March 2010 Archives

Japan and New Zealand voted against the CITES ban on trade in Atlantic tuna and Australia announced it would not vote in favour. Both Australia and New Zealand argue that fishing restrictions are more effective than a trade ban. (source)

Putting the public's mixed feelings about the war aside, research clearly indicates that the public is willing to pay for programs that have been shown to reduce crime, such as early childhood education, drug treatment, or more police. Thus, be wary of interpreting these raw rankings and poll numbers. They might tell us what is top of mind and of highest priority, but they don't tell us what the public is willing to pay for.

In a recent survey of residents in the U.S. and Sweden, RFF Fellow Alan Krupnick and his colleagues in Sweden found that 92% of Swedes and 71% of Americans are willing to pay for climate change mitigation efforts.

March 8, 2010, was my national television debut on FOX News. I didn't initially realize that it was the FOX News when an assistant producer contacted me for an interview concerning a National Science Foundation grant worth about $187,000 that we received to renovate Michigan State University's entomology collection. At first, I thought our local FOX affiliate, a little slow to report on this almost year-old grant, was contacting me. But subsequent phone conversations revealed that it was the National FOX channel, home to Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, knocking on my door. An assistant producer named Lauren and Tucker Carlson, a correspondent, would make the trip from New York to East Lansing that same evening. (Anthony Cognato, "My time on FOX News", The Scientist)

According to a new annual report (PDF) released today by the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), the participating schools are working to cut a combined estimated 33+ million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year.

The Landsat Program

The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Since 1972, Landsat satellites have collected information about Earth from space. This science, known as remote sensing, has matured with the Landsat Program.

Landsat satellites have taken specialized digital photographs of Earth's continents and surrounding coastal regions for over three decades, enabling people to study many aspects of our planet and to evaluate the dynamic changes caused by both natural processes and human practices. (from the Landsat program web site)

Southern Forests for the Future seeks to raise awareness about this important natural resource and the ecosystem services forests provide, such as fresh water, timber and recreation. We welcome you to learn more about these forests by exploring data, maps, and other information to highlight key features and trends for southern forests.

Chester Harris, newly elected to the Region 17 school board, is a Republican with a standard conservative outlook: He distrusts government bureaucracy, believes in fiscal restraint and thinks kids today have too many advantages and too few responsibilities.

But it is his answer to fundamental questions about the origins of life that sets him apart.

Harris, 53, rejects evolution. To him, the idea that humans and apes share a common ancestor takes "a whole lot more faith than believing there was a creator who set all these things in motion and allows us to operate under free will."

"I sort of got stuck on one thing with them, which was basically the teaching of evolution in the schools and how it tends to ride roughshod over the fact that various religions -- Christian, Hebrew, Muslim -- hold a theistic world view," Harris said one morning during a break from his job driving a school van. "Evolution is basically an assumption that there is no God."

Evolution simply notes that alleles, alternative forms of genes, change in a population over time. More importantly, though, evolutionary theory, like all scientific theories, is silent on the existence of any god; such an issue is well beyond the boundaries of science. Religious leaders as well as scientists fully understand this point. Indeed, more than 13,000 religious leaders in the United States have joined The Clergy Letter Project and have signed one of three Clergy Letters imploring school boards to teach evolutionary theory in science classes.

NSF invites reporters to participate on Monday, March 22 at 11:00 a.m., EDT

On March 22 at 11:00 a.m., EDT, officials from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy will discuss the launch of an interagency program aimed at generating predictions of climate change and its impacts at more localized scales and over shorter time periods than have previously been possible. This project represents an historic augmentation of support for interdisciplinary climate change research by NSF and its partner agencies.

Who:	Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation William F. Brinkman, director of the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy Roger Beachy, director of the National Institutes of Food and Agriculture, USDA and Chief Scientist USDA
What:	Media teleconference and webcast to discuss new project for generating high-resolution predictions of climate change and its impacts.
When:	Monday, March 22, 2010, at 11:00 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time.

How to Participate: Reporters are invited to participate in a live video teleconference hosted by NSF. Reporters may participate by teleconference or online. To participate by teleconference, call (800) 369-2058. To obtain the password to participate in the teleconference and to obtain the URL and password to access the webcast online, e-mail Lily Whiteman at lwhitema@nsf.gov. During or before the event, e-mail questions to webcast@nsf.gov.

-NSF-

Media Contacts
Whiteman Lily, National Science Foundation (703) 292-8310 lwhitema@nsf.gov

In the contest between commerce and conservation, a global conference this week aimed at protecting imperiled wildlife seems to be giving commerce the upper hand.

The most important feature [of scientific literacy] is an outlook that you bring with you in your daily walk through life. It's a lens through which you look that affects how you see the world. And the science literacy that can be promoted along those lines shows up in a lot of ways... So science literacy is not the know-it-all who's fluent in science jargon; science literacy is the person who knows how to question the world around them, and en route to an answer that's deeper than you would otherwise get.

A series of lightning strikes triggered the Antelope Complex Fire on July 5, 2007, which burned nearly 23,000 acres of Plumas' timber in less than a week. The Moonlight Fire struck just two months later, destroying 65,000 forest acres and requiring more than three weeks to contain. (source)

None of the handful of mis-statements (out of hundreds and hundreds of unchallenged statements) remotely undermines the conclusion that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Despite its excellent performance for accurately reporting the state-of-the-science, we certainly acknowledge that the IPCC should become more forthcoming in openly acknowledging errors in a timely fashion, and continuing to improve its assessment procedures to further lower the already very low rate of error.

...

The significance of IPCC errors has been greatly exaggerated by many sensationalist accounts, but that is no reason to avoid implementing procedures to make the assessment process even better. The public has a right to know the risks of climate change as scientists currently understand them. We are dedicated to working with our colleagues and government in furthering that task.

Ecology and evolutionary biology Ph.D. candidate Adam Wilson in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences investigates the effect of climate change on wildfire in South Africa under the direction of professor John Silander, who is among 30 full-time department faculty regularly awarded major research grants from such agencies as the National Science Foundation and NASA.

The integrity of climate research has taken a very public battering in recent months. Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.

The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

The InterAcademy Council (IAC), a multinational organization of the world's science academies, has been requested to conduct an independent review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) processes and procedures. The study comes at the invitation of the United Nations secretary-general and the chair of the IPCC, and will help guide the processes and procedures of the IPCC's fifth report and future assessments of climate science.(source)

The IAC is currently led by two co-chairs, Robbert Dijkgraaf, president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Lu Yongxiang, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Following IAC board approval of the review, the IAC co-chairs will appoint members of the IEG [an ad hoc Independent Evaluation Group] after a vetting process to assure their expertise, balance of perspectives, and absence of conflicts of interest. They will be volunteers who serve pro bono; only their travel and meeting expenses will be paid. Participants in the IEG will not be under obligation to any government, the IPCC, or the United Nations.

[S]omebody who had a question and answer session after one of my lectures ... said he'd been listening to the symphony and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn't. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.

The Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) has been established to encourage innovation and excellence in education, as well as to encourage the use of high-quality on-line resources by students, teachers, and the public. In 2009, the prize recognized outstanding projects from all regions of the world that brought freely available online resources to bear on science education.

1. You'll show your enthusiasm for science and engineering to everyone who sees you.
2. You'll help spread word about the Festival.
3. And you'll bring a child to the Expo. A portion of all the funds raised will be used to provide transportation to the National Mall for a disadvantaged student.

A strategic plan for a 10-year national effort to digitize and mobilize images and data associated with biological research collections is being developed. The key objective of the plan is to create a publicly available, comprehensive national collections resource that can be used to address a wide range of research questions and serve stakeholders in government agencies, academic institutions, and international biodiversity organizations. A workshop, held at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center on February 5-7, 2010, drafted the present outline for the digitization and web mobilization of data and images associated with U.S. biological collections. Input from the community is requested as this plan develops to ensure that it builds appropriately on existing projects and reflects the missions and needs of the nation's diverse biological collections.

In just the past few years, we've watched the number of science bloggers swell, while the tone of much of the commentary changed. Most disheartening, the relationships between bloggers fractured across once cohesive networks as small friendly communities chose sides in a growing culture war.

Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, who is responsible for the [higher education] sector, has ordered budget cuts of £600m by 2013 and called for stronger ties between universities and business. Last year the government decided to ring-fence funding for science-related subjects, and other areas of study are likely to suffer disproportionately if that decision is repeated. ("Growing outcry at threat of cuts in humanities at universities," by Anushka Asthana and Rachel Williams, The Guardian, 28 February 2010)

The challenges facing the country and the world cannot be addressed without the arts and humanities. People's complexity comes from their language, identities, histories, faiths and cultures. Without understanding that complexity we cannot address these challenges. Subjects such as literature, philosophy and history teach students to look at the world from a different perspective, to challenge ideas and to communicate effectively, to bring the flexibility and imagination that employers need and welcome.

[T]he writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity. (source)

It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the movement must be judged not only a failure, but a debacle.

Very few religious skeptics have been made more open to religious belief because of ID arguments. These arguments not only have failed to persuade, they have done positive harm by convincing many people that the concept of an intelligent designer is bound up with a rejection of mainstream science.

• In late November someone hacked into computers at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, removed e-mails from the server, and posted them on a publicly accessible computer.
• Some of the e-mails raised questions about the conduct of some scientists involved in preparing paleoclimate sections of the IPCC reports.
• The University of East Anglia was under a Freedom of Information Act request (or the U.K. equivalent) to release data to some interested parties. Those parties claim that the University has not been responsive.

1. What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?
2. Are the terms of reference and scope of the independent review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?
3. How independent are the other two international data sets?