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Our Extreme Future: Predicting and Coping with the Effects of a Changing Climate (Scientific American)

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Adapting to extreme weather calls for a combination of restoring wetland and building drains and sewers that can handle the water. But leaders and the public are slow to catch on. Final part of a three-part series

By John Carey | Thursday, June 30, 2011 | 97

Image: Fikret Onal/Flickr

Editor’s note: This article is the last of a three-part series by John Carey. Part 1, “Storm Warning: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change,” was posted on June 28. Part 2, “Global Warming and the Science of Extreme Weather,” was posted on June 29.

Extreme weather events have become both more common and more intense. And increasingly, scientists have been able to pin at least part of the blame on humankind’s alteration of the climate. What’s more, the growing success of this nascent science of climate attribution (finding the telltale fingerprints of climate change in extreme events) means that researchers have more confidence in their climate models—which predict that the future will be even more extreme.

Are we prepared for this future? Not yet. Indeed, the trend is in the other direction, especially in Washington, D.C., where a number of members of Congress even argue that climate change itself is a hoax.

Scientists hope that rigorously identifying climate change’s contribution to individual extreme events can indeed wake people up to the threat. As the research advances, it should be possible to say that two extra inches (five centimeters) of rain poured down in a Midwestern storm because of greenhouse gases, or that a California heat wave was 10 times more likely to occur thanks to humans’ impacts on climate. So researchers have set up rapid response teams to assess climate change’s contribution to extreme events while the events are still fresh in people’s minds. In addition, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is preparing a special report on extreme events and disasters, due out by the end of 2011. “It is important for us emphasize that climate change and its impacts are not off in the future, but are here and now,” explained Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, during a briefing at United Nations climate talks in Cancún last December.

The message is beginning to sink in. The Russian government, for instance, used to doubt the existence of climate change, or argue that it might be beneficial for Russia. But now, government officials have realized that global warming will not bring a gradual and benign increase in temperatures. Instead, they’re likely to see more crippling heat waves. As Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told the Security Council of the Russian Federation last summer: “Everyone is talking about climate change now. Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions.”

Doubts persist despite evidence

Among the U.S. public, the feeling is different. Opinion pollsand anecdotal reports show that most Americans do not perceive a threat from climate change. And a sizable number of Americans, including many newly elected members of Congress, do not even believe that climate change exists. Extreme weather? Just part of nature, they say. After all, disastrous floods and droughts go back to the days of Noah and Moses. Why should today’s disasters be any different? Was the July 23, 2010, storm that spawned Les Scott’s record hailstone evidence of a changing climate, for instance? “Not really,” Scott says. “It was just another thunderstorm. We get awful bad blizzards that are a lot worse.”

And yes, 22 of Maryland’s 23 counties were declared natural disaster areas after record-setting heat and drought in 2010. “It was the worst corn crop I ever had,” says fourth-generation farmer Earl “Buddy” Hance. But was it a harbinger of a more worrisome future? Probably not, says Hance, the state’s secretary of agriculture. “As farmers we are skeptical, and we need to see a little more. And if it does turn out to be climate change, farmers would adapt.” By then, adaptation could be really difficult, frets Minnesota organic farmer Jack Hedin, whose efforts to raise the alarm are “falling on deaf ears,” he laments.

Many scientists share Hedin’s worry. “The real honest message is that while there is debate about how much extreme weather climate change is inducing now, there is very little debate about its effect in the future,” says Michael Wehner, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and member of the lead author teams of the interagency U.S. Climate Change Science Program’s Synthesis and Assessment reports on climate extremes. For instance, climate models predict that by 2050 Russia will have warmed up so much that every summer will be as warm as the disastrous heat wave it just experienced, says Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. In other words, many of today’s extremes will become tomorrow’s everyday reality. “Climate change will throw some significant hardballs at us,” says Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “There will be a lot of surprises that we are not adapted to.”

A dusty future

One of the clearest pictures of this future is emerging for the U.S. Southwest and a similar meteorological zone that stretches across Italy, Greece and Turkey. Work by Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Seager and others predicts that these regions will get hotter and drier—and, perhaps more important, shows that the change has already begun. “The signal of a human influence on climate pops up in 1985, then marches on getting strong and stronger,” Barnett says. By the middle of the 21st century, the models predict, the climate will be as dry as the seven-year long Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s or the damaging 1950s drought centered in California and Mexico, Seager says: “In the future the drought won’t last just seven years. It will be the new norm.”

That spells trouble. In the Southwest the main worry is water—water that makes cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas possible and that irrigates the enormously productive farms of California’s Central Valley. Supplies are already tight. During the current 11-year dry spell, the demand for water from the vast Colorado River system, which provides water to 30 million people and irrigates four million acres (1.6 million hectares) of cropland, has exceeded the supply. The result: water levels in the giant Lake Mead reservoir dropped to a record low in October (before climbing one foot, or 30 centimeters, after torrential winter rains in California reduced the demand for Colorado River water). Climate change will just make the problem worse. “The challenge will be great,” says Terry Fulp, deputy regional director of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Region. “I rank climate change as probably my largest concern. When I’m out on my boat on Lake Mead, it’s on my mind all the time.”

The Southwest is just a snapshot of the challenges ahead. Imagine the potential peril to regions around the world, scientists say. “Our civilization is based on a stable base climate—it doesn’t take very much change to raise hell,” Scripps’s Barnett says. And given the lag in the planet’s response to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, many of these changes are coming whether we like them or not. “It’s sort of like that Kung Fu guy who said, ‘I’m going to kick your head off now, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it,'” Barnett says.

Grassroots action

Although efforts to fight climate change are now stalled in Washington, many regions do see the threat and are taking action both to adapt to the future changes and to try to limit the amount of global warming itself. The Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Region office, for instance, has developed a plan to make “manageable” cuts in the amounts of water that the river system supplies, which Fulp hopes will be enough to get the region through the next 15 years. In Canada, after experiencing eight extreme storms (of more than one-in-25-year intensity) between 1986 and 2006, Toronto has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade its sewer and storm water system for handling deluges. “Improved storm drains are the cornerstone of our climate adaptation policy,” explains Michael D’Andrea, Toronto’s director of water infrastructure management.

In Iowa, even without admitting that climate change is real, farmers are acting as if it is, spending millions of dollars to alter their practices. They are adding tile drainage to their fields to cope with increased floods, buying bigger machinery to move more quickly because their planting window has become shorter, planting a month earlier than they did 50 years ago, and sowing twice as many corn plants per acre to exploit the additional moisture, says Gene Takle, professor of meteorology at Iowa State University in Ames. “Iowa’s floods are in your face—and in your basement—evidence that the climate has changed, and the farmers are adapting,” he says.

Local officials have seen the connection, too. After the huge floods of 2008, the Iowa town of Cedar Falls passed an ordinance requiring that anyone who lives in the 500-year flood plain must have flood insurance—up from the previous 200-year flood requirement. State Sen. Robert Hogg wants to make the policy statewide. He also is pushing to restore wetlands that can help soak up floodwaters before they devastate cities. “Wetland restoration costs money, but it’s cheaper than rebuilding Cedar Rapids,” he says. “I like to say that dealing with climate change is not going to require the greatest sacrifices, but it is going to require the greatest foresight Americans have ever had.”

Right now, that foresight is more myopia, many scientists worry. So when and how will people finally understand that far more is needed? It may require more flooded basements, more searing heat waves, more water shortages or crop failures, more devastating hurricanes or other examples of the increases in extreme weather that climate change will bring. “I don’t want to root for bad things to happen, but that’s what it will take,” says one government scientist who asked not to be identified. Or as Nashville resident Rich Hays says about his own experience with the May 2010 deluge: “The flood was definitely a wake-up call. The question is: How many wake-up calls do we need?”

Reporting for this story was funded by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

Global Warming and the Science of Extreme Weather (Scientific American)

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How rising temperatures change weather and produce fiercer, more frequent storms. Second of a three-part series

By John Carey | Wednesday, June 29, 2011 | 46

HURRICANE KATRINA battered New Orleans in 2005. Image: NOAA

Editor’s note: This article is the second of a three-part series by John Carey. Part 1, posted on June 28, is “Storm Warning: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change”.

Extreme floods, prolonged droughts, searing heat waves, massive rainstorms and the like don’t just seem like they’ve become the new normal in the last few years—they have become more common, according to data collected by reinsurance company Munich Re (see Part 1 of this series). But has this increase resulted from human-caused climate change or just from natural climatic variations? After all, recorded floods and droughts go back to the earliest days of mankind, before coal, oil and natural gas made the modern industrial world possible.

Until recently scientists had only been able to say that more extreme weather is “consistent” with climate change caused by greenhouse gases that humans are emitting into the atmosphere. Now, however, they can begin to say that the odds of having extreme weather have increased because of human-caused atmospheric changes—and that many individual events would not have happened in the same way without global warming. The reason: The signal of climate change is finally emerging from the “noise”—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.

Scientists compare the normal variation in weather with rolls of the dice. Adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere loads the dice, increasing odds of such extreme weather events. It’s not just that the weather dice are altered, however. As Steve Sherwood, co-director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Australia, puts it, “it is more like painting an extra spot on each face of one of the dice, so that it goes from 2 to 7 instead of 1 to 6. This increases the odds of rolling 11 or 12, but also makes it possible to roll 13.”

Why? Basic physics is at work: The planet has already warmed roughly 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times, thanks to CO2and other greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. And for every 1-degree C (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperature, the amount of moisture that the atmosphere can contain rises by 7 percent, explains Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the U.K. Met Office’s Hadley Center for Climate Change. “That’s quite dramatic,” he says. In some places, the increase has been much larger. Data gathered by Gene Takle, professor of meteorology at Iowa State University in Ames, show a 13 percent rise in summer moisture over the past 50 years in the state capital, Des Moines.

The physics of too much rain

The increased moisture in the atmosphere inevitably means more rain. That’s obvious. But not just any kind of rain, the climate models predict. Because of the large-scale energy balance of the planet, “the upshot is that overall rainfall increases only 2 to 3 percent per degree of warming, whereas extreme rainfall increases 6 to 7 percent,” Stott says. The reason again comes from physics. Rain happens when the atmosphere cools enough for water vapor to condense into liquid. “However, because of the increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the troposphere, the radiative cooling is less efficient, as less radiation can escape to space,” Stott explains. “Therefore the global precipitation increases less, at about 2 to 3 percent per degree of warming.” But because of the extra moisture, when precipitation does occur (in both rain and snow), it’s more likely to be in bigger events.

Iowa is one of many places that fits the pattern. Takle documented a three- to seven-fold increase in high rainfall events in the state, including the 500-year Mississippi River flood in 1993, the 2008 Cedar Rapids flood as well as the 500-year event in 2010 in Ames, which inundated the Hilton Coliseum basketball court in eight feet (2.5 meters) of water . “We can’t say with confidence that the 2010 Ames flood was caused by climate change, but we can say that the dice are loaded to bring more of these events,” Takle says.

And more events seem to be in the news every month, from unprecedented floods in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to massive snowstorms that crippled the U.S. Northeast in early 2011, to the November 2010 to January 2011 torrents in Australia that flooded an area the size of Germany and France . This “disaster of biblical proportions,” as local Australian officials called it, even caused global economic shock waves: The flooding of the country’s enormously productive coal mines sent world coal prices soaring.

More stormy weather

More moisture and energy in the atmosphere, along with warmer ocean temperatures also mean more intense hurricanes, many scientists say. In fact, 2010 was the first year in decades in which two simultaneous category 4 hurricanes, Igor and Julia, formed in the Atlantic Ocean. In addition, the changed conditions bring an increased likelihood of more powerful thunderstorms with violent updrafts, like a July 23, 2010, tempest in Vivian, S.D., that produced hailstones that punched softball-size holes through roofs—and created a behemoth ball of ice measured at a U.S. record 8 inches (20 centimeters) in diameter even after it had partially melted. “I’ve never seen a storm like that before—and hope I’ll never go through anything like it,” says Les Scott, the Vivian farmer and rancher who found the hailstone .

Warming the planet alters large-scale circulation patterns as well. Scientists know that the sun heats moist air at the equator, causing the air to rise. As it rises, the air cools and sheds most of its moisture as tropical rain. Once six to 10 miles (9.5 to 16 kilometers) aloft, the now dry air travels toward the poles, descending when it reaches the subtropics, normally at the latitude of the Baja California peninsula. This circulation pattern, known as a Hadley cell, contributes to desertification, trade winds and the jet stream.

On a warmer planet, however, the dry air will travel farther north and south from the equator before it descends, climate models predict, making areas like the U.S. Southwest and the Mediterranean even drier. Such an expanded Hadley cell would also divert storms farther north. Are the models right? Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory has been looking for a climate change–induced drying trend in the Southwest, “and there seems to be some tentative evidence that it is beginning to happen,” he says. “It gives us confidence in the models.” In fact, other studies show that the Hadley cells have not only expanded, they’ve expanded more than the models predicted.

Such a change in atmospheric circulation could explain both the current 11-year drought in the Southwest and Minnesota’s status as the number one U.S. state for tornadoes last year. On October 26, 2010, the Minneapolis area even experienced record low pressure in what Paul Douglas, founder and CEO of WeatherNation in Minnesota, dubbed a “landicane”—a hurricanelike storm that swept across the country. “I thought the windows of my home would blow in,” Douglas recalls. “I’ve chased tornados and flown into hurricanes but never experienced anything like this before.” Yet it makes sense in the context of climate change, he adds. “Every day, every week, another piece of the puzzle falls into place,” he says. “More extreme weather seems to have become the rule, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and Asia.”

The rise of climate attribution

Is humankind really responsible? That’s where the burgeoning field of climate attribution, pioneered by Hadley’s Peter Stott and other scientists, comes in. The idea is to look for trends in the temperature or precipitation data that provide evidence of overall changes in climate. When those trends exist, it then becomes possible to calculate how much climate change has contributed to extreme events. Or in more technical terms, the probability of a particular temperature or rainfall amount is shaped roughly like a bell curve. A change in climate shifts the whole curve. That, in turn, increases the likelihood of experiencing the more extreme weather at the tail end of the bell curve. Whereas day-to-day weather remains enormously variable, the underlying human-caused shift in climate increases the power and number of the events at the extreme. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Deke Arndt puts it more colorfully: “Weather throws the punches, but climate trains the boxer,” he says. By charting the overall shift, then, it’s possible to calculate the increased chances of extreme events due to global warming.

This idea was already in the air in 2003 when Stott traveled though the worst heat wave in recorded European history on a wedding anniversary trip to Italy and Switzerland. One of the striking consequences he noticed was that the Swiss mountains were missing their usual melodious tinkling of cowbells. “There was no water in the mountains, and the farmers had to take all their cows down in the valley,” he says. He decided to see if he could pin part of the blame on climate change after he returned to his office in Exeter, England. “I didn’t expect to get a positive result,” he says

But he did. In fact, the signal of a warming climate was quite clear in Europe, even using data up to only 2000. In a landmark paper in Nature Stott and colleagues concluded that the chances of a heat wave like the 2003 event have more than doubled because of climate change. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Data collected since then show that the odds are at least four times higher compared with pre-industrial days. “We are very aware of the risks of misattribution,” Stott says. “We don’t want to point to specific events and say that they are part of climate change when they really are due to natural variability. But for some events, like the 2003 heat wave, we have the robust evidence to back it up.”

Case in point: Hurricane Katrina

Another event with a clear global warming component, says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., was Hurricane Katrina. Trenberth calculated that the combination of overall planetary warming, elevated moisture in the atmosphere, and higher sea-surface temperatures meant that “4 to 6 percent of the precipitation—an extra inch [2.5 centimeters] of rain—in Katrina was due to global warming,” he says. “That may not sound like much, but it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back or causes a levee to fail.” It was also a very conservative estimate. “The extra heat produced as moisture condenses can invigorate a storm, and at a certain point, the storm just takes off,” he says. “That would certainly apply to Nashville.” So climate change’s contribution to Katrina could have been twice as high as his calculations show, he says. Add in higher winds to the extra energy, and it is easy to see how storms can become more damaging.

This science of attribution is not without controversies. Another case in point: the 2010 Russian heat wave, which wiped out one quarter of the nation’s wheat crop and darkened the skies of Moscow with smoke from fires. The actual meteorological cause is not in doubt. “There was a blocking of the atmospheric circulation,” explains Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, also in Boulder. “The jet stream shifted north, bringing a longer period of high pressure and stagnant weather conditions.” But what caused the blocking? Hoerling looked for an underlying long-term temperature trend in western Russia that might have increased the odds of a heat wave, as Stott had done for the 2003 European event. He found nothing. “The best explanation is a rogue black swan—something that came out of the blue,” he says.

Wrong, retorts NCAR’s Trenberth. He sees a clear expansion of the hot, dry Mediterranean climate into western Russia that is consistent with climate change predictions—and that also intensified the Pakistan monsoon. “I completely repudiate Marty—and it doesn’t help to have him saying you can’t attribute the heat wave to climate change,” he says. “What we can say is that, as with Katrina, this would not have happened the same way without global warming.”

Yet even this dispute is smaller than it first appears. What is not in doubt is that the Russian heat wave is a portent—a glimpse of the future predicted by climate models. Even Hoerling sees it as a preview of coming natural disasters. By 2080, such events are expected to happen, on average, once every five years, he says: “It’s a good wake-up call. This type of phenomenon will become radically more common.”

Storm Warnings: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change (Scientific American)

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More violent and frequent storms, once merely a prediction of climate models, are now a matter of observation. Part 1 of a three-part series

By John Carey | Tuesday, June 28, 2011 | 130

DROWNING: The Souris River overflowed levees in Minot, N.D., as seen here on June 23. Image: Patrick Moes/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

In North Dakota the waters kept rising. Swollen by more than a month of record rains in Saskatchewan, the Souris River topped its all time record high, set back in 1881. The floodwaters poured into Minot, North Dakota’s fourth-largest city, and spread across thousands of acres of farms and forests. More than 12,000 people were forced to evacuate. Many lost their homes to the floodwaters.

Yet the disaster unfolding in North Dakota might be bringing even bigger headlines if such extreme events hadn’t suddenly seemed more common. In this year alone massive blizzards have struck the U.S. Northeast, tornadoes have ripped through the nation, mighty rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri have flowed over their banks, and floodwaters have covered huge swaths of Australia as well as displaced more than five million people in China and devastated Colombia. And this year’s natural disasters follow on the heels of a staggering litany of extreme weather in 2010, from record floods in Nashville, Tenn., and Pakistan, to Russia’s crippling heat wave.

These patterns have caught the attention of scientists at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They’ve been following the recent deluges’ stunning radar pictures and growing rainfall totals with concern and intense interest. Normally, floods of the magnitude now being seen in North Dakota and elsewhere around the world are expected to happen only once in 100 years. But one of the predictions of climate change models is that extreme weather—floods, heat waves, droughts, even blizzards—will become far more common. “Big rain events and higher overnight lows are two things we would expect with [a] warming world,” says Deke Arndt, chief of the center’s Climate Monitoring Branch. Arndt’s group had already documented a stunning rise in overnight low temperatures across the U.S. So are the floods and spate of other recent extreme events also examples of predictions turned into cold, hard reality?

Increasingly, the answer is yes. Scientists used to say, cautiously, that extreme weather events were “consistent” with the predictions of climate change. No more. “Now we can make the statement that particular events would not have happened the same way without global warming,” says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

That’s a profound change—the difference between predicting something and actually seeing it happen. The reason is simple: The signal of climate change is emerging from the “noise”—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.

Extreme signals

There are two key lines of evidence. First, it’s not just that we’ve become more aware of disasters like North Dakota or last year’s Nashville flood, which caused $13 billion in damage, or the massive 2010 summer monsoon in Pakistan that killed 1,500 people and left 20 million more homeless. The data show that the number of such events is rising. Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, has compiled the world’s most comprehensive database of natural disasters, reaching all the way back to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Researchers at the company, which obviously has a keen financial interest in trends that increase insurance risks, add 700 to 1,000 natural catastrophes to the database each year, explains Mark Bove, senior research meteorologist in Munich Re’s catastrophe risk management office in Princeton, N.J. The data indicate a small increase in geologic events like earthquakes since 1980 because of better reporting. But the increase in the number of climate disasters is far larger. “Our figures indicate a trend towards an increase in extreme weather events that can only be fully explained by climate change,” says Peter Höppe, head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research/Corporate Climate Center: “It’s as if the weather machine had changed up a gear.

The second line of evidence comes from a nascent branch of science called climate attribution. The idea is to examine individual events like a detective investigating a crime, searching for telltale fingerprints of climate change. Those fingerprints are showing up—in the autumn floods of 2000 in England and Wales that were the worst on record, in the 2003 European heat wave that caused 14,000 deaths in France, in Hurricane Katrina—and, yes, probably even in Nashville. This doesn’t mean that the storms or hot spells wouldn’t have happened at all without climate change, but as scientists like Trenberth say, they wouldn’t have been as severe if humankind hadn’t already altered the planet’s climate.This new science is still controversial. There’s an active debate among researchers about whether the Russian heat wave bears the characteristic signature of climate change or whether it was just natural variability, for instance. Some scientists worry that trying to attribute individual events to climate change is counterproductive in the larger political debate, because it’s so easy to dismiss the claim by saying that the planet has always experienced extreme weather. And some researchers who privately are convinced of the link are reluctant to say so publicly, because global warming has become such a target of many in Congress.

But the evidence is growing for a link between the emissions of modern civilization and extreme weather events. And that has the potential to profoundly alter the perception of the threats posed by climate change. No longer is global warming an abstract concept, affecting faraway species, distant lands or generations far in the future. Instead, climate change becomes personal. Its hand can be seen in the corn crop of a Maryland farmer ruined when soaring temperatures shut down pollination or the $13 billion in damage in Nashville, with the Grand Ole Opry flooded and sodden homes reeking of rot. “All of a sudden we’re not talking about polar bears or the Maldives any more,” says Nashville-based author and environmental journalist Amanda Little. “Climate change translates into mold on my baby’s crib. We’re talking about homes and schools and churches and all the places that got hit.”

Drenched in Nashville

Indeed, the record floods in Nashville in May 2010 shows how quickly extreme weather can turn ordinary life into a nightmare. The weekend began innocuously. The forecast was a 50 percent chance of rain. Musician Eric Normand and his wife Kelly were grateful that the weather event they feared, a tornado, wasn’t anticipated. Eric’s Saturday concert in a town south of Nashville should go off without a hitch, he figured.

He was wrong. On Saturday, it rained—and rained. “It was a different kind of rain than any I had experienced in my whole life,” says Nashville resident Rich Hays. Imagine the torrent from an intense summer thunderstorm, the sort of deluge that prompts you to duck under an underpass for a few minutes until the rain stops and it’s safe to go on, Little says. It was like that, she recalls—except that on this weekend in May 2010 it didn’t stop. Riding in the bus with his fellow musicians, Normand “looked through a window at a rain-soaked canopy of green and gray,” he wrote later. Scores of cars were underwater on the roads they had just traveled. A short 14-hour bus gig turned out to be “one of the most stressful and terrifying we had ever experienced,” Normand says.

And still it rained—more than 13 inches (33 centimeters) that weekend. The water rose in Little’s basement—one foot, two feet, three feet (one meter) deep. “You get this panicky feeling that things are out of control,” she says. Over at Hays’s home, fissures appeared in the basement floor, and streams of water turned into a “full-on river,” Hays recalls. Then in the middle of night, “I heard this massive crack, almost like an explosion,” he says. The force of the water had fractured the house’s concrete foundation. He and his wife spent the rest of the night in fear that the house might collapse.

Sunday morning, Normand went out in the deluge to ask his neighbor if he knew when the power might go back on—it was then he realized that his normal world had vanished. A small creek at the bottom of the hill was now a lake one-half mile (0.8 kilometer) wide, submerging homes almost up to their second stories. “My first reaction was disbelief,” Normand says. He and his family were trapped, without power and surrounded by flooded roads. “We were just freaked out,” he recalls.

And all across the flooded city the scenes were surreal, almost hallucinatory, Little says. “There were absurdities heaped upon absurdities. Churches lifted off foundations and floating down streets. Cars floating in a herd down highways.” In her own basement her family’s belongings bobbed like debris in a pond.

By time the deluge ended, more than 13 inches (33 centimeters) of rain had fallen, as recorded at Nashville’s airport. The toll: 31 people dead, more than $3 billion in damage—and an end to the cherished perception that Nashville was safe from major weather disasters. “A community that had never been vulnerable to this incredible force of nature was literally taken by storm,” Little says.

But can the Nashville deluge, the North Dakota floods and the many other extreme weather events around the world be connected with the greenhouse gases that humans have spewed into the atmosphere? Increasingly the answer seems to be yes. Whereas it will never be possible to say that any particular event was caused by climate change, new science is teasing out both the contributions that it makes to individual events—and the increase in the odds of extreme weather occurring as a result of climate change.

Nordeste perde um quinto dos reservatórios de água em 2010 (FSP)

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JC e-mail 4304, de 20 de Julho de 2011.

Relatório aponta bacias da região semiárida como as mais críticas.

A região Nordeste do País perdeu, entre outubro de 2009 e outubro de 2010, 20% dos reservatórios de água que possuía no período anterior, segundo a ANA (Agência Nacional de Águas). O dado está em um relatório sobre os recursos hídricos do País, publicado ontem e disponível em http://bit.ly/pnZBqo. Segundo a agência, a perda de reservatórios na região se deve à menor quantidade de chuvas.

Na região ficam as bacias do Semiárido, um dos pontos críticos quanto aos recursos hídricos, segundo o relatório. Também são classificadas assim as bacias do rio Meia Ponte, no Centro-Oeste, e a do Tietê, no Sudeste.

A definição leva em conta a disponibilidade e o uso de água, além da presença ou não de vegetação nativa e como é feito o tratamento dos resíduos sólidos no local. Segundo a ministra do Meio Ambiente, Izabella Teixeira, a ideia é, a partir dos dados do relatório, “focar os esforços nas áreas críticas”.

A ampliação dos serviços de saneamento foi apontada como prioridade pela ministra, principalmente nas cidades de até 50 mil habitantes. O pior índice de qualidade da água é o das áreas de grande densidade urbana.
(Folha de São Paulo)

Rios em péssimas condições (O Globo)

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JC e-mail 4304, de 20 de Julho de 2011.

Brasil tem só 4% de recursos hídricos com qualidade ótima, segundo relatório.

Com 12% da oferta de água do planeta, o Brasil tem apenas 4% de seus recursos hídricos com qualidade considerada ótima, percentual que caiu seis pontos de 2008 para 2009. Segundo avaliação do “Informe 2011 da Conjuntura dos Recursos Hídricos do Brasil”, divulgado ontem pela Agência Nacional de Águas (ANA), cem rios estão em situação ruim ou péssima.

Para avaliar o índice de qualidade da água, a agência usa nove parâmetros, que levam em conta principalmente a contaminação dos rios pelo lançamento de esgoto. Essa centena de rios em situação precária não consegue depurar naturalmente a quantidade de resíduos que vêm recebendo. Embora o governo argumente que está fazendo investimentos em políticas públicas de saneamento, mais da metade das cidades do país – 2.926 municípios – não tem tratamento de esgoto. O relatório aponta que em 2009 foram investidos R$21,4 bilhões em saneamento e gestão da água, sendo R$13,2 bilhões em obras de tratamento de esgoto.

A água de pior qualidade se concentra perto das regiões metropolitanas de São Paulo, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro e Salvador e das cidades de médio porte, como Campinas (SP) e Juiz de Fora (MG). Entre os rios cuja água é de péssima ou má qualidade, estão o Tietê, que corta a capital paulista, o Iguaçu, que forma as famosas Cataratas do Iguaçu, e o Guandu-Mirim, no Rio – os dois últimos ficam dentro de unidades de conservação, o Parque Nacional do Iguaçu e a Área de Proteção Ambiental (APA) do Rio Guandu, respectivamente.

Entre 2008 e 2009, a água de qualidade péssima no país se manteve em 2%; a ruim aumentou de 6% para 7%; a regular passou de 12% para 16% e a boa subiu de 70% para 71%. Nesse período, o número de pontos monitorados caiu de 1.812 para 1.747. O superintendente de Planejamento de Recursos Hídricos da agência, Ney Maranhão, mostrou-se satisfeito com os resultados do estudo.

– Temos 90,6% dos rios num estado satisfatório de qualidade e de disponibilidade (quantidade de água). Apenas 2% não apresentam resultado satisfatório – avaliou Maranhão, que coordenou o trabalho.

Estresse hídrico e agricultura – Maranhão ressaltou que as políticas públicas têm sido direcionadas para as bacias que estão em situação crítica, seja por apresentarem baixa disponibilidade ou qualidade de água. A maior parte dos rios e bacias com problema de oferta de água se encontra no Nordeste.

A ministra do Meio Ambiente, Izabella Teixeira, disse que, no futuro, o estresse hídrico (falta de água em algumas regiões do país) vai impactar na agricultura. Ao todo, 69% dos recursos consumidos pela população são usados em irrigação. Izabella aproveitou a ocasião para mandar um recado ao Congresso, onde tramita a reforma do Código Florestal.

– Quando estamos discutindo Código Florestal, não falamos apenas do uso do solo. Estamos falando de recursos hídricos e qualidade de vida. O relatório traz com muita propriedade o estresse hídrico com perda de mata ciliar (vegetação nativa às margens dos rios). Onde se desmata mata ciliar, há comprometimento dos recursos hídricos – afirmou a ministra.

O levantamento da ANA também levou em conta o problema das mudanças climáticas, responsáveis por eventos naturais extremos em datas diferentes no ano passado: a estiagem na Amazônia; as enchentes em Alagoas, Pernambuco e em Minas Gerais; as cheias no Rio, em São Paulo e no Rio Grande do Sul. Um exemplo do agravamento dessa situação: em 2006, foram registradas 135 situações de emergência ou de calamidade pública por conta de fortes chuvas. Em 2010, esse número de ocorrências subiu para 601. No total, quase 10% das cidades brasileiras – 563 municípios – decretaram situação de emergência devido a enchentes, inundações, enxurradas e alagamentos.

No caso das secas, houve uma inversão: 2010 registrou menos casos de emergência (583) do que 2006 (914). Entre 2009 e 2010 houve diminuição de 20,8% no nível dos reservatórios de água construídos no Nordeste para combater estiagens.
(O Globo)

La Niña’s Exit Leaves Climate Forecasts in Limbo (NASA)

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06.29.11

The latest satellite data of Pacific Ocean sea surface heights from the NASA/European Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 satellite show near-normal conditions in the equatorial Pacific. The image is based on the average of 10 days of data centered on June 18, 2011. Higher (warmer) than normal sea surface heights are indicated by yellows and reds, while lower (cooler) than normal sea surface heights are depicted in blues and purples. Green indicates near-normal conditions. Image credit: NASA/JPL Ocean Surface Topography Team

It’s what Bill Patzert, a climatologist and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., likes to call a “La Nada” – that puzzling period between cycles of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean when sea surface heights in the equatorial Pacific are near average.

The comings and goings of El Niño and La Niña are part of a long-term, evolving state of global climate, for which measurements of sea surface height are a key indicator. For the past three months, since last year’s strong La Niña event dissipated, data collected by the U.S.-French Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 oceanography satellite have shown that the equatorial Pacific sea surface heights have been stable and near average. Elsewhere, however, the northeastern Pacific Ocean remains quite cool, with sea levels much lower than normal. The presence of cool ocean waters off the U.S. West Coast has also been a factor in this year’s cool and foggy spring there.

The current state of the Pacific is shown in this OSTM/Jason-2 image, based on the average of 10 days of data centered on June 18, 2011. The image depicts places where Pacific sea surface height is higher (warmer) than normal as yellow and red, while places where the sea surface is lower (cooler) than normal are shown in blue and purple. Green indicates near-normal conditions. Sea surface height is an indicator of how much of the sun’s heat is stored in the upper ocean.

For oceanographers and climate scientists like Patzert, “La Nada” conditions can bring with them a high degree of uncertainty. While some forecasters (targeting the next couple of seasons) have suggested La Nada will bring about “normal” weather conditions, Patzert cautions previous protracted La Nadas have often delivered unruly jet stream patterns and wild weather swings.

In addition, some climatologists are pondering whether a warm El Niño pattern (which often follows La Niña) may be lurking over the horizon. Patzert says that would be perfectly fine for the United States.

“For the United States, there would be some positives to the appearance of El Niño this summer,” Patzert said. “The parched and fire-ravaged southern tier of the country would certainly benefit from a good El Niño soaking. Looking ahead to late August and September, El Niño would also tend to dampen the 2011 hurricane season in the United States. We’ve had enough wild and punishing weather this year. Relief from the drought across the southern United States and a mild hurricane season would be very welcome.”

Jason-2 scientists will continue to monitor Pacific Ocean sea surface heights for signs of El Niño, La Niña or prolonged neutral conditions.

JPL manages the U.S. portion of the OSTM/Jason-2 mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.

For more information on NASA’s ocean surface topography missions, visit: http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/.

To view the latest Jason-1 and OSTM/Jason-2 data, visit: http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/science/elninopdo/latestdata/.

Alan Buis 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov

2011-199

Some Catholics seek to counter Galileo (Chicago Tribune)

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Splinter group says the Earth, not the sun, is, indeed, at the center of the universe

By Manya A. Brachear, Tribune reporter
July 4, 2011

Some people believe the world literally revolves around them. It’s a belief born not of selfishness but faith.

A small group of conservative Roman Catholics is pointing to a dozen biblical verses and the Church’s original teaching as proof that the Earth is the center of the universe, the view that prompted Galileo Galilei’s clash with the Church four centuries ago.

The relatively obscure movement has gained a following among a few Chicago-area Catholics who find comfort in knowing there are still staunch defenders of original Church doctrine.

“This subject is, as far as I can see, an embarrassment to the modern church because the world more or less looks upon geocentrism or someone who believes it in the same boat as the flat Earth,” said James Phillips, of Cicero.

Phillips attends Our Lady Immaculate Catholic Church in Oak Park, a parish run by the Society of St. Pius X, a group that rejects most of the modernizing reforms the Vatican II council made from 1962 to 1965.

But by challenging modern science, the proponents of a geocentric universe are challenging the very church they seek to serve and protect.

“I have no idea who these people are. Are they sincere, or is this a clever bit of theater?” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, the curator of meteorites and spokesman for the Vatican Observatory.

Indeed, those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that the Earth revolves around the sun, is nothing more than a conspiracy theory to squelch the church’s influence.

“Heliocentrism becomes ‘dangerous’ if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system,” said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. “False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today. … Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world; and governments and academia were subservient to her.”

Sungenis is no lone Don Quixote, as illustrated by the hundreds of curiosity seekers, skeptics and supporters at a conference last fall titled “Galileo Was Wrong. The Church Was Right” just off the University of Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Ind.

Astrophysicists at Notre Dame didn’t appreciate the group hitching its wagon to the prestige of America’s flagship Catholic university and resurrecting a concept that’s extinct for a reason.

“It’s an idea whose time has come and gone,” astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich said. “There are some people who want to move the world back to the 1950s when it seemed like a better time. These are people who want to move the world back to the 1250s. I don’t really understand it at all.”

Garnavich said the theory of geocentrism violates what he believes should be a strict separation of church and science. One answers why, the other answers how, and never the twain should meet, he said.

But supporters of the theory contend that there is scientific evidence to support geocentrism, just as there is evidence to support the six-day story of creation in Genesis.

There is proof in Scripture that the Earth is the center of the universe, Sungenis said. Among many verses, he cites Joshua 10:12-14 as definitive proof: “And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, while the nation took vengeance on its foe. … The sun halted in the middle of the sky; not for a whole day did it resume its swift course.”

But Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., said the Bible is silent on geocentrism.

“There’s a big difference between looking at the origin of the planets, the solar system and the universe and looking at presently how they move and how they are interrelated,” Ham said. “The Bible is neither geocentric or heliocentric. It does not give any specific information about the structure of the solar system.”

Just as Ham challenges the foundation of natural history museums, Sungenis challenges planetariums, most notably the Vatican Observatory.

Consolmagno said the very premise of going after Galileo illustrates the theory’s lack of scientific credibility.

“Of course, we understand the universe in a far more nuanced way than Galileo did 400 years ago,” he said. “And I would hope that the next 400 years would see just as much development.”

But Sungenis said the renewed interest in geocentrism is due, in part, to the efforts of Christians entering the scientific domain previously dominated by secularists. These Christian scientists, he said, showed modern science is without scientific foundation or even good evidence.

The issue has even sparked a debate between Art and Pat Jones, of Lyons. Pat Jones, a conservative Catholic who often attends Mass at Phillips’ parish, said heliocentrism is part of a conspiracy.

“Because of our fallen nature in Christian terms, we take the line of least resistance — go with the flow,” said Pat Jones. “But the means of grace have to be intact.”

Her husband, Art, a self-described skeptical Protestant, says he is still a “doubting Thomas” but wouldn’t put it past the orthodox science community to cook up a conspiracy. He accompanied his wife to the South Bend conference to learn more and “keep peace in the family.”

Meanwhile, the theory has brought others like Phillips closer to God.

“I dropped my practice of faith,” Phillips said. “When I came back, it was a big wake-up call for me. … The world has its own dogmas.”

mbrachear@tribune.com

O futuro do presente no pretérito (Fapesp)

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HUMANIDADES | LITERATURA
A ficção científica brasileira e a relação do país com a ciência e a tecnologia

Carlos Haag
Edição Impressa 184 – Junho 2011

A Presidência da República dos Estados Unidos do Brasil estava confiada a uma mulher. O país estava mais forte, mais belo e rico. Para aqui convergiam povos de todos os recantos da Terra. A Amazônia está urbanizada, o analfabetismo foi abolido e, na roça, os trabalhadores cantam trechos da última ópera a que assistiram ou recitam, de cor, os poemas mais lindos.” Aviso: isso não é um texto institucional desvairado do governo atual. A autora, Adalzira Bittencourt (1904-1976), descreveu essa “previsão” em 1929 em Sua Excia. a presidente da República. Mas esse “paraíso” de ficção científica tem um porém: tudo isso foi conseguido graças à ascensão na política das mulheres, que implementam um rígido programa de eugenia e higiene social. Por uma ironia do destino, a presidente, dra. Mariangela de Albuquerque, apaixona-se pelo pintor Jorge, que só conhece por cartas amorosas. Cansada de esperar o amante, a primeira mandatária ordena que seja trazido, algemado, em sua presença. “Era lindo de rosto, mas tinha não mais do que 90 cm de altura e tinha nas costas uma corcunda enorme.” A presidente eugenista ordena, implacável, a eutanásia profilática no amado. “Era mulher”, encerra-se, em tom vitorioso, a novela.

O tom “ideológico” da novela percorreu, e ainda se mantém, a produção de ficção científica brasileira, infelizmente pouco estudada e vista, em geral, como “produto de segunda ordem” e indigno do cânone literário. “Desde o século XIX o gênero provou ser um veículo ideal para registrar tensões na definição da identidade nacional e do processo de modernização. Essas tensões são exacerbadas na América Latina e, por isso, a produção da ficção em países como Brasil, Argentina e México, grandes representantes desse gênero no continente, é muito mais politizada do que a escrita nos países do Norte. No Brasil, o gênero ajudou a refletir uma agenda política mais concreta e os escritores, ontem e hoje, estão mais intimamente envolvidos com os rumos futuros de seu país e usaram o gênero nascente não apenas para circular suas idéias na arena pública, mas também para mostrar aos seus compatriotas suas opiniões sobre a realidade presente e suas visões sobre um tempo futuro, melhor e mais moderno”, explica a historiadora Rachel Haywood Ferreira, da Universidade do Estado de Iowa, autora de The emergence of Latin American science fiction, que acaba de ser lançado nos EUA pela Wesleyan University Press. “A ficção científica brasileira permite traçar a crise de identidade que acompanhou a modernização, juntamente com o senso de perda que a persegue, e que é parte da entrada do Brasil na condição pós-moderna. A ficção nacional em parte exemplifica a erosão da narrativa latino-americana de identidade nacional, porque ela se torna cada vez mais influenciada pela troca cultural inerente à globalização iniciada nos anos 1990”, concorda a professora de literatura Mary Ginway, da Universidade da Flórida, autora de Ficção científica brasileira: mitos culturais e nacionalidade no país do futuro (Devir Livraria). Apesar disso, o gênero continua considerado como “menor”. “É uma pena, porque o deslocamento da tradição da ficção para o contexto de um país em desenvolvimento nos permite revelar certas assunções sobre como se dá esse desenvolvimento e determinar a função desse gênero nesse tipo de sociedade. A ficção científica fornece um barômetro para medir atitudes diante da tecnologia, ao mesmo tempo que reflete as implicações sociais da modernização da sociedade brasileira”, avalia Mary. “Há mesmo uma variação gradual de um clima de otimismo para outro, de pessimismo: a ciência parece não mais ser a garantia da verdade, como se pensava, e o impacto da tecnologia pode nem sempre ser positivo, o que dificulta que se alcance o potencial nacional. Tudo isso se pode ver na ficção científica latino-americana: a definição da identidade nacional; as tensões entre ciência e religião e entre campo e cidade; a pseudociência”, nota Rachel.

Para a pesquisadora, a literatura especulativa é importante em paí-ses como o Brasil, onde “ciência e tecnologia têm um papel-chave na vida intelectual, já que a tecnologia é vista como a solução possível para que o país possa superar o atraso histórico do desenvolvimento econômico com a esperança de se criar uma sociedade melhor e mais utópica”. Infelizmente, foi justamente essa ligação com o nacional que representou a glória e o desprezo da ficção científica no Brasil, apesar de termos acompanhado com certa rapidez a expansão do gênero na Europa. A primeira ficção científica nacional data de 1868 (foi publicada no jornal O Jequitinhonha até 1872), Páginas da história do Brasil, escrita no ano 2000, de Joaquim Felício dos Santos, uma obra satírica sobre a monarquia que leva dom Pedro II numa viagem pelo tempo até o futuro, onde descobre como seu regime de governo era pernicioso ao país. “Obras como essas que adentram o século XX, até os anos 1920, mostram que havia interesse dos brasileiros em desenvolver narrativas utópicas, fantasias moralizadoras e até o romance científico, um corpo de ficção especulativa que poderia ter sustentado uma produção maior nas décadas seguintes. Infelizmente, como viria a acontecer nos anos 1970, os exercícios nacionais não resistiram à pressão estrangeira, à pressão da crítica, que não criou um nicho para o gênero no Brasil, e ao relativo desinteresse do público leitor”, analisa Roberto de Sousa Causo, autor de Ficção científica, fantasia e horror no Brasil: 1875-1950 (Editora da UFMG). “A separação rígida entre a literatura sancionada e a não sancionada redundou na quase total ausência de uma pulp era no contexto brasileiro. A ficção especulativa perdeu esse espaço de inventividade desregrada, de abertura de novas possibilidades, de constituição de uma tradição mais empreendedora”, avalia.

Como observa Antonio Candido, em sua Formação da literatura brasileira, há uma posição fechada no país de considerar a literatura como prática constitutiva de nacionalidade, um pragmatismo que implica até hoje a diminuição da imaginação, pelo interesse de se usar politicamente as letras como forma de representar a experiência social e humana. Nesse movimento, avalia Causo, os usos da literatura como instrumento de formação da nacionalidade teriam preferido a documentação realista e naturalista orientada pelo progresso e pelo determinismo. “A versão brasileira sofre duplamente por causa de suas associações com ‘arte baixa’, fruto de uma tradição autoritária nacional que abomina a cultura de massas e a arte popular, e por ser um gênero imaginativo num país que dá alto valor ao realismo literário”, concorda a brasilianista Mary Gingway. Num conto de Jorge Calife, um dos mais conhecidos autores contemporâneos de ficção científica, Brasil, país do futuro, um jovem, em 1969, durante a ditadura, tem como dever de casa escrever um ensaio sobre o Brasil do ano 2000. Ele, de fato, consegue viajar no tempo e ver o Rio do futuro, uma dolorosa decepção ao descobrir que nada mudara e a vida dos brasileiros continuava miserável. De volta ao quarto, escreve o texto descrevendo uma cidade imaginária sob um domo, com medo de ser reprovado pelo professor se falasse a verdade. “Essa história é um lembrete de que, a despeito da modernização global, o Brasil pode enfrentar uma longa espera antes de receber os benefícios da tecnologia”, afirma a pesquisadora americana.

Os inícios da ficção científica foi o chamado romance científico, desenvolvido entre 1875 e 1939, que tomava como modelos europeus os livros de Jules Verne e Wells. “Embora as contribuições científicas latino-americanas desse período fossem pequenas em comparação com o resto do mundo, os cientistas desses países estavam em sintonia com o que fazia na Europa e a adoção da eugenia é um sinal da aprovação generalizada da ciência como prova de modernidade cultural. Os textos criados nesse espírito não se revelam como imitações de modelos literários imperialistas que mostravam sociedades imaginárias baseadas em tecnologias inviáveis, mas em obras que descreviam o presente com a autoridade do discurso científico e almejavam o futuro brilhante que viria com certeza. São textos utópicos que acontecem em lugares remotos ou tempos distantes, descrevendo sociedades inexistentes em detalhes”, analisa Rachel. A eugenia dessas obras, porém, vem embalada numa versão mais soft, um ramo alternativo das noções hereditárias de Lamarck, em que havia espaço para a reforma das deformações humanas, algo que entusiasmava os brasileiros, já que ofereciam soluções científicas viáveis para os “problemas” nacionais. “Era um neolamarckismo tingido com cores otimistas em que reformas do meio social poderiam resultar em melhoras permanentes e que o progresso, mesmo nos trópicos, era possível. Mais tarde, o darwinismo social se juntaria ao caldo que produziria a ficção”, conta a pesquisadora. Um bom exemplo é o romance pioneiro no gênero, Dr. Benignus (1875), de Augusto Zaluar, uma expedição científica ao interior do Brasil, com direito a seres vindos do Sol, muita conversa e pouca aventura. Para Benignus, a ciência serviria para dar valor ao cidadão importante ou resgataria a nação “bárbara” e abandonada.

Outro tema característico aparece em O presidente negro ou O choque das raças (1926), de Monteiro Lobato, que mostra como a divisão do eleitorado branco em 2228 permite a eleição nos EUA de um presidente negro, o que faz os brancos se unirem novamente para colocar os negros “sob controle”. Para o escritor, a mestiçagem era justamente o fator responsável pelo atraso econômico e cultural. A solução era seduzir os negros com um alisador de cabelos, os “raios Ômega”, que provocavam a esterilização do usuário. De forma menos agressiva, o tom eugenista transparece nas obras do jornalista Berilo Neves, autor da coletânea A costela de Adão (1930) e O século XXI (1934), histórias satíricas passadas no futuro cujo alvo preferencial eram o feminismo e as frivolidades femininas. Em geral suas narrativas misóginas envolvem a criação de máquinas de reprodução humana que fazem as mulheres obsoletas ou um mundo futuro em que os gêneros aparecem trocados. Em A liga dos planetas (1923), de Albino José Coutinho, o primeiro romance nacional a mostrar uma viagem espacial, o narrador constrói seu “aeroplano” e finca a bandeira brasileira na Lua. Mas não foge do pensamento corrente: a missão espacial tinha como justificativa um pedido presidencial para que o herói encontrasse, em outros mundos, gente de qualidade, porque aqui isso não acontecia.

Mas houve exceções honrosas ao darwinismo social, como A Amazônia misteriosa (1925), de Gustavo Cruls, inspirado em A ilha do Dr. Moureau, de Wells, com uma solução nacional: o protagonista perdido pela Amazônia se encontra com um cientista alemão, o professor Hartmann, que faz experiências em crianças do sexo masculino desprezadas pelas amazonas. Como se isso não bastasse, o médico, após tomar uma droga alucinógena, topa com Atahualpa, que descreve a ele os abusos feitos pelos europeus. O protagonista vê que esses foram mantidos pelo cientista tedesco e rejeita as explorações colonialistas e o abuso da ciência. Em A república 3.000 ou A filha do inca (1930), o modernista Menotti Del Picchia descreve uma expedição que se depara com uma civilização de grande tecnologia em pleno Brasil Central, isolada sob uma cúpula invisível. Os protagonistas rejeitam os postulados positivistas, fogem com a princesa inca e tudo se encerra com uma elegia à vida simples. Jerônymo Monteiro, o futuro autor do personagem Dick Peter, usa seu romance Três meses no século 81 (1947) para mostrar o seu protagonista Campos confrontando o próprio Wells sobre a viagem do tempo, usando o recurso da “transmigração da alma”, provocada por médiuns. “O herói de Monteiro não apenas viaja no tempo, mas lidera uma rebelião de humanistas contra a elite massificadora da Terra futura, aliando-se aos marcianos com quem o nosso planeta está em guerra”, diz Causo. “Por um lado, a nossa ficção científica vai se imbuindo da realidade trágica do subdesenvolvimento e ilumina a compreensão do leitor sobre a conjuntura particular em que vive, o que nos diferenciava da ficção científica do Primeiro Mundo. Ao mesmo tempo, reconhecer isso nos fez rejeitar conceitos importados, como o darwinismo social. Não havia mais razão na convivência entre esse discurso e uma conjuntura de neocolonialismo, como se vê na ficção científica brasileira do final do século XIX e início do XX, salvo dentro de uma postura elitista interna ao país”, analisa o pesquisador.

Enquanto isso, florescia nos EUA, em revistas populares, as pulp magazines, uma ficção científica tecnófila, pouco preocupada com o estilo ou com a caracterização de personagens, mais interessada no engajamento do leitor na ação, na aventura e na extravagância das ideias, as pulp fictions. Apesar dos esforços pulps de Berilo Neves e em particular de Jerônymo Monteiro (considerado o “pai da ficção científica brasileira”), essa forma popular não vingou no país. “O Brasil perdeu ao não ter acesso a esse material ou por não ter criado a sua versão de uma era de revistas populares, em que a inventividade estava presente e o público reagia, criando um forte vínculo entre produtores e consumidores de ficção científica”, lembra Causo. Ao lado dessa golden age anglo–americana, a ficção nacional, também em função dos efeitos do pós-guerra, passa a apresentar uma desconfiança básica da ciência e da tecnologia nas mãos dos humanos por conta do poder da razão em face dos excessos da emoção. “Em razão da aguda divisão de classes da sociedade brasileira, com forte concentração de renda nas mãos da elite, a tecnologia é vista como um elemento divisor, e não unificador. Para os brasileiros, a tecnologia é mais um problema político e econômico, e não uma forma de resolvê-lo”, analisa Mary Ginway. Apesar disso, os anos 1960 presenciam uma explosão do gênero graças aos esforços do editor baiano Gumercindo Rocha Dorea, criador das Edições GRD, que passam a batizar e abrigar uma nova geração de escritores, incluindo-se criadores do mainstream convidados a criar ficção como Dinah Silveira de Queiroz, Rachel de Queiroz, Fausto Cunha, entre outros.

Entre EUA e Brasil passam a acontecer descompassos ficcionais. “Se a ficção científica americana abraça a tecnologia e a mudança, mas teme rebeliões ou invasões por robôs e alienígenas, a ficção brasileira tende a rejeitar a tecnologia, mas abraça os robôs e acha os alienígenas como sendo indiferentes ou exóticos, mas pouco ameaçadores, quando não portadores de uma mensagem de paz ao mundo”, afirma Mary. Tampouco as visões americanas de megalópoles plenas de mecanismos futuristas agradavam aos brasileiros. “A sociedade brasileira, por seu passado rural e patriarcal, valoriza o personalismo nas relações, colocando valo no contato humano. Assim, essa rejeição pode ser lida como a negação de uma nova ordem baseada na uniformização e na obediência cega a uma cultura organizacional”, continua a pesquisadora. A ficção científica nacional começa a colocar o seu sabor sobre os arroubos do futuro. “A tecnologia só pode ser solução, nessas obras, quando é reduzida e humanizada. Os alienígenas, comparados aos estrangeiros, são descritos como indiferentes aos humanos e seus destinos, tomando recursos e abandonando os humanos à sua sorte. A Amazônia, por exemplo, passa a ser alvo desses invasores, que pousam ali. Já os robôs são vistos com grande simpatia, talvez em função do passado escravista em que havia uma promiscuidade entre servos e senhores. Assim, os ícones da ficção são transformados pelas relações sociais brasileiras tradicionais e suas possibilidades como agentes de mudança social, enquanto possibilidades utópicas são geralmente negadas.” Os autores nacionais se apropriam de um gênero do Primeiro Mundo que lida com ciência e tecnologia e, ao transformarem seus paradigmas, tornam-no antitecnológico e nacional, segundo a pesquisadora, um gesto compreensível de resistência ante o temor da modernização que ameaçava destruir a cultura e as tradições humanistas do Brasil, como se verá com o golpe de 1964.

Esse período da ditadura marca o início da ficção científica distópica, ou seja, usar elementos familiares e fazê-los estranhos para discutir ideias e fazer denúncias. “Ao usar um mundo futurista imaginário, as distopias se concentram em temas políticos e satirizam tendências presentes na sociedade. Daí as distopias nacionais serem todas representações alegóricas de um Brasil sob regime militar, com alusões à censura, tortura, controle etc. Os enredos são sempre sobre rebeliões contra uma tecnocracia perversa e arbitrária”, nota Mary. É um abrasileiramento da tendência da new age da ficção científica internacional, sob os auspícios de Ray Bradbury, em que a tecnologia aparece como vilã ao roubar dos brasileiros a sua identidade (uma questão recorrente desde o século XIX), em especial quando em mãos de um governo autoritário. “No lado oposto está o mito da identidade, visto como natural e imutável, assumindo a forma da natureza, da mulher, da sexualidade, da terra”, nota Causo. Com o fim da ditadura, a ficção científica volta ao seu padrão em formas mais sofisticadas como o cyberpunk, a ficção hard e as histórias alternativas, muitas escritas por mulheres.

Em 1988, Ivan Carlos Regina lança o manifesto antropofágico da ficção científica brasileira, que como o manifesto de Oswald de Andrade, propõe uma “canabalização” do gênero pelos escritores brasileiros. “Precisamos deglutir, após o bispo Sardinha, a pistola de raios laser, o cientista maluco, o alienígena bonzinho, o herói invencível, a dobra espacial, a mocinha com pernas perfeitas e cérebro de noz e o disco voador, que estão tão distantes da realidade brasileira quanto a mais longínqua das estrelas.” “Ao combinar formas altas e baixas de literatura, ao unir mito, mídia, tecnologia moderna e ao abordar questões como raça e gênero sexual, a ficção nacional da pós-ditadura desconstrói a noção de Brasil como uma nação tropical exótica, cheia de gente feliz, oferecendo um mosaico pós-moderno dos conflitos brasileiros para lutar com a sua própria história e com a crescente globalização”, nota Mary. Nesse momento há mesmo quem advogue o gênero como terreno fértil para os escritores do mainstream. “Os heróis da prosa de ficção brasileira estão cansados. Faz pelo menos 20 anos que a sua rotina não muda”, avisa o escritor Nelson de Oliveira, autor de Os transgressores, em seu “Convite ao mainstream”. “Nossa sorte é que na literatura brasileira existem outras correntes além da principal. A mais vigorosa, brutal e vulgar é a ficção científica. Ela é como os bárbaros que puseram abaixo Roma. Os bárbaros são a solução para uma civilização decadente. Os temas da ficção científica são a semente desses guerreiros que, ao fecundarem a prosa cansada e decadente do mainstream, ajudarão a gerar contos e romances mais consistentes e menos artificiais.”

IPCC estuda geoengenharia para minimizar aquecimento (Carbono Brasil)

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JC e-mail 4286, de 24 de Junho de 2011

Talvez motivada pela lentidão das negociações climáticas, entidade sugere que cientistas avaliem possibilidades para refletir os raios solares e até o depósito de ferro nos oceanos para estimular o crescimento de algas que absorvam o CO².

O jornal britânico The Guardian teve acesso a documentos do Painel Intergovernamental de Mudanças Climáticas da ONU (IPCC) destinados para os cientistas que formam o grupo de trabalho em geoengenharia da entidade e revelou que utilizar essa opção para lidar com as mudanças climáticas está sendo considerada com seriedade.

O grupo de cientistas se reúne na próxima semana em Lima, no Peru, e tem como principal objetivo fornecer sugestões para os governos de quais tecnologias de geoengenharia seriam mais eficientes e seguras.

Entre as propostas que o IPCC pede para serem avaliadas estão: Dispersar aerossóis de enxofre na estratosfera para refletir parte dos raios solares de volta para o espaço; Depositar grandes quantidades de ferro nos oceanos para o crescimento de algas que absorvam o CO²; Realizar a bioengenharia de culturas agrícolas para que tenham uma cor que reflita os raios solares; Suprimir a formação de nuvens do tipo cirrus, que agem acentuando o efeito estufa.

De acordo com o The Guardian, outras medidas que podem ser estudadas são a dispersão de partículas de água do mar nas nuvens para que reflitam os raios solares, a pintura de branco das estradas e telhadas em todo o mundo e diferentes maneiras de capturar e armazenar os gases do efeito estufa.

Apesar das ideias parecerem ficção científica, algumas delas já foram inclusive tiradas do papel. No começo de 2009, um navio de pesquisas alemão carregado com 20 toneladas de sulfato de ferro partiu em direção à Antártica com o objetivo de injetar o material no fundo do oceano. A operação acabou sendo suspensa no último momento pelo governo alemão que atendeu aos pedidos da comunidade internacional.

Realizar projetos de geoengenharia sempre levantou muita polêmica, tanto que em 2010 a Convenção sobre Diversidade Biológica (CDB) aprovou uma moratória desse tipo de iniciativa. Entretanto, a moratória permite a continuidade de estudos em pequena escala em circunstâncias controladas.

Mesmo a Sociedade Americana de Meteorologia (AMS), entidade que defende o uso da geoengenharia, alerta que ainda são necessários muitos estudos antes que seja feita qualquer alteração de grande porte nos sistemas terrestres.

“O potencial para ajudar a sociedade, assim como os riscos de consequências inesperadas, exigem mais pesquisas, regulamentações e transparência nas iniciativas”, ressalta a instituição.

Contrários até mesmo a continuidade de estudos sobre o assunto, 125 grupos ambientais e de direitos humanos de 40 países, incluindo a Friends of the Earth International e a Via Campesina, entregaram uma carta nesta semana para o presidente do IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, alertando que a entidade não tem competência para avaliar a opção da geoengenharia.

“Perguntar a um grupo de cientistas que trabalham com geoengenharia se é preciso fazer mais pesquisas sobre o assunto é igual perguntar se um urso quer mel”, afirma a carta. Segundo os ambientalistas, essa não é uma questão apenas cientifica, é política.

A geoengenharia voltou a ganhar força depois que foi registrado que em 2010 as emissões bateram um novo recorde histórico, apesar de todas as promessas dos governos mundiais. De acordo com a Agência Internacional de Energia, o ano passado registrou a emissão de 30,6 gigatoneladas de dióxido de carbono.

Além disso, o ritmo das negociações internacionais está muito lento, tornando praticamente impossível que seja criado um acordo climático global nos próximos meses.

A própria presidente da Convenção-Quadro da ONU sobre Mudanças Climáticas (UNFCCC), Christiana Figueres, afirmou que talvez seja preciso adotar tecnologias mais radicais para conter o aquecimento em no máximo 2°C e evitar as piores consequências das mudanças climáticas.

“Estamos nos colocando em uma situação onde precisaremos utilizar métodos mais drásticos para retirar as emissões da atmosfera”, concluiu Figueres.

How the ‘ecosystem’ myth has been used for sinister means (The Guardian)

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When, in the 1920s, a botanist and a field marshal dreamed up rival theories of nature and society, no one could have guessed their ideas would influence the worldview of 70s hippies and 21st-century protest movements. But their faith in self-regulating systems has a sinister history

Adam Curtis
The Observer, Sunday 29 May 2011

A small greenhouse at Biosphere 2 in Arizona in 1988. The attempt to create an enclosed ecological system ended in failure. Photograph: Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis

At the end of March this year there was a wonderful moment of television interviewing on Newsnight. It was just after student protesters had invaded Fortnums and other shops in Oxford Street during the TUC march against the cuts. Emily Maitlis asked Lucy Annson from UK Uncut whether, as a spokesperson for the direct-action group, she condemned the violence.

Annson swiftly opened the door that leads to the nightmare interview, saying: “We are a network of people who self-organise. We don’t have a position on things. It’s about empowering the individual to go out there and be creative.”

“But is it wrong for individuals to attack buildings?” asked Maitlis.

“You’d have to ask that particular individual,” replied Annson.

“But you are a spokesperson for UK Uncut,” insisted Maitlis. And Annson came out with a wonderful line: “No. I’m a spokesperson for myself.”

What you were seeing in that interchange was the expression of a very powerful ideology of our time. It is the idea of the “self-organising network”. It says that human beings can organise themselves into systems where they are linked, but where there is no hierarchy, no leaders and no control. It is not the old form of collective action that the left once believed in, where people subsumed themselves into the greater force of the movement. Instead all the individuals in the self-organising network can do whatever they want as creative, autonomous, self-expressive entities, yet somehow, through feedback between all the individuals in the system, a kind of order emerges.

At its heart it says that you can organise human beings without the exercise of power by leaders.

As a political position it is obviously very irritating for TV interviewers, which may or may not be a good thing. And it doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t a valid way for organising protests – and possibly even human society. But I thought I would tell the brief and rather peculiar history of the rise of the idea of the “self-organising network”.

Of course some of the ideas come out of anarchist thought. But the idea is also deeply rooted in a strange fantasy vision of nature that emerged in the 1920s and 30s as the British Empire began to decline. It was a vision of nature and – ultimately – the whole world as a giant system that could stabilise itself. And it rose up to grip the imagination of those in power – and is still central in our culture.

But we have long forgotten where it came from. To discover this you have to go back to a ferocious battle between two driven men in the 1920s. One was a botanist and Fabian socialist called Arthur Tansley. The other was one of the most powerful and ruthless rulers of the British Empire, Field Marshal Jan Smuts.

It all started with a dream. One night Tansley had an unsettling nightmare that involved him shooting his wife. So he did the natural thing and started reading the works of Sigmund Freud, and even went to be analysed by Freud himself. Then Tansley came up with an extraordinary theory. He took Freud’s idea that the human brain is like an electrical machine – a network around which energy flowed – and argued that the same thing was true in nature. That underneath the bewildering complexity of the natural world were interconnected systems around which energy also flowed. He coined a name for them. He called them ecosystems.

But Tansley went further. He said that the world was composed at every level of systems, and what’s more, all these systems had a natural desire to stabilise themselves. He grandly called it “the great universal law of equilibrium”. Everything, he wrote, from the human mind to nature to even human societies – all are tending towards a natural state of equilibrium.

Tansley admitted he had no real evidence for this. And what he was really doing was taking an engineering concept of systems and networks and projecting it on to the natural world, turning nature into a machine. But the idea, and the term “ecosystem”, stuck.

But then Field Marshal Smuts came up with an even grander idea of nature. And Tansley hated it.

Field Marshal Smuts was one of the most powerful men in the British empire. He ruled South Africa for the British empire and he exercised power ruthlessly. When the Hottentots refused to pay their dog licences Smuts sent in planes to bomb them. As a result the black people hated him. But Smuts also saw himself as a philosopher – and he had a habit of walking up to the tops of mountains, taking off all his clothes, and dreaming up new theories about how nature and the world worked.

This culminated in 1926 when Smuts created his own philosophy. He called it Holism. It said that the world was composed of lots of “wholes” – the small wholes all evolving and fitting together into larger wholes until they all came together into one big whole – a giant natural system that would find its own stability if all the wholes were in the right places. Einstein liked the theory, and it became one of the big ideas that lots of right-thinking intellectuals wrote about in the 1930s. Even the King became fascinated by it.

But Tansley attacked. He publicly accused Smuts of what he called “the abuse of vegetational concepts” – which at the time was considered very rude. He said that Smuts had created a mystical philosophy of nature and its self-organisation in order to oppress black people. Or what Tansley maliciously called the “less exalted wholes”.

And Tansley wasn’t alone. Others, including HG Wells, pointed out that really what Smuts was doing was using a scientific theory about order in nature to justify a particular order in society – in this case the British empire. Because it was clear that the global self-regulating system that Smuts described looked exactly like the empire. And at the same time Smuts made a notorious speech saying that blacks should be segregated from whites in South Africa. The implication was clear: that blacks should stay in their natural “whole” and not disturb the system. It clearly prefigured the arguments for apartheid.

And this was the central problem with the concept of the self-regulating system, one that was going to haunt it throughout the 20th century. It can be easily manipulated by those in power to enforce their view of the world, and then be used to justify holding that power stable.

Because, although Tansley and Smuts and their argument about power would be forgotten, hybrid combinations of their ideas were going to re-emerge later in the century – strange fusions of systems engineering and mystical visions of organic wholes.

Thirty years later, thousands of young Americans who were disenchanted with politics went off instead to set up their own experimental communities – the commune movement. And they turned to Arthur Tansley’s idea of the ecosystem as a model for how to create a human system of order within the communes.

But they also fused it with cybernetic ideas drawn from computer theory, and out of this came a vision of strong, independent humans linked, just like in nature, in a network that was held together through feedback. The commune dwellers mimicked the ecosystem idea in their house meetings where they all had to say exactly what was on their minds at that moment – so information flowed freely round the system. And through that the communes were supposed to stabilise themselves.

But they didn’t. In many communes across America in the late 1960s house meetings became vicious bullying sessions where the strong preyed mercilessly on the weak, and nobody was allowed to voice any objections. The rules of the self-organising system said that no coalitions or alliances were allowed because that was politics – and politics was bad. If you talk today to ex-commune members they tell horrific stories of coercion, violent intimidation and sexual oppression within these utopian communities, while the other commune members stood mutely watching, unable under the rules of the system to do anything to stop it.

Again, the central weakness of the self-organising system was dramatically demonstrated. Whether it was used for conservative or radical ends, it could not cope with power, which is one of the central dynamic forces in human society.

But at the very same time a new generation of ecologists began to question the very basis of Arthur Tansley’s idea of the self-regulating ecosystem. Out of this came a bloody battle within the science of ecology, with the new generation showing powerfully that wherever they looked in nature they found not stability, but constant, dynamic change; that Tansley’s idea of a underlying pattern of stability in nature was really a fantasy, not a scientific truth.

But in an age that was increasingly disillusioned with politics, the ghosts not just of Tansley but also of Smuts now began to re-emerge in epic form. In the late 70s an idea rose up that we – and everything else on the planet – are connected together in complex webs and networks. Out of it came epic visions of connectivity such as the Gaia theory and utopian ideas about the world wide web. And human beings believed that their duty was not to try to control the system, but to help it maintain its natural self-organising balance.

At the end of 1991 a giant experiment began in the Arizona desert. Its aim was to create from scratch a model for a whole self-organising world.

Biosphere 2 was a giant sealed world. Eight humans were locked in with a mass of flora and other fauna, and a balanced ecosystem was supposed to naturally emerge. But from the start it was completely unbalanced. The CO2 levels started soaring, so the experimenters desperately planted more green plants, but the CO2 continued to rise, then dissolved in the “ocean” and ate their precious coral reef. Millions of tiny mites attacked the vegetables and there was less and less food to eat. The men lost 18% of their body weight. Then millions of cockroaches took over. The moment the lights were turned out in the kitchen, hordes of roaches covered every surface. And it got worse – the oxygen in the world started to disappear and no one knew where it was going. The “bionauts” began to suffocate. And they began to hate one another – furious rows erupted that often ended with them spitting in one another’s faces. A psychiatrist was brought in to see if they had gone insane, but concluded simply that it was a struggle for power.

Then millions of ants appeared from nowhere and waged war on the cockroaches. In 1993 the experiment collapsed in chaos and hatred.

The idea of nature that underpinned all these visions of self-organisation was a fantasy. A fantasy that was born at a time when those who ran the British empire were desperately trying to cling on to power as the dynamic forces of history whirled around them. So they turned to science to create a vision of a static world where everything is stable and your moral duty is to make sure that nothing ever changes.

The other problem with the self-organising system is that it cannot deal with power. Although it sees human beings all linked together in a system, its fundamental rule is that they must remain separate individuals. Alliances and coalitions would compromise the precious autonomy of the individual, and destabilise the system.

And in a Newsnight studio on a March evening this year, this is what you could hear. Lucy Annson insisted again and again to Emily Maitlis that she was only a spokesperson for herself, and under the rules of the network no one could stand back and judge the system. Emily said: “You’re not a completely peaceful organisation.” Lucy came back with the killer line: “I don’t think anyone can make an assessment of that, other than the people involved in the actions themselves.”

What the anti-cuts movement has done without realising is adopt an idea of how to order the world without hierarchies, a machine theory that leads to a static managerialism. It may be very good for organising creative and self-expressive demonstrations, but it will never change the world.

At the end of Biosphere 2 the ants destroyed the cockroaches. They then proceeded to eat through the silicone seal that enclosed the world. Through collective action the ants worked together and effectively destroyed the existing system. They then marched off into the Arizona desert. Who knows what they got up to there.

Academic Adaptation and “The New Communications Climate” (Open the Echo Chamber blog)

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Posted by Edward R. Carr (31 May 2011)

[Original post here].

Andrew Revkin has a post up on Dot Earth that suggests some ways of rethinking scientific engagement with the press and the public.  The post is something of a distillation of a more detailed piece in the WMO Bulletin.  Revkin was kind enough to solicit my comments on the piece, as I have appeared in Dot Earth before in an effort to deal with this issue as it applies to the IPCC, and this post is something of a distillation of my initial rapid response.

First, I liked the message of these two pieces a lot, especially the push for a more holistic engagement with the public through different forms of media, including the press.  As Revkin rightly states, we need to “recognize that the old model of drafting a press release and waiting for the phone to ring is not the path to efficacy and impact.” Someone please tell my university communications office.

A lot of the problem stems from our lack of engagement with professionals in the messaging and marketing world.  As I said to the very gracious Rajendra Pachauri in an email exchange back when we had the whole “don’t talk to the media” controversy:

I am in no way denigrating your [PR] efforts. I am merely suggesting that there are people out there who spend their lives thinking about how to get messages out there, and control that message once it is out there. Just as we employ experts in our research and in these assessment reports precisely because they bring skills and training to the table that we lack, so too we must consider bringing in those with expertise in marketing and outreach.

I assume that a decent PR team would be thinking about multiple platforms of engagement, much as Revkin is suggesting.  However, despite the release of a new IPCC communications strategy, I’m not convinced that the IPCC (or much of the global change community more broadly) yet understands how desperately we need to engage with professionals on this front.  In some ways, there are probably good reasons for the lack of engagement with pros, or with the “new media.” For example, I’m not sure Twitter will help with managing climate change rumors/misinformation as it is released, if only because we are now too far behind the curve – things are so politicized that it is too late for “rapid response” to misinformation. I wish we’d been on this twenty years ago, though . . .

But this “behind the curve” mentality does not explain our lack of engagement.  Instead, I think there are a few other things lurking here.  For example, there is the issue of institutional politics. I love the idea of using new media/information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) to gather and communicate information, but perhaps not in the ways Revkin suggests.  I have a section later inDelivering Development that outlines how, using existing mobile tech in the developing world, we could both get better information about what is happening to the global poor (the point of my book is that, as I think I demonstrate in great detail, we actually have a very weak handle on what is going on in most parts of the developing world) and could empower the poor to take charge of efforts to address the various challenges, environmental, economic, political and social, that they face every day.  It seems to me, though, that the latter outcome is a terrifying prospect for some in development organizations, as this would create a much more even playing field of information that might force these organizations to negotiate with and take seriously the demands of the people with whom they are working.  Thus, I think we get a sort of ambiguity about ICT4D in development practice, where we seem thrilled by its potential, yet continue to ignore it in our actual programming.  This is not a technical problem – after all, we have the tech, and if we want to do this, we can – it is a problem of institutional politics.  I did not wade into a detailed description of the network I envision in the book because I meant to present it as a political challenge to a continued reticence on the part of many development organizations and practitioners to really engage the global poor (as opposed to tell them what they need and dump it on them).  But my colleagues and I have a detailed proposal for just such a network . . . and I think we will make it real one day.

Another, perhaps more significant barrier to major institutional shifts with regard to outreach is the a chicken-and-egg situation of limited budgets and a dominant academic culture that does not understand media/public engagement or politics very well and sees no incentive for engagement.  Revkin nicely hits on the funding problem as he moves past simply beating up on old-school models of public engagement:

As the IPCC prepares its Fifth Assessment Report, it does so with what, to my eye, appears to be an utterly inadequate budget for communicating its findings and responding in an agile way to nonstop public scrutiny facilitated by the Internet.

However, as much as I agree with this point (and I really, really agree), the problem here is not funding unto itself – it is the way in which a lack of funding erases an opportunity for cultural change that could have a positive feedback effect on the IPCC, global assessments, and academia more generally that radically alters all three. The bulk of climate science, as well as social impact studies, come from academia – which has a very particular culture of rewards.  Virtually nobody in academia is trained to understand that they can get rewarded for being a public intellectual, for making one’s work accessible to a wide community – and if I am really honest, there are many places that actively discourage this engagement.  But there is a culture change afoot in academia, at least among some of us, that could be leveraged right now – and this is where funding could trigger a positive feedback loop.

Funding matters because once you get a real outreach program going, productive public engagement would result in significant personal, intellectual and financial benefits for the participants that I believe could result in very rapid culture change.  My twitter account has done more for the readership of my blog, and for my awareness of the concerns and conversations of the non-academic development world, than anything I have ever done before – this has been a remarkable personal and intellectual benefit of public engagement for me.  As universities continue to retrench, faculty find themselves ever-more vulnerable to downsizing, temporary appointments, and a staggering increase in administrative workload (lots of tasks distributed among fewer and fewer full-time faculty).  I fully expect that without some sort of serious reversal soon, I will retire thirty-odd years hence as an interesting and very rare historical artifact – a professor with tenure.  Given these pressures, I have been arguing to my colleagues that we must engage with the public and with the media to build constituencies for what we do beyond our academic communities.  My book and my blog are efforts to do just this – to become known beyond the academy such that I, as a public intellectual, have leverage over my university, and not the other way around.  And I say this as someone who has been very successful in the traditional academic model.  I recognize that my life will need to be lived on two tracks now – public and academic – if I really want to help create some of the changes in the world that I see as necessary.

But this is a path I started down on my own, for my own idiosyncratic reasons – to trigger a wider change, we cannot assume that my academic colleagues will easily shed the value systems in which they were intellectually raised, and to which they have been held for many, many years.  Without funding to get outreach going, and demonstrate to this community that changing our model is not only worthwhile, but enormously valuable, I fear that such change will come far more slowly than the financial bulldozers knocking on the doors of universities and colleges across the country.  If the IPCC could get such an effort going, demonstrate how public outreach improved the reach of its results, enhanced the visibility and engagement of its participants, and created a path toward the progressive politics necessary to address the challenge of climate change, it would be a powerful example for other assessments.  Further, the participants in these assessments would return to their campuses with evidence for the efficacy and importance of such engagement . . . and many of these participants are senior members of their faculties, in a position to midwife major cultural changes in their institutions.

All this said, this culture change will not be birthed without significant pains.  Some faculty and members of these assessments will want nothing to do with the murky world of politics, and prefer to continue operating under the illusion that they just produce data and have no responsibility for how it is used.  And certainly the assessments will fear “politicization” . . . to which I respond “too late.”  The question is not if the findings of an assessment will be politicized, but whether or not those who best understand those findings will engage in these very consequential debates and argue for what they feel is the most rigorous interpretation of the data at hand.  Failure to do so strikes me as dereliction of duty.  On the other hand, just as faculty might come to see why public engagement is important for their careers and the work they do, universities will be gripped with contradictory impulses – a publicly-engaged faculty will serve as a great justification for faculty salaries, increased state appropriations, new facilities, etc.  Then again, nobody likes to empower the labor, as it were . . .

In short, in thinking about public engagement and the IPCC, Revkin is dredging up a major issue related to all global assessments, and indeed the practices of academia.  I think there is opportunity here – and I feel like we must seize this opportunity.  We can either guide a process of change to a productive end, or ride change driven by others wherever it might take us.  I prefer the former.

Scientists Cry Foul Over Report Criticizing National Science Foundation (msnbc.com)

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By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43187678

A report released by the office of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) distorts the goals and purposes of National Science Foundation-funded (NSF) research in an effort to paint the agency as wasteful, scientists say.

Coburn released “The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope” May 26, raising “serious questions regarding the agency’s management and priorities,” according to Coburn’s office. But scientists whose research is targeted in the report say Coburn has oversimplified or otherwise misrepresented their work. [Infographic: Science Spending in the Federal Budget ]

“Good Lord!” Texas A&M psychologist Gerianne Alexander, whose work on hormones and infant development appears in the report, wrote in an email to LiveScience. “The summary of the funded research is very inaccurate.”

This isn’t the first time politicians have taken aim at the NSF in the name of deficit reduction. In December 2010, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.) called for citizens to review NSF grants and highlighted a few projects he viewed as wasteful, including research meant to evaluate productivity.

NSF’s entire budget of approximately $7 billion represents about one-half of 1 percent of the projected 2011 federal deficit.

Funding and review

The new report acknowledges that NSF has funded research leading to innovations ranging from the Internet to bar codes. NSF also runs a rigorous evaluation process when choosing to fund grants. Each year, the agency receives more than 45,000 competitive proposals, NSF spokesperson Maria Zacharias told LiveScience in December. NSF funds about 11,500 of those, Zacharias said.

However, according to a review by Coburn’s staff, the senator is unconvinced that NSF is making the right decisions.

“It is not the intent of this report to suggest that there is no utility associated with these research efforts,” the report reads. “The overarching question to ask, however, is simple. Are these projects the best possible use of our tax dollars, particularly in our current fiscal crisis?”

Science out of context

Scientists say Coburn’s office fails to put their research into context, often choosing silly-sounding projects to characterize entire research programs.

Alexander’s work, for example, is characterized as a $480,000 experiment meant to discover “if boys like trucks and girls like dolls.” According to the report, scientists could have saved their time by “talking to any new parent.”

In fact, Alexander said, the research project is more complicated.

“The grant supports research asking whether the postnatal surge in testosterone levels in early infancy contributes to the development of human behavior,” she said. “This is not a trivial issue.” [Read: The Truth About Genderless Babies ]

That’s because some preliminary evidence suggests that disruptions in hormones like testosterone can alter behavior, Alexander said, potentially contributing to the development of disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism.

Toy choice is a way to measure sex differences in behavior, because babies tend to choose stereotyped boy-girl toys early on, Alexander said. She and her team measure infant hormone levels and look for effects on behavior, activity levels, temperament and verbal development.

Likewise, a much-ballyhooed project that put shrimp on a treadmill was part of research intended to find out how marine animals will cope with increased environmental stress.

Robot laundry?

Coburn focused much of the report on social science research. But the report also questions several robotics projects, including a robot that can fold laundry. The report mocks the research, noting that it takes the robot 25 minutes to fold a single towel.

In fact, the $1.5 million NSF grant went not to teach robots how to do slow-motion laundry, but to learn how to make robots that can interact with complex objects, said lead researcher Pieter Abbeel of UC Berkeley. The towel-folding, which came six months into a four-year project, was an ideal challenge, Abbeel said, because folding a soft, deformable towel is very different from the pick-up-this-bolt, screw-in-this-screw tasks that current robots can perform.

“Towel-folding is just a first, small step toward a new generation of robotic devices that could, for example, significantly increase the independence of elderly and sick people, protect our soldiers in combat, improve the delivery of government services and a host of other applications that would revolutionize our day-to-day lives,” Abbeel wrote in an email to LiveScience.

Overseeing basic science

“It’s legitimate to ask what kind of scientific research is important and what isn’t,” said John Hibbing, a professor of political science whose research on the genetics of political leaningsappeared in Coburn’s report. However, Hibbing expressed doubt that Coburn’s nonscientific review process could meet that goal.

“I sympathize with the desire to identify things that are silly and not useful,” Hibbing told LiveScience. “But I’m not sure he’s identified a really practical strategy to distinguish between the two.”

Genes, germs and the origins of politics (New Scientist)

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NS 2813: Genes, germs and the origins of politics

* 18 May 2011 by Jim Giles

A controversial new theory claims fear of infection makes the difference between democracy and dictatorship

COMPARE these histories. In Britain, democracy evolved steadily over hundreds of years. During the same period, people living in what is now Somalia had many rulers, but almost all deprived them of the chance to vote. It’s easy to find other stark contrasts. Citizens of the United States can trace their right to vote back to the end of the 18th century. In Syria, many citizens cannot trace their democratic rights anywhere – they are still waiting for the chance to take part in a meaningful election.

Conventional explanations for the existence of such contrasting political regimes involve factors such as history, geography, and the economic circumstances and culture of the people concerned, to name just a few. But the evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill has a different idea. He says that the nature of the political system that holds sway in a particular country – whether it is a repressive dictatorship or a liberal democracy – may be determined in large part by a single factor: the prevalence of infectious disease.

It’s an idea that many people will find outrageously simplistic. How can something as complex as political culture be explained by just one environmental factor? Yet nobody has managed to debunk it, and its proponents are coming up with a steady flow of evidence in its favour. “It’s rather astonishing, and it could be true,” says Carlos Navarrete, a psychologist at the Michigan State University in East
Lansing.

Thornhill is no stranger to controversy, having previously co-authored A Natural History of Rape, a book proposing an evolutionary basis for rape. His iconoclastic theory linking disease to politics was inspired in part by observations of how an animal’s development and behaviour can respond rapidly to physical dangers in a region, often in unexpected ways. Creatures at high risk of being eaten by predators, for example, often reach sexual maturity at a younger age than genetically similar creatures in a safer environment, and are more likely to breed earlier in their lives. Thornhill wondered whether threats to human lives might have similarly influential consequences to our psychology.

The result is a hypothesis known as the parasite-stress model, which Thornhill developed at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, with his colleague Corey Fincher.

 

 

Xenophobic instincts

The starting point for Thornhill and Fincher’s thinking is a basic human survival instinct: the desire to avoid illness. In a region where disease is rife, they argue, fear of contagion may cause people to avoid outsiders, who may be carrying a strain of infection to which they have no immunity. Such a mindset would tend to make a community as a whole xenophobic, and might also discourage interaction between the various groups within a society – the social classes, for instance – to prevent unnecessary contact that might spread disease. What is more, Thornhill and Fincher argue, it could encourage people to conform to social norms and to respect authority, since adventurous behaviour may flout rules of conduct set in place to prevent contamination.

Taken together, these attitudes would discourage the rich and influential from sharing their wealth and power with those around them, and inhibit the rest of the population from going against the status quo and questioning the authority of those above them. This is clearly not a situation conducive to democracy. When the threat of disease eases, however, these influences no longer hold sway, allowing forces that favour a more democratic social order to come to the fore.

That’s the idea, anyway. But where is the evidence?

The team had some initial support from earlier studies that had explored how a fear of disease affects individual attitudes. In 2006, for example, Navarrete found that when people are prompted to think about disgusting objects, such as spoilt food, they become more likely to express nationalistic values and show a greater distrust of foreigners (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 27, p 270). More recently, a team from Arizona State University in Tempe found that reading about contagious illnesses made people less adventurous and open to new experiences, suggesting that they have become more inward looking and conformist (Psychological Science, vol 21, p 440).

Temporarily shifting individual opinions is one thing, but Thornhill and Fincher needed to show that these same biases could change the social outlook of a whole society. Their starting point for doing so was a description of cultural attitudes called the “collectivist-individualist” scale. At one end of this scale lies the collectivist outlook, in which people place the overall good of society ahead of the freedom of action of the individuals within it. Collectivist societies are often, though not exclusively, characterised by a greater respect for authority – if it’s seen as being necessary for the greater good. They also tend to be xenophobic and conformist. At the other end there is the individualist viewpoint, which has more emphasis on openness and freedom for the individual.

Pathogen peril

In 2008, the duo teamed up with Damian Murray and Mark Schaller of the University of British  Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, to test the idea that societies with more pathogens would be more collectivist. They rated people in 98 different nations and regions, from Estonia  to Ecuador, on the collectivist-individualist scale, using data from questionnaires and studies of linguistic cues that can betray a social outlook. Sure enough, they saw a correlation: the greater the threat of disease in a region, the more collectivist people’s attitudes were (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 275, p 1279). The correlation remained even when they controlled for potential confounding factors, such as wealth and urbanisation.

A study soon followed showing similar patterns when comparing US states. In another paper, Murray and Schaller examined a different set of data and showed that cultural differences in one collectivist trait – conformity – correlate strongly with disease prevalence (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 37, p 318).

Thornhill and Fincher’s next challenge was to find evidence linking disease prevalence not just with cultural attitudes but with the political systems they expected would go with them. To do so, they used a 66-point scale of pathogen prevalence, based on data assembled by the Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Online Network. They then compared their data set with indicators that assess the politics of a country. Democracy is a tough concept to quantify, so the team looked at a few different measures, including the Freedom House Survey, which is based on the subjective judgements of a team of political scientists working for an independent American think tank, and the Index of Democratization, which is based on estimates of voter participation (measured by how much of a population cast their votes and the number of referendums offered to a population) and the amount of competition between political parties.

The team’s results, published in 2009, showed that each measure varied strongly with pathogen prevalence, just as their model predicted (Biological Reviews, vol 84, p 113). For example, when considering disease prevalence, Somalia is 22nd on the list of nations, while the UK comes in 177th. The two countries come out at opposite ends of the democratic scale (see “An infectious idea”).

Importantly, the relationship still holds when you look at historical records of pathogen prevalence. This, together with those early psychological studies of immediate reactions to disease, suggests it is a nation’s health driving its political landscape, and not the other way around, according to the team.

Last year, they published a second paper that used more detailed data of the diseases prevalent in each region. They again found that measures of collectivism and democracy correlate with the presence of diseases that are passed from human to human – though not with the prevalence of diseases transmitted directly from animals to humans, like rabies (Evolutionary Psychology, vol 8, p 151). Since collectivist behaviours would be less important for preventing such infections, this finding fits with Thornhill and Fincher’s hypothesis.

“Thornhill’s work strikes me as interesting and promising,” says Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who was unaware of it before we contacted him. He notes that it is consistent with his own finding that a society needs to have a degree of economic security before democracy can develop. Perhaps this goes hand in hand with a reduction in disease prevalence to signal the move away from collectivism, he suggests.

Inglehart’s comments nevertheless highlights a weakness in the evidence so far assembled in support of the parasite-stress model. An association between disease prevalence and democracy does not necessarily mean that one drives the other. Some other factor may drive both the prevalence of disease in an area and its political system. In their 2009 paper, Thornhill and Fincher managed to eliminate some of the possible “confounders”. For example, they showed that neither a country’s overall wealth nor the way it is distributed can adequately explain the link between the prevalence of disease there and how democratic it is.

But many other possibilities remain. For example, pathogens tend to be more prevalent in the tropics, so perhaps warmer climates encourage collectivism. Also, many of the nations that score high for disease and low for democracy are in sub-Saharan Africa, and have a history of having been colonised, and of frequent conflict and foreign exploitation since independence. Might the near-constant threat of war better explain that region’s autocratic governments? There’s also the possibility that education and literacy would have an impact, since better educated people may be more likely to question authority and demand their rights to a democracy. Epidemiologist Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine thinks such factors might be the ones that count, and says the evidence so far does not make the parasite-stress theory any more persuasive than these explanations.

Furthermore, some nations buck the trend altogether. Take the US and Syria, for example: they have sharply contrasting political systems but an almost identical prevalence of disease. Though even the harshest critic of the theory would not expect a perfect correlation, such anomalies require some good explanations.

Also lacking so far in their analysis is a coherent account of how historical changes in the state of public health are linked to political change. If Thornhill’s theory is correct, improvements in a nation’s health should lead to noticeable changes in social outlook. Evidence consistent with this idea comes from the social revolution of the 1960s in much of western Europe and North America, which involved a shift from collectivist towards individualist thinking. This was preceded by improvements in public health in the years following the second world war – notably the introduction of penicillin, mass vaccination and better malaria control.

There are counter-examples, too. It is not clear whether the opening up of European society during the 18th century was preceded by any major improvements in people’s health, for example. Nor is there yet any clear evidence linking the current pro-democracy movements in the Middle East and north Africa to changes in disease prevalence. The theory also predicts that episodes such as the recent worldwide swine-flu epidemic should cause a shift away from democracy and towards authoritarian, collectivist attitudes. Yet as Holly Arrow, a psychologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, points out, no effect has been recorded.

Mysterious mechanisms

To make the theory stick, Thornhill and his collaborators will also need to provide a mechanism for their proposed link between pathogens and politics. If cultural changes are responsible, young people might learn to avoid disease – and outsiders – from the behaviour of those around them. Alternatively, the reaction could be genetically hard-wired. So far, it has not proved possible to eliminate any of the possible mechanisms. “It’s an enormous set of unanswered questions. I expect it will take many years to explore,” Schaller says.

One possible genetic explanation involves 5-HTTLPR, a gene that regulates levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. People carrying the short form of the gene are more likely to be anxious and to be fearful of health risks, relative to those with the long version. These behaviours could be a life-saver if they help people avoid situations that would put them at risk of infection, so it might be expected that the short version of the gene is favoured in parts of the world where disease risk is high. People with the longer version of 5-HTTLPR, on the other hand, tend to have higher levels of serotonin and are therefore more extrovert and more prone to risk-taking. This could bring advantages such as an increased capacity to innovate, so the long form of the gene should be more
common in regions relatively free from illness.

That pattern is exactly what neuroscientists Joan Chiao and Katherine Blizinsky at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have reported in a paper published last year. Significantly, nations where the short version of the gene is more common also tend to have more collectivist attitudes (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 277, p 529).

It is only tentative evidence, and some doubt that Chiao and Blizinsky’s findings are robust enough to support their conclusions (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 278, p 329). But if the result pans out with further research, it suggests the behaviours involved in the parasite-stress model may be deeply ingrained in our genetic make-up, providing a hurdle to more rapid political change in certain areas. While no one is saying that groups with a higher proportion of short versions of the gene will never develop a democracy, the possibility that some societies are more genetically predisposed to it than others is nevertheless an uncomfortable idea to contemplate.

Should the biases turn out to be more temporary – if flexible psychological reactions to threat, or cultural learning, are the more important mechanisms – the debate might turn to potential implications of the theory. Projects aiming to improve medical care in poor countries might also lead a move to more democratic and open governments, for example, giving western governments another incentive to fund these schemes. “The way to develop a region is to emancipate it from parasites,” says Thornhill.

Remarks like that seem certain to attract flak. Curtis, for instance, bristled a little when New Scientist put the idea to her, pointing out that the immediate threat to human life is a pressing enough reason to be concerned about infectious disease.

Thornhill still has a huge amount of work ahead of him if he is to provide a convincing case that will assuage all of these doubts. In the meantime, his experience following publication of A Natural History of Rape has left him prepared for a hostile reception. “I had threats by email and phone,” he recalls. “You’re sometimes going to hurt people’s feelings. I consider it all in a day’s work.”

Jim Giles is a New Scientist correspondent based in San Francisco

The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing

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From an interesting call for papers:

“Scientists spend a lot of time testing a hypothesis, and classifying experimental results as (in)significant evidence. But even after a century of hot debate, there is no consensus on what this concept of significance implies, how the results of hypothesis tests should be interpreted, and which practical pitfalls have to be avoided. Take the fierce criticisms of significance testing in economics, take the endless debate about statistical reform in psychology, take the foundational disagreement between frequentists and Bayesians about what constitutes statistical evidence.”

(Link to the conference here).

Ordem no caos (FAPESP)

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31/05/2011

Por Elton Alisson

Pesquisadores desenvolvem modelo teórico para explicar e determinar as condições para a ocorrência de sincronização isócrona em sistemas caóticos. Estudo pode levar à melhoria de sistemas como o de telecomunicações.

Agência FAPESP – Na natureza, enxames de vaga-lumes enviam sinais luminosos uns para os outros. Isso é feito inicialmente de forma autônoma, individual e independente e, sob determinadas circunstâncias, pode dar origem a um fenômeno robusto de natureza coletiva chamado sincronização. Como resultado, milhares de vaga-lumes piscam em uníssono, de forma ritmada, emitindo sinais luminosos em sincronia com os demais.

Há pouco mais de 20 anos se descobriu que a sincronização também ocorre em sistemas caóticos – sistemas complexos de comportamento imprevisível nas mais variadas áreas, como economia, clima ou agricultura. Outra descoberta mais recente foi que a sincronização resiste a atrasos na propagação de sinais emitidos.

Nessas situações, sob determinadas circunstâncias, a sincronização pode emergir em sua forma isócrona, isto é, com atraso zero. Isso significa que equipamentos como osciladores estão perfeitamente sincronizados no tempo, mesmo recebendo sinais atrasados dos demais. Entretanto, os modelos teóricos desenvolvidos para explicar o fenômeno não levaram esse fato em consideração até o momento.

Uma nova pesquisa realizada por cientistas do Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA) e do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Inpe) resultou em um modelo teórico para demonstrar como a sincronização ocorre quando há atraso na emissão e no recebimento de informação entre osciladores caóticos.

Os resultados do estudo, que podem ser utilizados para aprimorar sistemas tecnológicos, foram publicados em abril no periódico Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical.

Durante o estudo, os pesquisadores buscaram explicar a sincronização quando há atraso no recebimento da informação entre os osciladores caóticos. O objetivo é determinar as condições sob as quais o fenômeno ocorre em sistemas reais.

“Utilizando a teoria da estabilidade de Lyapunov-Krasovskii, que trata do problema da estabilidade em sistemas dinâmicos, estabelecemos critérios de estabilidade que, a partir de parâmetros como o tempo de atraso no recebimento das informações entre os osciladores, permitem determinar se os osciladores entrarão em estado de sincronização isócrona”, disse um dos autores do artigo, José Mario Vicensi Grzybowski, à Agência FAPESP.

“Foi a primeira demonstração de forma totalmente analítica da estabilidade da sincronização isócrona. Não há similares na literatura”, afirmou Grzybowski, que realiza trabalho de doutorado em engenharia eletrônica e computação no ITA com Bolsa da FAPESP.

As descobertas do estudo poderão possibilitar o aprimoramento de sistemas tecnológicos baseados em sincronização, especialmente em sistemas de telecomunicação baseados em caos.

Além disso, entre as possíveis aplicações estão os satélites em formação de voo, em que um precisa manter uma distância relativa adequada em relação aos outros e, ao mesmo tempo, estabelecer um referencial (sincronização) que permita o intercâmbio de informações, coleta e combinação eletrônica de imagens oriundas dos diversos satélites da formação.

“Nesse caso, o referencial pode ser estabelecido por meio de um fenômeno que emerge naturalmente desde que as condições apropriadas sejam proporcionadas, diminuindo ou até dispensando o uso de algoritmos”, disse.

Redes complexas naturais

Veículos aéreos não tripulados, que podem explorar uma determinada região em conjunto, além de robôs e sistemas de controle distribuídos, que também precisam trabalhar de forma coordenada em uma rede, podem utilizar os resultados da pesquisa.

Os autores do estudo também pretendem fazer com que o fenômeno da sincronização ocorra em sistemas tecnológicos sem a necessidade de existir um líder que oriente a forma como os outros agentes osciladores devem se comportar.

“Pretendemos eliminar a figura do líder e fazer com que a sincronização ocorra em função da interação entre os agentes, como ocorre com uma espécie de vaga-lumes na Ásia, que entra em sincronização sem que um deles lidere”, disse Elbert Einstein Macau, pesquisador do Inpe e outro autor do estudo, do qual participou também Takashi Yoneyama, do ITA.

Segundo eles, nessa pesquisa foi analisada a sincronização com um atraso de tempo na transmissão da informação entre dois osciladores. Mas no trabalho que desenvolvem atualmente os resultados serão expandidos para uma rede de osciladores de modo a ampliar a escala do problema, e de sua solução.

Dessa forma, segundo eles, será possível modelar fenômenos baseados na sincronização isócrona em escala de rede e contemplar fenômenos naturais que apresentam nível de complexidade muitas vezes superior.

“Em princípio, qualquer fenômeno real que se baseia na sincronização isócrona poderá ser tratado a partir desses elementos teóricos, que podem servir para projetos de redes tecnológicas, ou para analisar e compreender comportamentos emergentes em redes naturais, mesmo naquelas em que não temos formas de influir diretamente”, disse Grzybowski.

O artigo Stability of isochronal chaos synchronization (doi:10.1088/1751-8113/44/17/175103) pode ser lido em http://iopscience.iop.org/1751-8121/44/17/175103/pdf/1751-8121_44_17_175103.pdf

Confronting the ‘Anthropocene’ (N.Y. Times)

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May 11, 2011, 9:39 AM
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
N.Y. Times, Dot Earth

NASA. Donald R. Pettit, an astronaut, took this photograph of London while living in the International Space Station.

LONDON — I’m participating in a one-day meeting at the Geological Society of London exploring the evidence for, and meaning of, the Anthropocene. This is the proposed epoch of Earth history that, proponents say, has begun with the rise of the human species as a globally potent biogeophysical force, capable of leaving a durable imprint in the geological record.

This recent TEDx video presentation by Will Steffen, the executive director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, lays out the basic idea:

There’s more on the basic concept in National Geographic and from the BBC. Paul Crutzen, the Nobel laureate in chemistry who, with others, proposed the term in 2000, and Christian Schwägerl, the author of “The Age of Man” (German), described the value of this new framing for current Earth history in January in Yale Environment 360:

Students in school are still taught that we are living in the Holocence, an era that began roughly 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. But teaching students that we are living in the Anthropocene, the Age of Men, could be of great help. Rather than representing yet another sign of human hubris, this name change would stress the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as stewards of the Earth. It would highlight the immense power of our intellect and our creativity, and the opportunities they offer for shaping the future. [Read the rest.]

I’m attending because of a quirky role I played almost 20 years ago in laying the groundwork for this concept of humans as a geological force. A new paper from Steffen and three coauthors reviewing the conceptual and historic basis for the Anthropocene includes an appropriately amusing description of my role:

Biologist Eugene F. Stoermer wrote: ‘I began using the term “anthropocene” in the 1980s, but never formalized it until Paul [Crutzen] contacted me’. About this time other authors were exploring the concept of the Anthropocene, although not using the term. More curiously, a popular book about Global Warming, published in 1992 by Andrew C. Revkin, contained the following prophetic words: ‘Perhaps earth scientists of the future will name this new post-Holocene period for its causative element—for us. We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene [sic]. After all, it is a geological age of our own making’. Perhaps many readers ignored the minor linguistic difference and have read the new term as Anthro(po)cene!

If you’ve been tracking my work for a while, you’re aware of my focus on the extraordinary nature of this moment in both Earth and human history. As far as science can tell, there’s never, until now, been a point when a species became a planetary powerhouse and also became aware of that situation.

As I first wrote in 1992, cyanobacteria are credited with oxygenating the atmosphere some 2 billion years ago. That was clearly a more profound influence on a central component of the planetary system than humans raising the concentration of carbon dioxide 40 percent since the start of the industrial revolution. But, as far as we know, cyanobacteria (let alone any other life form from that period) were neither bemoaning nor celebrating that achievement.

It was easier to be in a teen-style resource binge before science began to delineate an edge to our petri dish.

We no longer have the luxury of ignorance.

We’re essentially in a race between our potency, our awareness of the expressed and potential ramifications of our actions and our growing awareness of the deeply embedded perceptual and behavioral traits that shape how we do, or don’t, address certain kinds of risks. (Explore “Boombustology” and “Disasters by Design” to be reminded how this habit is not restricted to environmental risks.)

This meeting in London is two-pronged. It is in part focused on deepening basic inquiry into stratigraphy and other branches of earth science and clarifying how this human era could qualify as a formal chapter in Earth’s physical biography. As Erle C. Ellis, an ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, put it in his talk, it’s unclear for the moment whether humanity’s impact will be long enough to represent an epoch, or will more resemble “an event.” Ellis’s presentation was a mesmerizing tour of the planet’s profoundly humanized ecosystems, which he said would be better described as “anthromes” than “biomes.”

Ellis said it was important to approach this reality not as a woeful situation, but an opportunity to foster a new appreciation of the lack of separation of people and their planet and a bright prospect for enriching that relationship. In this his views resonate powerfully with those of Rene Dubos, someone I’ll be writing about here again soon.

Through the talks by Ellis and others, it was clear that the scientific effort to define a new geological epoch, while important, paled beside the broader significance of this juncture in human history.

In my opening comments at the meeting, I stressed the need to expand the discussion from the physical and environmental sciences into disciplines ranging from sociology to history, philosophy to the arts.

I noted that while the “great acceleration” described by Steffen and others is already well under way, it’s entirely possible for humans to design their future, at least in a soft way, boosting odds that the geological record will have two phases — perhaps a “lesser” and “greater” Anthropocene, as someone in the audience for my recent talk with Brad Allenby at Arizona State University put it.

I also noted that the term “Anthropocene,” like phrases such as “global warming,” is sufficiently vague to guarantee it will be interpreted in profoundly different ways by people with different world views. (As I explained, this is as true for Nobel laureates in physics as it is for the rest of us.)

Some will see this period as a “shame on us” moment. Others will deride this effort as a hubristic overstatement of human powers. Some will argue for the importance of living smaller and leaving no scars. Others will revel in human dominion as a normal and natural part of our journey as a species.

A useful trait will be to get comfortable with that diversity.

Before the day is done I also plan on pushing Randy Olson’s notion of moving beyond the “nerd loop” and making sure this conversation spills across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries from the get-go.

There’s much more to explore of course, and I’ll post updates as time allows. You might track the meeting hash tag, #anthrop11, on Twitter.

Como a Linguagem Modela o Pensamento (Scientific American Brasil)

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Diferentes idiomas afetam de maneiras distintas a percepção do mundo

por Lera Boroditsky
Scientific American Brasil – edição 106 – Março 2011

Estou diante de uma menina de 5 anos em pormpuraaw, uma pequena comunidade aborígene na borda oeste do Cabo York, no norte da Austrália Quando peço para ela me mostrar o norte, ela aponta com precisão e sem hesitação. A bússola confirma que ela está certa. Mais tarde, de volta a uma sala de conferências na Stanford University, faço o mesmo pedido a um público de ilustres acadêmicos, ganhadores de medalhas de ciência e prêmios de gênios. Peço-lhes para fechar os olhos (para que não nos enganem) e apontem o norte. Muitos se recusam por não saberem a resposta. Aqueles que fazem questão de se demorar um pouco para refletir sobre o assunto, em seguida apontam em todas as direções possíveis. Venho repetindo esse exercício em Harvard e Princeton e em Moscou, Londres e Pequim, sempre com os mesmos resultados.

Uma criança de cinco anos de idade em uma cultura pode fazer algo com facilidade que cientistas eminentes de outras culturas lutam para conseguir. O que poderia explicar isso? Parece que a resposta surpreendente é a linguagem.

A noção de que diferentes idiomas possam transmitir diferentes habilidades cognitivas remonta a séculos. Desde 1930, essa associação foi indicada pelos linguistas americanos Edward Sapir e Benjamin Lee Whorf, que estudaram como as línguas variam, e propuseram maneiras pelas quais os falantes de idiomas distintos podem pensar de forma diferente. Na década de 70, muitos cientistas ficaram decepcionados com a hipótese de Sapir-Whorf, e ela foi praticamente abandonada. Mas agora, décadas depois, um sólido corpo de evidências empíricas demonstrando como os diferentes idiomas modelam o pensamento finalmente emergiu. As evidências derrubam o dogma de longa data sobre a universalidade e rendem visões fascinantes sobre as origens do conhecimento e a construção da realidade. Os resultados têm implicações relevantes para o direito, a política e a educação.

Ao redor do mundo, as pessoas se comunicam usando uma deslumbrante variedade de idiomas – mais ou menos 7 mil ao todo –, e cada um deles exige condições muito diferentes de seus falantes. Suponha, por exemplo, que eu queira dizer que vi a peça Tio Vânia na Rua 42. Em mian, língua falada em Papua, Nova Guiné, o verbo que usei revelaria se o evento acabou de acontecer, aconteceu ontem ou em passado remoto, enquanto na Indonésia, o verbo não denotaria sequer se o evento já aconteceu ou ainda está para acontecer. Em russo, o verbo revelaria o meu gênero. Em mandarim, eu teria de especificar se o tio do título é materno ou paterno e se ele está relacionado por laços de sangue ou de casamento, porque há vocábulos diferentes para todos esses tipos diferentes de tios e assim por diante (ele é irmão da mãe, como a tradução chinesa claramente expressa). E em pirarrã, língua falada no Amazonas, eu não poderia dizer “42”, porque não há palavras que expressem números exatos, apenas vocábulos para “poucos” e “muitos”.

Pesquisas em meu laboratório e em vários outros vêm descobrindo como a linguagem molda até mesmo as dimensões mais fundamentais da experiência humana: espaço, tempo, causalidade e relacionamentos com os outros.

Voltemos a Pormpuraaw. Ao contrário do inglês, o kuuk thaayorre, idioma falado em Pormpuraaw não usa termos relativos ao espaço como esquerda e direita. Em vez disso, os falantes de kuuk thaayorre conversam em termos de pontos cardeais absolutos (norte, sul, leste, oeste, e assim por diante). Claro que, em inglês também há termos designando os pontos cardeais, mas apenas em grandes escalas espaciais. Não diríamos, por exemplo: “Eles colocaram os garfos de sobremesa a sudeste dos garfos grandes.” Mas em kuuk thaayorre os pontos cardeais são usados em todas as escalas. Isso significa que acaba se dizendo coisas como “o copo está a sudeste do prato” ou “o menino em pé ao sul de Mary é meu irmão”. Em Pormpuraaw, deve-se estar permanentemente orientado, apenas para conseguir falar corretamente.

Além disso, o trabalho inovador realizado por Stephen C. Levinson, do Instituto Max Planck de Psicolinguística, em Nijmegen, na Holanda, e John B. Haviland, da University of California em San Diego, durante as duas últimas décadas têm demonstrado que falantes de idiomas que se valem de direções absolutas são especialmente bons em manter o registro de onde estão, mesmo em paisagens desconhecidas ou no interior de edifícios estranhos. Eles fazem isso melhor que quem vive nos mesmos ambientes, mas não falam essas línguas.

Pessoas que pensam de modo diferente sobre o espaço também são suscetíveis a pensar de forma diferente sobre o tempo. Por exemplo, minha colega Alice Gaby, da University of California em Berkeley e eu demos aos falantes de kuuk thaayorre conjuntos de fotos que mostravam progressões temporais: o envelhecimento de um homem, o crescimento de um crocodilo, uma banana sendo consumida. Em seguida, pedimos que organizassem as imagens embaralhadas no chão para indicar a sequência temporal correta.

Testamos cada pessoa duas vezes, cada vez elas olhavam para um ponto cardeal diferente. Os falantes de inglês que recebem esta tarefa vão organizar as cartas de modo que o passar do tempo seja da esquerda para a direita. Os de língua hebraica tenderão a colocar as cartas da direita para a esquerda. Isso mostra que a direção da escrita em uma linguagem influencia a forma como organizamos o tempo. Os kuuk thaayorre, porém, rotineiramente não organizam as cartas da esquerda para a direita ou da direita para a esquerda. Eles as arrumaram de leste para o oeste. Isto é, quando estavam sentados de frente para o sul, as cartas ficaram da esquerda para a direita. Quando encaravam o norte, as cartas ficaram da direita para a esquerda. Quando olhavam para o leste, as cartas vinham na direção do corpo, e assim por diante. Nunca dissemos a ninguém que direção eles estavam encarando – os thaayorre kuuk já sabiam disso e espontaneamente usaram essa orientação espacial para construir suas representações do tempo.

As representações do tempo variam de muitas outras maneiras pelo mundo. Por exemplo, os falantes de inglês consideram que o futuro fica “adiante” e o passado “para trás”. Em 2010, Lynden Miles da University of Aberdeen, na Escócia, e seus colegas descobriram que os falantes de inglês, inconscientemente, balançam seus corpos para a frente, ao pensar no futuro, e, para trás, ao considerar o passado. Mas em aimará, um idioma falado na cordilheira dos Andes, dizem que o passado está à frente e o futuro atrás. E a linguagem corporal dos falantes de aimará corresponde ao seu modo de falar: em 2006, Rafael Núñez, da University of Califórnia em San Diego e Eve Sweetser, da mesmo universidade, no campus de Berkeley, descobriram que os aimarás gesticulam na frente deles quando falam do passado, e atrás deles
quando discutem o futuro.

Lembrando “quem fez o quê?”
Os falantes de línguas diferentes também diferem na forma como descrevem os eventos e podem se lembrar bem de quem fez o quê. Todos os acontecimentos, mesmo os acidentes ocorridos em frações de segundos, são complexos e exigem que analisemos e interpretemos o que aconteceu. Tomemos, por exemplo, o caso do ex-vice- presidente Dick Cheney na caça de codornas, na qual, ele atirou em Harry Whittington, por acidente. Pode-se dizer que “Cheney atirou em Whittington” (em que Cheney é a causa direta), ou “Whittington foi baleado por Cheney” (distanciando Cheney do resultado), ou “Whittington levou um bom chumbinho” (deixando Cheney totalmente de fora). O próprio Cheney disse: “Resumindo, eu sou o cara que puxou o gatilho que disparou a bala que atingiu Harry”, interpondo uma longa cadeia de ações entre ele e o resultado. A fala do então presidente George Bush: “Ele ouviu um movimento de pássaro, virou-se, puxou o gatilho e viu seu amigo se ferir”, foi uma desculpa ainda mais magistral, transformando Cheney de agente a mera testemunha em menos de uma frase.

Minha aluna Caitlin M. Fausey e eu descobrimos que diferenças linguísticas influenciam o modo pelo qual as pessoas analisam o que aconteceu e exercem consequências na memória de testemunhas. Em nossos estudos, publicados em 2010, falantes de inglês, espanhol e japonês assistiram a vídeos de dois rapazes estourando balões, quebrando ovos e derramando bebidas intencionalmente, ou sem querer. Mais tarde, passamos aos participantes um teste de memória pelo qual tinham de dizer qual sujeito havia feito a ação, exatamente como numa fileira diante da polícia. Outro grupo de falantes de inglês, espanhol e japonês descreveu os mesmos acontecimentos. Quando olhamos para as informações da memória, encontramos exatamente as diferenças na memória de testemunhas oculares previstas pelos padrões de linguagem. Os falantes de todos os três idiomas descreveram as ações intencionais usando o agente, dizendo coisas como “Ele estourou o balão”, e todos os três grupos lembraram igualmente bem de quem fizera essas ações intencionais. Entretanto, quando passaram para os acidentais, surgiram diferenças interessantes. Os falantes de espanhol e japonês foram menos propensos a descrever os acidentes que os que falavam inglês. E, da mesma forma, lembraram- se menos do agente que os que falavam inglês. Isso não aconteceu por terem pior memória global – eles se lembraram dos agentes de eventos intencionais (para os quais seus idiomas naturalmente mencionariam os agentes), da mesma forma que fizeram os indivíduos de língua inglesa.

Não apenas as línguas influenciam o que lembramos, mas as estruturas dos idiomas podem facilitar ou dificultar o nosso aprendizado de coisas novas. Por exemplo, pelo fato de as palavras correspondentes a número em alguns idiomas revelarem a base decimal implícita mais claramente que em inglês (não há adolescentes problemáticos, com 11 ou 13 anos, em mandarim, por exemplo), as crianças que aprendem essas línguas são capazes de interiorizar mais rapidamente a base decimal. E, dependendo de quantas sílabas as palavras relativas a números têm, será mais fácil ou mais difícil memorizar um número de telefone ou fazer cálculo mental. A linguagem pode até afetar a rapidez com que as crianças descobrem se pertencem ao sexo masculino ou feminino.

O QUE MODELA O QUÊ?
Essas são apenas algumas das fascinantes descobertas das diferenças translinguísticas em cognição. Mas, como saber se as diferenças na linguagem criam diferenças em pensamento, ou se é o contrário? Parece que a resposta inclui os dois: a maneira como pensamos influencia a maneira de falar, mas a influência também age na direção contrária. Durante a década anterior, vimos uma infinidade de demonstrações engenhosas estabelecendo que a linguagem realmente desempenha papel causal na formação da cognição. Estudos demonstraram que ao mudar o modo de falar, mudamos a maneira de pensar. O ensino de novas denominações de cores, por exemplo, muda a capacidade de as pessoas as discriminarem. Pessoas bilíngues mudam o modo de enxergar o mundo dependendo do idioma que falam. Duas descobertas publicadas em 2010 demonstram que mesmo algo tão fundamental quanto de quem você gosta e não gosta depende do idioma em que é feita a pergunta.

Esses estudos, um de Oludamini Ogunnaike e seus colegas de Harvard e outro de Shai Danziger e seus colegas da Universidade Ben-Gurion de Negev, Israel, observaram bilíngues nos idiomas árabe e francês em Marrocos, espanhol e inglês nos Estados Unidos, e árabe e hebraico em Israel, em cada caso foram testadas as tendências implícitas dos participantes. Por exemplo, pediram às pessoass bilíngues em árabe e hebraico que apertassem rapidamente botões em resposta a palavras, mediante várias situações. Em uma delas, foram instruídos para, ao verem um nome hebreu como “Yair”, ou uma característica positiva como “bom” ou “forte”, pressionarem “M”; se vissem um nome árabe como “Ahmed” ou um aspecto negativo como “mesquinho” ou “fraco”, deveriam pressionar “X”. Em outra situação, a paridade foi revertida, de modo que os nomes judaicos e características negativas partilhavam um botão e nomes árabes e aspectos positivos correspondiam a um só botão. Os pesquisadores mediram a rapidez com que os indivíduos foram capazes de responder nas duas condições. Essa tarefa tem sido amplamente utilizada para medir tendências involuntárias ou automáticas – com que naturalidade coisas como características positivas e grupos étnicos parecem se corresponder na mente das pessoas.

Surpreendentemente, os pesquisadores verificaram grandes mudanças nessas tendências involuntárias automáticas em indivíduos bilíngues, dependendo do idioma em que foram testadas. Os bilíngues em árabe e hebraico mostraram atitudes implícitas mais positivas em relação aos judeus quando testados em hebraico que quando testados em árabe.

A linguagem também parece estar envolvida em muitos mais aspectos de nossa vida mental que os cientistas previamente supunham. As pessoas confiam na língua, mesmo quando fazem coisas simples como distinguir manchas de cor, contar pontos em uma tela ou se orientar em uma pequena sala: meus colegas e eu descobrimos que, ao limitar a capacidade de acesso às faculdades linguísticas fluentes de um indivíduo, dando-lhe uma tarefa verbal que exige competição, como repetir uma notícia, prejudica a capacidade de executá-la. Isso significa que as categorias e as distinções que existem em determinados idiomas interferem amplamente em nossa vida mental. O que os pesquisadores vêm chamando de “pensamento” esse tempo todo na verdade parece ser uma reunião de ambos: processos linguísticos e não linguísticos. Assim, pode não existir grande quantidade de pensamento humano adulto quando a linguagem não desempenha um papel significativo.

Uma característica marcante da inteligência humana é a sua adaptabilidade, a capacidade de inventar e reorganizar os conceitos do mundo de modo a se adequar às mudanças de metas e ambientes. Uma consequência dessa flexibilidade é a enorme diversidade de idiomas que surgiu ao redor do mundo. Cada um oferece o seu próprio conjunto de ferramentas cognitivas e engloba o conhecimento e a visão de mundo desenvolvidos ao longo de milhares de anos dentro de uma cultura. Cada um tem uma forma de perceber, classificar e fazer sentido no mundo, um guia inestimável desenvolvido e aperfeiçoado por nossos antepassados. A investigação sobre a forma como o idioma que falamos molda a nossa forma de pensar está ajudando os cientistas a desvendar o modo como criamos o conhecimento e construímos a realidade e como conseguimos ser tão inteligentes e sofisticados. E essa percepção ajuda- nos a compreender exatamente a essência daquilo que nos faz humanos.

Lera Boroditsky é professora-assistente de psicologia cognitiva da Stanford University e editora-chefe de Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. Seu laboratório faz experimentos em todo o mundo, concentrando-se em representações mentais e nos efeitos do idioma na cognição.

© Duetto Editorial. Todos os direitos reservados. Link original aqui.

Índios serão atendidos por pajés em hospital do RS (OESP)

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Por Elder Ogliari

Agência Estado – sex, 13 de mai de 2011

Os índios mbyá-guarani de São Miguel das Missões serão atendidos pelos médicos e também pelos pajés da tribo no Hospital São Miguel Arcanjo, principal casa de saúde do município do noroeste do Rio Grande do Sul.

O acordo entre a comunidade, representada pelo cacique Ariel Ortega, e o diretor da Associação Hospitalar São Miguel Arcanjo, Inácio Müller, foi assinado no fim de abril, a pedido do Ministério Público Federal.

Segundo a crença guarani, a medicina tradicional do homem branco não é suficiente para tratar todos os males, porque é mais voltada para o corpo do que para o espírito. O hospital destinou uma sala com banheiro privativo e espaço para três leitos, na qual é permitido o uso de cachimbo e eventuais manifestações sonoras do ritual, ao contrário do restante das dependências, onde se proíbe o fumo e se recomenda silêncio.

Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says (BBC)

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2 March 2011 Last updated at 07:31 GMT

By Jason PalmerScience and technology reporter, BBC News, Dallas

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Their means of analysing the data invokes what is known as nonlinear dynamics – a mathematical approach that has been used to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part.

One of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, put forth a similar model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages.

At its heart is the competition between speakers of different languages, and the “utility” of speaking one instead of another.

“The idea is pretty simple,” said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona.

“It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility.

“For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there’s some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not.”

Dr Wiener continued: “In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.”

The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the “non-religious” category.

They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.

And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.

However, Dr Wiener told the conference that the team was working to update the model with a “network structure” more representative of the one at work in the world.

“Obviously we don’t really believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the other people in society,” he said.

However, he told BBC News that he thought it was “a suggestive result”.

“It’s interesting that a fairly simple model captures the data, and if those simple ideas are correct, it suggests where this might be going.

“Obviously much more complicated things are going on with any one individual, but maybe a lot of that averages out.”

 

21 March 2011 Last updated at 03:59 GMT

Two-thirds of Britons not religious, suggests survey

By John McManusBBC News

Nearly two-thirds of people do not regard themselves as “religious”, a new survey carried out to coincide with the 2011 Census suggests.

The British Humanist Association (BHA), which commissioned the poll, said people often identified themselves as religious for cultural reasons.

The online poll asked 1,900 adults in England and Wales a question which is on this month’s census form.

The Office for National Statistics has defended the wording of the census.

While 61% of the poll’s respondents said they did belong to a religion, 65% of those surveyed answered “no” to the further question: “Are you religious?”

Two surveys were commissioned, one covering England and Wales, and the other for Scotland. The Scottish survey was commissioned by the Humanist Society of Scotland.

South of the border, 61% of respondents said they did have a religion.

But only 29% also said they were religious, while 65% said they were not.

This poll is further evidence… that the data produced by the census, used by local and national government as if it indicates religious belief and belonging, is in fact highly misleading”

Andrew CopsonBritish Humanist Association

Among respondents who identified themselves as Christian, fewer than half said they believed Jesus Christ was a real person who died, came back to life and was the son of God.

Another 27% said they did not believe that at all, while 25% were unsure.

In Scotland, 42% of respondents said they did not belong to a religion, yet in a further question “Are you religious?” 56% answered “no”.

The BHA has complained the wording of the optional census question about religion encourages people to wrongly identify themselves as believers.

In the last census in 2001, 72% of people were classed as Christians – a figure which is much higher than other surveys.

The BHA believes people might tick “yes” to the census question on religion for reasons of cultural identity.

The chief executive of the BHA, Andrew Copson, is running a national campaign encouraging non-religious people to state their unbelief clearly on their census forms.

He said: “This poll is further evidence for a key message of the Census Campaign – that the data produced by the census, used by local and national government as if it indicates religious belief and belonging, is in fact highly misleading.

Religious affiliation

The humanists say data which might indicate a greater amount of religious belief than actually exists, is being used to justify faith schools, and the continuing presence of Anglican bishops in the House of Lords.

The Office for National Statistics has defended the wording of the religion question.

A spokesman told the BBC: “The religion question measures the number of people who self-identify an affiliation with a religion, irrespective of the extent of their religious belief or practice.”

The think tank Theos, which undertakes research into religious matters, says attempting to measure cultural affiliation to religion – rather than actual, regular practice – is a good idea, as it shows the broad values society shares.

It also disputes the BHA’s assertion that the collected data is used for political purposes.

 

Brasileiros são mais europeus do que se imaginava (O Globo, JC)

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JC e-mail 4203, de 18 de Fevereiro de 2011.

As conclusões estão na pesquisa coordenada pelo geneticista Sérgio Danilo Pena, da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, e publicada na revista científica “PLoS”

Os brasileiros são bem mais europeus do que africanos. Esqueça todas as análises já feitas com base em conceitos como raça e cor da pele. O primeiro grande estudo a medir a ancestralidade da população do País a partir de sua genética revela uma participação europeia muito maior do que se imaginava preponderante em todo o território, inclusive nas regiões Norte e Nordeste. As conclusões estão na pesquisa coordenada pelo geneticista Sérgio Danilo Pena, da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, e publicada na revista científica “PLoS”.

O trabalho revelou que, em todas as regiões, a ancestralidade europeia é dominante, com percentuais que variam de 60,6% no Nordeste a 77,7% no Sul. Mesmo as pessoas que se denominam negras pelos critérios do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) apresentam, na verdade, uma alta ancestralidade branca. Para se ter uma ideia, na Bahia, os negros tem 53,9% de raízes europeias. Na análise dos especialistas envolvidos no trabalho, a “europeização” do Brasil se deu a partir do fim do século 19, com o fim do tráfico negreiro e da escravidão e o início do fluxo migratório de aproximadamente 6 milhões de trabalhadores europeus.

Para além do impacto histórico e antropológico que os resultados do novo estudo podem ter, Sérgio Pena ressalta ainda a sua importância do ponto de vista médico: os tratamentos podem ser mais homogêneos do que se imaginava.

Formada por três diferentes raízes ancestrais, indígena, europeia e africana, a população brasileira sempre se acreditou muito heterogênea. Mas o estudo conclui que, independentemente de eventuais classificações baseadas na cor da pele, os brasileiros são muito homogêneos do ponto de vista de sua ancestralidade.
(Roberta Jansen de O Globo)

[Para uma discussão mais sofisticada da questão, ver: Santos, Ricardo Ventura, Peter H. Fry, Simone Monteiro, Marcos Chor Maio, José Carlos Rodrigues, Luciana Bastos‐Rodrigues, and Sérgio D. J. Pena. Color, Race, and Genomic Ancestry in Brazil: Dialogues between Anthropology and Genetics. Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, 2009, pp. 787‐819.]

Petrobras vira nome de dinossauro na Argentina (FSP, JC)

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JC e-mail 4199, de 14 de Fevereiro de 2011

Titanossauro recém-descoberto no país se chamará “Petrobrasaurus”. Animais “patrocinados” estão ficando comuns, e mesmo pessoas podem pagar para colocar seu nome em espécies

Sinal dos tempos: hoje em dia até dinossauro tem “naming rights” – o termo que se usa quando uma empresa coloca o seu nome em um estádio de futebol ou em uma sala de cinema, por exemplo.

O caso de merchandising paleontológico mais recente é o de um titanossauro argentino herbívoro e quadrúpede com 85 milhões de anos de idade, 22 metros e até 35 toneladas que ganhou o nome da Petrobras, descoberto por pesquisadores de lá.

Casos parecidos aconteceram recentemente com outras empresas do ramo da Petrobras. O dino Futalognkosaurus dukei, de 2007, por exemplo, tem esse nome por causa da Duke Energy. O Panamericansaurus, de 2010, refere-se à Pan American Energy.

A homenagem dos hermanos não é, claro, só um gesto de camaradagem latino-americana: a Petrobras, que hoje tem vários poços pelo país, dá suporte logístico (como alojamento e alimentação) a paleontólogos do país que tentam encontrar fósseis perto das perfurações.

Segundo Leonardo Filippi, paleontólogo do Museo Municipal Argentino Urquiza e autor do artigo científico, não é bem, então, que a Petrobras tenha “comprado” o nome do bicho. Nas palavras dele, é um “reconhecimento da colaboração constante” da empresa brasileira.

Involuntariamente, os argentinos acabaram revivendo a crítica de que a Petrobras, supostamente gigante e lenta, seria um dinossauro. Ao menos não deram ao bicho o famigerado apelido de “Petrossauro”, mas sim o nome de Petrobrasaurus puestohernandezi – o segundo nome por causa de Puesto Hernández, na Patagônia, local onde o animal foi achado.

“De um tempo para cá, dar a empresas e instituições que financiam pesquisas os animais recém-descobertos tem se tornado muito comum. Nos EUA, é prática. A National Geographic, por exemplo, é bastante lembrada”, diz Mario Cozzuol, paleontólogo da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

Espécies grandes e chamativas como dinossauros, claro, são consideradas mais valiosas. Quem não é uma gigante do setor petrolífero, porém, pode se contentar em nomear espécies de menor destaque – e há um vasto mercado de nomenclatura científica se consolidando.

Uma ONG europeia chamada Biopat se especializou em intermediar a venda de nomes de espécies recém-descobertas. Qualquer um pode colocar o nome que quiser em um bicho ou planta, basta pagar. É caro: eternizar o seu nome em um beija-flor, por exemplo, chega a custar mais de R$ 20 mil.

O problema é que empresas e pessoas só querem mesmo nomear espécies carismáticas como beija-flores ou orquídeas – mesmo que o pessoal da Biopat faça um bom desconto, ninguém se interessa por uma coitada de uma baratinha, digamos.

O fato de ninguém querer dar nome para insetos é tão sério que a empresa achou estranho quando um cliente alemão quis pagar para isso. Entrou em contato com ele e descobriu que o nome que ele queria colocar no bicho era… bom, era o da sua sogra.

O caso da sogra-inseto chegou a ser assunto nas páginas da normalmente sisuda revista acadêmica Science em março de 2005, em um texto que desejava justamente chamar a atenção para a grave desigualdade que a preferência por bichos e plantas fofas estava criando.

Tinha-se receio que os milhares de dólares estimulando a descoberta de espécies bonitas acabassem minando a busca por espécies na ala desprezada que natureza -vamos lá, não é porque os bichos são feios que não tem o seu valor científico.

No Brasil, esse capitalismo todo ainda não chegou à nomeação de espécies.

Homenagens são mais comuns. Foi assim que o jornalista José Hamilton Ribeiro, por votação na internet, passou a nomear um antúrio-mirim, planta ornamental de nome científico Aceae anthurium hamiltoni, encontrada em uma reserva da Vale no Espírito Santo. (Folha de São Paulo)

Of course scientists can communicate (Nature)

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Tim Radford takes aim at the popular myth that researchers are hopeless at explaining their work to a general audience.

Tim Radford

Published online 26 January 2011 | Nature 469, 445 (2011) | doi:10.1038/469445a

There are several canards about scientists, but one is more pernicious simply because so many scientists themselves repeat it: scientists are not good communicators.

Once again, the allegation is to be the subject of discussions, this time at next month’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. It can be found onNature ‘s website, heard in research councils, it is even occasionally propagated by the public-engagement community, and sometimes endorsed by journalists. In response, I can only say bosh, balderdash and Bronowski, and follow with other intemperate expletives such as Haldane, Hawking and Huxley, Eddington and E. O. Wilson, not to mention, as if in a state of terminal exasperation, Dawkins!

Between 1980 and 2005, I commissioned working scientists to write for The Guardian newspaper — from astronomers royal to impoverished doctoral students — and almost all of them delivered high-standard, well-focused newspaper prose and many of them went on to live by the pen. I also encountered distinguished scientists who had already become literary stars.

One was the astronomer Carl Sagan, who told me that his literary hero was Thomas Henry Huxley. Another was the industrial chemist, poet and writer Primo Levi, who when I tried to ask him about the Two Cultures debate — the apparent divide between the humanities and sciences — gently reminded me that Dante Alighieri (himself the subject of at least one paper in Nature), was a member of the Florentine guild of physicians and apothecaries. And a third was the Czech poet and dissident Miroslav Holub, who wrote his occasionalGuardian column in English, and asked that at the end of each I describe him as the author of Immunology of Nude Mice (1989). All three were better writers than most writers: two will still be famous as writers a century from now.

“Enthusiasm is infectious, but to command an audience of readers, scientists should exploit their other natural gifts.”

 

They were, of course, exceptions. We all inherit the gift of words; the gift for words, however, is unevenly distributed. Even so, there are reasons why scientists, in particular, should be and often are good communicators. One is that most scientists start with the engaging quality of enthusiasm — to get through a degree course, the PhD and all the research-council hoops, you would need it — and enthusiasm is derived from a Greek term that means divinely intoxicated. Enthusiasm is infectious, but to command an audience of readers, scientists should exploit their other natural gifts. One of these is training in clarity. Another is training in observation. And a third is knowledge.

Those who can think clearly can usually write clearly: thoughts have value only when expressed, and the more clearly they are expressed, the greater their potential value. Those whose business is to observe are aware of subtle differences that must be described, or the observations would be meaningless. And those who write must have something new or useful to say: if not, why say anything? A novelist who does not publish is not a novelist. A scientist who does not publish remains a scientist — at least for the duration of the research-council grant — but the science performed is of no apparent value until somebody else hears about it.

The problems for the scientist as a public communicator start with academic publishing: the language, form and conventions of the published scientific paper could almost have been devised to conceal information. Even in conversation, scientists start with a communication problem — words that are perfectly ordinary within science are simply never heard on a football terrace or in a tavern or bus queue. So to be effective communicators, scientists have to learn to stand back from their own work and see it as strangers might do.

It is not a difficult trick: even journalists have learned it. What is the most significant thing about your research? Is it that, at cosmological distances, type Ia supernovae in high redshift galaxies seem insufficiently lustrous? Or is it that you have just realized that you cannot account for 71% of the Universe; make that 96% if you throw in dark matter alongside this newly discovered dark energy? Which is more likely to make people attend? Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday were stars of the lecture halls. Many distinguished scientists — Richard Feynman, J. B. S. Haldane and Peter Medawar among them — knew how to hold a popular audience, and they weren’t afraid to address their peers with the same vividness and economy. In fact, their fame became inseparable from their gift for words. So the case for scientists as inherently bad communicators is a canard.

And while we have our ducks in a row, let me invoke the canard that scientists occasionally propagate about the media: that it does not appreciate scientific uncertainty. That one is especially irritating. It seems to say “I, as a scientist, wish to have it both ways. I want the privilege of knowing better than you, and the indulgence of being wrong without guilt, because science, don’t you see, is really about uncertainty.” To which the foolish answer might be “In which case, why should we listen?” But alas, people in any case listen selectively, even to the best communicators, which might be why so many Americans think Darwin’s theory of evolution is “only a theory”. Scientists are not the only people to blame for a problem in communication.

Tim Radford was science editor of The Guardian until 2005. e-mail: tim.radford@guardian.co.uk

Dr. Google e seus bilhões de pacientes (Ciência Hoje)

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Uma análise mais cuidadosa da relação de doentes com a internet leva a crer que médicos e cientistas precisam aprender a lidar com a nova geração de enfermos.

Por: Thiago Camelo

Publicado em 02/02/2011 | Atualizado em 03/02/2011

Dr. Google e seus bilhões de pacientes
Pintura do século 19 retrata visita de médico a casa do paciente. A profissão está longe, bem longe, de ser questionada. Mas muitas pessoas valem-se, atualmente, da pesquisa na internet para entender melhor algumas doenças. (Wikimedia Commons)

Regina Elizabeth Bisaglia, em mais uma consulta de rotina, indicava ao paciente a melhor maneira de cuidar da pressão. Ao mesmo tempo, observava a expressão introspectiva do homem a sua frente. A cardiologista não entendia ao certo a desconfiança em seu olhar, mas começava a presumir o motivo. Logo, entenderia o porquê.

Depois de uma explicação um pouco mais técnica, o senhor abriu um sorriso e o olhar tornou-se mais afável. A médica acabara de falar o que o paciente queria ouvir e, por isso, passava a ser merecedora de sua confiança.

“Entendi. O senhor andou consultando o doutor Google, certo?”, disse, de modo espirituoso, Bisaglia.

A médica atesta: muitas vezes os pacientes chegam ao consultório com o diagnóstico já pronto e buscam apenas uma confirmação. Ou mais: vão ao médico dispostos a testar e aprovar (ou não) o especialista.

“Não adianta os médicos reclamarem. Os pacientes vão à internet pesquisar e isso é um caminho sem volta. Informação errada existe em todos os meios, mas eu diria que muitas vezes é interessante que a pessoa procure se informar melhor”, diz a cardiologista, com mais de 30 anos de profissão.

“Há momentos em que o paciente não confia no que o médico diz ou se faz de desentendido. Nessas horas, é muito importante que ele perceba que existem mais pessoas falando a mesma coisa e passando pelo mesmo problema e que, portanto, é fundamental se cuidar. Nada melhor do que a conversa na rede para isso”, completa a médica.

Discussão antiga

Não é de hoje que a questão do ‘doutor Google’ e do ‘paciente expert‘ é debatida. Mas se antes a maioria dos argumentos pendia a favor dos médicos e contra a pesquisa dos leigos na área – sob o medo compreensível da automedicação ou dá má informação –, agora o viés da conversa caminha para um olhar mais relativista. Estudos sobre o assunto já propõem, inclusive, que os médicos tenham na sua formação uma espécie de aula especial para lidar com os pacientes internautas.

“Médicos e pesquisadores precisam estar cientes de que a informação está lá fora e que os pacientes estão tentando se educar da melhor forma possível”, diz, em conversa por e-mail, a neurocientista norte-americana Katie Moisse.

A cientista também é repórter da Scientific American e escreveu, na edição de fevereiro da revista, um artigo que fala justamente sobre a tríade médico-paciente-internet. No texto, Moisse conta a história do cirurgião vascular Paulo Zamboni, que no final de 2009 relatou um experimento que prometia ajudar os portadores de esclerose múltipla. A questão: Zamboni estava no início da pesquisa e não tinha, até o momento, feito testes rigorosos o suficiente para colocar sua técnica em prática.

Em outros tempos, diz Moisse, poucas pessoas teriam acesso ao estudo. Não foi, naturalmente, o que aconteceu com o cirurgião, que se viu pressionado por grupos de pacientes e seus familiares para disponibilizar, o quanto antes, o procedimento desenvolvido por ele.

Esse fenômeno também não é recente. O primeiro ‘motim’ de um grupo de doentes para que resultados de pesquisas fossem liberados e aplicados rapidamente é amplamente conhecido na literatura médica: na década de 1980, os infectados pelo vírus da Aids não se conformavam com a ideia de que, enquanto pacientes morriam aos milhares, poucos tinham acesso aos primeiros medicamentos (à altura, ainda em fase de teste).

Um verdadeiro grupo de ativistas, alguns com e outros sem a doença, formou-se e, se a relação entre médico e paciente mudou desde então, muito se deve a esses manifestantes.

Novo fenômeno

Hoje, a internet propicia a formação de grupos sobre não apenas uma, mas várias doenças: salas de discussão, fóruns e páginas sobre as mais diversas patologias. Um dos sites mais conhecidos é o Patients like me (Pacientes como eu, em português), uma rede social com quase 50 mil pessoas que reúne pacientes com os mais diversos problemas. O objetivo, como a maioria dos grupos, é o de trocar informação sobre doenças e, também, encontrar alento e apoio naqueles que partilham o mesmo sofrimento.

“A internet certamente faz do mundo um lugar menor. É uma oportunidade maravilhosa para as pessoas compartilharem ideias. Algumas redes de pacientes usam a internet para coletar dados e, até mesmo, publicá-los em periódicos revisados por pares”, conta Moisse.

Em alguns casos, os portais sobre doenças – sejam elas nada letais como a psoríase ou extremamente perigosas como a hepatite C – podem ajudar o paciente a se inteirar mais sobre a doença que, anteriormente, desconhecia.

“A informação disponível na internet pode trabalhar a favor da saúde, como o caso de uma pessoa que descobre que a sua timidez excessiva pode ser na verdade um quadro de transtorno de ansiedade, um transtorno psiquiátrico que tem tratamentos de eficácia comprovada”, diz o psiquiatra Rafael Freire.

É a mesma linha defendida pelo biólogo e neurocientista Daniel Cadilhe, responsável pela mediação entre o leitor-paciente e o portal do Laboratório Nacional de Células-tronco Embrionárias.

“No Orkut há uma comunidade com quase 26 mil membros sobre o assunto [células-tronco]. Chegam perguntas diariamente sobre possibilidades de tratamentos utilizando o que estudamos.

Tentamos responder da forma mais clara, realista e responsável possível, sempre passando a informação verdadeira ou indicando quem poderá ajudar a tirar a dúvida”, explica Cadilhe, absolutamente ciente do reboliço que causam as palavras ‘células-tronco embrionárias’.

A grande maioria dos especialistas, como era de se esperar, dá o mesmo conselho para o paciente na hora de pesquisar e se juntar a grupos na internet: seja responsável, busque as melhores referências e procure saber quem está dando a informação. E ainda: lembre-se de que nem sempre o que se deseja ler/ouvir é o diagnóstico correto.

Como diz, com certo humor, a cardiologista Regina Elizabeth Bisaglia, a primeira busca na internet pode ser a mais simplória: “A pesquisa mais importante na rede é o nome de um bom médico para se consultar”.

Thiago Camelo
Ciência Hoje On-line

FDA Wants Cigarette Packs to Include Images of Corpses, Diseased Lungs (ABC News)

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Graphic Warnings on U.S. Cigarette Packs May Curb Smoking, Advocates Say

By LARA SALAHI, ABC News Medical Unit

Nov. 10, 2010

The modest one-liners of the dangers of smoking, now featured on cigarette packs, may soon turn into gory images and messages that will cover nearly half the pack.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration unveiled 36 jarring labels Wednesday aimed at escalating efforts to warn smokers of the fatal consequences of cigarette smoking. These labels represent the agency’s exercise of its new authority over tobacco products and the most significant change in cigarette warnings since companies were forced to add the mandatory Surgeon General’s warning in 1965.

Some of the proposed images include a man smoking from a tracheotomy hole, a cadaver labeled to show it died from lung disease, and a pained infant exposed to smoke.

For decades federal regulators and health experts have warned that cigarettes are deadly. But Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, called the ramped-up measures “a timely and much-needed shot in the arm.”

“The current warnings are more than 25 years old, go unnoticed on the side of cigarette packs and fail to effectively communicate the serious health risks of smoking,” said Myers.

Although smoking rates have declined overall since the 1960s, health officials noted that rates have leveled off in the last decade. About 21 percent of U.S. adults, and nearly 20 percent of high school students smoke cigarettes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency’s goal is to reduce the 443,000 deaths associated with tobacco use each year.

Previous studies suggest that graphic health warnings displayed in other countries worked better than text warnings to motivate smokers to quit, and nonsmokers not to start.

Images used on cigarette packs in countries like Canada are so disturbing that some smokers buy covers for their cigarette packs to block out the images.

“Having a coordinated policy, having these warnings, making them so visible, making them real is, in my opinion and in the opinion of the American Cancer Society, going to be a very positive step forward,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.

Experts Say Fear Messages May Not Work for Long

But some experts wonder how long the proposed fear messages will work.

“The point of putting these pictures is the shock value, and research tells us shock value on its own rarely works,” said Timothy Edgar, associate professor and graduate program director of health communication at Emerson College in Boston, Mass.

Most Americans already know that smoking is dangerous — the message that the FDA is trying to convey, said Edgar. And while the campaign may dissuade some smokers at the start of the campaign, the communication tactic may not spur many to kick the habit for good, if at all.

“I think people are still going to have a hard time saying, yes that’s me on that label,” said Edgar. “There’s a physical addiction involved in this as well. It’s not an absolute choice for many who smoke.”

According to Joy Schmitz, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Texas medical school in Houston, the intended message will more likely reach younger adults, or those who may have just picked up the habit.

“It might give them pause for concern or contemplation as to their choice of smoking when they see the pretty dramatic scene on the packages,” said Schmitz.

But evidence suggests effective messages not only communicate the danger but also offer ways to help change behavior, said Edgar.

“There’s none of that here,” said Edgar, who suggested the campaign should also offer direct actions for people to take to quit smoking.

“Simply showing someone that there is a severe outcome or they’re personally responsible is not enough. They need to know there’s something they can do about it,” he said.

Schmitz agreed.

“It needs to be combined with the anti-smoking policies, restricting smoking in the environment, as well as promoting effective evidence-based smoking cessation treatments that are available,” she said.

The FDA will accept public comment on the proposed labels through January 2011, and will select nine to use by June 2011. The agency will then require all manufacturers to use the labels on all U.S. sold cigarettes by October 22, 2012.