Eat with the fullest pleasure [Tomorrow's Table]
"Eating with the fullest pleasure- pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance- is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world".
Wendell Berry
Slime mould attacks simulates Tokyo rail network [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
In a Japanese laboratory, a group of scientists is encouraging a rapidly expanding amoeba-like blob to consume Tokyo. Thankfully, the blob in question is a "slime mould" just around 20cm wide, and "Tokyo" is represented by a series of oat flakes dotted about a large plastic dish. It's all part of a study on better network design through biological principles. Despite growing of its own accord with no plan in mind, the mould has rapidly produced a web of slimy tubes that look a lot like Tokyo's actual railway network.
The point of this simulation isn't to reconstruct the monster attacks of popular culture, but to find ways of improving transport networks, by recruiting nature as a town planner. Human societies depend on good transport networks for ferrying people, resources and information from place to place, but setting up such networks isn't easy. They have to be efficient, cost-effective and resistant to interruptions or failure. The last criterion is particularly challenging as the British public transport system attests to, every time a leaf or snowflake lands on a road or railway.
Living thing also rely on transport networks, from the protein tracks that run through all of our cells to the gangways patrolled by ant colonies. Like man-made networks, these biological ones face the same balancing act of efficiency and resilience, but unlike man-made networks, they have been optimised through millions of years of evolution. Their strategies have to work - if our networks crash, the penalties are power outages or traffic jams; if theirs crash, the penalty is death.
To draw inspiration from these biological networks, Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University worked with the slime mould Physarum polycephalum. This amoeba-like creature forages for food by sending out branches (plasmodia) from a central location. Even though it forms vast, sprawling networks, it still remains as a single cell. It's incredibly dynamic. Its various veins change thickness and shape, new ones form while old ones vanish, and the entire network can crawl a few centimetres every hour.
For a mindless organism, the slime mould's skill at creating efficient networks is extraordinary. It can find the most effective way of linking together scattered sources of food, and it can even find the shortest path through a maze. But can it do the same for Tokyo's sprawling cityscape?
Tero grew Physarum in a wet dish at a place corresponding to Tokyo, with oat flakes marking the locations of other major cities in the Greater Tokyo Area. Physarum avoids bright light, so Tero used light to simulate mountains, lakes and other prohibitive terrain on his miniature map. The mould soon filled the space with a densely packed web of plasmodia. Eventually, it thinned out its networks to focus on branches that connected the food sources. Even by eye, these final networks bore a striking similarity to the real Tokyo rail system.
The mould's abilities are a wonder of self-optimisation. It has no sense of forward-planning, no overhead maps or intelligence to guide its moves. It creates an efficient network by laying down plasmodia indiscriminately, strengthening whatever works and cutting back on whatever doesn't. The approach seems as haphazard as a human planner putting railway tracks everywhere, and then removing the ones that aren't performing well. Nonetheless, the slime mould's methods (or lack thereof) produced a network with comparable cost, efficiency and tolerance for faults to the planned human attempt.
Tero tried to emulate this slime mould's abilities using a deceptively simple computer model, consisting of an randomly meshed lattice of tubes. Each tube has virtual protoplasm flowing through it, just as the branches of the slime mould do. The faster the flow rate, the wider the tube becomes. If the flow slows, the tubes thin and eventually disappear.
Tweaking the specific conditions of the model produced networks that were very similar to those of both live Physarum and Tokyo's actual rail system. Tweaking it further allowed Tero to boost the system's efficiency or resilience, while keeping its costs as low as possible. This, perhaps, is the engineering of the future - a virtual system inspired by a biological one that looks a lot like a man-made one.
Reference: Tero et al. 2010. Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design. Science 10.1126/science.1177894
More on slime moulds: Predatory slime mould freezes prey in large groups
Images: from AAAS/Science
Silly Rabbit, Commodities Tricks Are For Kids [Built on Facts]
This is a little off the beaten path, but it's a silly little diversion with some classic "the press lacks numeracy skills" complaints as a bonus. Thomas Frank writing in the Wall Street Journal has written a rather wild piece - One Cross of Gold, Coming Up: How the government could get even with right-wing cranks.
It's mainly in a Modest Proposal sort of vein; I don't expect he's even a little serious. Still, fun to take a look at. His proposal runs more or less as follows:
1. All those right wing cranks are hoarding stashes of gold.
2. The federal government has lots of gold in Fort Knox.
3. Sell it all on the open market, reducing the deficit, cratering the price of gold, and wiping out the finances of the right.
4. Cackle maniacally in the manner of Sesame Street's Count von Count!
As it is satirical in nature, I'm not giving the Journal a hard time for publishing something so reminiscent of Dr. Evil. I am going to give them a hard time for not thinking about the math of the situation. If they had, they'd see two gaping holes in the plan, either one of which alone would in reality end the plan with an empty Fort Knox and an entirely undamaged group of right wing gold bugs.
1. The Theoretical Problem: To flood a commodities market, you need a flood of that commodity. According to Mr. Frank, Fort Knox contains 261 million troy ounces of Gold. According to The Economist, world production of gold is around 2.4 billion troy ounces per year. In short, the liquidation of the entirety of Fort Knox would be the equivalent to adding a little over a month's worth of natural mine production. Since essentially all the gold that has ever been mined is still in circulation, such an action simply wouldn't necessarily dent the price very much. It would be analogous to the occasional pre-election releases of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves. It produces a limited and temporary price drop, but the extra supply is so small as to not make much difference. On the other hand investors could take it as a sign of governmental instability and drive up the price of gold.
[UPDATE: Hubris, meet Nemesis. I have myself made a serious mistake! World gold production is actually only 75 million troy ounces a year. On the other hand, Fort Knox only holds about 147 million troy ounces, as not all the US gold is stored there. As such it represents a little under two years worth of world production. A sudden release probably would dent prices significantly, though only on a temporary basis since central banks would immediately seize on the opportunity to buy a valuable commodity at a discount during a period of otherwise uncertain economic times. Ditto other large exchange-traded funds and industrial users. Thus Point 1 is likely still valid over the mid to long term, but over the short term the government could flood the market if it wanted. Point 2 still stands unaffected.]
2. The Observational Problem: Individual investors in the US - right wing or otherwise - don't actually buy much gold. Frank seems to believe right-wing paranoia has driven up the price, but that's just bananas. The entire US only consumes a fraction of the world gold supply. Much the gold that is sold in the US goes straight to jewelery manufacturers and industrial users. The fraction that is purchased as an investment generally circulates among central banks, exchange-traded funds, and other large interests - not your average investor with a gold eagle coin or two. Their impact is certainly much smaller than the massive purchases of the central banks of China and India. Conversely, there's very little evidence that anyone, right or left, is actually investing any meaningful percentage of their assets in precious metals. No massive 401(k) exchanges for pretty metal, no sudden demand for safes, no sudden surge of reporting in the somewhat arcane IRS tax disclosures that commodities sellers must follow. Further, the dinky gold-selling outfits that advertise on Glenn Beck and the like are explicitly geared toward small transactions. If it were anything other than a niche within a niche within a niche, large-scale exchange-traded gold funds would be looking for customers in those markets as well. They ain't.
Either one of those two problems renders Frank's plan unworkable. Still, it's a cute little thought exercise. I do, on the other hand, wish an explicitly Wall Street publication had put a little more number crunching into it.
Spotlight on two Japanese volcanoes [Eruptions]
Sakurajima in Japan, erupting in December 2009. Image courtesy of Photovolcanica.com
Richard Roscoe at Photovolcanica.com has just posted two great sites focusing on two of the most active volcanoes in Japan: Sakurajima and Suwanosejima. These volcanoes are almost constantly erupting with small strombolian events punctuated by occasional plinian eruptions.
Sakurajima is on the island of Kyushu (well, technically Kagoshima, but right off the coast of Kyushu) less than 10 miles / 20 km from the city of Kagoshima. The volcano has been erupting since 1955 with both explosive and effusive products - some quite large, up to VEI 3. In January 1914, Sakurajima had a VEI 4 eruption after almost 100 years of quiet. The area near the volcano, including Kagoshima, was buried in ~1.5 km3 ash and tephra, with thousands of buildings destroyed from the weight of the tephra fall. If you feel like seeing what's up at Sakuajima, you can watch its volcano-cam.
A map of the most active volcanoes of Japan.
Suwanosejima is further south in the Ryukyu Island along the Japanese arc on Suwanose Island. It, too, is a very active volcano, with the current eruptive cycle starting in 2004, but prior to that, it erupted almost every year since the early 1990's. It tends to favor strombolian explosions that are smaller (VEI 1 and 2) than Sakurajima. However, a a series of large eruption in 1813-14 caused people to abandon the island. That eruption produced pyroclastic flows and lava flows that ranked as a VEI 4 eruption. It had a second VEI 4 in 1889, but since then the eruptions have been smaller.
Civility, Science Communication, and the White Patriarchy [The Primate Diaries]
My friend Henry Gee at Nature Network wrote a few thoughts about how issues of race, gender and communication were discussed at the recent ScienceOnline2010 conference (#scio10 for the Twitter inclined). In his post he raises what he felt were unfair criticisms to his comments about laying ground rules to enforce civil conversation in science blog posts:
I make the point that civility can be encouraged by laying out ground rules - as John Wilkins says on his admirable blog, Evolving Thoughts - and I hope he won't mind my quoting it in extenso:
'This is my living room, so don't piss on the floor. I reserve the right to block users and delete any comments that are uncivil, spam or offensive to all. I have a broad tolerance, but don't test it, please. Try to remain coherent, polite and put forward positive arguments if engaged in debate. There are plenty of places you can accuse people of being pedophilic communist sexist pigs; don't do it here.'
Much to my amazement I am criticized very sharply for expressing what I thought (and still think) to be a perfectly reasonable view. The counter-argument is that the enforcement of ground rules is an act of white male patriarchy and acts to exclude certain subsets of society from taking part. I think this is tosh, actually, but some otherwise intelligent and articulate people seem to believe it. Are such ground rules inherently discriminatory, or are they fair?
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
Tobacco plants foil very hungry caterpillars by switching pollinators to hummingbirds [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
The partnerships between flowering plants and the animals that pollinate them are some of the most familiar in the natural world. The active nature of animals typically casts the plants as the passive partners in this alliance, but in reality, they're just as involved. That becomes particularly apparent when the animals renege on their partnership.
Nicotinia attenuata, a type of wild US tobacco, is usually pollinated by hawkmoths. To lure them in, it opens its flowers at night and releases alluring chemicals. But pollinating hawkmoths often lay their eggs on the plants they visit and the voracious caterpillars start eating the plants. Fortunately for the plant, it has a back-up plan. It stops producing its moth-attracting chemicals and starts opening its flowers during the day instead. This simple change of timing opens its nectar stores to a very different pollinator that has no interest in eating it - the black-chinned hummingbird.
Danny Kessler from the Max Planck Institute first noticed the tobacco plant's partner-swapping antics by watching a population of flowers that was overrun by hawkmoth caterpillars. Nearly every plant was infested. To Kessler's surprise, around one in six flowers started opening between 6 and 10am, rather than their normal business hours of 6 and 10pm. To see if the two trends were related, Kessley deliberately infested plants from another population with young hawkmoth larvae.
Eight days later, and 35% of the flowers had started opening in the morning, compared to just 11% of uninfested plants. The flowers use a cocktail of various chemicals to lures in night-flying moths, but the main ingredient is benzyl acetone (BA). A large plume gets releases when the flower opens at night. It's so essential that genetically modified plants, which can't produce BA, never manage to attract any moths. Nonetheless, the flowers that opened in the morning never produced any BA.
By artificially boosting the nectar yield of specific flowers, Kessler showed that hawkmoths are more likely to lay eggs on plants that reward them with the most nectar. So by putting off the adult hawkmoths from visiting the flowers, the plants gained a reprieve from future onslaughts by their larvae.
The larvae themselves prompt the switch. As they munch away, their saliva releases complex mixtures of fats and amino acids into the wounds they create. This cocktail trigger a genetic alarm in the plant's cells, which culminates in a burst of jasmonic acid. This all-important plant chemical coordinates a variety of defences, from producing poisons to summoning predators and parasitic wasps. In this case, it's responsible for shifting the flowers' blooming schedule.
Kessler demonstrated the role of the caterpillars' saliva and jasmonic acid through a clever series of experiments. Even if no larvae are around, just adding their saliva to artificial wounds causes some plants to switch to the morning opening hours. If the plants are genetically modified so that they can't produce jasmonic acid, the entire process grinds to a halt, rescued only by the artificial addition of jasmonic acid.
Having solved the problem of the very hungry caterpillars, the plants still need pollinators. Again, the revised opening schedule provides the solution. Through painstaking field observations, Kessler showed that hummingbirds were strongly attracted to the morning blossoms, almost always visiting these flowers first. The birds have apparently learned to associate the shape of the opened flowers with the prospect of a rich, early-morning beakful of nectar. The plant gets a new partner, while avoiding the unwanted shenanigans of its old one.
Hummingbirds, of course, never eat other parts of the plant but if they're such compliant partners, why doesn't the tobacco plant always open its flowers in the morning? We don't know, but Kessler suggests that the birds, for all their strengths, may not be quite as reliable as the moths. Hummingbirds are more likely to drink from multiple flowers on the same plant, which would lead to a lot of self-fertilisation. They're more restricted by geographical factors, such as the presence of nearby nest sites. And, unlike hawkmoths, they can't be summoned across long distances through the simple use of smell.
Picture by Stan Shebs
Reference: Kessler et al. 2010. Changing Pollinators as a Means of Escaping Herbivores. Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.071
More on pollination:
- Of flowers and pollinators - a case study of punctuated evolution
- Tiny treeshrews chug alcoholic nectar without getting drunk
- Ancient plants manipulate insects for hot, smelly sex
- Orchid lures in pollinating wasps with promise of fresh meat
So You Want to Cut Your Resource Usage? [Casaubon's Book]
A friend of mine, Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man) once observed that cutting your energy usage should be as easy as rolling off a log - that as long as it is always easier to use more resources, and the path of least resistance heads towards taking the car or turning up the heat, we're destined to struggle. And he's right.
However, in another way, he may be wrong. While I agree with him that we can do a lot of things to make energy reduction a lot easier for people (think, using one really obvious example, how many people are simply afraid to ride their bikes in traffic, and who could be persuaded to take a bike if they simply had a safe place to ride), I'm not sure that it will ever be as easy as rolling off a log.
Why? Because there isn't a one-size fits all answer to the problems raised by our resource use. Not everyone lives in the same place. Not everyone has the same needs. Not everyone is going to make the same changes - nor should they. If a basic principle of using less and living better is to live more locally, that alone will radically reshape our choices. Heating is going to be much more a priority for me in upstate NY than it would be for someone in Pheonix - on the other hand, coppicing some trees to do it with is going to be a lot more viable in my climate than in a water-straitened one. Local food sheds will produce different cuisines - there is no such thing as a one-size fits all diet.
Beyond location, there are differences of structure. All of us have things we're just not prepared to do. Or we're not prepared to do them yet. I don't have a refrigerator - or rather I do, but it isn't plugged in. During the cold months, we use our enclosed porch for natural refrigeration. During the warm periods, we use the smaller fridge as an icebox, rotating frozen milk jugs to provide coolth from the super-efficient freezer we require for professional reasons (since we sell meat from our farm). The substantial savings in electric costs works great for us. It freaks other people out - but there are plenty of people who'd rather die than give up their fridges but who are perfectly willing to consider going to the laundromat. Given the distance from her to my local laundromat, the size of my family and the fact that we use almost no disposable items (cloth for most), my washer would be the very last appliance I gave up. Fridge? No biggie.
The biggest barrier to making a real impact, however, is that people get confused about what matters and how much - and for good reason. First of all, there's plenty of greenwashing "look, here's a green chainsaw so you can deforest more of your land!" "Look, buy this designer eco-bag and save a teeny tiny bit of oil in plastic bags and feel good about your impact..." Second, it is genuinely confusing. For example one study suggested that Brits should import their lamb from New Zealand, because it used less energy than wintering over sheep in Britain. But the comparison was between the most common meat breeds of sheep in both countries, rather than well adapted British landraces that require fewer inputs. Of course, they produce less lamb - so the answer might well be "eat less lamb, and when you do eat it, choose different breeds" - but how many people shopping at even a farmer's market ask what breed of sheep their meat came from? How many would understand the answer?
That's why the same generalities get repeated over and over again. So we get people converting to CFL lights, which is good, but not enough. We get people buying green products, which is helpful, but not enough. And which products? How do we sort all this out?
Well, my goal has been to figure it out for my family and to pass that information along. After 3 years of living at between 1/5 and 1/10th of the energy the average family uses, there are some generalities I can offer to people. But they aren't the ones you'll see in most of the "10 tips to go green" articles.
1. Buy a lot less stuff. So much of what's out there focuses on replacing one consumer need with a marginally less toxic or awful option. This is a lousy way to make substantial reductions in your energy usage. What makes a huge difference is reducing consumer spending radically - that is, cutting back on everything from lumber to underpants. When you do buy things, but them used. This is really hard for most people - but the reality is all those dollars operate like votes - they say "make another one, and make more packaging for it, and run the factory a little longer." Not buying stuff is one of the most powerful tools we've got.
2. Structure your life so that it is easier to be green than not. Most of us have a limited mount of self-discipline - we are a little lazy. So if there's a choice between a mile and a half walk or just hopping in the car, we find that despite our best intentions, we just didn't get going in time to walk. Well, the harder you make all that stuff for yourself, the better. That means disconnect the appliances you don't want to use, and put them up on a high shelf, so that it is easier to use the manuals (or you could sell them). Don't have a car, or don't have second car, so that if you want to go to the library you have to walk, bike or take the bus.
3. Take a Sabbath or a no-use day and enforce it. Try and establish at least one day a week in which you don't drive, don't turn on the computer and don't shop. The value of this is that a. it gives you the gift of what we all say we want anyway, time with family and friends, quiet time, etc... But it also prevents us from constantly powering things up. Turn stuff off - start with one day, try and add more if you can. What's amazing about this is how much of a pleasure this comes to be - but it is hard to disconnect.
4 Pick the low hanging fruit. You probably have some really obvious ways that you are wasting energy. For example, not putting your tv and vcr on a powerstrip allows them to continue drawing power when you aren't using them. Eliminating this "phantom load" is a pretty easy step. Or perhaps you don't meal plan so you've been running out to the store two or three times a week. But it isn't really hard to to shift to doing it once, while doing other errands. You've been meaning to stop your junk mail, and you don't really like it, but you haven't gotten around to it.
5. Do things that are just as easy with human power, with human power. Got a little postage stamp of a lawn? Well, get a push mower. By the time you change your oil and get the thing out of the garage, you will have used more of your own energy than simply running a good push mower (if you've never used a new, light one, don't assume it will be too hard) over that bit of lawn. Want to start baking your own bread, but assuming you need a bread machine? Get a book that shows no-knead recipes that rise overnight - you can have better bread for breakfast with less effort. We tend to assume that labor-saving devices save labor - we assume it so strongly that we often don't check, and it turns out, they don't.
6. Eat appropriately to your place and season. What grows well there? What's in season? What's local? What's in your backyard? No one should eat as much meat as the typical American does, and often recommendations on diet focus on not eating meat or as much. This is important, but the kind of meat matters too - what grows well naturally near you? What do local farmers have. Did you know that meat, eggs and mil are seasonal as well? What is ready now? What can you get inexpensively? Can you preserve some of what is abundant now for the time when it won't be? Local diets are really local - the food you'd eat in Nebraska and the food you'd eat in coastal Maine are not the same, and shouldn't be.
7. If it is the end that matters - change your means. Consider household heating for example - most of us want to be warm enough to be comfortable at home. There are lots of ways to accomplish this, however, including wearing more clothes, putting on a hat, heating a rice bag or hot water bottle and placing it strategically, using space heaters or radiant heaters, adapting to cooler temperatures early in the season, heating the whole house, etc... Focus on achieving your goal (being comfortable) and on finding new ways to do it - you can focus on heating you, rather than the entire house. You want to have tea or coffee available all day? Ok, try a thermos, instead of running the coffee pot all morning. You need enough light to read by? What about an LED book light? You want the kids to look like their friends? How about finding a nice consignment shop, or organizing a clothing swap with friends? Sometimes we mix up ends and means, and assume that the means are the point - that what we care about isn't being warm, but having the house be 70.
8. Go at the big hogs. The things that are probably your biggest energy costs are heating, cooling, refrigeration, transport and your meat consumption. So when you try and figure out how to make an impact, start there. Find that carpool. Try the bus. Make more vegetarian meals. Replace your fridge with a smaller model. Put jugs of water in fridge and freezer since it runs more efficiently full. Reinsulate. Run the a/c only when it is above 82 in the house.
9. Cut things in half. Nobody enjoys giving things up, so consider halving them instead. Use half as much detergent, shampoo, conditioner - those measures on the bottles are meant to sell things. Spend half as much on movies and treats. Wash towels and sheets half as often. Try and walk or bike half the time. Try and waste only half the food you have been. Remember, things don't have to be 100% - and often, the impact of doing something half the time includes you recognizing that we could do it even less.
10. We do like things to be easy, but not everything we like is easy. For all that it is important that people not feel befuddled and overwhelmed by the idea of reducing energy usage, it is possible to get people involved by the creative, fun and engaging elements of doing this. That is, even if it never is as simple as rolling off a log, people are engaged by complex things when they derive a sense of artfulness, accomplishment and pleasure from them. That is, you can get people to try and navigate a local diet, even if that's more complex than "don't eat X" if you can convince them that really local diets taste better and offer opportunities for creative expression. It may not be easy to figure out how to make your own, mend your own or do without things - but if people get to be pleased and proud that they learned something new or accomplished something difficult, they may do it anyway. Making the hard stuff interesting goes a long way to making people forget that it can be hard.
Sharon
Ms. IPCC and the Climate Scandals – Why the Real Shockers Aren’t the Ones in the Press [Casaubon's Book]
There's yet another kerfuffle about climatology going on. First, of course, there was climategate, whose total revealed knowledge is "if you hack into people's private emails you might find out that some people, even climate scientists, are jerks sometimes." Now there's another one - in the IPCC report, there's an error. That is, scientists took a non-peer reviewed source and transposed it into the report, and didn't back check that source. This was stupid, of course, and should be criticized and corrected.
That said, since the material in the IPCC is overwhelmingly peer-reviewed science, this doesn't really cast any larger doubt on anything about anthropogenic global warming. In fact, what's astonishing is that with so many people so highly paid by Exxon and others to pick holes in the IPCC report, this is all they've found. Imagine this is all the dirt someone could find on a Presidential candidate - the party and everyone else would be thrilled! Get out the catchy slogans and the inaugural gowns - we've got a candidate! Actually, let's imagine that - let's do the thought experiment, and pretend that we have a Presidential candidate on our hands, Ms. IPCC.
Then, try to imagine that someone without any agenda at all was as well paid to read through the IPCC report with a fine-toothed comb and pick up any mistakes. Imagine that they too reported what they'd learned to the media, and the media drew our attention to the aggregate of the errors. What, then, would we find? Would we find that the Ms. IPCC was, in fact, clean and scandal free in every respect, ready for prime time and the presidency, or would we find a dashing young pool boy or girl, some stock market finagling and the cribbing of a good chunk of her autobiography?
I fear that Ms. IPCC would have more than a few black marks to her name. If her tremendous charisma (And, honestly, do you really think that the IPCC has tremendous charisma? Think Martha Coakley here.) wasn't enough to get her through the equivalent of her little weekend at an Aspen ski resort with the governor of Minnesota, his wife and three professional mimes, she'd be back to cribbing a new memoir. So why don't we hear about those shocking revelations?
The reason we don't is that the mistakes in the IPCC have not been ones that the Global Warming Doubters have any incentive to publicize. Overwhelmingly they show the IPCC science to have radically understated the severity of climate change, and to have allowed themselves to be influenced in the direction of muting the evidence. The right has no incentive to point out the ways in which IPCC actually is wrong, in this case. The aggregate of the scientific evidence shows that it has been significantly wrong - but the evidence almost entirely supports the case that the Ms. IPCC, being a product of a committee, actually has softened her accounts of both what may happen and how to respond to it.
Consider arctic sea ice, for example - the nearest predictions on arctic sea ice put the summer ice-free arctic at 2013, while more mid-range projections now put it at the middle of the century. The IPCC? End of the century. Consider assumptions about how much emissions will increase - we know that they have increased more than anticipated. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet? Supposed to be totally stable. In fact? Maybe not so much - it may well be losing mass. When might we have to worry about methane leaking out of the permafrost? IPCC thought remotely a concern in 2100 - but methane rises suggest it may already be happening. The one thing we know about climate change is this - that the IPCC, for a host of reasons, has softened the story of how rapidly climate change is occurring and slated to occur. And if there was anyone to make money off of this fact, it would be plastered all over the news as the real scandal.
The IPCC is a committee, and it works like a comittee. Sometimes it makes minor structural errors, like putting a reference that it should have back checked. More often, it makes the errors you would expect from a committee that has to satisfy all the members, and that is fundamentally, a political body, influenced by the political institutions that support it and by the assumptions that underly most people who live in our age. It is going to make mistakes - and most of those mistakes are actually going to be mistakes of not wanting to push limits too hard, of not demanding too radical a change, rather than mistakes of overstatement.
Personally, I don't think Ms. IPCC, aside from the lack of charisma, would make a bad candidate. She's telling a hard truth the best way she can. She makes mistakes. She has a few scandals in her past, and probably a few more to play out in the public domain. She's under intense pressure and scrutiny, and under the that level of scrutiny, she's bound to fail sometimes. She's flawed, and most of all, she's flawed because the same qualities that make her a viable candidate, a viable institution to most people are the ones that most press her to make things look more positive, more hopeful. She's the best we can offer under the circumstances - because she gets a lot of the basics, and we don't live in a world where getting the refinements pays off politically.
Sharon
The American Jeremiad About Science and Society [Framing Science]
Last week the NSF Science Indicators report was released, triggering more dramatic calls to action and overstated warnings from commentators about the alleged decline of science in American society. This predictable reaction is part of a decades enduring "fall from grace narrative" about the place of science in American society, a distracting if not harmful myth that I discussed in a co-authored article with Dietram Scheufele published earlier this year.
Since Sputnik, each decade has spawned a novel form of this American jeremiad, whether it be the Cold War race against the Russians, alleged American anti-intellectualism; the rise of pseudoscience, the paranormal, and the religious right; the threat of post-modernism and the academic left; the Bush administration's "war on science"; or contemporary laments over an "unscientific America" or the rise of denialism. Yet as we review in the article, across these decades, though science has not been well understood by the public, it has remained as an institution deeply respected, admired, and valued. While almost every other institution has plummeted in public evaluations, science in American society stands with the Supreme Court and the military in commanding deference and authority.
Each decade's jeremiad about American science, of course, is distracting and harmful. These narratives often scapegoat and deride social groups such as the religious or over-emphasize the influence of conservatives on climate change, while failing to examine the role, for example, that the liberal movement and environmentalists might play in contributing to political gridlock. Fundamentally, however, the jeremiad places the blame for problems on society, without evaluating the institutional roots of the problem, considering for example that new forms of decision-making and governance and new types of policy regimes might be needed if we are ever to collectively take action on an issue such as climate change.
I have always been curious about why the American science jeremiad has been so enduring and such a powerful lens through which scientists, science organizations, progressives, commentators, and journalists view problems such as climate change. For one, I know that the jeremiad is self-deflecting, placing blame on groups such as climate skeptics, while turning focus away from strategic problems sometimes created by experts and their environmental allies.
But this month's Atlantic magazine cover story by James Fallows has broadened my perspective on the jeremiad's source. In his must-read analysis, Fallows takes a critical look at American society in general, describing that not just science, but U.S. societal status has almost always been in a constant state of perceived crisis, ranging from colonial laments over living up to God's expectations to a Cold War evolution of "falling behind" the Soviet Union and now China and other countries. Yet as Fallows notes, in the views of experts assessing the indicators, American society and culture is doing quite well across a number of dimensions. Here's what Fallows writes about the "falling behind China" in science jeremiad:
Americans often fret about the troops of engineers and computer scientists marching out of Chinese universities. They should calm down. Each fall, Shanghai's Jiao Tong University produces a ranking of the world's universities based mainly on scientific-research papers. All such rankings are imprecise, but the pattern is clear. Of the top 20 on the latest list, 17 are American, the exceptions being Cambridge (No. 4), Oxford (No. 10), and the University of Tokyo (No. 20). Of the top 100 in the world, zero are Chinese.
"On paper, China has the world's largest higher education system, with a total enrollment of 20 million full-time tertiary students," Peter Yuan Cai, of the Australian National University in Canberra, wrote last fall. "Yet China still lags behind the West in scientific discovery and technological innovation." The obstacles for Chinese scholars and universities range from grand national strategy--open economy, closed political and media environment--to the operational traditions of Chinese academia. Students spend years cramming details for memorized tests; the ones who succeed then spend years in thrall to entrenched professors. Shirley Tilghman said the modern American model of advanced research still shows the influence of Vannevar Bush, who directed governmental science projects during and after World War II. "It was his very conscious decision to get money into young scientists' hands as quickly as possible," she said. This was in contrast to the European "Herr Professor" model, also prevalent in Asia, in which, she said, for young scientists, the "main opportunity for promotion was waiting for their mentor to die." Young Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, Dutch know they will have opportunities in American labs and start-ups they could not have at home. This will remain America's advantage, unless we throw it away.
On science and the American higher educational system, Fallows has this further to observe:
Maybe I was biased in how I listened, but in my interviews, I thought I could tell which Americans had spent significant time outside the country or working on international "competitiveness" issues. If they had, they predictably emphasized those same two elements of long-term American advantage. "My favorite statistic is that one-quarter of the members of the National Academy of Sciences were born abroad," I was told by Harold Varmus, the president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and himself an academy member (and Nobel Prize winner). "We may not be so good on the pipeline of producing new scientists, but the country is still a very effective magnet."
"We scream about our problems, but as long as we have the immigrants, and the universities, we'll be fine," James McGregor, an American businessman and author who has lived in China for years, told me. "I just wish we could put LoJacks on the foreign students to be sure they stay." While, indeed, the United States benefits most when the best foreign students pursue their careers here, we come out ahead even if they depart, since they take American contacts and styles of thought with them. Shirley Tilghman, a research biologist who is now the president of Princeton, made a similar point more circumspectly. "U.S. higher education has essentially been our innovation engine," she told me. "I still do not see the overall model for higher education anywhere else that is better than the model we have in the United States, even with all its challenges at the moment." Laura Tyson, an economist who has been dean of the business schools at UC Berkeley and the University of London, said, "It can't be a coincidence that so many innovative companies are located where they are"--in California, Boston, and other university centers. "There is not another country's system that does as well--although others are trying aggressively to catch up."
So if multiple indicators--from opinion surveys to higher education outputs--depict science as remaining at an admired and healthy status in American status, why can't we make progress on complex problems such as climate change? For one, as we wrote and others such as Roger Pielke Jr and Daniel Sarewitz have argued, it's a mistake to narrowly define climate change as a scientific issue and as a matter of scientific expertise driving policy outcomes. Moreover, as we also wrote, scientists and their organizations have almost unequaled communication capital, part of the problem is using that communication capital wisely and effectively to promote greater public engagement.
But perhaps the biggest challenge is what Fallows zeroes in on. Despite the prominence and influence of science in society, we lack the governing mechanisms and policy regimes to enable collective action on systemic threats such as climate change. As Fallows succinctly puts it, the U.S. enjoys "a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world's talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke."
While Fallows does an outstanding job of diagnosing the problem, I think he falls a bit short in offering solutions. On science specifically, he points to the idea of re-establishing the Office of Technology Assessment, a favored fix-all promoted by liberal commentators and organizations but one that many experts doubt would significantly alter how Congress and the administration use scientific advice in making policy decisions. [For more, see David Goldston's past column at Nature.]
Ultimately, however, Fallows article commands a greater focus on governance structures and policy regimes for science related-policy. Society matters and communication is central to both societal relations and policy-making, but until we figure out pathways and forms that re-invent our governing structures--including filibuster and debate rules in the Senate--no amount of scientific expertise and effective engagement will catalyze serious collective action on systemic problems such as climate change.
An Open History of Science – ScienceOnline2010 (#scio10) [The Primate Diaries]
This is the brief presentation I gave on Saturday, Jan. 16 as part of this year's ScienceOnline conference. I was thrilled to have PZ Myers, Greg Laden and Janet Stemwedel present (the latter of whom posted her thoughts on the session).
John McKay and I led a discussion on the intersection between open access and scientific innovation. See the program description here and these posts for more information. In John's section he emphasized how the early history of scientific publishing was one where individual researchers simply pooled their letters into journals and shared them with one another as they built on each other's ideas. Frequently the ideas they discussed would be subject to censorship by political or religious authorities and the tension between open science and closed societies has long been a factor in how successful scientific innovation has been in a given time.
As I discuss above, this history can help us inform the present considerations of open access publishing and offer a guide as we consider future policy decisions.