Arquivo da tag: ciência

Global Warming May Worsen Effects of El Niño, La Niña Events (Climate Central)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Desastre, El Niño, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

Published: October 12th, 2011

By Michael D. Lemonick

Does this mean Texas is toast?

As just about everyone knows, El Niño is a periodic unusual warming of the surface water in the eastern and central tropical Pacific Ocean. Actually, that’s pretty much a lie. Most people don’t know the definition of El Niño or its mirror image, La Niña, and truthfully, most people don’t much care.

What you do care about if you’re a Texan suffering through the worst one-year drought on record, or a New Yorker who had to dig out from massive snowstorms last winter (tied in part to La Niña), or a Californian who has ever had to deal with the torrential rains that trigger catastrophic mudslides (linked to El Niño), is that these natural climate cycles can elevate the odds of natural disasters where you live.

At the moment, we’re now entering the second year of the La Niña part of the cycle. La Niña is one key reason why the Southwest was so dry last winter and through the spring and summer, and since La Niña is projected to continue through the coming winter, Texas and nearby states aren’t likely to get much relief.

Precipitation outlook for winter 2011-12, showing the likelihood of below average precipitation in Texas and other drought-stricken states.

But Niñas and Niños (the broader cycle, for you weather/climate geeks, is known as the “El Niño-Southern Oscillation,” or “ENSO”) don’t just operate in isolation. They’re part of the broader climate system, which means that climate change could theoretically change how they operate — make them develop more frequently, for example, or less frequently, or be more or less pronounced. Climate change could also intensify the effects of El Niño and La Niña events.

Climate scientists have been wrestling with the first question for a while now, and they still don’t really have a definitive answer. Some climate models have suggested that global warming has already begun to cause subtle changes in ENSO cycles, and that the changes will become more pronounced later this century. But a new study, published in the Journal of Climate, doesn’t find much evidence for that.

But on the second question, the new study is a lot more definitive. “Due to a warmer and moister atmosphere,” said co-author Baylor Fox-Kemper, of the University of Colorado in a press release, “the impacts of El Niño are changing even though El Niño itself doesn’t change.”

That’s because global warming has begun to change the playing field on which El Niño and La Niña operate, just as it’s changing the background conditions that give rise to our everyday weather. The Texas drought is a prime example. Its most likely cause is reduced rainfall from La Niña-related weather patterns. But however dry Texas and Oklahoma might have been otherwise, the killer heat wave that plagued the region this past summer — the sort of heat wave global warming is already making more commonplace — baked much of the remaining moisture out of both the soil and vegetation. No wonder large parts of the Lone Star State have gone up in smoke.

A map of sea surface temperature anomalies, showing a swath of cooler than average waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean – a telltale sign La Niña conditions.

When the next El Niño occurs in a year or two, it will probably bring heavy rains to places like Southern California, whose unstable hillsides tend to slide when soggy. Except now, thanks to global warming, the typical El Niño-related storms that roll in off the Pacific may well be turbocharged, since a warmer atmosphere can hold more water. This is the reason, say many climate scientists, that downpours have become heavier in recent decades across broad geographical areas.

La Niña, plus the added moisture in the air from global warming, have also been partially implicated in the massive snowstorms that struck the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states during the last two winters. Those could get worse as well, suggests the new analysis. “What we see,” says Fox-Kemper, “is that certain atmospheric patterns, such as the blocking high pressure south of Alaska typical of La Niña winters, strengthen…so, the cooling of North America expected in a La Niña winter would be stronger in future climates.” So to pre-answer the question that will inevitably be asked next winter: no, more snow does NOT contradict the idea that the planet is warming. Quite the contrary.

Finally, for those who really do want to know what El Niño and La Niña actually are, as opposed to what they do, you can go to NOAA’s El Niño page. But be warned: there will be a quiz, and the word “thermocline” will appear.

Comments

By Kirk Petersen (Maplewood, NJ 07040)
on October 13th, 2011

Seventh paragraph, third sentence should begin “Its most likely cause”—not “it’s”.

Vital Details of Global Warming Are Eluding Forecasters (Science)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

Science 14 October 2011:
Vol. 334 no. 6053 pp. 173-174
DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6053.173

PREDICTING CLIMATE CHANGE

Richard A. Kerr

Decision-makers need to know how to prepare for inevitable climate change, but climate researchers are still struggling to sharpen their fuzzy picture of what the future holds.

Seattle Public Utilities officials had a question for meteorologist Clifford Mass. They were planning to install a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of storm-drain pipes that would serve the city for up to 75 years. “Their question was, what diameter should the pipe be? How will the intensity of extreme precipitation change?” Mass says. If global warming means that the past century’s rain records are no guide to how heavy future rains will be, he was asked, what could climate modeling say about adapting to future climate change? “I told them I couldn’t give them an answer,” says the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, researcher.

Climate researchers are quite comfortable with their projections for the world under a strengthening greenhouse, at least on the broadest scales. Relying heavily on climate modeling, they find that on average the globe will continue warming, more at high northern latitudes than elsewhere. Precipitation will tend to increase at high latitudes and decrease at low latitudes.

But ask researchers what’s in store for the Seattle area, the Pacific Northwest, or even the western half of the United States, and they’ll often demur. As Mass notes, “there’s tremendous uncertainty here,” and he’s not just talking about the Pacific Northwest. Switching from global models to models focusing on a single region creates a more detailed forecast, but it also “piles uncertainty on top of uncertainty,” says meteorologist David Battisti of UW Seattle.

First of all, there are the uncertainties inherent in the regional model itself. Then there are the global model’s uncertainties at the regional scale, which it feeds into the regional model. As the saying goes, if the global model gives you garbage, regional modeling will only give you more detailed garbage. And still more uncertainties are created as data are transferred from the global to the regional model.

Although uncertainties abound, “uncertainty tends to be downplayed in a lot of [regional] modeling for adaptation,” says global modeler Christopher Bretherton of UW Seattle. But help is on the way. Regional modelers are well into their first extensive comparison of global-regional model combinations to sort out the uncertainties, although that won’t help Seattle’s storm-drain builders.

Most humble origins

Policymakers have long asked for regional forecasts to help them adapt to climate change, some of which is now unavoidable. Even immediate, rather drastic action to curb emissions of greenhouse gases would not likely limit warming globally to 2°C, generally considered the threshold above which “dangerous” effects set in. And nothing at all can be done to reduce the global warming effects expected in the next several decades. They are already locked into climate change.

Sharp but true? Feeding a global climate model’s prediction for midcentury (top) into a regional model gives more details (bottom), but modelers aren’t sure how accurate the details are. CREDIT: NORTH AMERICAN REGIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENT PROGRAM

So scientists have been doing what they can for decision-makers. Early on, it wasn’t much. A U.S. government assessment released in 2000, Climate Change Impacts on the United States, relied on the most rudimentary regional forecasting technique (Science, 23 June 2000, p. 2113). Expert committee members divided the country into eight regions and then considered what two of their best global climate models had to say about each region over the next century. The two models were somewhat consistent in the far southwest, where the report’s authors found it was likely that warmer and drier conditions would eliminate alpine ecosystems and shorten the ski season.

But elsewhere, there was far less consistency. Over the eastern two-thirds of the contiguous 48 states, for example, the two models couldn’t agree on how much moisture soils would hold in the summer. Kansas corn would either suffer severe droughts more frequently, as one model had it, or enjoy even more moisture than it currently does, as the other indicated. But at least the uncertainties were plain for all to see.

The uncertainties of regional projections nearly faded from view in the next U.S. effort, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The 2009 study drew on not two but 15 global models melded into single projections. In a technique called statistical downscaling, its authors assumed that local changes would be proportional to changes on the larger scales. And they adjusted regional projections of future climate according to how well model simulations of past climate matched actual climate.

Statistical downscaling yielded a broad warming across the lower 48 states with less warming across the southeast and up the West Coast. Precipitation was mostly down, especially in the southwest. But discussion of uncertainties in the modeling fell largely to a footnote (number 110), in which the authors cite a half-dozen papers to support their assertion that statistical downscaling techniques are “well-documented” and thoroughly corroborated.

The other sort of downscaling, known as dynamical downscaling or regional modeling, has yet to be fully incorporated into a U.S. national assessment. But an example of state-of-the-art regional modeling appeared 30 June in Environmental Research Letters. To investigate what will happen in the U.S. wine industry, regional modeler Noah Diffenbaugh of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his colleagues embedded a detailed model that spanned the lower 48 states in a climate model that spanned the globe. The global model’s relatively fuzzy simulation of evolving climate from 1950 to 2039—calculated at points about 150 kilometers apart—then fed into the embedded regional model, which calculated a sharper picture of climate change at points only 25 kilometers apart.

Closely analyzing the regional model’s temperature projections on the West Coast, the group found that the projected warming would decrease the area suitable for production of premium wine grapes by 30% to 50% in parts of central and northern California. The loss in Washington state’s Columbia Valley would be more than 30%. But adaptation to the warming, such as the introduction of heat-tolerant varieties of grapes, could sharply reduce the losses in California and turn the Washington loss into a 150% gain.

Not so fast

A rapidly growing community of regional modelers is turning out increasingly detailed projections of future climate, but many researchers, mostly outside the downscaling community, have serious reservations. “Many regional modelers don’t do an adequate job of quantifying issues of uncertainty,” says Bretherton, who is chairing a National Academy of Sciences study committee on a national strategy for advancing climate modeling. “We’re not confident predicting the very things people are most interested in being predicted,” such as changes in precipitation.

Regional models produce strikingly detailed maps of changed climate, but they might be far off base. “The problem is that precision is often mistaken for accuracy,” Bretherton says. Battisti just doesn’t see the point of downscaling. “I would never use one of these products,” he says.

The problems start with the global models, as critics see it. Regional models must fill in the detail in the fuzzy picture of climate provided by global models, notes atmospheric scientist Edward Sarachik, professor emeritus at UW Seattle. But if the fuzzy picture of the region is wrong, the details will be wrong as well. And global models aren’t very good at painting regional pictures, he says. A glaring example, according to Sarachik, is the way global models place the cooler waters of the tropical Pacific farther west than they are in reality. Such ocean temperature differences drive weather and climate shifts in specific regions halfway around the world, but with the cold water in the wrong place, the global models drive climate change in the wrong regions.

Gregory Tripoli’s complaint about the global models is that they can’t create the medium-size weather systems that they should be sending into any embedded regional model. Tripoli, a meteorologist and modeler at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, cites the case of summertime weather disturbances that churn down off the Rocky Mountains and account for 80% of the Midwest’s summer rainfall. If a regional model forecasting for Wisconsin doesn’t extend to the Rockies, Wisconsin won’t get the major weather events that add up to be climate. And some atmospheric disturbances travel from as far away as Thailand to wreak havoc in the Midwest, he says, so they could never be included in the regional model.

A tougher nut. Predicting the details of precipitation using a regional model (bottom) fed by a global model (top) is even more uncertain than projecting regional temperature change. CREDIT: NORTH AMERICAN REGIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENT PROGRAM

Even the things the global models get right have a hard time getting into regional models, critics say. “There are a lot of problems matching regional and global models,” Tripoli says. In one problem area, global and regional models usually have different ways of accounting for atmospheric processes such as individual cloud development that neither model can simulate directly, creating further clashes. Even the different philosophies involved in building global models and regional models can lead to mismatches that create phantom atmospheric circulations, Tripoli says. “It’s not straightforward you’re going to get anything realistic,” he says.

Redeeming regional modeling

“You could say all the global and regional models are wrong; some people do say that,” notes regional modeler Filippo Giorgi of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. “My personal opinion is we do know something now. A few reports ago, it was really very, very difficult to say anything about regional climate change.”

But Giorgi says that in recent years he has been seeing increasingly consistent regional projections coming from combinations of many different models and from successive generations of models. “This means the projections are more and more reliable,” he says. “I would be confident saying the Mediterranean area will see a general decrease in precipitation in the next decades. I’ve seen this in several generations of models, and we understand the processes underlying this phenomenon. This is fairly reliable information, qualitatively. Saying whether the decrease will be 10% or 50% is a different issue.”

The skill of regional climate forecasting also varies from region to region and with what is being forecast. “Temperature is much, much easier” than precipitation, Giorgi notes. Precipitation depends on processes like atmospheric convection that operate on scales too small for any model to render in detail. Trouble simulating convection also means that higher-latitude climate is easier to project than that of the tropics, where convection dominates.

Regional modeling does have a clear advantage in areas with complex terrain such as mountainous regions, notes UW’s Mass, who does regional forecasting of both weather and climate. In the Pacific Northwest, the mountains running parallel to the coast direct onshore winds upward, predictably wringing rain and snow from the air without much difficult-to-simulate convection.

The downscaling of climate projections should be getting a boost as the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) gets up to speed. Begun in 2009, CORDEX “is really the first time we’ll get a handle on all these uncertainties,” Giorgi says. Various groups will take on each of the world’s continent-size regions. Multiple global models will be matched with multiple regional models and run multiple times to tease out the uncertainties in each. “It’s a landmark for the regional climate modeling community,” Giorgi says.

Science 23 June 2000:
Vol. 288 no. 5474 p. 2113
DOI: 10.1126/science.288.5474.2113

GREENHOUSE WARMING

Dueling Models: Future U.S. Climate Uncertain

Richard A. Kerr

When Congress started funding a global climate change research program in 1990, it wanted to know what all this talk about greenhouse warming would mean for United States voters. Ten years later, a U.S. national assessment, drawing on the best available climate model predictions, concludes that the United States will indeed warm, affecting everything from the western snowpacks that supply California with water to New England’s fall foliage. But on a more detailed level, the assessment often draws a blank. Whether the cornfields of Kansas will be gripped by frequent, severe droughts, as one climate model has it, or blessed with more moisture than they now enjoy, as another predicts, the report can’t say. As much as policy-makers would like to know exactly what’s in store for Americans, the rudimentary state of regional climate science will not soon allow it, and the results of this 3-year effort brought the point home.

“This is the first time we’ve tried to take the physical [climate] system and see what effect it might have on ecosystems and socioeconomic systems,” says Thomas Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, and a co-chair of the committee of experts that pulled together the assessment report “Climate Change Impacts on the United States” (available at http://www.nacc.usgcrp.gov/). “We don’t say we know there’s going to be catastrophic drought in Kansas,” he says. “What we do say is, ‘Here’s the range of our uncertainties.’ This document should get people to think.” If anything is certain, Karl says, it’s that “the past isn’t going to be a very good guide to future climate.”

By chance, the assessment had a handy way to convey the range of uncertainty that regional modeling serves up. The report, which divides the country into eight regions, is based on a pair of state-of-the-art climate models—one from the Canadian Climate Center and one from the U.K. Hadley Center for Climate Research and Prediction—that couple a simulated atmosphere and ocean. The two models solved the problems of simplifying a complex world in different ways, leading to very different predicted U.S. climates. “In terms of temperature, the Canadian model is at the upper end of the warming by 2100” predicted by a range of models, says modeler Eric Barron of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and a member of the assessment team. “The Hadley model is toward the lower end. The Canadian model is on the dry side, and the Hadley model is on the wet side. We’re capturing a substantial portion of the range of simulations. We tried hard to convey that uncertainty.”

On a broad scale, the report can conclude: “Overall productivity of American agriculture will likely remain high, and is projected to increase throughout the 21st century,” although there will be winners and losers from place to place, and adapting agricultural practice to climate change will be key. Where the models are somewhat consistent, as in the far southwest, the report ventures what could be construed as predictions: “It is likely that some ecosystems, such as alpine ecosystems, will disappear entirely from the region,” or “Higher temperatures are likely to mean … a shorter season for winter activities, such as skiing.” Where the models clash, as on summer soil moisture over the eastern two-thirds of the lower 48 states, it explains the alternatives and suggests ways to adapt, such as switching crops.

The range of possible climate impacts laid out by the models “fairly reflects where we are in the science,” says Karl. But he notes that the effort did lack one important input: Congress mandated the assessment without funding it. “You get what you pay for,” says climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “A lot of it was done hastily.” Karl concedes that everyone involved would have liked to have had more funding delivered more reliably.

Even given more time and money, however, the assessment may not have come up with much better small-scale predictions, given the inherent limitations of the science. Even the best models today can say little that’s reliable about climate change at the regional level, never mind at the scale of a congressional district. Their picture of future climate is fuzzy—they might lump together San Francisco and Los Angeles because the models have such coarse geographic resolution—and the realism of such meteorological phenomena as clouds and precipitation is compromised by the inevitable simplifications of simulating the world in a computer.

“For the most part, these sorts of models give a warming,” says modeler Filippo Giorgi, “but they tend to give very different predictions, especially at the regional level, and there’s no way to say one should be believed over another.” Giorgi and his colleague Raquel Francisco of the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, recently evaluated the uncertainties in five coupled climate models—including the two used in the national assessment—within 23 regions, the continental United States comprising roughly three regions. Giorgi concludes that as the scale of prediction shrinks, reliability drops until for small regions “the model data are not believable at all.”

Add in uncertainties external to the models, such as population and economic growth rates, says modeler Jerry D. Mahlman, director of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, and the details of future climate recede toward unintelligibility. Some people in Congress and the policy community had “almost silly expectations there would be enormously useful, small-scale specifics, if you just got the right model. But the right model doesn’t exist,” says Mahlman.

Still, even though the national assessment does not offer the list of region-by-region impacts that Congress might have hoped for, it does show “where we are adaptable and where we are vulnerable,” says global change researcher Stephen Schneider of Stanford University. In 10 years, modelers say, they’ll do better.

The Post-Normal Seduction of Climate Science (Forbes)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, discurso ambiental, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsão, Psicologiarenzotaddei

William Pentland, 10/14/2011 @ 12:22AM |2,770 views

In early 2002, former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained why the lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein with terrorist groups did not mean there was no connection during a televised press conference.

“[T]here are known ‘knowns’ – there are things we know we know,” said Rumsfeld. “We also know there are known ‘unknowns’ – that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown ‘unknowns’ – the ones we don’t know we don’t know . . . it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

Rumsfeld turned out to be wrong about Hussein, but what if he had been talking about global warming? Well, he probably would have been on to something there. Unknowns of any ilk are a real pickle in climate science.

Indeed, uncertainty in climate science has induced a state of severe political paralysis. The trouble is that nobody really knows why. A rash of recent surveys and studies have exonerated most of the usual suspects – scientific illiteracy, industry distortions, skewed media coverage.

Now, the climate-science community is scrambling to crack the code on the “uncertainty” conundrum. Exhibit A: the October 2011 issue of the journal Climatic Change, the closest thing in climate science to gospel truth, which is devoted entirely to the subject of uncertainty.

While I have yet to digest all of the dozen or so essays, I suspect they are only the opening salvo in what is will soon become a robust debate about the significance of uncertainty in climate-change science. The first item up on the chopping block is called post-normal science (PNS).

PNS is a model of the scientific process pioneered by Jerome Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz, which describes the peculiar challenges science encounters where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.” Unlike “normal” science in the sense described by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, post-normal science commonly crosses disciplinary lines and involves new methods, instruments and experimental systems.

Judith Curry, a professor at Georgia Tech, weighs the wisdom of taking the plunge on PNS in an excellent piece called “Reasoning about climate uncertainty.” Drawing on the work of Dutch wunderkind, Jeroen van der Sluijs, Curry calls on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to stop marginalizing uncertainty and get real about bias in the consensus building process. Curry writes:

The consensus approach being used by the IPCC has failed to produce a thorough portrayal of the complexities of the problem and the associated uncertainties in our understanding . . . Better characterization of uncertainty and ignorance and a more realistic portrayal of confidence levels could go a long way towards reducing the “noise” and animosity portrayed in the media that fuels the public distrust of climate science and acts to stymie the policy process.

PNS is especially seductive in the context of uncertainty. Not surprisingly, Curry suggests that instituting PNS-like strategies at the IPCC “could go a long way towards reducing the ‘noise’ and animosity” surrounding climate-change science.

While I personally believe PNS is persuasive, the PNS model provokes something closer to revulsion in many people. Last year, members of the U.S. House of Representatives filed a petition challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency‘s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment seemed less sanguine about post-normal science:

. . . the conclusions of organizing bodies, especially the IPCC, cannot be said to reflect scientific “consensus” in any meaningful sense of that word. Instead, they reflect a political movement that has commandeered science to the service of its agenda. This is “post-normal science”: the long-dreaded arrival of deconstructionism to the natural sciences, according to which scientific quality is determined not by its fidelity to truth, but by its fidelity to the political agenda.

It seems unlikely that taking the PNS plunge would appreciably improve the U.S. public’s perception of the credibility, legitimacy and salience of climate-change assessments. This probably says more about Americans than it does about the analytic force of the PNS model.

Let’s face it. Americans do not agree on a whole hell of a lot. And they never have. Many U.S. institutions were deliberately designed to tolerate the coexistence of free states and slave-owning states. Ironically, Americans appear to agree more on climate-change science than other high-profile scientific controversies like the safety of genetically-modified organisms.

While it pains me to admit this, I am increasingly convinced that the IPCC’s role in assessing the science of climate change needs to be scaled back. The IPCC was an overly optimistic experiment in international governance designed for a world that never materialized. The U.N. General Assembly established the IPCC in the months immediately preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only two few years later, the IPCC’s first assessment report and the creation of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

A new world order seemed to be dawning in those days, which is probably why it seemed like a good idea to ask scientists to tell us what constitutes “dangerous climate change.” Two decades and two world trade towers later, the world is a decidedly less hospitable place for institutions like the IPCC.

The proof is in the pudding – or, in this case, the atmosphere.

Climate Change Tumbles Down Europe’s Political Agenda as Economic Worries Take the Stage (N.Y. Times)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, discurso ambiental, Economia, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

By JEREMY LOVELL of ClimateWire. Published: October 13, 2011

LONDON — Climate change has all but fallen off the political agenda across Europe as the resurging economic crisis empties national coffers and shakes economic confidence, and the public and the press turn their attention to more immediate issues of rising fuels bills and joblessness, analysts say.

Sputtering economies, a shift of attention to looming elections and the prospect of little or no movement in the December climate talks in Durban, South Africa, have combined to take the political momentum out of an issue that was a major cause in Europe.

“It is way down the agenda and will not feature in elections,” said Edward Cameron, director of the World Resources Institute think tank’s international climate initiative, on the sidelines of a meeting on climate change at London’s Chatham House think tank. “At a time of joblessness and fiscal crises, it is very difficult to advance the climate change issue.”

That is as true for next year’s presidential elections in the United States as it will be in France, despite the fact that there has been a series of environmental disasters, from the Texas drought this year to Russia’s heat wave and consequent steep rise in wheat prices last year.

According to acclaimed NASA scientist James Hansen, who has been warning of impending climatic doom for decades, the lack of focus on these events is in no small part due to the fact that scientists are poor communicators while the climate change skeptics have mounted a smoothly run campaign to capitalize on any mistakes and admissions of uncertainty.

“There is a strong campaign by those people who want to continue the fossil fuel business as usual. Climate contrarians … have managed in the public’s eye to muddy the waters enough that there is uncertainty why should we do anything yet,” he said on a visit to London’s Royal Society for a meeting on lessons to be learned from past climate change battles.

“They have been winning the argument in the last several years, even though the science has become clearer,” he added.

Nuclear power issue distracts Berlin

In Germany, where a generous feed-in tariff scheme has produced some 28 gigawatts of wind power capacity and more than 18 GW of solar photovoltaic capacity, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government was forced into an abrupt U-turn on a controversial move to extend the lives of the country’s fleet of nuclear power plants. There was a political revolt after the March 11 nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan.

The oldest seven of Germany’s nuclear plants were closed immediately after Fukushima and will now never reopen, while the remainder will close by 2022.

This has had the perverse effect in a country proud of its renewable energy efforts of increasing the use of coal-fired power plants and increasing the likelihood of new coal- or gas-fired plants being built. The price tag will include higher carbon emissions at exactly the time that the Germany along with the rest of the European Union is pledged to cut emissions.

While political observers believe the climate change issue will come back to the fore at some point in Germany — a country where the Greens have played a pivotal political role — the nuclear power issue is so politically charged that it is off the agenda for now.

Even in the United Kingdom, which has a huge wind energy program and where the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power 15 months ago pledging to be the “greenest government ever,” there are major signs of backsliding. A long-awaited energy bill has been shelved, and renewable energy support costs and carbon emission reduction targets are either under review or about to be.

At the Conservative Party’s annual conference earlier this month, climate change was consigned to a brief debate on the opening Sunday, when delegates were mostly just arriving and finding their way around or still traveling to get there.

Damned by faint praise in London

Prime Minister David Cameron did not mention the issue in his speech to the conference — a performance that usually sets the broad agenda for the following year — and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne caused environmental outrage but satisfaction to the party’s right wing by pledging that the United Kingdom would not go any faster than its E.U. neighbors on emission cuts.

This is despite the fact that the United Kingdom has a legal target to cut its carbon emissions by at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, with cuts of 35 percent by 2022 and 50 percent by 2025, whereas the European Union’s goal is 20 percent by 2020.

It was widely reported that the 2022 target was only agreed to after a major battle in the Cabinet between supporters of Conservative Osborne and those of Liberal Democrat Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Huhne. It has since been announced that the carbon targets will be reviewed in 2014.

Even in London, where charismatic Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson came to power in 2008 in part on a green ticket, the issue has largely been parked and replaced by transport in the run-up to next year’s mayoral elections. The city’s aging transport system is feared likely to come under massive strain during the 2012 Olympic Games.

Then there is the strange case of a strategic plan on adapting London to climate change, the draft of which was launched with great fanfare and declarations of urgency in February 2010. It was on the brink of publication in September 2010, but after that, it appeared to have vanished without trace.

At the same time, most members of City Hall’s climate change team, set up under the previous Labour administration, have been moved to other jobs.

‘Too difficult — and not a vote winner’

“Political leaders get it, but the treasuries don’t. The men with the money don’t want to be first movers,” said Nick Mabey, co-founder of environmental think tank E3G. “But the political froth has gone. It has become too difficult — and not a vote winner.”

Compounding that problem, at least in the United Kingdom, has been a series of reports underscoring the likely high cost to households of green energy policies at a time when the prices of domestic electricity and gas are already rising sharply.

A recent opinion poll found that the climate change issue has been replaced by concerns over rising fuel bills and energy security.

But Mabey is not too concerned. While the subject may be off the immediate political agenda, behind the scenes, the more enlightened corporate leaders and investment fund managers have been making their own calculations. They are moving their money into the low-carbon economic transformation that in some cases is already profitable and in many eyes essential and inevitable.

The main danger, they say, is that if climate change as a driver of action is allowed to languish too long and become too invisible while energy becomes the main motivator, it will become far harder to resurrect climate change.

For Mabey and WRI’s Cameron, while the deep and seemingly returning global economic crisis has proved a serious distraction internationally as well as domestically, all is not lost.

For a number of reasons, including the rise of a new and major climate player — China — and a series of new scientific reports on climate change due over the next two or three years, 2015 will be the next pivotal moment for the world to take collective action, they say.

“Climate change doesn’t keep people awake at night. Our task for the next few years is to move it back up the political agenda again,” said WRI’s Cameron.

Group Urges Research Into Aggressive Efforts to Fight Climate Change (N.Y. Times)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

By CORNELIA DEAN, Published: October 4, 2011

With political action on curbing greenhouse gases stalled, a bipartisan panel of scientists, former government officials and national security experts is recommending that the government begin researching a radical fix: directly manipulating the Earth’s climate to lower the temperature.

Members said they hoped that such extreme engineering techniques, which include scattering particles in the air to mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes or stationing orbiting mirrors in space to reflect sunlight, would never be needed. But in itsreport, to be released on Tuesday, the panel said it is time to begin researching and testing such ideas in case “the climate system reaches a ‘tipping point’ and swift remedial action is required.”

The 18-member panel was convened by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a research organization based in Washington founded by four senators — Democrats and Republicans — to offer policy advice to the government. In interviews, some of the panel members said they hoped that the mere discussion of such drastic steps would jolt the public and policy makers into meaningful action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which they called the highest priority.

The idea of engineering the planet is “fundamentally shocking,” David Keith, an energy expert at Harvard and the University of Calgary and a member of the panel, said. “It should be shocking.”

In fact, it is an idea that many environmental groups have rejected as misguided and potentially dangerous.

Jane Long, an associate director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the panel’s co-chairwoman, said that by spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, human activity was already engaged in climate modification. “We are doing it accidentally, but the Earth doesn’t know that,” she said, adding, “Going forward in ignorance is not an option.”

The panel, the Task Force on Climate Remediation Research, suggests that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy begin coordinating research and estimates that a valuable effort could begin with a few million dollars in financing over the next few years.

One reason that the United States should embrace such research, the report suggests, is the threat of unilateral action by another country. Members say research is already under way in Britain, Germany and possibly other countries, as well as in the private sector.

“A conversation about this is going to go on with us or without us,” said David Goldston, a panel member who directs government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Counciland is a former chief of staff of the House Committee on Science. “We have to understand what is at stake.”

In interviews, panelists said again and again that the continuing focus of policy makers and experts should be on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But several acknowledged that significant action remained a political nonstarter. Last month, for example, the Obama administration told the federal Environmental Protection Agency to hold off on tightening ozone standards, citing complications related to the weak economy.

According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to raising the global average surface temperatures by about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. It is impossible to predict how much impact the report will have. But given the panelists’ varied political and professional backgrounds, they seem likely to achieve one major goal: starting a broader conversation on the issue. Some climate experts have been working on it for years, but they have largely kept their discussions to themselves, saying they feared giving the impression that there might be quick fixes for climate change.

“Climate adaptation went through the same period of concern,” Mr. Goldston said, referring to the onetime reluctance of some researchers to discuss ways in which people, plants and animals might adjust to climate change. Now, he said, similar reluctance to discuss geoengineering is giving way, at least in part because “it’s possible we may have to do this no matter what.”

Although the techniques, which fall into two broad groups, are more widely known as geoengineering, the panel prefers “climate remediation.”

The first is carbon dioxide removal, in which the gas is absorbed by plants, trapped and stored underground or otherwise removed from the atmosphere. The methods are “generally uncontroversial and don’t introduce new global risks,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate expert at Stanford University and a panel member. “It’s mostly a question of how much do these things cost.”

Controversy arises more with the second group of techniques, solar radiation management, which involves increasing the amount of solar energy that bounces back into space before it can be absorbed by the Earth. They include seeding the atmosphere with reflective particles, launching giant mirrors above the earth or spewing ocean water into the air to form clouds.

These techniques are thought to pose a risk of upsetting earth’s natural rhythms. With them, Dr. Caldeira said, “the real question is what are the unknown unknowns: Are you creating more risk than you are alleviating?”

At the influential blog Climate Progress, Joe Romm, a fellow at the Center for American Progress, has made a similar point, likening geo-engineering to a dangerous course of chemotherapy and radiation to treat a condition curable through diet and exercise — or, in this case, emissions reduction.

The panel rejected any immediate application of climate remediation techniques, saying too little is known about them. In 2009, the Royal Society in Britain said much the same, assessing geoengineering technologies as “technically feasible” but adding that their potential costs, effectiveness and risks were unknown.

Similarly, in a 2010 review of federal research that might be relevant to climate remediation, the federal Government Accountability Office noted that “major uncertainties remain on the efficacy and potential consequences” of the approach. Its report also recommended that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy “establish a clear strategy for geoengineering research.”

John P. Holdren, who heads that office, declined interview requests. He issued a statement reiterating the Obama administration’s focus on “taking steps to sensibly reduce pollution that is contributing to climate change.”

Yet in an interview with The Associated Press in 2009, Dr. Holdren said the possible risks and benefits of geoengineering should be studied very carefully because “we might get desperate enough to want to use it.”

In a draft plan made public on Friday, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a coordinating effort administered by his office, outlined its own climate change research agenda, including studies of the impacts of rapid climate change.

The plan said that climate-related projections would be crucial to future studies of the “feasibility, effectiveness and unintended consequences of strategies for deliberate, large-scale manipulations of Earth’s environment,” including carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management.

Many countries fault the United States for government inaction on climate change, especially given its longtime role as a chief contributor to the problem.

Frank Loy, a panelist and former chief climate negotiator for the United States, suggested that people around the world would see past those issues if the United States embraced geoengineering studies, provided that it was “very clear about what kind of research is undertaken and what the safeguards are.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 4, 2011

An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to Frank Loy as the nation’s chief climate negotiator; he is a former chief climate negotiator. It also misstated the name of a federal agency that reported on the potential effectiveness of climate remediation. It is the Government Accountability Office, not the General Accountability Office.

NSF seeks cyber infrastructure to make sense of scientific data (Federal Computer Week)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Computação, Matemática, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologiarenzotaddei

By Camille Tuutti, Oct 04, 2011

The National Science Foundation has tapped a research team at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to develop a national data infrastructure that would help future scientists and researchers manage the data deluge, share information and fuel innovation in the scientific community.

The UNC group will lead the DataNet Federation Consortium, which includes seven universities. The infrastructure that the consortium will try to create would support collaborative multidisciplinary research and will “democratize access to information among researchers and citizen scientists alike,” said Rob Pennington, program director in NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

“It means researchers on the cutting edge have access to new, more extensive, multidisciplinary datasets that will enable breakthroughs and the creation of new fields of science and engineering,” he added.

The effort would be a “significant step in the right direction” in solving some of the key problems researchers run into, said Stan Ahalt, director at the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill, which federates the consortium’s data repositories to enable cross-disciplinary research. One of the issues researchers today grapple with is how to best manage data in a way that maximizes its utility to the scientific community, he said. Storing massive quantities of data and the lack of well-designed methods that allow researchers to use unstructured and structured data simultaneously are additional obstacles for researchers, Ahalt added.

The national data infrastructure may not solve everything immediately, he said, “but it will give us a platform for start working meticulously on more long-term rugged solutions or robust solutions.”

DFC will use iRODS, the integrated Rule Oriented Data System, to implement a data management infrastructure. Multiple federal agencies are already using the technology: the NASA Center for Climate Simulation, for example, imported a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite image dataset onto the environment so academic researchers would have access, said Reagan Moore, principal investigator for the Data Intensive Cyber Environments research group at UNC-Chapel Hill that leads the consortium.

It’s very typical for a scientific community to develop a set of practices around a particular methodology of collecting data, Ahalt explained. For example, hydrologists know where their censors are and what those mean from a geographical perspective. Those hydrologists put their data in a certain format that may not be obvious to someone who is, for example, doing atmospheric studies, he said.

“The long-term goal of this effort is to improve the ability to do research,” Moore said. “If I’m a researcher in any given area, I’d like to be able to access data from other people working in the same area, collaborate with them, and then build a new collection that represents the new research results that are found. To do that, I need access to the old research results, to the observational data, to simulations or analyze what happens using computers, etc. These environments then greatly minimize the effort required to manage and distribute a collection and make it available to research.”

For science research as a whole, Ahalt said the infrastructure could mean a lot more than just managing the data deluge or sharing information within the different research communities.

“Data is the currency of the knowledge economy,” he said. “Right now, a lot of what we do collectively and globally from an economic standpoint is highly dependent on our ability to manipulate and analyze data. Data is also the currency of science; it’s our ability to have a national infrastructure that will allow us to share those scientific assets.”

The bottom line: “We’ll be more efficient at producing new science, new innovation and new innovation knowledge,” he said.

About the Author

Camille Tuutti is a staff writer covering the federal workforce.

Little Ice Age Shrank Europeans, Sparked Wars (NetGeo)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedambientalismo, ciência, Cultura, discurso ambiental, Economia, História, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Violênciarenzotaddei

Study aims to scientifically link climate change to societal upheaval.

London’s River Thames, frozen over in 1677. Painting by Abraham Hondius via Heritage Images/Corbis

Brian Handwerk, for National Geographic News

Published October 3, 2011

Pockmarked with wars, inflation, famines and shrinking humans, the 1600s in Europe came to be called the General Crisis.

But whereas historians have blamed those tumultuous decades on growing pains between feudalism and capitalism, a new study points to another culprit: the coldest stretch of the climate change period known as the Little Ice Age.

(Also see “Sun Oddly Quiet—Hints at Next ‘Little Ice Age’?”)

The Little Ice Age curbed agricultural production and eventually led to the European crisis, according to the authors of the study—said to be the first to scientifically verify cause-and-effect between climate change and large-scale human crises.

Prior to the industrial revolution, all European countries were by and large agrarian, and as study co-author David Zhang pointed out, “In agricultural societies, the economy is controlled by climate,” since it dictates growing conditions.

A team led by Zhang, of the University of Hong Kong, pored over data from Europe and other the Northern Hemisphere regions between A.D. 1500 to 1800.

The team compared climate data, such as temperatures, with other variables, including population sizes, growth rates, wars and other social disturbances, agricultural production figures and famines, grain prices, and wages.

The authors say some effects, such as food shortages and health problems, showed up almost immediately between 1560 and 1660—the Little Ice Age’s harshest period—during which growing seasons shortened and cultivated land shrank.

As arable land contracted, so too did Europeans themselves, the study notes. Average height followed the temperature line, dipping nearly an inch (two centimeters) during the late 1500s, as malnourishment spread, and rising again only as temperatures climbed after 1650, the authors found.

Others effects—such as famines, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), or the 164 Manchu conquest of China—took decades to manifest. “Temperature is not a direct cause of war and social disturbance,” Zhang said. “The direct cause of war and social disturbance is the grain price. That is why we say climate change is the ultimate cause.”

The new study is both history lesson and warning, the researchers added.

As our climate changes due to global warming (see interactive), Zhang said, “developing countries will suffer more, because large populations in these countries [directly] rely on agricultural production.”

More: “Climate Change Killed Neanderthals, Study Says” >>

Questioning Privacy Protections in Research (New York Times)

26/10/2011UncategorizedAntropologia, Ética, Índios, ciência, Discriminação, Incerteza, medicina, Opinião pública, Política, Raça, Racismo, Saúde, Violência, Visualidaderenzotaddei

Dr. John Cutler, center, during the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Abuses in that study led to ethics rules for researchers. Coto Report

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: October 23, 2011

Hoping to protect privacy in an age when a fingernail clipping can reveal a person’s identity, federal officials are planning to overhaul the rules that regulate research involving human subjects. But critics outside the biomedical arena warn that the proposed revisions may unintentionally create a more serious problem: sealing off vast collections of publicly available information from inspection, including census data, market research, oral histories and labor statistics.

Organizations that represent tens of thousands of scholars in the humanities and social sciences are scrambling to register their concerns before the Wednesday deadline for public comment on the proposals.

The rules were initially created in the 1970s after shocking revelations that poor African-American men infected with syphilis in Tuskegee, Ala., were left untreated by the United States Public Health Service so that doctors could study the course of the disease. Now every institution that receives money from any one of 18 federal agencies must create an ethics panel, called an institutional review board, or I.R.B.

More than 5,875 boards have to sign off on research involving human participants to ensure that subjects are fully informed, that their physical and emotional health is protected, and that their privacy is respected. Although only projects with federal financing are covered by what is known as the Common Rule, many institutions routinely subject all research with a human factor to review.

The changes in the ethical guidelines — the first comprehensive revisions in more than 30 years — were prompted by a surge of health-related research and technological advances.

Researchers in the humanities and social sciences are pleased that the reforms would address repeated complaints that medically oriented regulations have choked off research in their fields with irrelevant and cumbersome requirements. But they were dismayed to discover that the desire to protect individuals’ privacy in the genomics age resulted in rules that they say could also restrict access to basic data, like public-opinion polls.

Jerry Menikoff, director of the federal Office for Human Research Protections, which oversees the Common Rule, cautions that any alarm is premature, saying that federal officials do not intend to pose tougher restrictions on information that is already public. “If the technical rules end up doing that, we’ll try to come up with a result that’s appropriate,” he said.

Critics welcomed the assurance but remained skeptical. Zachary Schrag, a historian at George Mason University who wrote a book about the review process, said, “For decades, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have suffered because of rules that were well intended but poorly considered and drafted and whose unintended consequences restricted research.”

The American Historical Association, with 15,000 members, and the Oral History Association, with 900 members, warn that under the proposed revisions, for example, new revelations that Public Health Service doctors deliberately infected Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and mental patients with syphilis in the 1940s might never have come to light. The abuses were uncovered by a historian who by chance came across notes in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh. That kind of undirected research could be forbidden under guidelines designed to prevent “data collected for one purpose” from being “used for a new purpose to which the subjects never consented,” said Linda Shopes, who helped draft the historians’ statement.

The suggested changes, she said, “really threaten access to information in a democratic society.”

Numerous organizations including the Consortium of Social Science Associations, which represents dozens of colleges, universities and research centers, expressed particular concern that the new standards might be modeled on federal privacy rules relating to health insurance and restrict use of the broadest of identifying information, like a person’s ZIP code, county or city.

The 11,000-member American Anthropological Association declared in a statement that any process that is based on the health insurance act’s privacy protections “would be disastrous for social and humanities research.” The 45,000-member American Association of University Professors warned that such restrictions “threaten mayhem” and “render impossible a great deal of social-science research, ranging from ethnographic community studies to demographic analysis that relies on census tracts to traffic models based on ZIP code to political polls that report by precinct.”

Dr. Menikoff said references to the statutes governing health insurance information were meant to serve as a starting point, not a blueprint. “Nothing is ruled out,” he said, though he wondered how the review system could be severed from the issue of privacy protection, as the consortium has discussed, “if the major risk for most of these studies is that you’re going to disclose information inadvertently.” If there is confidential information on a laptop, he said, requiring a password may be a reasonable requirement.

Ms. Shopes, Mr. Schrag and other critics emphasized that despite their worries they were happy with the broader effort to fix some longstanding problems with institutional review boards that held, say, an undergraduate interviewing Grandma for an oral history project to the same guidelines as a doctor doing experimental research on cancer patients.

“The system has been sliding into chaos in recent years,” said Alice Kessler-Harris, president of the 9,000-member Organization of American Historians. “No one can even agree on what is supposed to be covered in the humanities and social sciences.”

Vague rules designed to give the thousands of review boards flexibility when dealing with nonmedical subjects have instead resulted in higgledy-piggledy enforcement and layers of red tape even when no one is at risk, she said.

For example Columbia University, where Ms. Kessler-Harris teaches, exempts oral history projects from review, while boards at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, San Diego, have raised lengthy objections to similar interview projects proposed by undergraduate and master’s students, according to professors there.

Brown University has been sued by an associate professor of education who said the institutional review board overstepped its powers by barring her from using three years’ worth of research on how the parents of Chinese-American children made use of educational testing.

Ms. Shopes said board members at one university had suggested at one point that even using recorded interviews deposited at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library would have needed Reagan’s specific approval when he was alive.

Many nonmedical researchers praised the idea that scholars in fields like history, literature, journalism, languages and classics who use traditional methods of research should not have to submit to board review. They would like the office of human protections to go further and lift restrictions on research that may cause participants embarrassment or emotional distress. “Our job is to hold people accountable,” Ms. Kessler-Harris said.

Dr. Menikoff said, “We want to hear all these comments.” But he maintained that when the final language is published, critics may find themselves saying, “Wow, this is reasonable stuff.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 26, 2011

An article on Monday about federal officials’ plans to overhaul privacy rules that regulate research involving human subjects, and concerns raised by scholars, paraphrased incorrectly from comments by Linda Shopes, who helped draft a statement by historians about possible changes. She said that board members at a university (which she did not name) — not board members at the University of Chicago — suggested at one point that using recorded interviews deposited at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library would have needed Reagan’s specific approval when he was alive.

Bleak Prospects for Avoiding Dangerous Global Warming (Science)

24/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

by Richard A. Kerr on 23 October 2011, 1:00 PM

The bad news just got worse: A new study finds that reining in greenhouse gas emissions in time to avert serious changes to Earth’s climate will be at best extremely difficult. Current goals for reducing emissions fall far short of what would be needed to keep warming below dangerous levels, the study suggests. To succeed, we would most likely have to reverse the rise in emissions immediately and follow through with steep reductions through the century. Starting later would be far more expensive and require unproven technology.

Published online today in Nature Climate Change, the new study merges model estimates of how much greenhouse gas society might put into the atmosphere by the end of the century with calculations of how climate might respond to those human emissions. Climate scientist Joeri Rogelj of ETH Zurich and his colleagues combed the published literature for model simulations that keep global warming below 2°C at the lowest cost. They found 193 examples. Modelers running such optimal-cost simulations tried to include every factor that might influence the amount of greenhouse gases society will produce —including the rate of technological progress in burning fuels efficiently, the amount of fossil fuels available, and the development of renewable fuels. The researchers then fed the full range of emissions from the scenarios into a simple climate model to estimate the odds of avoiding a dangerous warming.

The results suggest challenging times ahead for decision makers hoping to curb the greenhouse. Strategies that are both plausible and likely to succeed call for emissions to peak this decade and start dropping right away. They should be well into decline by 2020 and far less than half of current emissions by 2050. Only three of the 193 scenarios examined would be very likely to keep the warming below the danger level, and all of those require heavy use of energy systems that actually remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. That would require, for example, both creating biofuels and storing the carbon dioxide from their combustion in the ground.

“The alarming thing is very few scenarios give the kind of future we want,” says climate scientist Neil Edwards of The Open University in Milton Keynes, U.K. Both he and Rogelj emphasize the uncertainties inherent in the modeling, especially on the social and technological side, but the message seems clear to Edwards: “What we need is at the cutting edge. We need to be as innovative as we can be in every way.” And even then, success is far from guaranteed.

Estudo americano confirma aquecimento da superfície terrestre (BBC)

22/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

Richard Black

Da BBC News

Estação meteorológica próxima de aeroporto.

Grupo afirma que estações meteorológicas dão dados precisos sobre aquecimento

Uma nova análise de um grupo de cientistas dos Estados Unidos concluiu que a superfície da Terra está ficando mais quente.

Desde 1950, a temperatura média em terra aumentou em um grau centígrado, segundo as descobertas do grupo Berkeley Earth Project.

O Berkeley Earth Project usou novos métodos e novos dados, mas as descobertas do grupo seguem a mesma tendência climática vista pela Nasa e pelo Escritório de Meteorologia da Grã-Bretanha, por exemplo.

“Nossa maior surpresa foi que os novos resultados concordam com os valores de aquecimento publicados anteriormente por outras equipes nos Estados Unidos e Grã-Bretanha”, afirmou o professor Richard Muller, que estabeleceu o Berkeley Earth Project na Universidade da Califórnia reunindo dez cientistas renomados.

“Isto confirma que estes estudos foram feitos cuidadosamente e que o potencial de (estudos) tendenciosos, identificados pelos céticos em relação ao aquecimento global, não afetam seriamente as conclusões”, acrescentou.

O grupo de cientistas também relata que, apesar de o efeito de aumento de calor perto de cidades – o chamado efeito de ilha de calor urbana – ser real e já ter sido estabelecido, ele não é o responsável pelo aquecimento registrado pela maioria das estações climáticas no mundo todo.

Ceticismo

O grupo examinou as alegações de blogueiros “céticos” em relação ao fenômeno, que afirmam que os dados de estações meteorológicas não mostram uma tendência verdadeira de aquecimento global.

Eles dizem que muitas estações meteorológicas registraram aquecimento pois estão localizadas perto de cidades e as cidades crescem, aumentando o calor.

No entanto, o grupo de cientistas descobriu cerca de 40 mil estações meteorológicas no mundo todo cujas informações foram gravadas e armazenadas no formato digital.

Os pesquisadores então desenvolveram uma nova forma de analisar os dados para detectar a tendência das temperaturas globais em terra desde 1800.

O resultado foi um gráfico muito parecido com aqueles produzidos pelos grupos mais importantes do mundo, que tiveram seus trabalhos criticados pelos céticos.

Dois destes três registros são mantidos pelos Estados Unidos, na Administração Oceânica e Atmosférica Nacional (NOAA) e na Nasa. O terceiro é uma colaboração entre o Escritório de Meteorologia da Grã-Bretanha e o Centro de Pesquisa Climática da Universidade de East Anglia (UEA).

O professor Phil Jones, do Centro de Pesquisa Climática da UEA, encarou o trabalho do grupo com cautela e afirmou que espera ler “o relatório final”, quando for publicado.

“Estas descobertas iniciais são muito encorajadoras e ecoam nossos resultados e nossa conclusão de que o impacto das ilhas urbanas de calor na média global de temperatura é mínimo”, disse.

Trânsito e fumaça em rua da China (Reuters)

Céticos dizem que proximidade de cidades alteram dados de estações

Phil Jones foi um dos cientistas britânicos acusados de manipular dados para exagerar a influência humana no aquecimento global. Os cientistas foram inocentados em 2010.

O caso teve início em 2009, com o vazamento de e-mails de Jones nos quais o cientista parecia sugerir que alguns dados de pesquisas sobre o aquecimento global fossem excluídos de apresentações que seriam realizadas na conferência da ONU sobre mudanças climáticas.

O episódio deu munição aos céticos em relação ao papel dos seres humanos nas alterações climáticas. Mas a sindicância da Universidade de East Anglia concluiu que não havia dúvidas sobre o rigor e a honestidade dos cientistas.

Sem publicação

Bob Ward, diretor de política e comunicações para o Instituto Graham de Mudança Climática e Meio Ambiente, de Londres, afirmou que o aquecimento global é claro.

“Os chamados céticos devem deixar de lado sua alegações de que o aumento na temperatura média global pode ser atribuído ao impacto do crescimento das cidades”, disse.

A equipe do Berkeley Earth Project decidiu divulgar os dados de suas pesquisas inicialmente em seu próprio website, ao invés de fazê-lo em uma publicação especializada.

Os pesquisadores estão pedindo para que os internautas comentem e forneçam suas opiniões antes de preparar os manuscritos para a publicação científica formal.

Richard Muller, que criou o grupo de pesquisa, afirmou que esta livre circulação de informações marca uma volta à forma como a ciência precisa ser feita, ao invés de apenas publicar o estudo em revistas científicas.

A New Discipline Emerges: The Psychology of Science (Science Daily)

21/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Educação, Psicologiarenzotaddei

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — You’ve heard of the history of science, the philosophy of science, maybe even the sociology of science. But how about the psychology of science? In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, San Jose State University psychologist Gregory J. Feist argues that a field has been quietly taking shape over the past decade, and it holds great promise for both psychology and science.

“Science is a cognitive act by definition: It involves personality, creativity, developmental processes,” says Feist — everything about individual psychology. So what is the psychology of science? “Simply put,” he writes, it is “the scientific study of scientific thought and behavior.” The psychology of science isn’t just about scientists, though. It’s about how children make organized sense of the world, what comprises scientific talent and interest — or growing disinterest — and even people’s embrace of pseudoscience.

Reviewing about two dozen articles, Feist mentions work in many psychological subspecialties. Neuroscientists have observed the brain correlations of scientific reasoning, discovering, for instance, that people pay more attention to data that concur with their own personal theories. Developmental psychologists have found that infants can craft theories of the way the world works. They’ve also looked at the ages at which small children begin to distinguish theories from evidence.

In its focus on such processes as problem-solving, memory, and creativity, cognitive psychology may be the most mature of the specialties in its relationship to the doing of science. Feist’s own work in this area offers some intriguing findings. In meta-analyses of personality studies of scientific interest and creativity, he has teased out a contradiction: People who are highly interested in science are higher than others in “conscientiousness” (that is, such traits as caution and fastidiousness) and lower in “openness” to experience. Meanwhile, scientific creativity is associated with low conscientiousness and high openness.

Feist believes that a new psychology of science is good for science, which has become more and more important to society, culture, and the economy. Educators need to understand the ways children and adolescents acquire the requisites of scientific inquiry, he says, “and we want to encourage kids who have that talent to go that way.”

But the new sub-discipline is also good for psychology. “Like other disciplines, psychology is fracturing into smaller and smaller areas that are isolated from each other,” he says. “The psychology of science is one of the few recent disciplines that bucks that trend. We’re saying: ‘Let’s look at the whole person in all the basic psychological areas — cognition, development, neuroscience — and integrate it in one phenomenon.’ That’s an approach which is unusual these days.”

Onças-pintadas ajudam a preservar Caatinga (Valor Econômico)

18/10/2011Uncategorizedambientalismo, ciência, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Onça, Previsão, Visualidaderenzotaddei

JC e-mail 4366, de 18 de Outubro de 2011.

Mapear quantas são, como vivem e por onde andam as onças-pintadas da Caatinga permitirá conhecer o efeito da transposição do São Francisco sobre a região.

É bem ali, onde a onça bebe água, que se arma o laço. Em setembro, no auge da seca na Caatinga, foram dez armadilhas na região de Sento Sé, município do norte baiano, às margens do lago de Sobradinho. Cinco pesquisadores, 30 dias, água racionada, nada de luz elétrica, computador ou telefone, e R$ 22 mil de investimento. No fim da expedição, nenhuma onça-pintada ganhou colar com GPS. Mas a frustração dos cientistas dá logo lugar ao planejamento da nova campanha. É nesse compasso que vão perseguindo a criação de uma espécie de “índice-onça de sustentabilidade”, que está relacionado com uma das principais, e mais polêmicas, obras do Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC), a transposição do rio São Francisco.

Tanto interesse nesse gato hiperbólico – é o maior felino das Américas, o terceiro maior do mundo depois do tigre e do leão, e dono da mordida mais potente entre seus parentes – transcende a biologia. Onça-pintada só vive onde tem água e é predador importante, que regula ecossistemas. Não deixa, por exemplo, a população de capivaras, veados ou ratos explodir. No topo da cadeia alimentar, é uma espécie guarda-chuva. “Protegendo a onça-pintada, está se protegendo todas as outras”, diz o veterinário Ronaldo Gonçalves Morato, 44 anos, um dos poucos especialistas em onças do país das onças.

Na base do estudo está a proposta de se criar, no coração do Semiárido, um corredor de fauna. A tentativa é construir uma área de proteção que leve em conta o potencial econômico da região. Um dos elementos é o Parque Nacional Boqueirão da Onça, em estudo há dez anos. Teria 800 mil hectares e seria a maior unidade de conservação fora da Amazônia. Mas enquanto o governo não resolve se cria ou não o parque, o valor e a grilagem das terras aumentam. Há também o interesse do Ministério das Minas e Energia, que vê na região um bom potencial eólico.

O governo busca consenso para garantir alguma proteção ao terceiro e mais castigado bioma brasileiro. Menos de 2% da Caatinga é área protegida. Mais de 45% da vegetação foi desmatada e a região sofre desertificação. “Temos a visão de que a Caatinga é pobre e pronto. Mas existem paisagens fantásticas e recursos naturais mal aproveitados”, diz Morato. “Explorar a Caatinga com um bom programa turístico, seria bem interessante.”

A diversidade biológica é rica, mesmo com escassez de água. Há centenas de espécies de pássaros, répteis e anfíbios. As paisagens são belas e variadas, há pinturas rupestres e frutas que dão doces exóticos. Na seca, a vegetação fica sem folhas, para gastar menos energia. “O pessoal chama esse cenário de mata branca. É só chover que, três dias depois, está tudo verde. É maravilhoso”, encanta-se Morato.

O parque, que não sai do papel, tomaria 45% do município de Sento Sé, região bem pouco povoada de gente e talvez bem povoada por onças. A pintada, que se espalhava pela Caatinga nos tempos de Lampião, hoje está restrita a 25% do bioma. Os pesquisadores acreditam que existam cinco grandes populações de onças-pintadas no Semiárido, um ou dois animais a cada 100 km2 – em Cáceres, no Pantanal, a densidade é bem mais alta, média de sete onças a cada 100 km2. As estimativas falam em 300 a 400 animais na Caatinga.

Mapear, com alguma precisão, quantas são, como vivem e por onde andam as onças-pintadas do sertão nordestino é ter um indicador ambiental para saber, depois, o quanto a transposição do São Francisco afetou a região. Se as onças-pintadas continuarem por lá depois da obra, é sinal positivo. O projeto faz parte do Programa de Revitalização da Bacia do São Francisco, coordenado pelo Ministério do Meio Ambiente em parceria com o da Integração Regional. Também conseguiu recursos na BM&F Bovespa. Onças, principalmente as pintadas, são animais glamourosos.

A majestade da espécie-símbolo da fauna brasileira, impressa nas cédulas de R$ 50, é inversamente proporcional ao que se conhece sobre o animal. “Nem sabemos o quanto uma onça-pintada vive”, diz Morato. “A cada pergunta que respondemos, surge uma nova.” Ele começou a carreira fazendo estágio no zoológico de Sorocaba, em São Paulo, o suficiente para perceber que queria mesmo era estudar animais em vida livre.

Morato trabalha com onças há 20 anos, há seis é o coordenador do Centro Nacional de Pesquisa e Conservação de Mamíferos Carnívoros (Cenap), instituto que estuda uma lista de 26 espécies – de lobos-guará a ariranhas. Só de felinos são oito espécies, entre onças pintadas e pardas, jaguatiricas e gatos-do-mato. Dá para ver da estrada o painel gigante de uma onça-pintada nos vidros da sede do Cenap, em Atibaia. O centro foi criado há 17 anos e é um braço do Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio).

Os investimentos no projeto Ecologia e Conservação da Onça-Pintada no Médio São Francisco, ou simplesmente Onças da Caatinga, é de R$ 800 mil em quatro anos. A primeira campanha de captura para colocação do colar foi em 2010, e também não teve êxito. Não é fácil pegar um bicho desses. Os laços de aço são montados perto das áreas que elas costumam frequentar. “A gente identifica os pontos onde as onças passam, e deixamos os laços. Mas às vezes elas andam ao lado do laço e a gente só vê os rastros no dia seguinte. É difícil.”

Difícil é pouco. Para um mês de acampamento em setembro, levaram 300 litros de água por pessoa. Não há estradas, carro não chega, as pedras cortam os pneus. Equipamentos e água são levados a pé. Banho, só de caneca.

Quando dá sorte e a onça cai no laço, os pesquisadores lançam o dardo anestésico e começam a medir o animal: peso, tamanho, tamanho da pata, análise dos dentes. É a hora de colocar o colar com telemetria que pesa 800 gramas e tem um GPS instalado em uma caixinha, na parte da frente. Cada animal tem frequência própria. Depois, programam de quanto em quanto tempo o pesquisador receberá as informações por onde anda a onça – de duas em duas horas, por exemplo. Uma vez por semana, os dados são enviados ao e-mail do cientista pela empresa que administra o satélite. O colar pode ser programado para cair do pescoço depois de determinado período, e ser recolhido. “Fica, por exemplo, 400 dias na onça, e aí cai”, explica Morato.

“A tecnologia favoreceu muito o nosso trabalho”, diz ele. O avanço tecnológico tem seu preço, nada disso é barato. O Cenap usa colares da suíça Televilt, cada um a US$ 3.800. O contrato anual do satélite são outros US$ 1.200 por colar. Hoje existem 40 equipamentos do gênero em onças-pintadas no Brasil. Ao recolher várias informações sobre o comportamento do animal – desde como e para onde se desloca, quais ambientes procura, como se alimenta – os cientistas desenham o tamanho da “área de vida” da onça. “Vou vislumbrando o ambiente que posso sugerir para preservação”, explica Morato.

O “Onças na Caatinga” levantou recursos na BVS&A, portal da Bovespa que lista projetos sociais e ambientais. “Quem tiver interesse pode entrar lá, escolher o que acha interessante, e doar”, diz Sonia Favaretto, diretora de sustentabilidade da Bolsa. A iniciativa resultou em R$ 150 mil em dois anos. O Cenap trabalhou em parceria com a ONG Pró-Carnívoros, que ajuda a viabilizar os projetos de pesquisa.

O papel de regulador ecológico da onça-pintada não é o único. “Com a perda de espécies, perdem-se ambientes, ficamos mais expostos a catástrofes”, aponta Morato. A redução de predadores representa aumento das presas e mais pressão sobre a vegetação. “Isso, a longo prazo, diminui o estoque de carbono”, lembra. Morato defende que é preciso refletir sobre o valor econômico das onças-pintadas e o apelo turístico que representam.

Rick Perry officials spark revolt after doctoring environment report (The Guardian)

17/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Conservadorismo, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Poder, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

Scientists ask for names to be removed after mentions of climate change and sea-level rise taken out by Texas officials

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 October 2011 13.05 BST

Republican presidential hopeful Texas Gov. Rick Perry

Rick Perry’s administration deleted references to climate change and sea-level rise from the report. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Officials in Rick Perry’s home state of Texas have set off a scientists’ revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state’s environmental agency.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. “None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed,” said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Centre.

“To me it is simply a question of maintaining scientific credibility. This is simply antithetical to what a scientist does,” Lester said. “We can’t be censored.” Scientists see Texas as at high risk because of climate change, from the increased exposure to hurricanes and extreme weather on its long coastline to this summer’s season of wildfires and drought.

However, Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination, has elevated denial of science, from climate change to evolution, to an art form. He opposes any regulation of industry, and has repeatedly challenged the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Texas is the only state to refuse to sign on to the federal government’s new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. “I like to tell people we live in a state of denial in the state of Texas,” said John Anderson, an oceanography at Rice University, and author of the chapter targeted by the government censors.

That state of denial percolated down to the leadership of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency chief, who was appointed by Perry, is known to doubt the science of climate change. “The current chair of the commission, Bryan Shaw, commonly talks about how human-induced climate change is a hoax,” said Anderson.

But scientists said they still hoped to avoid a clash by simply avoiding direct reference to human causes of climate change and by sticking to materials from peer-reviewed journals. However, that plan began to unravel when officials from the agency made numerous unauthorised changes to Anderson’s chapter, deleting references to climate change, sea-level rise and wetlands destruction.

“It is basically saying that the state of Texas doesn’t accept science results published in Science magazine,” Anderson said. “That’s going pretty far.”

Officials even deleted a reference to the sea level at Galveston Bay rising five times faster than the long-term average – 3mm a year compared to .5mm a year – which Anderson noted was a scientific fact. “They just simply went through and summarily struck out any reference to climate change, any reference to sea level rise, any reference to human influence – it was edited or eliminated,” said Anderson. “That’s not scientific review that’s just straight forward censorship.”

Mother Jones has tracked the changes. The agency has defended its actions. “It would be irresponsible to take whatever is sent to us and publish it,” Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. “Information was included in a report that we disagree with.”

She said Anderson’s report had been “inconsistent with current agency policy”, and that he had refused to change it. She refused to answer any questions. Campaigners said the censorship by the Texas state authorities was a throwback to the George Bush era when White House officials also interfered with scientific reports on climate change.

In the last few years, however, such politicisation of science has spread to the states. In the most notorious case, Virginia’s attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who is a professed doubter of climate science, has spent a year investigating grants made to a prominent climate scientist Michael Mann, when he was at a state university in Virginia.

Several courts have rejected Cuccinelli’s demands for a subpoena for the emails. In Utah, meanwhile, Mike Noel, a Republican member of the Utah state legislature called on the state university to sack a physicist who had criticised climate science doubters.

The university rejected Noel’s demand, but the physicist, Robert Davies said such actions had had a chilling effect on the state of climate science. “We do have very accomplished scientists in this state who are quite fearful of retribution from lawmakers, and who consequently refuse to speak up on this very important topic. And the loser is the public,” Davies said in an email.

“By employing these intimidation tactics, these policymakers are, in fact, successful in censoring the message coming from the very institutions whose expertise we need.”

Seeing Value in Ignorance, College Expects Its Physicists to Teach Poetry (N.Y. Times)

17/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Cultura, Educação, Incertezarenzotaddei

By ALAN SCHWARZ

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Sarah Benson last encountered college mathematics 20 years ago in an undergraduate algebra class. Her sole experience teaching math came in the second grade, when the first graders needed help with their minuses.

Sarah Benson has a Ph.D. in art history and a master’s in comparative literature, but this year she is teaching geometry. Shannon Jensen for The New York Times

And yet Ms. Benson, with a Ph.D. in art history and a master’s degree in comparative literature, stood at the chalkboard drawing parallelograms, constructing angles and otherwise dismembering Euclid’s Proposition 32the way a biology professor might treat a water frog. Her students cared little about her inexperience. As for her employers, they did not mind, either: they had asked her to teach formal geometry expressly because it was a subject about which she knew very little.

It was just another day here at St. John’s College, whose distinctiveness goes far beyond its curriculum of great works: Aeschylus and Aristotle, Bacon and Bach. As much of academia fractures into ever more specific disciplines, this tiny college still expects — in fact, requires — its professors to teach almost every subject, leveraging ignorance as much as expertise.

“There’s a little bit of impostor syndrome,” said Ms. Benson, who will teach Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry” next semester. “But here, it’s O.K. that I don’t know something. I can figure it out, and my job is to help the students do the same thing. It’s very collaborative.”

Students in Ms. Benson’s class discussing Euclid.Shannon Jensen for The New York Times

Or as St. John’s president, Chris Nelson (class of 1970), put it with a smile only slightly sadistic: “Every member of the faculty who comes here gets thrown in the deep end. I think the faculty members, if they were cubbyholed into a specialization, they’d think that they know more than they do. That usually is an impediment to learning. Learning is born of ignorance.”

Students who attend St. John’s — it has a sister campus in Santa Fe, N.M., with the same curriculum and philosophies — know that their college experience will be like no other. There are no majors; every student takes the same 16 yearlong courses, which generally feature about 15 students discussing Sophocles or Homer, and the professor acting more as catalyst than connoisseur.

What they may not know is that their professor — or tutor in the St. John’s vernacular — might have no background in the subject. This is often the case for the courses that freshmen take. For example, Hannah Hintze, who has degrees in philosophy and woodwind performance, and whose dissertation concerned Plato’s “Republic,” is currently leading classes on observational biology and Greek.

“Some might not find that acceptable, but we explore things together,” said Ryan Fleming, a freshman in Ms. Benson’s Euclid class. “We don’t have someone saying, ‘I have all the answers.’ They’re open-minded and go along with us to see what answers there can be.”

Like all new tutors, Ms. Benson, 42, went through a one-week orientation in August to reacquaint herself with Euclid, and to learn the St. John’s way of teaching. She attends weekly conferences with more seasoned tutors.

Her plywood-floor classroom in McDowell Hall is as almost as dim and sparse as the ones Francis Scott Key (valedictorian of the class of 1796) studied in before the college’s original building burned down in 1909. Eight underpowered ceiling lights barely illuminated three walls of chalkboards. While even kindergarten classrooms now feature interactive white boards and Wi-Fi connected iPads, not one laptop or cellphone was visible; the only evidence of contemporary life was the occasional plastic foam coffee cup.

The discussion centered not on examples and exercises, but on the disciplined narrative of Euclid’s assertions, the aesthetic economy of mathematical argument. When talk turned to Proposition 34 of Book One, which states that a parallelogram’s diagonal divides it into equal areas, not one digit was used or even mentioned. Instead, the students debated whether Propositions 4 and 26 were necessary for Euclid’s proof.

When a student punctuated a blackboard analysis with, “The self-evident truth that these triangles will be equal,” the subliminal reference to the Declaration of Independence hinted at the eventual braiding of the disciplines by both students and tutors here. So, too, did a subsequent discussion of how “halves of equals are equals themselves,” evoking the United States Supreme Court’s logic in endorsing segregation 2,200 years after Euclid died.

Earlier in the day, in a junior-level class taught by a longtime tutor about a portion of Newton’s seminal physics text “Principia,” science and philosophy became as intertwined as a candy cane’s swirls. Students discussed Newton’s shrinking parabolic areas as if they were voting districts, and the limits of curves as social ideals.

One student remarked, “In Euclid before, he talked a lot about what is equal and what isn’t. It seems here that equality is more of a continuum — we can get as close as we want, but never actually get there.” A harmony of Tocqueville was being laid over Newton’s melody.

The tutor, Michael Dink, graduated from St. John’s in 1975 and earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. Like most professors here, he long ago traded the traditional three-course academic career — writing journal articles, attending conferences and teaching a specific subject — for the intellectual buffet at St. John’s. His first year included teaching Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” a treatise on planetary movements, and atomic theory. He since has taught 15 of the school’s 16 courses, the exception being sophomore music.

“You have to not try to control things,” Mr. Dink said, “and not think that what’s learned has to come from you.”

This ancient teaching method could be making a comeback well beyond St. John’s two campuses. Some education reformers assert that teachers as early as elementary school should lecture less at the blackboard while students silently take notes — the sage-on-the-stage model, as some call it — and foster more discussion and collaboration among smaller groups. It is a strategy that is particularly popular among schools that use technology to allow students to learn at their own pace.

Still, not even the most rabid reformer has suggested that biology be taught by social theorists, or Marx by mathematicians. That philosophy will continue to belong to a school whose president has joyfully declared, “We don’t have departmental politics — we don’t have departments!”

Anthony T. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton and president of the American Historical Association, said he appreciated the approach.

“There’s no question that people are becoming more specialized — it’s natural for scholars to cover a narrow field in great depth rather than many at the same time,” he said. “I admire how St. John’s does it. It sounds both fun and scary.”

Risco é coisa séria (JC)

15/10/2011UncategorizedAlimentos geneticamente modificados, Biotecnologias, ciência, Enquadramento, Genética, Incerteza, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, Opinião pública, Previsão, Riscorenzotaddei

JC e-mail 4364, de 14 de Outubro de 2011.

Artigo de Francisco G. Nóbrega enviado ao JC Email pelo autor.

A sociedade moderna está banhada em comunicação. Como “boa notícia não é notícia”, a lente psicológica humana registra sempre um cenário pior que a realidade. A percepção usual é que os riscos de todos os tipos aumentam dia a dia. A redução global da violência, por exemplo, é tema do livro recente do psicólogo da Universidade Harvard, Steven Pinker (http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/qa-with-steven-pinker). Ao arrepio do senso comum, ele demonstra, objetivamente, que estamos progredindo neste quesito.

Mas nossa mente não descança em sua aguda capacidade de detectar outras fontes de risco. Temos alguns campeões de audiência: energia nuclear para eletricidade, alimentos geneticamente modificados e aquecimento global catastrófico e antropogênico. O dano potencial das três ameaças mencionadas, objetivamente, não se concretizou de maneira alguma, embora a terceira ameaça deva se realizar no futuro, segundo seus defensores. As pessoas se encantam com o automóvel e seus acessórios, cada vez mais atraentes. Não se pensa em baní-lo, apesar de resultar em cerca de 40.000 mortos e inúmeros incapacitados cada ano, só no Brasil. David Ropeik, que pertence ao Centro Harvard para Análise de Risco, explica como facilmente se distorce o perigo real de situações. Quanto mais afastadas do senso comum (como radiação e plantas geneticamente modificadas), mais facilmente são manipuladas, por ignorância ou interesses outros, apavorando o cidadão comum. Ropeik explica como este medo sem sentido passa a ser um fator de estresse e um risco objetivo para a saúde das pessoas, devendo ser evitado.

Dentro desse universo, são justificadas as preocupações do Dr. Ferraz (“O feijão nosso de cada dia”, Jornal da Ciência, 6/10/2011). Ele é membro da CTNBio, atua na setorial vegetal/ambiental e sua área de concentração é em agroecologia, o que explica, pelo menos em parte, suas dúvidas. No entanto essas preocupações não têm a consistência sugerida pelo autor e a análise da CTNBio, que resultou na aprovação deste feijão, é confiável.

A comissão se pauta sempre pelas diretivas da legislação que são amplas, para dar conta de todas as possibilidades de risco para os consumidores e meio ambiente. No entanto o corpo técnico existe exatamente para atuar de maneira seletiva e consciente, examinando caso a caso. Os testes são examinadas com o rigor que a modificação introduzida na planta exige para plena segurança. Se as modificações são consideradas sem qualquer risco significativo, os testes são avaliados à luz deste fato.

Testes com muitos animais, altamente confiáveis estatisticamente, seriam exigidos pela comissão na eventualidade de uma planta transgênica produzir, por exemplo, uma molécula pesticida não protéica que seria em tudo semelhante a uma droga produzida pela indústria farmacêutica. Isto poderá acontecer em certo momento, já que as plantas têm capacidade de produzir os mais variados pesticidas naturais para se defenderem na natureza. A substância seria absorvida no intestino e se disseminaria por órgãos e tecidos, possivelmente exercendo efeitos sistêmicos e localizados que exigem avaliação. Isso já aconteceu, sem querer, com uma batata produzida por melhoramento convencional nos EUA. Seu consumo levou a mal estar e foi recolhida apressadamente: portava altos níveis de glicoalcalóides tóxicos para o homem, o que explicava sua excelente resistência às pragas da cultura.

No caso do feijão Embrapa, nenhuma molécula não protéica nova é produzida e o pequeno RNA que interfere com a replicação do vírus, caso alguém venha a ingerir folhas e caules, será um entre centenas ou milhares de RNAs que ingerimos diariamente com qualquer produto vegetal. O RNA introduzido, no entanto, não foi detectado no grão do feijão cozido, usando técnicas extremamente poderosas.

As variações detectadas, se estatisticamente significativas (concentração de vitamina B2 ou cisteína por exemplo) não representam risco algum. A técnica clássica de cultura de tecidos, usada para gerar variedades de qualidade em horticultura e propagação de árvores, reconhecidamente resulta em variações naturais que introduzem certas modificações desejáveis e algumas indesejáveis, que o melhorista depois seleciona. É a variação somaclonal, que também afeta os clones geneticamente modificados na sua fase de seleção.

Portanto, é no mínimo ingênuo dizer que o feijão Embrapa 5.1 “deveria ser idêntico” a variedade de origem pois as manipulações necessárias para gerar o transgênico resultam em certas alterações que, se irrelevantes, são ignoradas e se deletérias são descartadas pelos cientistas. Se fizermos as mesmas análises, cujos resultados preocupam alguns, com as muitas variedades convencionais consumidas no país, as diferenças serão impressionantes e irrelevantes para a questão “segurança”.

Como já foi comentado anteriormente, não existe base factual (bioquímica ou genética) para imaginar que o feijão Embrapa apresente risco maior do que um feijão comum ou melhorado por mutagênese química ou física, que por sinal, não é supervisionado nutricional e molecularmente antes de sua comercialização. Sem base biológica, os testes tornam-se formalidades supérfluas e o ruído experimental, principalmente com amostras pequenas, quase inevitavelmente vai gerar resultados que são irrelavantes a menos que se amplie muito o número de animais (para amostras controle e transgênicas) além de ser prudente incluir animais alimentados com outros feijões convencionais para uma idéia realista do significado das variações detectadas. Imaginem o custo dessa busca “caça fantasma”, desencadeada simplesmente devido a uma aplicação pouco esclarecida do princípio da precaução. As preocupações sem base racional, levantadas a todo momento pelos que temem a tecnologia, se aplicariam com maior lógica aos produtos convencionais.

Caso isso aconteça, do dia para a noite estaria inviabilizada a produção agrícola do planeta. Por que não fazer estudos com Rhizobium e nodulação em todos os feijões comercializados? Por que não conduzir estudos nutricionais de longo prazo com os alimentos convencionais derivados de mutagênese? Qual a razão lógica que exclui essas preocupações com as plantas convencionais? Ou a razão seria metafísica? A alteração introduzida seria “contra a natureza”, algo como o pecado original, que, em muitas interpretações, consistiu apenas em comer o fruto da “árvore do conhecimento”? Recentemente 41 cientistas suecos da área vegetal lançaram um manifesto contra a sobre-regulação da genética moderna na Europa (reproduzido no blog GenPeace: genpeace.blogspot.com). Os autores observam que, fazendo um paralelo com as exigências para os produtos farmacêuticos, a “lógica da legislação atual sugere que apenas drogas produzidas por meio de engenharia genética deveriam ser avaliadas quando a efeitos indesejáveis”.

Instilar o medo com base em suposições não ajuda a proteger a população ou o meio ambiente. Marie Curie teria dito “Na vida nada deve ser temido. Mas tudo deve ser compreendido”. Considero irresponsável usar o “princípio da precaução” como alguns o fazem. Inclusive a OMS caiu nesta armadilha, classificando os telefones celulares no grupo 2B de risco para causar câncer. A radiação destes equipamentos é cerca de um milhão de vezes inferior à energia que pode produzir radicais livres e gerar dano ao DNA. A classe 2B inclui o risco de câncer relativo ao café, resíduos da queima de combustíveis fósseis e uso de dentadura…. O que a WHO manteve viva, irresponsavelmente, é a justificativa para a dúvida, que vai legitimar pesquisas caras e irrelevantes, cujo resultado será inconclusivo, como o mega estudo anterior. Incrivelmente mais perigoso é o uso do celular enquanto se dirige.

Francisco G. da Nóbrega é professor da Universidade de São Paulo (USP).

Can indigenous peoples be relied on to gather reliable environmental data? (Stanford University)

15/10/2011UncategorizedAntropologia, Índios, ciência, Cidadania, Cultura, Discriminação, discurso ambiental, Racismorenzotaddei

Public release date: 13-Oct-2011
Contact: Louis Bergeron
Stanford University

No one is in a better position to monitor environmental conditions in remote areas of the natural world than the people living there. But many scientists believe the cultural and educational gulf between trained scientists and indigenous cultures is simply too great to bridge — that native peoples cannot be relied on to collect reliable data.

But now, researchers led by Stanford ecologist Jose Fragoso have completed a five-year environmental study of a 48,000-square-kilometer piece of the Amazon Basin that demonstrates otherwise. The results are presented in a paper published in the October issue of BioScience and are available online.

The study set out to determine the state of the vertebrate animal populations in the region and how they are affected by human activities. But Fragoso and his colleagues knew they couldn’t gather the data over such a huge area by themselves.

“The only way you are going to understand what is in the Amazon in terms of plants and animals and the environment, is to use this approach of training indigenous and the other local people to work with scientists,” Fragoso said.

“If I had tried to use only scientists, postdocs and graduate students to do the work, it would not have been accomplished.”

Fragoso and his colleagues worked in the Rupununi region in Guyana, a forest-savanna ecosystem occupied by the Makushi and Wapishana peoples. They support themselves primarily through a mix of subsistence hunting, fishing and agriculture, along with some commercial fishing, bird trapping and small-scale timber harvesting.

The researchers recruited 28 villages and trained more than 340 villagers in methods of collecting field data in a consistent, systematic way. The villagers were shown how to walk a transect through an area, recording sightings and signs of animals, noting the presence of plants that animals feed on and marking their observations on a map.

The training was not without its challenges. Many of the older villagers were expert bushmen, but could not read, write or do arithmetic. Many of the younger villagers, who had received some formal education, were literate but lacked knowledge of the animals and plants in the wilds around their communities. So researchers paired younger and older villagers to go into the field together. All the villagers were paid for the work they did.

Part of any scientific study is validating the accuracy of the data and Fragoso’s team knew that no matter how well they trained their indigenous technicians, they would have to analyze the data for errors and possible fabrications.

The researchers used a variety of methods, including having a different team of technicians or researchers walk some transects a second time, to verify that they were regularly walked by technicians, that data were accurate and that reported animal sightings were plausible. They also had technicians fill out monthly questionnaires about their work and did statistical analyses for patterns of discrepancy in the data.

The most consistently accurate data was recorded by technicians in communities that had strong leadership and that were part of a larger indigenous organization, such as an association of villages. Fabricated data was most common among technicians from villages unaffiliated or loosely affiliated with such an association, where there was less oversight.

The other main factor was whether a technician’s interest in the work went beyond a salary, whether he was interested in acquiring knowledge.

After all the data verification was done, the researchers found that on average, the indigenous technicians were every bit as able to systematically record accurate data as trained scientists. They were also probably better than scientists at detecting animals and their signs.

“This is the first study at a really large scale that shows that consistently valid field data can be collected by trained, indigenous peoples and it can be done really well,” Fragoso said. “We have measured the error and discovered that 28 percent of villages experienced some data fabrication. This originated from about 5 percent (18 out of 335) of technicians fabricating data, which may not be much different than what occurs in the community of scientists.”

“The indigenous technicians are no more corrupt, sloppy, or lazy than we are,” he said, noting that every year papers published in peer-reviewed science journals have to be withdrawn because of falsified or inaccurate data.

In all, the technicians walked over 43,000 kilometers through the wild, recording data. That’s once around the world and then some. They logged 48,000 sightings of animals of 267 species. They also recorded over 33,000 locations of fruit patches on which various species of animals feed.

Working with indigenous technicians enables researchers to gather far more data over a much larger area than would otherwise be possible, Fragoso said. Such data can be used by governments, scientists and conservation organizations to get an understanding of remote areas, from tropical forests to the Arctic tundra.

Fragoso is optimistic about how the results of the study will be received by the scientific community.

“I have presented this study to some pretty unreceptive groups, such as at scientific meetings, but by the end of the presentation audience members are either convinced, or at least they doubt their argument, which is a major achievement in itself,” he said.

“One thing about the scientific community – if you have enough solid data and the analysis is well done, there is very little you can argue against.”

* * *
[One should ask as well: Can scientists be relied on to gather reliable environmental data? Or journalists? Or politicians?]

Medida da discórdia (quântica) (Fapesp)

14/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Física, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Visualidaderenzotaddei

Pesquisadores brasileiros medem diretamente pela primeira vez propriedade que pode se mostrar muito importante para o desenvolvimento da computação quântica (montagem:Ag.FAPESP)

14/10/2011

Por Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – A fragilidade das propriedades quânticas, que desaparecem devido à interação com o meio ambiente, a temperatura finita ou em corpos macroscópicos, representa um dos maiores obstáculos para o desenvolvimento dos desejados computadores quânticos, máquinas ultravelozes que seriam capazes de realizar simultaneamente e, em questão de segundos, operações que os computadores convencionais demorariam bilhões de anos para efetuar.

Um grupo de físicos brasileiros mediu experimentalmente de forma direta, pela primeira vez, uma propriedade que pode ser útil para o desenvolvimento da computação quântica.

Derivados do projeto “Informação quântica e decoerência”, apoiado pela FAPESP por meio do Programa Jovens Pesquisadores em Centros Emergentes, os resultados dos experimentos foram publicados em 30 de setembro na Physical Review Letters.

Em 9 de agosto, o grupo havia publicado na mesma revista um artigo em que descreveram como conseguiram medir a chamada discórdia quântica à temperatura ambiente.

Introduzido em 2001, o conceito de discórdia quântica indica a correlação não clássica entre duas entidades, como núcleos, elétrons, spins e fótons, que implica em características que não podem ser observadas em sistemas clássicos.

Até então se acreditava que essa grandeza quântica só poderia ser medida em sistemas muito bem controlados ou a baixíssimas temperaturas e isolados do meio ambiente, uma vez que qualquer interferência seria capaz de destruir a ligação entre os objetos quânticos, que era atribuída unicamente a um fenômeno físico chamado emaranhamento – o que dificultaria a concepção de um computador quântico.

“Entretanto, medimos experimentalmente essa correlação (discórdia) quântica e demonstramos que ela está presente onde não se esperava e que esse fenômeno pode ser explorado mesmo à temperatura ambiente, em situações em que há muito ruído térmico”, disse Roberto Menezes Serra, professor da Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC) e coordenador do projeto, à Agência FAPESP.

Para medir a discórdia quântica, os pesquisadores trabalharam com uma molécula de clorofórmio, que possui um átomo de carbono, um de hidrogênio, e três de cloro.

Utilizando técnicas de ressonância magnética nuclear, eles codificaram um bit quântico no spin do núcleo do hidrogênio e outro no de carbono, em um cenário em que eles não estavam emaranhados, e demonstraram que é possível medir as correlações quânticas entre os dois spins nucleares.

Por intermédio do experimento, desenvolveram um método prático para medir correlações quânticas (a discórdia quântica) através de uma grandeza física, denominada “testemunha ocular”, que permite a observação direta do caráter quântico da correlação de um sistema. “Isso demonstrou de forma inequívoca a natureza quântica dos testes de princípios realizados em ressonância magnética nuclear à temperatura ambiente. Esses resultados podem abrir caminho para outras aplicações em informação quântica à temperatura embiente”, disse Serra.

No trabalho publicado no novo artigo, os pesquisadores brasileiros mediram outro fenômeno que haviam previsto, denominado mudança súbita de comportamento da discórdia quântica.

O efeito descreve a alteração de comportamento da discórdia quântica quando o sistema físico em que ela está presente entra em contato com o meio ambiente, causando uma perda de coerência do sistema (um fenômeno conhecido como decoerência). Nessa situação, a discórdia quântica pode permanecer constante e insensível ao ruído térmico durante um determinado tempo e, depois, começar a decair.

“Conhecer as sutilezas do comportamento dinâmico desse sistema é importante porque, se utilizarmos a discórdia quântica para obter alguma vantagem em algum processo, como de metrologia ou de processamento de informação, precisamos saber o quão robusto esse aspecto quântico é em relação a essa perda de coerência para conhecer por quanto tempo o dispositivo pode funcionar bem e quais erros devem ser corrigidos”, explicou Serra.

Referência mundial

Até há alguns anos, os cientistas achavam que o emaranhamento fosse uma propriedade essencial para obtenção de ganhos em um sistema quântico, como a maior capacidade para a troca de informações entre objetos quânticos. Recentemente, descobriu-se que essa propriedade não é necessariamente fundamental para a vantagem quântica em processamento de informação, porque há protocolos em que a vantagem quântica é obtida em sistemas não emaranhados. Dessa forma, conjectura-se que a discórdia quântica é que poderia estar associada às vantagens de um sistema quântico .

Em função disso, tanto a discórdia como o emaranhamento passaram a ser reconhecidos como úteis para a realização de tarefas em um computador quântico. No entanto, sistemas não emaranhados dotados de discórdia teriam a vantagem de ser mais robustos à ação do meio externo, uma vez que o emaranhamento pode desaparecer subitamente, em um fenômeno chamado “morte súbita”.

“Nosso maior interesse, no momento, é avançar na compreensão da origem da vantagem dos computadores quânticos. Se soubermos isso, poderemos construir dispositivos mais eficientes, consumindo menos recursos para controlar sua coerência”, disse Serra.

De acordo com o pesquisador, o grupo de físicos brasileiros foi o primeiro a utilizar técnicas de ressonância magnética nuclear para medir a discórdia quântica de forma direta e se tornou referência mundial na área.

Para realizar as medições, o grupo de pesquisadores da UFABC se associou inicialmente ao grupo liderado pelo professor Tito José Bonagamba, do Instituto de Física da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), campus de São Carlos, que coordenou os primeiros experimentos por meio do projeto“Manipulação de spins nucleares através de técnicas de ressonância magnética e quadrupolar nuclear”, também realizado com apoio da FAPESP.

Os experimentos mais recentes foram realizados por meio de uma colaboração entre os pesquisadores da UFABC e da USP de São Carlos com um grupo de pesquisa do Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF), no Rio de Janeiro, liderado pelo professor Ivan Oliveira. Os pesquisadores também contaram com o apoio do Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia de Informação Quântica (INCT-IQ).

“Nesse momento, estão sendo desenvolvidos no CBPF métodos para lidar com sistemas de três e quatro bits quânticos que, associados às técnicas que desenvolvemos para medir a discórdia quântica e outras propriedades, permitirão testarmos protocolos mais complexos em ciência da informação quântica como, por exemplo, de metrologia e de máquinas térmicas quânticas”, contou Serra.

Os artigos Experimentally Witnessing the Quantumness of Correlations e Environment-Induced Sudden Transition in Quantum Discord Dynamics, de Serra e outros (doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.070501 e 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.140403), ), publicados naPhysical Review Letters, podem ser lidos emlink.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.070501 elink.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.140403.

Saber tradicional e lógica científica beneficiam a pesca (Agência USP)

14/10/2011UncategorizedAntropologia, ciência, Cidadania, Conhecimento tradicional, Cultura, Economia, Enquadramento, participatividade, Políticas públicasrenzotaddei

Por Sandra O. Monteiro
Publicado em 13/outubro/2011

Cotidiano e tradições são relevantes para pesca e políticas regionais

Na Lagoa dos Patos, no Rio Grande do Sul, um desacordo entre a forma de exploração de uma comunidade de pescadores e a maneira de pensar a exploração de alguns pesquisadores das ciências naturais impede que políticas públicas para a região sejam efetivas. Isso estimula movimentos socias de desobediência civil contrários a normas estatais firmadas apenas em conceitos “científicos”.

A comunidade em questão está localizada na Ilha dos Marinheiros, segundo distrito da cidade de Rio Grande (RS), na Lagoa dos Patos. O local foi base de um estudo etnográfico desenvolvido pelo oceanógrafo Gustavo Moura, desenvolvido durante seu mestrado no Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciência Ambiental (Procam) da USP. Segundo o pesquisador, as comunidades locais denominam “nosso mar” o pedaço da Lagoa dos Patos em que cada grupo vive e desenvolve sua pesca. “Tal desentendimento impede que políticas públicas para a região sejam efetivas e atuem realmente na conservação dos recursos naturais ou na expansão das liberdades de quem vive da pesca na região”, observa Moura.

A pesquisa foi realizada por meio da vivência (observação de fenômenos naturais e sociais) e de entrevistas com os moradores locais. Para o pesquisador, a ciência por meio de suas metodologias e cálculos não consegue respostas para todos os fatos ou para dar a efetiva precisão a dados sobre fenômenos naturais. E as respostas que a ciência oferece é apenas uma das formas culturais de ver o mundo. A oceanografia clássica, por exemplo, preocupa-se em preservar o ambiente dentro de uma perspectiva exclusiva de análise técnica de um suposto comportamento matemático da natureza. Esquece, no entanto, que nem tudo é exato e exclui, da sua busca por respostas, o diálogo com as ciências humanas e as culturas tradicionais por considerá-las imprecisas. À respeito disto, Moura diz que a ciência oceanográfica não deve ser desconsiderada, mas experiências e valores humanos também são relevantes no estudo de fenômenos naturais e na formulação de políticas públicas.

Oceanografia Humana e Políticas Públicas

A etnoocenagrafia, uma das linhas de pesquisa da Oceanografia Humana, considera as tradições e observações sobre a natureza, que passam de pai para filho, que levam em conta o tempo cíclico da natureza (o vento, a lua e as chuvas, por exemplo). Além disso também observam a forma como cada comunidade interage com o “seu próprio mar” a partir de situações de comércio e em datas religiosas como a Páscoa “em que muitos pescadores não trabalham”, relata o pesquisador.

Oceanografia e antropologia favorecem conservação de recursos pesqueiros

Uma das questões polêmicas relaciona-se à melhor época para se pescar uma determinada espécie. Tem a ver com o tamanho do camarão-rosa, por exemplo. Nem sempre a melhor época para se pescar é de 01 de fevereiro a 31 de maio, como determina a lei de defesa do Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais (Ibama). “Pois a natureza vista pelos pescadores tem uma lógica diferente da lógica científica. Uma espécie atinge o tamanho considerado bom pelos pescadores, frequentemente, numa data diversa da prevista em lei em quase todos os anos, antes ou depois de primeiro de fevereiro”, reflete o Moura.

A troca de informações diárias entre os próprios pescadores é outra situação que alguns pesquisadores e agentes de fiscalização locais não entendem e discriminam pela fato de ocorrerem em festas e bares. Estas trocas de informação tem relação, por exemplo, com a construção das decisões de quando, como e onde pescar dentro do território tradicional de pesca e com um conjunto de relações sociais instituídas pela posse informal de “pedaços de mar”.

Segundo Moura, quando regras tradicionais de uso dos recursos naturais são incorporadas nas políticas públicas, elas podem trazer menores prejuízos ambientais do que se baseadas em pura lógica científica. “Além disso, pode trazer mais liberdade para os pescadores trabalharem, em vez da castração de liberdades como ocorre com a política atual.”

A dissertação Águas da Coréia: pescadores, espaço e tempo na construção de um território de pesca na Lagoa dos Patos (RS) numa perspectiva etnooceanográfica foi orientada pelo professor Antonio Carlos Sant’Ana Diegues. O estudo será publicado na forma de livro pela editora NUPEEA, em 2012. “Águas da Coréia…” será o primeiro livro de etnooceanografia já publicado dentro e fora do Brasil, e uma das poucas publicações disponíveis na área de Oceanografia Humana.

Com informações da Agência Universitária de Notícias (AUN)
Fotos cedidas pelo pesquisador

O tempo da meteorologia (Tome Ciência)

10/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

A meteorologia é muito mais do que dar uma olhada na previsão do tempo quando se planeja uma viagem de fim de semana. No momento em que o aquecimento global é uma ameaça, e as grandes catástrofes climáticas tornam-se cada vez mais frequentes, ressalta-se a importância e a responsabilidade dos meteorologistas. O aumento do conhecimento e as inovações tecnológicas nessa área permitem hoje prever com certa antecedência e precisão os fenômenos do clima. E retirar rapidamente pessoas de áreas de risco pode salvar muitas vidas. O tema deste debate foi sugerido pela Sociedade Brasileira de Meteorologia, instituição vinculada à Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência – a SBPC.

Participantes:

Carlos Afonso Nobre, secretário de Políticas e Programas de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento do Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia (MCT), dirigiu por mais de 10 anos o Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) e participa da criação, em 2011, do Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alerta de Desastres Naturais.

Maria Gertrudes Justi da Silva, coordenadora do curso de meteorologia da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Ex-presidente da Sociedade Brasileira de Meteorologia faz parte do Conselho de Coordenação das Atividades de Meteorologia, Climatologia e Hidrologia no Governo Federal.

José Marques é o presidente do Conselho Deliberativo da Sociedade Brasileira de Meteorologia. Foi da primeira turma de meteorologistas formados em universidade brasileira, graduado em 1967 pela UFRJ. Até então os cursos eram só no exterior, onde depois, na França, ele fez o pós-doutorado.

Ednaldo Oliveira dos Santos, professor adjunto do Departamento de Ciências Ambientais do Instituto de Florestas da Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro(UFRRJ), é presidente da União Nacional dos Estudiosos em Meteorologia e representante da América do Sul no comitê internacional que estuda educação sem distância de meteorologia. É também pesquisador associado do Instituto Virtual Internacional de Mudanças Globais, da COPPE/UFRJ.

Nobel de Química vai para cristal que “não devia existir” (Folha de São Paulo); Nobel para cristais inusitados (Fapesp)

06/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Incerteza, Nobel, Químicarenzotaddei

JC e-mail 4359, de 06 de Outubro de 2011.

Israelense mostrou que estrutura cristalina pode ser formada por padrões complexos que nunca se repetem.

Os meticulosos cadernos de laboratório do israelense Daniel Shechtman permitem datar com precisão a descoberta que acaba de render a ele o Prêmio Nobel em Química deste ano. Foi na manhã de 8 de abril de 1982 que ele usou uma série de pontos de interrogação para marcar sua surpresa com o que estava vendo no microscópio: um cristal que não deveria existir.

Para o comitê do Nobel, ele “modificou a concepção fundamental do que é um objeto sólido”, mostrando que os átomos podem se organizar em estruturas de grande complexidade, que não se repetem. Por isso, embora o achado ainda tenha pouca aplicação prática, ele foi considerado digno do prêmio.

Para Nivaldo Speziali, presidente da Sociedade Brasileira de Cristalografia, o ganhador mostrou “que a periodicidade estrutural [a repetição regular das mesmas estruturas] não é necessária na definição de cristal”. Há exemplos de materiais artificiais e naturais com os quasicristais (como são chamados) do israelense. A arte medieval bolou estruturas parecidas.

Teimosia – Shechtman precisou de muita persistência, pois a grande maioria dos cientistas duvidou de seus achados. Um deles era Linus Pauling, ganhador do Nobel em 1954, conta Speziali. Por conta das reações negativas, o israelense chegou a ser expulso do laboratório onde trabalhava nos EUA. Hoje ele está no Instituto de Tecnologia de Israel, em Haifa.

Em entrevista dada ao comitê do Nobel, Shechtman disse que sua descoberta lhe ensinou que “o bom cientista é humilde a ponto de estar disposto a considerar novidades inesperadas e violações de leis estabelecidas”.

Os quasicristais descobertos são, em sua maioria, criados artificialmente quando uma liga metálica derretida é esfriada rapidamente em uma superfície giratória. Sua estrutura tridimensional dificulta a propagação de ondas, o que define suas características peculiares. Eles são maus condutores de calor e de eletricidade, têm baixa fricção e aderência, mas são altamente resistentes e, por isso, prometem grande aplicabilidade.

Seriam bons para aço reforçado, lâminas e agulhas cirúrgicas, frigideiras e motores a diesel. Mas poucas aplicações concretas já foram desenvolvidas devido ao alto custo de produção deles. Arte islâmica já trazia padrões dos quasicristais

AIQ – O ano de 2011 é celebrado como o Ano Internacional da Química, e o Prêmio Nobel em Química dado a um físico coroa o aspecto interdisciplinar da área. A descoberta dos quasicristais, por exemplo, tem relações com a física, com a engenharia de materiais, com a matemática e até com as artes não figurativas, sem falar na própria química, é claro. O padrão não repetitivo presente nos quasicristais tem raízes matemáticas antigas. A razão das distâncias entre os átomos nesses materiais está sempre relacionada à proporção áurea, descrita pelo matemático Fibonacci no século 13 e conhecida já na Antiguidade.

Na década de 1970, Roger Penrose usou a proporção áurea para produzir mosaicos aperiódicos, imagens compostas de combinações de formas geométricas que são infinitamente variadas. Os mosaicos da arte islâmica medieval, como o do palácio de Alhambra, na Espanha, também têm o mesmo padrão dos mosaicos de Penrose e dos quasicristais.

* * *

Nobel para cristais inusitados

06/10/2011

Agência FAPESP – O ganhador do prêmio Nobel de Química de 2011 é Dan Shechtman, do Instituto de Tecnologia de Israel (Technion), pela descoberta dos quase-cristais. O anúncio foi feito nesta quarta-feira (05/10) pela Academia Real de Ciências da Suécia.

Diferente dos cristais, os quase-cristais são formas estruturais ordenadas, mas em padrões que não se repetem. Suas configurações não contam com as simetrias dos cristais e eram consideradas impossíveis até serem descobertas por Shechtman.

Na manhã de 8 de abril de 1982, enquanto examinava uma liga de alumínio e manganês em um microscópio eletrônico, o cientista viu uma imagem que contradizia as leis da natureza e inicialmente duvidou do que havia observado.

Mais difícil foi convencer a comunidade científica de que se tratava de uma importante descoberta. Um dos que duvidaram foi Linus Pauling, ganhador do Nobel de Química em 1954.

Em toda matéria sólida, até então se achava que os átomos se agrupavam dentro de cristais em padrões simétricos repetidos periódica e constantemente. Para os cientistas, essa repetição era fundamental de modo a se obter um cristal.

A imagem vista por Shechtman mostrava algo diferente: que átomos em um cristal poderiam ser agrupados em um padrão que simplesmente não se repetiria jamais. A descoberta foi tão polêmica que o próprio cientista foi convidado a deixar o grupo de pesquisa do qual fazia parte. O diretor do laboratório até mesmo lhe deu um manual de cristalografia, aconselhando-o a estudar mais.

Mas o tempo e outras pesquisas mostraram que Shechtman estava certo e sua descoberta acabou alterando o conceito e o conhecimento sobre a matéria sólida.

Mosaicos não periódicos, como os medievais encontrados em construções islâmicas – tal qual o palácio de Alhambra, na Espanha, ou a mesquita Darb-i Imam, no Irã, ajudaram os cientistas a entender como os quase-cristais se parecem no nível atômico.

Assim como os quase-cristais, esses mosaicos têm padrões regulares, que seguem regras matemáticas, mas nunca se repetem.

Depois da descoberta de Shechtman, outros cientistas produziram diversos tipos de quase-cristais em laboratório. Na natureza, essas formas inusitadas também são encontradas. Foram observadas em amostras de minerais de um rio na Rússia e em um tipo de aço feito na Suécia.

Quase-cristais estão sendo experimentados nos mais variados produtos, de frigideiras e motores a diesel.

Shechtman receberá 10 milhões de coroas suecas (cerca de R$ 2,8 milhões) em cerimônia em dezembro, em Estocolmo.

Making Funny with Climate Change (The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media)

04/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Discriminação, Enquadramento, Humor, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsão, Sensacionalismo, Violência, Visualidaderenzotaddei

Keith Kloor September 30, 2011

Comedy may be able to make inroads with audiences in ways that ‘serious journalism’ often cannot. With an issue as serious as climate science suggests, communicators should not shy from taking the risks of injecting humor as appropriate.

Last week, Colorado-based science journalist Michelle Nijhuis lamented the standard environmental news story. She wrote:

“Environmental journalists often feel married to the tragic narrative. Pollution, extinction, invasion: The stories are endless, and endlessly the same. Our editors see the pattern and bury us in the back pages; our readers see it and abandon us on the subway or in the dentist’s office.”

Commentary

A welcome exception to this rule, Nijhuis noted, was New Yorker writer Ian Frazier, who has injected humor into the many environmentally themed nonfiction pieces he’s penned over the years.

This might also be the key to the success of Carl Hiaasen‘s best-selling novels. There is nothing new about the sleazy politics and environmental destruction that are regular themes of his books. But it gets digested through wickedly funny scenes and lampooned characters. There are no sacred cows, either. Tree huggers and traditional eco-villains get equally caricatured.

Writers have had a harder time using humor to communicate global warming. In the non-fiction universe, there are no Ian Fraziers tackling the issue in a quirky, sideways manner. Journalists in mainstream media treat the topic somberly and dutifully. Exhaustion may be setting in for some. Recently NPR’s Robert Krulwich wrote:

“I got a call the other day from some producer I very much admire. They wanted to talk about a series next year on global warming and I thought, why does this subject make me instantly tired? Global warming is important, yes; controversial, certainly; complicated (OK by me); but somehow, even broaching this subject makes me feel like someone’s putting heavy stones in my head.”

But if reporters are getting jaded, TV writers and comedians are eagerly joining the fray. Recent satirical novels by acclaimed writers, such as Jonathan Franzen and Ian McEwan have also tackled climate change.

Whether any of these pop culture and high-minded literary endeavors is influencing attitudes is impossible to know. Still, some climate communicators see humor as their best chance to make climate issues resonate with the public at large, though the tact can be a double-edged sword, as one climate campaigner notes:

“Humor’s capacity for radical imagination creates a mental space for potential change but also comes with a loss of control as it breaks taboos and turns the order of reality upside down and inside out. Indeed, because of this ability to destabilize the established order, George Orwell stated that every joke is a tiny revolution. It denudes power of its authority, which is true of those that we oppose but also those that we cherish. Using humor to communicate on climate change means that scientists and environmentalists lose the monopoly on framing climate change and even risk becoming the butt of the joke. However uncomfortable, this may be necessary if we truly want the public at large to take ownership of the issue.”

That some attempts at humor can backfire has already been demonstrated. But if the stakes are as high as climate science suggests, then that’s a risk climate communicators should not be afraid to take.

Keith Kloor

Keith Kloor is a New York City-based freelance journalist who writes often about the environment and climate change. (E-mail: keith@yaleclimatemediaforum.org)

A Map of Organized Climate Change Denial (Dot Earth, N.Y. Times)

04/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Enquadramento, Incerteza, jornalismo, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

October 2, 2011, 3:51 PM

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Oct. 3, 9:00 p.m. | Updated
A chart of “key components of the climate change denial machine” has been produced by Riley E. Dunlap, regents professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, and Aaron M. McCright, an associate professor of sociology at Michigan State University. The diagram below (reproduced here with permission) is from a chapter the two researchers wrote on organized opposition to efforts to curb greenhouse gases for the new Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society.
That there are such well-financed and coordinated efforts is not contentious. And this is not the first attempt to map them.

But it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone skeptical of worst-case predictions of human-driven climate disruption, or everyone opposed to certain climate policies, is part of this apparatus.

And there’s plenty to chart on the other edge of the climate debate — thosegroups and outlets pursuing a traditional pollution-style approach to greenhouse gases.

[Oct. 3, 9:00 p.m. | Updated As it happens, the blogger behind Australian Climate Madness has posted a skeptics’ map of “the climate alarmism machine.” (see below) I think some, though by no means all, aspects of the map are not bad. But, as with so much of the climate debate, it is an overdrawn, overblown caricature of reality.]

It’s also important to examine whether a world without such efforts — in which citizens had a clear view of both what is known, and uncertain, about the human factor in shaping climate-related risks — would appreciably change. Some insist the answer is yes. Given the deep-rooted human bias tothe near and now and other aspects of our “inconvenient mind,” I’m not nearly so sure (although this doesn’t stop me from working on this challenge, of course).

Timothy Ingold, “Science and silence”

03/10/2011UncategorizedAntropologia, ciência, discurso ambiental, Economia, Educação, Mudanças climáticasrenzotaddei

Timothy Ingold, conferência de encerramento da III Reunião de Antropologia da Ciência e da Tecnologia, Universidade de Brasília, 01 de outubro de 2011.

Título: Science and silence

Áudio aqui.

Foto: Pedro Ferreira.

Vídeo:

Some issues with an anthropology of climate change (Imponderabilia)

01/10/2011UncategorizedAntropologia, ciência, Clima, Cultura, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Previsão, Visualidaderenzotaddei

By Heid Jerstad
Imponderabilia
Spring ’10 – Issue 2

Introduction: Climate change is something everyone comes across in their personal and day-to-day lives. This article explores some of the possible reasons why anthropology has been slow in taking up this issue and analogies are drawn with the postcolonial and feminist critiques of anthropology.

Some issues with an anthropology of climate change

Is there a stigma in anthropology about climate issues? Do you see this title and think ‘well, I switch off my lights, but this has no place in academia?’ I would like to reflect a little on why this might be so. As students we learn about the ‘personal as political’ in gender theory. I think the issue of climate change (and the related, but not identical, issue of peak oil) may be a fairly close parallel to the attention given to gender issues in anthropology during the 1980s. Both feminism and the climate change movement are political movements in society, wanting to change the way people live their lives. So why is climate change only present on the margins of anthropological research?

Several scholars have issued calls to action, arguing that this area needs further research (Rayner 1989, Battersbury 2008, Crate and Nuttall 2009). So far, however, it has been hard for anthropologists to directly engage with the issue of climate change. I propose in the following to discuss and examine several reasons for this.

Firstly, anthropology has in the past few decades focused on subjectivities of difference (Moore 2009). That is to say on minorities, colonial power imbalances and sexualities, to give a few examples. The theory developed to deal with these identity and power issues is then perhaps badly suited to address phenomena that are affecting the entire globe. All human societies seem to be experiencing some impact, regardless of which categories of difference they might fall into. In some cases, the social, economic and ecological impact of other, non-climatic changes – for instance the effect of mining and tubewells on the groundwater in Rajasthan (Jerstad 2009) – combines with climatic effects to ‘exacerbate . . . existing problems’ (Crate and Nuttall 2009:11). To comprehend this interaction, socially oriented analysis is required. The ethnographic focus of the anthropologist, sharpened as it has been by highlighting issues of difference, can contribute to more complete understandings of the complex agricultural, linguistic, ritual, local-global, differentiated forces and effects operating on various scales and infrastructures. Such research – on the societal effects of climate change – can benefit from the theory base of anthropology, and subjectivities of difference would certainly have their place in such an analysis.

Secondly, the issue of climate change forces contact between academic anthropology and the ‘hard’ sciences and ‘development.’ Each of these points of contact proves problematic in its own way.

‘Science’ has been set aside by mainstream anthropology to the degree that there is a set of ‘replacement’ parallels within the discipline – such as medical anthropology and ethnobiology. But it is within western science that the majority of the research on climate change has been done. Here scientists have become activists and found their scientific material to have ethical relevance. What they lack is an understanding of how climatic effects will impact human societies around the world existing under very different ecological and social conditions.

‘Development’ – though sometimes the site of fruitful collaboration with anthropology – operates under very different assumptions from anthropology (Mosse 2006). The tendency in development is to use climate change as an excuse to deal with existing problems such as drought or extreme weather events. Yet here there is a risk that climate change will be sidelined by governments and other internal social institutions as ‘just another issue’ for the development agencies to deal with.

Thirdly, a reluctance to engage politically, which is not new in the discipline, seems to contribute to anthropologists’ reluctance to tackle climate change as an issue. Could doing fieldwork today while ignoring ecological issues be seen as equivalent to doing fieldwork in the 1930s while ignoring the colonial presence? Both situations are political, placing anthropologists between the countries that fund them and those that provide the data for their work – countries that are themselves caught up in global power relationships. In the colonial instance, the anthropologist was often from the country colonising their area of study. Today issues of power relations are far more complex, but this is all the more reason not to ignore them. I am suggesting not only to place climate change in the ethics or methodology section of a monograph with reference to political relationships and logistical issues, but also to reflect on cultural relationships with the ‘weather,’ how it is changing and how these relationships in turn may be affected. In Crates’ work with the Sakha people of Siberia (2008), she introduces her call for anthropologists to become advocates with a story of the ‘bull of winter’ losing its horns and hence its strength, signalling spring. This meteorological model no longer meshes with experienced reality for the Sakha, highlighting the cultural implications of climatic change beyond ‘mere’ agricultural or economic effects (Vedwan and Rhoades 2001).

Another analogy, touched on in the introduction, is with gender. Problematising the gendered dimension of societies is a political act, but a necessary one in order to avoid the passive politics of unquestioningly reinforcing the status quo. An anthropological study of Indian weddings without mention of the hijras – cross-dressing dancers (Nanda 1990) – for instance, might leave the reader with the general impression that gender/sexuality in India is uniformly dualistic. In the same way, leaving energy relations to economists and political scientists is itself a political act. The impacts of climate change on humans, though mediated by wind and weather, are as social as gender relations, and are products of a particular set of power relations (Hornborg 2008). By ignoring them, anthropologists risk becoming passive supporters of this system.

An anthropology of climate change is emerging (Grodzins Gold 1998, Rudiak-Gould 2009), and anthropologists must reflect on and orient themselves in relation to this. Villagers and other informants are affected by drought, floods, storms and more subtle meteorological changes that are hard to pinpoint as climate-change caused but can be assumed to be climate-change exacerbated. Would anthropological work in these areas and on these issues primarily benefit aid organisations? I don’t think so. Giving academic credibility to problems people are facing can allow governments, corporations and other bodies to act and change policy in a world where the word of a villager tends to carry very little weight.

Bibliography

Battersbury, Simon. 2008. Anthropology and Global Warming: The Need for Environmental Engagement. Australian Journal of Anthropology 19 (1)

Crate, S. A. and Nuttall, 2009. Anthropology and Climate Change: From encounters to actions. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Crate, S. A. 2008. “Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Global Climate Change.” Current Anthropology, 49 (4), 569.

Gold, Ann Grodzins. 1998. “Sin and Rain: Moral Ecology in Rural North India.” In Lance E. Nelson ed. Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India. Albany: State University of New York Press, 165-195.

Hornberg, A. 2008. Machine fetishism and the consumer’s burden. Anthropology Today, 24 (5).

Jerstad, H. 2009. Climate Change in the Jaisamand Catchment Area: Vulnerability and Adaptation. Unpublished report for SPWD.

Mosse, D. 2006. Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.). 12 (4), 935-956.

Moore, Henrietta 20th Oct 2009 SOAS departmental seminar.

Nanda, S. 1990. Neither man nor woman: the hijras of India. Wadsworth: Open University Press.

Rayner, S. 1989. Fiddling While the Globe Warms? Anthropology Today 5 (6)

Rudiak-Gould, P. 2009. The Fallen Palm: Climate Change and Culture Change in the Marshall Islands. VDM Verlag.

Vedwan and Rhoades, 2001 Climate change in the western Himalayas of India: a study of local perception and response. Climate research, 19, 109-117.

Heid Jerstad is a Norwegian-English MA Res student at SOAS. After completing a BA in arch and anth at Oxford, she went to India and worked on the impacts of climate change in southern Rajasthan. She is now attempting to pursue related issues in her dissertation. In her spare time she volunteers in a Red Cross shop, hosts dinner parties and fights with her sword.