not kept pace with inflation for years.

Funding decisions are ultimately up to Congress, but questions of “how much” are simply one element of science policy. Another is the responsibility to provide clear and accurate scientific advice to the President and to Congress so that they can make informed decisions on public policy. Marburger is absolutely right that we need to start thinking now about who the capable individuals are that will fill science policy positions within the next administration, because the first job of those people won’t be ensuring more funding for R&D, it will be restoring scientific integrity to executive decision making. From inaction and delay on addressing climate change, to short-sighted policies on stem cell research, to the obliteration the EPA’s ability to protect citizens from environmental contaminates, the current administration’s assault on scientific integrity is well-documented and wearying.

The next President will need a team of science advisors who can help direct the billions of dollars the federal government spends on scientific research and development into efforts that build a low-carbon economy enhanced by innovation and opportunity for all workers, and a healthcare system that serves everyone who in the country. And they’ll have to push back hard against those who continue to wage war on science.

Bob Dinneen, CEO and President of of the Renewable Fuels Association testified that ethanol production has a very small effect on food prices, and may actual be keeping them down. He told committee members that corn growers heeded the market signal sent by the RFS mandate last year, producing an additional 2.5 billion bushels of corn over the previous year’s yield, of which only 600 million bushels went towards producing ethanol. Thus, he argued, there was actually an increase in available corn.

Dinneen followed up by citing research which shows that only two percent of the world supply of corn is used goes into ethanol production and that only three percent of food price increases was attributable to that production. He said the main driver of increased food prices was the price of oil. Removing the RFS, he said, would only increase the price of energy, driving up food prices even further.

Rick Tolman, CEO of the National Corn Growers Association backed up Dinneen’s claim, explaining that the main culprit of increased food prices is the price of oil, which plays a significant role in each part of the food production chain. Tolman cited a recent study suggesting that a $1-per-gallon increase in the price of gas has three times the impact on food prices than a $1-per-bushel increase in the price of corn. He also testified that only 19 cents of each consumer dollar in the United States can be attributed to farm products such as grain, oil seeds, and meat. Labor costs 38 cents, and transportation, packaging, energy, and other costs make up the remaining 43 cents. He cited USDA economist Ephraim Liebtag, who calculates that a 50 percent increase in corn prices would translate to an increase in retail food prices of less than one percent.

Don’t remove the mandates, but don’t increase them either was the recommendation from Scott Faber, Vice President of Federal Affairs for the Grocery Manufacturers Association. He acknowledged that many factors are involved in the recent spike, “including increasing global food demand, export and other restrictions, adverse weather in some countries, commodity speculation, and higher energy prices.” He said that the one factor that is under the control of Congress is the package of “mandates and subsidies diverting food into fuel production.” Congress should be mindful, he said, that rising food prices are a significant challenge to the poorest twenty percent of Americans who spend about one-third of their after-tax income on food.

The food price spike has also pushed millions of people around the world in to poverty, he said, forcing food aid programs to ration their supplies. He asked Congress to revisit the mandate schedule; to push harder for second- and third- generation biofuels; and to increase support of international food programs and agricultural development.

Fortunately, there is a sufficient supply of biofuel feedstocks that do not compete with food crops: see “Alternative Cellulosic Biomass By the Numbers.”

Bob Dinneen, CEO and President of the Renewable Fuels Association, defended the RFS, saying that it “makes more sense today then when it was passed.” He argued that the RFS plays a major role in reducing the price of gasoline and U.S. dependence on foreign oil; curtailing greenhouse gas emissions; creating new jobs; and revitalizing rural America.

He claimed that this year’s mandate, if met, will bring GHG emission reductions equivalent to taking 2.5 million cars off the road. He also addressed the recent Searchinger report arguing that biofuel production may actually cause increased GHG emissions. Dinneen cited a response to the study questioning its underlying model and said that more research is needed to address the issue. Searchinger himself has countered such critiques of the study, saying that its conclusions hold regardless of adjustments to the model.

Dinneen also testified that biofuels are also lowering oil prices, citing a recent Merrill Lynch report suggesting world oil prices would be 15 percent higher without the current expansion of biofuel production. He called for greater investment in delivery methods and transportation infrastructure to bring ethanol to where its needed quickly and cheaply.

Charles Drevna, President of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association offered an opposing view, asking Congress to do away with the RFS and instead let the market dictate the integration of alternative (note: not “renewable”) fuels into the transportation fuel mix. He told the hearing audience that the mandates not only distort the market, but stifle competition and innovation.

He took issue with Dinneen’s claim of lower gas prices from the introduction of biofuels, saying that adding ethanol to fuel does not actually translate into cost savings at the pump. Because current biofuels have less energy content then gasoline, cars end up requiring more fuel, which offsets lower prices he said. To solidify his claim, Drevna cited a report which found that E85 ethanol cost eighty cents more per gallon then gasoline when its price was adjusted for its lower combustion efficiency.

Drevna also disagreed with Dinneen that biofuels are reducing the cost of gasoline because ethanol production is subsidized, offering the appearance of lower prices. But he failed to note that the government has been very generous in supporting oil production in recent years. As Sam Davis and Dan Weiss of the Center for American Progress point out, in 2004 and 2005, big oil companies received tax breaks worth over $17 billion over the next decade. This assistance, they also say, “continues even as BP, ConocoPhillips, and Shell just posted record first quarter 2008 profits—a combined total of $20.8 billion.”

If the ethanol subsidy is removed, Drevna argued, ethanol would be uneconomical in comparison to gasoline on a thermal energy scale. He also claimed that the U.S. lacks the necessary infrastructure to meet the mandates, leaving refiners to unfairly pay the price of penalties imposed by Congress. He asked committee members to do away with the current tariff on imported ethanol to afford flexibility to refiners trying to meet these increased RFS mandates.

Amid growing controversy, Subcommittee On Energy and Air Quality Chairman Rick Boucher (D-VA) called the hearing to revisit the RFS just five months after Congress increased the mandate as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 which passed at the end of last year. The polarized hearing left committee members with a wide array of considerations to mull over as they decide the fate of the RFS in the coming months. To make sense of it all, Science Progress breaks down the hearing to discuss its varying themes. First up, what’s right with the RFS and ways to make it better.

The hearing opened up with testimony from Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD) who introduced her bill, H.R. 5236, better known as the Renewable Biomass Facilitation Act. The bill intends to expand the RFS to allow woody biomass collected from both federal and private forests to be used in the production of biofuel that would count towards the RFS. Woody biomass—the byproducts of forest management practices—are usually burned or left to rot, releasing carbon and methane into the atmosphere and could be put to better use as feedstock for biofuels, she argued. Most committee members used their allotted time to heap congratulations on Rep. Sandlin and pledge support for her bill. Using residual agricultural and forestry biomass as biofuel feedstock would avoid competition with food crops.

Committee members then heard from Robert Meyers, associate assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation who touted the President’s proposed Alternative Fuel Standard, which would replace the RFS in 2010. The AFS would include alternative, but non-renewable fuels such as natural gas and coal-to-liquid (which is a boondoggle), hydrogen, and plug-in hybrids, in addition to those renewable fuels already included in the RFS. While the AFS ups the required amount of alternative fuels in the country’s fuel supply, it gives the EPA discretion to adjust or waive requirements to protect the economy or environment from any detrimental impacts of biofuel production. He also revealed that the EPA’s report on the environmental and health impacts of biofuels—requested by Congress in 2005—will be released in the coming weeks.

Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the National Resources Defense Council, praised the RFS for its forward-looking approach, but pressed Congress to ensure proper safeguards are in place to protect the environment and food prices. He commended the RFS for properly defining lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions for biofuels to include the entire production process, as well as land use changes, which can severely alter the effectiveness of biofuels in reducing GHG emissions. He noted how the RFS requires the vast majority of new biofuels derived from cellulosic biomass to reduce lifecycle GHG emissions by 60 percent, a step away from a “more is better” policy to a “better is better” policy.

Greene recommended that Congress push the EPA to study environmental consequences of biofuels to ensure that science drives policy, not politics. He asked Congress to adopt a cap-and-trade program as part of a comprehensive approach to reduce GHG emissions and to reform the current ethanol tax credit to be technology-neutral and performance-based. Such an approach would incentivize biofuel innovation and keep Congress from picking the winners and losers in the biofuel marketplace, he argued.

First, in June of 2007, came Cyclone Gonu, the first recorded Category 5 ever in the Arabian Sea, and the cause of the worst natural disaster in the history of the nation of Oman (the storm racked up some $4 billion in damage to the desert country). Then, last November, we saw Cyclone Sidr, a strong Category 4/weak Category 5 storm that killed at least 3,500 Bangladeshis with a powerful storm surge that reached 16 feet high in some places, and swept inland over the low-lying country.

There’s no telling yet how bad Nargis will turn out to be.

But in human terms, none of these storms can touch Cyclone Nargis, which rapidly exploded in intensity last week before smacking into southern Myanmar (formerly Burma) as a still-strengthening Category 4 with a tightly packed, cloud-filled eye. As I write this the death toll has reached 22,000 by some accounts, and is expected to climb higher. In terms of its murderousness, Nargis has already surpassed 1998′s Hurricane Mitch, which killed some 11,000 in Nicaragua and Honduras and left almost as many missing. Let us hope that it gets nowhere near the 1991 Bangladesh Cyclone, which killed 138,000, or the 1970 Bhola Cyclone, which also struck present-day Bangladesh and killed between 300,000 and 500,000 people—the deadliest hurricane on record.

Unfortunately, Nargis sounds a lot like that last storm. Much of the death toll occurred in Myanmar’s low-lying but also very populous Irrawaddy Delta region, which experienced a storm surge that probably exceeded 13 feet in many places. When you combine a poor population living in a low lying area in very flimsy structures with a rapidly exploding storm that took an ill-prepared region by surprise with its force—and there are already charges from Laura Bush that the military junta running Myanmar failed to warn its people—it’s a perfect recipe for disaster.

There’s no telling yet how bad Nargis will turn out to be: It appears that entire villages were swept away and the death toll will probably rise significantly over the coming days. But already, there are some points to bear in mind from the Nargis tragedy:

It’s Not About Global Warming, But Poverty and Infrastructure.

Hurricanes have been dramatically active in the North Indian region in the past year, just as they were in the Atlantic region in 2004 and 2005. There is quite a body of scientific research now developing on whether global warming may be leading to stronger storms, more of them (or fewer), and so forth. However, this remains a very murky area, and global warming can hardly explain a fact like this: Although the Yucatan and Central America got smacked by back-to-back Category 5 storms last year—Hurricanes Dean and Felix were both far more powerful, meteorologically, than Cyclones Sidr and Nargis—the combined death toll was only 162. That’s because nations like Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras warned their populations and, in some cases, evacuated people in vulnerable areas. It’s already painfully obvious that Myanmar’s military junta did nothing of the kind.

The American Media Present a Very Selective Picture of Cyclone Disasters in the Developing World.

You are hearing a lot about Cyclone Nargis right now because the death and destruction is so sudden and so staggering. And you will likely hear more, because a political subplot is now emerging which finds First Lady Laura Bush rightly denouncing Myanmar’s military junta—a regime guilty of gross human rights violation, to say nothing of massive ignorance—in the wake of the tragedy. However, in 2007, when the island nation of Madagascar was literally brought to its knees by repeated cyclone strikes—none of which, on its own, was nearly as bad as Nargis, but which collectively created a massive humanitarian crisis—we heard much less about it. When it comes to natural disasters, the press focuses on drama, and does not strictly calibrate its coverage volume to the scale of the tragedy or the need for aid.

Hurricane/Cyclone Forecasting in the North Indian Region is Lackluster at Best.

Here in the United States, we have the best hurricane forecasters in the world—and they protect the entire North Atlantic region from storms (and the Northeastern Pacific as well). Our government flies aircraft into approaching storms to determine their strengths. It releases state-of-the-art updates every six hours. It runs suites of computer models to compute possible storm tracks and intensities. But for the Indian Ocean region, there is nothing that remotely compares. The Indian Meteorological Department‘s products hardly match the sophistication of what we have in the U.S., and I don’t know if Myanmar even has a hurricane forecasting center of its own. Into such a situation comes Nargis, the toughest kind of storm to forecast and also the most dangerous—a rapid intensifier near land. Even the U.S. National Hurricane Center would have had trouble with Nargis, but given that this storm occurred in the Bay of Bengal, serious disaster was probably unpreventable. That doesn’t exonerate Myanmar’s military junta; but it does suggest that the nations of the region, or the international community, ought to invest in far better cyclone forecasting capacities for these incredibly vulnerable areas.

Hurricanes Can Bring Down Governments.

In his book Divine Wind, MIT’s Kerry Emanuel emphasizes how at key moments, tropical cyclones have actually changed world history. That’s precisely what happened with the 1970 Bhola Cyclone: It was the deadliest storm known to us, with some 300,000 to 500,000 dead in what was then East Pakistan. At the time Pakistan was one nation; but a strong separatist movement existed in the east. Enter the cyclone, and in the ensuing tragedy, even as the international community mobilized and the news media swept in, the central government in West Pakistan was widely perceived as inept, uncaring, uninvolved. Anger rose, and before long the nation we now call Bangladesh declared its independence—although it took a civil war to ensure it.

Even without a sophisticated analysis of the political situation in Myanmar, one can see many parallels in the Nargis catastrophe. We clearly have another regime that was out of touch, that did little or nothing to protect its people—the worst kind of despotism and irresponsibility. And now, in the glare of international scrutiny, there will be mounting outrage, and rightly so. If Cyclone Nargis can help strengthen the movement for Burmese democracy, at least there will be some silver lining in this tragedy.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs at The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

During his testimony, John Stephenson, director of the Government Accountability Office’s Natural Resources & Environment department, criticized the thirty-two-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act for being “outdated” and “cumbersome.” TSCA requires the EPA to secure information on all new and old chemical substances and to regulate those chemicals found to cause unreasonable risk to the public or environment. This means the EPA, and not the chemical manufacturers, must prove the safety of chemicals. As history would suggest, this is a Sisyphean task for an already resource-strapped agency. According to senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), of the 80,000 or so chemicals currently used by industry, the Agency has only tested 200.

Is there a solution to this appalling situation? Stephenson believes the answer may lie in the Europe Union’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals program, also known as REACH. In 2006, the EU passed REACH, a 849-page piece of legislation requiring that all chemicals produced or imported in the EU of one ton or more in volume be tested for health and safety risks and registered with a central chemical authority. What makes the policy unique is that chemical manufacturers and importers must prove to federal authorities their chemicals are safe, not vice versa. (For a more in-depth analysis of REACH, see the BBC’s Q&A report on the program).

Stephenson went on to praise REACH, believing its model fosters a fruitful partnership between industry and government because authorities can better protect the public and chemical companies can avoid litigation if hazardous chemicals are identified upfront rather than down the road. Critics argue such approaches could hamstring the chemical industry’s ability to innovate; force companies to move off-shore, costing U.S. jobs; and forcing many small businesses under. Minority witness V.M. Delisi of Fanwood Chemical Inc. echoed these concerns, suggesting it was a “myth” to believe chemical companies have unlimited sources to deal with the onus of proving the safety of their products. Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) countered such fears, saying companies that have created safer alternatives to toxic chemicals have seen their products kept out of the market because weak regulation favors cheaper, more hazardous chemicals. Stronger regulation would foster innovation and safer options, she argued. Annette Gellert, co-founder of the WELL Network, a nonprofit focused on the environment and its connection to the health of children and families, noted that if the U.S. maintains weak chemical regulation it could become a dumping ground for toxic products that cannot be sold in Europe and other stricter countries.

As Chris Mooney explained in his recent column, the EPA is in the midst of a complete meltdown. After censoring its own scientists, demonstrating disdain for scientific integrity, and failing to prevent mercury pollution, repairing the damage done to the EPA by the Bush Administration will require the upmost attention of the next President. But some are left to wonder why it even came to this stage. As Tuesday’s hearing wrapped up, Chairman Boxer’s (D-CA) said simply: “No one can explain to me where there is room for politics when you are looking at the health and safety of the American people.”

In particular, a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences, and a closely related study from the federal Climate Change Science Program (the same study I complained about the administration trying to deep-six), together present a kind of case study of what one kind of targeted adaptation might look like. Both studies focus on the transportation sector in particular: the NAS study on a nationwide basis and the CCSP study exclusively for the Gulf region. They broadly agree that at present, we’re ignoring considerable global warming-related risks to our transportation infrastructure. Climate change will be a huge burden on an already taxed national transportation system, and in this respect, the Gulf Coast region is perhaps the most vulnerable of all.

At minimum, the transportation community must wake up to climate risks.

To understand that vulnerability, consider a few facts laid out in the CCSP report: Over the next fifty to 100 years, global warming could inundate a “vast portion” of the Gulf Coast with a sea level rise in the range of 2 to 4 feet. That’s terrifying, because “27 percent of the major roads, 9 percent of the rail lines, and 72 percent of the ports are at or below 122 cm (4 feet) in elevation.” And of course, that’s just the risk posed by sea level rise. But as we all know, this region is also very vulnerable to hurricanes–which, surfing atop higher seas in the future, will prove even more devastating than they’ve been thus far. To once again quote from the CCSP report: “With storm surge at 7 m (23 ft), more than half of the area’s major highways (64 percent of Interstates; 57 percent of arterials), almost half of the rail miles, 29 airports, and virtually all of the ports are subject to flooding.”

Clearly, the U.S. Gulf Coast features transportation disasters just waiting to happen, a predicament that will only worsen in the future. So what should we be doing?

The answer seems to be that we should start by educating transportation professionals themselves. As anyone who’s ever had a flight delayed because of severe thunderstorms knows, transportation is highly dependent upon weather. Yet at present, there’s a culture in the field of transportation management–as in many other areas–that tends to ignore or overlook the implications of long-term climate change (which means, among other things, systematic weather changes). Both the NAS and CCSP reports highlight the inadequate communication practices that currently persist between transportation professionals and climate experts, leading to a situation in which long-term transportation plans (including the design of infrastructure) often go forward without taking the changing climate into account.

So at minimum, the transportation community must wake up to climate risks, start shoring up its infrastructure, and begin planning new infrastructure accordingly. That’s unlikely to happen, though, without concerted government involvement. Not only must specific government agencies, like the Department of Transportation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, facilitate better communication between the climate and transportation communities; and not only should research continue, in the vein of the recent CCSP report, to provide better information about the nature of climate risks. No–we must go much farther still to create an entire government apparatus to facilitate local adaptation to climate change in the transportation sector.

Clearly, to right this wrong, the next administration will have to do something unprecedented.

It will be a massive task. We’ll need to ensure that the federal government requires higher standards of resiliency in the future for transportation infrastructure. We’ll have to ensure that states and localities get adequate federal funding to help them keep up with a changing climate; and that the relevant federal agencies, especially the Department of Transportation, get enough money in their own budgets to do the requisite climate-related adaptation work. We’ll need to immediately start rebuilding some of our most vulnerable infrastructure. And all of this activity will have to be coordinated, not willy-nilly.

And if that sounds like a lot, don’t forget: the transportation sector represents just one targeted area in which we’ll have to adapt to climate change, and the Gulf Coast just one specific region. To address all sectors and all regions…well, that’s a staggering task, and one that has been entirely neglected thus far by the Bush administration.

Clearly, to right this wrong, the next administration will have to do something unprecedented. There’s no other way but to set up a whole branch of government dedicated to climate change adaptation in its myriad respects, headed by a leader who, if not in the president’s cabinet, should be in close contact with decision-makers at the highest level. Such a move would be unprecedented, but it simply underscores the importance of one of the least discussed aspects of our necessary response to global warming–preparedness.

Yeah, we have to cut emissions; yeah, we have to negotiate internationally; and yeah, we have to invest in green energy technology. But at the same time, we also have to staff an entire government with professionals and experts who can manage not only these programs, but also take the lead on climate change adaptation in its many facets–one of the knottiest areas of all.

And it’s never been done before.

Chris Mooney is a Contributing Editor for Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.