Arquivo da tag: Incerteza
Profits Before Environment (N.Y. Times)
August 30, 2011, 10:27 PM
By MARK BITTMAN
I wasn’t surprised when the administration of George W. Bush sacrificed the environment for corporate profits. But when the same thing happens under a Democratic administration, it’s depressing. With little or no public input, policies that benefit corporations regardless of the consequences continue to be enacted.
No wonder an April 2010 poll from the Pew Research Center found that about only 20 percent of Americans have faith in the government (it’s one thing upon which the left and right and maybe even the center agree). But maybe this is nothing new: as Glenda Farrell, as Genevieve “Gen” Larkin, put it in “Gold Diggers of 1937,” “It’s so hard to be good under the capitalistic system.”
But is anyone in power even trying? Last winter, the Department of Agriculture deregulated Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa, despite concerns about cross-pollination of non-genetically modified crops. It then defied a court order banning the planting of genetically modified sugar beets pending completion of an environmental impact study.
Monsanto engineers these plants and makes Roundup, the herbicide they resist. But Roundup-ready crops don’t increase long-term yields, a host of farmers are now dealing with “superweeds” and there is worry about superbugs, nearly all courtesy of Monsanto. In fact, this system doesn’t contribute to much of anything except Monsanto’s bottom line. Yet Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack gave Monsanto the nod, perhaps yielding to pressure from the White House.
The United States exerts that same kind of pressure abroad. WikiLeaks cables show that U.S. “biotechnology outreach programs” have promoted genetically modified crops in Africa, Asia and South America; they’ve also revealed that diplomats schemed to retaliate against any European Union countries that oppose those crops.
Sacrificing the environment for profits didn’t stop with Bush, and it doesn’t stop with genetically modified organisms. Take, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline extension. XL is right: the 36-inch-wide pipeline, which will stretch from the Alberta tar sands across the Great Plains to the Gulf Coast, will cost $7 billion and run for 1,711 miles — more than twice as long as the Alaska pipeline. It will cross nearly 2,000 rivers, the huge wetlands ecosystem called the Nebraska Sandhills and the Ogallala aquifer, the country’s biggest underground freshwater supply.
If Keystone is built, we’ll see rising greenhouse gas emissions right away (tar sands production creates three times as many greenhouse gases as does conventional oil), and our increased dependence on fossil fuels will further the likelihood of climate-change disaster. Then there is the disastrous potential of leaks of the non-Wiki-variety. (It’s happened before.)
Proponents say the pipeline will ease gas prices and oil “insecurity.” But domestic drilling has raised, not lowered, oil prices, and as for the insecurity — what we need is to develop wiser ways to use the oil we have.
They say, too, that the pipeline could create 100,000 new jobs. But even the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union oppose the pipeline, saying, “We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil.”
Sounds as if union officials have been reading the writer and activist Bill McKibben, who calls the pipeline “a fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent,” and NASA scientist Jim Hansen, who says the oil Keystone will deliver “is essentially game over” for the planet.
Game over? No problem, says the State Department, which concluded that the project will have no significant impact on “most resources along the proposed pipeline corridor.” The Sierra Club quickly responded by calling the report “an insult to anyone who expects government to work for the interests of the American people.”
I do expect that, and I am insulted. President Obama can deny Keystone the permit. A truly environmentally friendly president (like the one candidate Obama appeared to be) would be looking for creative ways to leave fossil fuels underground, not extract them. Perhaps he doesn’t “believe in” global warming at this point, like many Republicans?
When government defends corporate interests, citizens must fight. McKibben has helped organize protests at the White House against Keystone, and he’s one of hundreds who’ve been arrested in the last couple of weeks. These people are showing that the role of government as corporate ally must be challenged.
As it will be in the fight against carte blanche for genetically modified organisms: From Oct. 1 to Oct. 16, there will be a march from New York City to Washington to demand that genetically modified foods be labeled, something a majority of Americans want. This small, perfectly reasonable request has run into joint opposition from the biotech industry and (here we go again) the Food and Drug Administration.
Why are most of us are filled with mistrust of the government? Maybe because we, like Gen Larkin, know it’s so hard to be good under the capitalistic system.
Seca de 2010 na Amazônia foi a mais drástica desde 1902 (Fapesp)
Constatação foi feita por pesquisadores do Inpe a partir da análise de série histórica de dados de pluviosidade na região da bacia amazônica (foto:Fapeam)
30/08/2011
Agência FAPESP – Cientistas do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Inpe) concluíram em um estudo, publicado na revista Geophysical Research Letters, que a seca de 2010 na Amazônia foi a mais drástica já registrada desde 1902, superando a de 2005, que até então era considerada a maior do século.
A constatação foi feita a partir da análise de uma série histórica de dados de pluviosidade na região da bacia amazônica, com medições desde 1902.
Os resultados do estudo apontam que o processo teve início no começo do verão, durante o El Niño (um processo natural de aquecimento das águas do Pacífico), mas foi intensificado pelo aquecimento das águas tropicais do Atlântico Norte. Em função disso, se originou uma estação seca que se estendeu por muitos meses, ocasionando alterações no ciclo hidrológico.
Como consequência desse processo, houve rebaixamento dos níveis de água e seca completa de cursos d’água e tributários de rios na bacia amazônica. A região sul foi a mais afetada. O fenômeno causou graves problemas socioambientais, especialmente às populações ribeirinhas, que ficaram isoladas por dependerem dos rios para seu deslocamento.
Em outro artigo recém-publicado na revista Theoretical Applied Climatology, pesquisadores do Inpe apresentaram os resultados de um amplo estudo sobre as inundações na Amazônia e Nordeste do Brasil, ocorridas no período de maio a julho de 2009. O fenômeno provocou mortes e deixou milhares de famílias desabrigadas. O trabalho demonstra que essas chuvas torrenciais foram as mais intensas e duradouras já registradas.
O rio Negro, principal tributário do rio Amazonas, atingiu seu maior nível em 107 anos. Os autores concluíram que o evento foi resultado de uma conjuntura de fatores meteorológicos, especialmente o aquecimento acima do normal das águas superficiais do Atlântico Sul – aspecto importante para a explicação das chuvas abundantes em vastas regiões do leste amazônico e Nordeste do país.
Os pesquisadores destacaram também que esses episódios extremos, assim como a seca duradoura ocorrida no ano de 2010 na bacia amazônica, reforçam a hipótese de que anomalias no regime pluviométrico e de temperatura serão mais frequentes em cenários futuros de mudanças climáticas.
Entre os autores dos estudos está José Antônio Marengo Orsini, chefe do Centro de Sistema Terrestre do Inpe.
O artigo The drought of 2010 in the context of historical droughts in the Amazon region(doi:10.1029/2011GL047436), de Orsini e outros, pode ser lido em www.inpe.br/noticias/arquivos/pdf/2011GL047436.pdf.
O partido anticiência (JC, O Globo)
JC e-mail 4333, de 30 de Agosto de 2011.
Artigo de Paul Krugman publicado no O Globo de hoje (30).
John Huntsman Jr., ex-governador de Utah e embaixador na China, não é um forte pré-candidato à indicação do Partido Republicano para concorrer à Presidência. E isto é muito ruim porque o desejo de Huntsman é dizer o indizível sobre o partido – especialmente que ele está se tornando o “partido anticiência”. Isto é algo enormemente importante. E deveria nos aterrorizar.
Para entender o que Huntsman defende, considere declarações recentes dos dois mais fortes pretendentes à indicação republicana: Rick Perry e Mitt Romney.
Perry, governador do Texas, fez manchetes recentemente ao fazer pouco da evolução humana como uma “simples teoria”, que tem “algumas lacunas” – uma observação que soaria como novidade para a vasta maioria dos biólogos. Mas o que mais chamou a atenção foi o que ele disse sobre mudança climática: “Penso que há um número substancial de cientistas que manipulou dados para obter dólares para seus projetos. E penso que estamos vendo, quase toda semana, ou todo dia, cientistas questionando a ideia original de que o aquecimento global provocado pelo homem é a causa da mudança climática.” É uma declaração extraordinária – ou talvez o adjetivo correto seja “vil”.
A segunda parte da declaração de Perry é falsa: o consenso científico sobre a interferência humana no aquecimento global – que inclui 97% a 98% dos pesquisadores de campo, segundo a Academia Nacional de Ciências – está se tornando mais forte à medida que aumentam as evidências sobre a mudança do clima.
De fato, se você acompanha a ciência climática sabe que o principal aspecto nos últimos anos tem sido a preocupação crescente de que as projeções sobre o futuro do clima estejam subestimando o provável aumento da temperatura. Advertências de que poderemos enfrentar mudanças cimáticas capazes de ameaçar a civilização no fim do século, antes consideradas estranhas, partem agora dos principais grupos de pesquisa.
Mas não se preocupe, sugere Perry; os cientistas estão apenas atrás de dinheiro, “manipulando dados” para criar uma falsa ameaça. Em seu livro “Fed Up”, ele despreza a ciência do clima como “uma bagunça falsa e artificial que está se desmanchando”.
Eu poderia dizer que Perry está tirando isso de uma teoria conspiratória verdadeiramente louca, que afirma que milhares de cientistas de todo o mundo estão levando dinheiro, sem que nenhum deseje quebrar o código de silêncio. Poderia apontar que múltiplas investigações em acusações de falsidade intelectual da parte dos cientistas climáticos acabaram com a absolvição dos pesquisadores de todas as acusações. Mas não se preocupe: Perry e os que pensam como ele sabem em que desejam acreditar e sua resposta a qualquer um que os contradiga é iniciar uma caça às bruxas.
Então de que modo Romney, o outro forte concorrente à indicação republicana, respondeu ao desafio de Perry? Correndo dele. No passado, Romney, ex-governador de Massachusetts, endossou fortemente a noção de que a mudança climática provocada pelo homem é uma real preocupação. Mas, na semana passada, ele suavizou isso e disse pensar que o mundo está realmente esquentando, mas “eu não conheço isto” e “não sei se isso é causado principalmente pelo homem”. Que coragem moral!
É claro, sabemos o que está motivando a súbita falta de convicção de Romney. Segundo o Public Policy Polling, somente 21% dos eleitores republicanos de Iowa acreditam no Aquecimento Global (e somente 35% creem na evolução). Dentro do Partido Republicano, ignorância deliberada tornou-se um teste decisivo para os candidatos, no qual Romney está determinado a passar a qualquer custo.
Então, é agora altamente provável que o candidato presidencial de um de nossos dois grandes partidos políticos será ou um homem que acredita no que quer acreditar, ou um homem que finge acreditar em qualquer coisa que ele ache que a base do partido quer que ele acredite.
E o caráter crescentemente anti-intelectual da direita, tanto dentro do Partido Republicano como fora dele, se estende além da questão da mudança climática.
Ultimamente, por exemplo, a seção editorial do “Wall Street Journal” passou da antiga preferência pelas ideias econômicas de “charlatães e maníacos” — pela definição famosa de um dos principais conselheiros econômicos do ex-presidente George W. Bush – para um descrédito geral do pensamento árduo sobre questões econômicas. Não prestem atenção a “teorias fantasiosas” que conflitam com o “senso comum”, diz-nos o “Journal”. Por que deveria alguém imaginar que se precisa mais do que estômago para analisar coisas como crises financeiras e recessões?
Agora, não se sabe quem ganhará a eleição presidencial do próximo ano. Mas há chances de que, mais dia menos dia, a maior nação do mundo será dirigida por um partido que é agressivamente anticiência, mesmo anticonhecimento. E, numa era de grandes desafios – ambiental, econômico e outros – é uma terrível perspectiva.
Paul Krugman é colunista do “New York Times”.
Os donos da chuva (Fapesp)
Pesquisa FAPESP
Edição 186 – Agosto 2011
Política de C & T > Polêmica
Intervenções no clima global podem já ser viáveis, mas têm enormes riscos
Por Carlos Fioravanti
Duas novas expressões – gerenciamento do clima e geoengenharia – estão aparecendo com mais frequência nos debates internacionais sobre a ciência e a política das mudanças climáticas. Uma das razões é o fracasso nas tentativas de implementação de políticas efetivas de redução de emissões de gases estufa. O que há de novo é que não é mais utópico pensar em intervir no clima regional ou mundial para evitar a contínua elevação da temperatura média global, as secas ou inundações intensas que se tornam mais frequentes à medida que as alterações climáticas se intensificam. Já pode ser viável usar aviões, balões ou canhões para espalhar partículas de aerossóis na estratosfera ou aumentar a nebulosidade do planeta semeando nuvens. Essas intervenções poderiam refletir parte da radiação solar de volta para o espaço e resfriar o planeta como forma de reduzir os efeitos das crescentes concentrações de gases do efeito estufa como o dióxido de carbono (CO2).
Os especialistas alertam, porém, que pode ser bastante perigoso – e não só porque os efeitos dessas intervenções no clima global são imprevisíveis. “Um só país ou um só milionário pode tentar mudar o clima na Terra, com consequências imprevisíveis”, observou o físico Paulo Artaxo, professor da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), em um debate realizado em junho no Instituto de Relações Internacionais da USP. “Espero que não comece uma competição entre países, grandes empresas ou bilionários dos Estados Unidos, da Inglaterra ou do mundo árabe que queiram salvar o mundo mudando o clima de propósito. A possibilidade já existe, basta uma decisão.”
Estima-se que despejar toneladas de enxofre na alta atmosfera para produzir partículas de aerossóis custaria US$ 10 bilhões ao ano, bem menos do que o US$ 1 trilhão previsto para reduzir as emissões de CO2. A geoengenharia ou engenharia climática, como é chamada a intervenção deliberada e de ampla escala no clima, oferece outras possibilidades. As mais simples incluem o aumento da refletividade das superfícies das construções e o reflorestamento em larga escala, já que as plantas absorvem muito CO2 enquanto crescem. Possibilidades mais refinadas consistem no espalhamento de íons de ferro no oceano para aumentar a fertilidade de algas marinhas, que sequestrariam CO2 e o levariam para o fundo dos oceanos.
Debatida no mundo acadêmico desde os anos 1960, a geoengenharia ganhou visibilidade pública com George W. Bush, presidente dos Estados Unidos de 2001 a 2009. Bush preferia apostar em estratégias desse tipo para lidar com os efeitos dos problemas provocados pelo aquecimento global em vez de reduzir as emissões, prevenindo os impactos. Os adeptos da geoengenharia – um grupo que inclui a indústria de combustíveis fósseis e alguns cientistas que acham que o problema climático é tão urgente que requer intervenções drásticas – argumentam que existe a possibilidade de reduzir a temperatura do planeta de propósito, não como panaceia, mas como medida paliativa, enquanto outras medidas mais demoradas são colocadas em prática.
Riscos – Alan Robock, pesquisador da Universidade Rutgers, Estados Unidos, tem alertado que os riscos podem superar os benefícios, mesmo que a geoengenharia funcione como esperado. Segundo ele, mudanças propositais no clima global poderiam amenizar a pressão social pela adoção de medidas de redução da emissão de gases do efeito estufa, além de descontrolar o clima ainda mais – um dos efeitos previstos é a redução das chuvas anuais – as monções – sobre a Ásia e a África, ameaçando a produção de alimentos para centenas de milhões de pessoas.
Em 2008, na Science, Robock afirmou que a geoengenharia poderia ser usada como arma de guerra de um país contra povos inimigos, causando secas ou inundações de consequências catastróficas em territórios hostis. Emergem também perguntas ainda sem respostas: quem vai controlar o clima e dizer que é hora de parar? Robock propõe a seguinte situação: e se a Rússia quisesse a temperatura global um pouco mais alta e a Índia um pouco mais baixa? O sociólogo da Universidade de Brasília (UnB) Eduardo Viola, que participou do debate na USP, teme que os países mais poderosos, como China, Rússia, Estados Unidos, tomem unilateralmente decisões que possam beneficiá-los, mas prejudicar muitos outros.
“Não temos governança global para lidar com esses problemas. O que um presidente dos Estados Unidos como Sarah Palin faria?”, indagou Jason Blackstock, pesquisador do Center for International Governance Innovation (Cigi), Canadá, em sua apresentação na USP. “Temos de ter um entendimento claro de todas as implicações.” Cada estratégia traz fortes efeitos colaterais. Segundo ele, aumentar a quantidade de enxofre na atmosfera pode esfriar a Terra, mas também alterar a precipitação e o balanço de radiação direta e difusa, com fortes efeitos sobre o funcionamento dos ecossistemas. Inversamente, a proposta de reduzir em 0,5% o teor de enxofre do combustível usado em navios até 2020, cogitada como forma de evitar 35 mil mortes de pessoas, principalmente nas proximidades de portos, poderia aumentar a incidência de luz solar na superfície – e o planeta esquentaria um pouco mais.
“Os cientistas em geral são favoráveis à pesquisa de geoengenharia e podem planejar experimentos em pequena escala nos próximos anos”, diz Artaxo, com base nas reuniões internacionais de que tem participado. “O problema é que não há efeito apenas local.” Por causa dos ventos, parte de uma carga de enxofre lançada, por exemplo, na região central dos Estados Unidos facilmente em apenas um dia iria para o Atlântico ou para o Pacífico, com consequências imprevisíveis sobre o equilíbrio do clima terrestre.
As descargas intencionais de partículas aerossóis teriam um efeito similar ao das supererupções vulcânicas. O exemplo mais citado é o Pinatubo, vulcão das Filipinas que entrou em erupção em junho de 1991. Em poucos dias, ele liberou 20 megatoneladas (cada megatonelada equivale a 1 bilhão de quilogramas) de dióxido de enxofre. As partículas se espalharam pela atmosfera e a temperatura do ar na superfície dos continentes do hemisfério Norte caiu dois graus. Depois de um ano, as partículas assentaram e a temperatura voltou a aumentar.
Em 2002, na Science, Robock observou que o espalhamento de partículas vindas de erupção vulcânica não é um fenômeno inócuo: pode reduzir a radiação solar e, consequentemente, a evaporação e a chuva por um ou dois anos. Artaxo aponta outra consequência do acúmulo de aerossóis na atmosfera: “Nunca mais teremos céus azuis como hoje, e os telescópios ópticos na superfície terrestre seriam inúteis”.
Para ele, a melhor solução contra os impactos do aquecimento global é reduzir rapidamente o consumo de combustíveis fósseis e as emissões de gases do efeito estufa e mudar o modo pelo qual usamos os recursos naturais do planeta. “Se formos inteligentes”, diz ele, “podemos usar os recursos naturais do planeta de modo mais eficiente e sustentável, sem precisar de experiências mirabolantes que colocam ainda mais em risco nosso frágil ecossistema terrestre”.
Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns (Scientific American)
The Secret Language Code
By Gareth Cook | Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Psychologist James Pennebaker. Image: Marsha Miller
Are there hidden messages in your emails? Yes, and in everything you write or say, according to James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker has been a leader in the computer analysis of texts for their psychological content. And in his new book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns,” he argues that how we use words like “I,” “she,” and “who” reveal secrets of our psychology. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
COOK: How did you become interested in pronouns?
PENNEBAKER: A complete and total accident. Until recently, I never thought about parts of speech. However, about ten years ago I stumbled on some findings that caught my attention. In the 1980s, my students and I discovered that if people were asked to write about emotional upheavals, their physical health improved. Apparently, putting emotional experiences into language changed the ways people thought about their upheavals. In an attempt to better understand the power of writing, we developed a computerized text analysis program to determine how language use might predict later health improvements. In other words, I wanted to find if there was a healthy way to write.
Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most. Specifically, those people who benefited the most from writing changed in their pronoun use from one essay to another. Pronouns were reflecting people’’s abilities to change perspective.
As I pondered these findings, I started looking at how people used pronouns in other texts — blogs, emails, speeches, class writing assignments, and natural conversation. Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others. It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness.
COOK: What would make you think that the use of pronouns would be meaningful?
PENNEBAKER: Never in a million years would I have thought that pronouns would be a worthwhile research topic. I ran study after study and initially found large and unexpected differences between people in their pronoun use. In hindsight, I think I ignored the findings because they didn’’t make sense. One day, I lined up about 5 experiments that I had conducted and every one revealed the same effects. It was that day that I finally admitted to myself that pronouns must be meaningful.
COOK: What differences have you found between men and women?
PENNEBAKER: Almost everything you think you know is probably wrong. Take this little test. Who uses the following words more, women or men?
> 1st person singular (I, me, my)
> 1st person plural (we, us our)
> articles (a, an, the)
> emotion words (e.g., happy, sad, love, hate)
> cognitive words (e.g., because, reason, think, believe)
> social words (e.g., he, she, friend, cousin)
Most people assume that men use I-words and cognitive words more than women and that women use we-words, emotions, and social words more than men. Bad news. You were right if you guessed that women use social words more. However, women use I-words and cognitive words at far higher rates than men. There are no reliable differences between men and women for use of we-words or emotion words (OK, those were trick questions). And men use articles more than women, when you might guess there’d be no difference.
These differences hold up across written and spoken language and most other languages that we have studied. You can’t help but marvel at the fact that we are all bombarded by words from women and men every day of our lives and most of us have never “heard” these sex differences in language. Part of the problem is that our brains aren’t wired to listen to pronouns, articles, prepositions, and other “junk” words. When we listen to another person, we typically focus on what they are saying rather than how they are saying it.
Men and women use language differently because they negotiate their worlds differently. Across dozens and dozens of studies, women tend to talk more about other human beings. Men, on the other hand, are more interested in concrete objects and things. To talk about human relationships requires social and cognitive words. To talk about concrete objects, you need concrete nouns which typically demand the use of articles.
No matter what your sex, if you have to explain that Sally is leaving her husband because of her new lover, you have to make references to all the actors and you have to do some fairly complex cognitive analyses. If you have to explain why your carburetor in your car is broken, your causal analysis will likely be relatively pallid and will involve referring to concrete nouns.
COOK: You write about using this to analyze historical documents. Do you think this tool might be of any use to historians or biographers?
PENNEBAKER: Historians and biographers should jump on this new technology. The recent release of the Google Books Project should be required reading for everyone in the humanities. For the first time in the history of the world, there are methods by which to analyze tremendously large and complex written works by authors from all over the world going back centuries. We can begin to see how thinking, emotional expression, and social relations evolve as a function of world-wide events. The possibilities are breathtaking.
In my own work, we have analyzed the collected works of poets, playwrights, and novelists going back to the 1500s to see how their writing changed as they got older. We’ve compared the pronoun use of suicidal versus non-suicidal poets. Basically, poets who eventually commit suicide use I-words more than non-suicidal poets.
The analysis of language style can also serve as a psychological window into authors and their relationships. We have analyzed the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and compared it with the history of their marriage. Same thing with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Using a method we call Language Style Matching, we can isolate changes in the couples’ relationships.
COOK: What are some of the more unusual “texts” you have applied this technique to?
PENNEBAKER: Some of the more unusual texts have been my own. There is something almost creepy about analyzing your own emails, letters of recommendation, web pages, and natural conversations.
COOK: And what have you found?
PENNEBAKER: One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.
I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached — hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.
COOK: Does your work have any application in lie detection?
PENNEBAKER: It does. Several labs, including ours, have now conducted studies to evaluate the prospect of building a linguistic lie detector. The preliminary findings are promising. In controlled studies, we can catch lying about 67% of the time where 50% is chance. Humans, reading the same transcripts, only catch lying 53% of the time. This is actually quite impressive unless you are a person in the judicial system. If you are waiting for a language-based system to catch real world lying at rates of 90 or 95 percent of the time, it won’t happen in your lifetime. It’s simply too complicated.
COOK: What are you looking into now? Where do you see the field going in the future?
PENNEBAKER: One of the most fascinating effects I’ve seen in quite awhile is that we can predict people’s college performance reasonably well by simply analyzing their college admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.
To me, the use of nouns — especially concrete nouns — reflects people’s attempts to categorize and name objects, events, and ideas in their worlds. The use of verbs and pronouns typically occur when people tell stories. Universities clearly reward categorizers rather than story tellers. If true, can we train young students to categorize more? Alternatively, are we relying too much on categorization strategies in American education?
I think one advantage I have had in my career is that I’ve got a short attention span. If something new and exciting bubbles up in our data, I will likely drop what I’m doing and try to understand it. It’s a wonderful time to be alive.
Confronting the ‘Paradox of Progress’ (Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media)
A First-Hand Perspective
Google’s Science Communication Fellows
Paul Higgins August 2, 2011
The ‘paradox of progress’ illustrated by climate change prompts a first-hand participant in a recent Google fellowship program to ponder how best to combine scientific and technological advances with improved public understanding for the benefit of society overall.
Scientific and technological advances are creating a challenging paradox for society, a paradox of progress.
Advances in the sciences and technical fields provide our society with tremendous capacity to overcome the numerous challenges we face. But those challenges in many cases are driven by the rapidly expanding scale of human activities, which are made possible in the first place by advances in science and technology.
Circumventing this paradox of progress — reaping the benefits that science and technology bring us, while avoiding the unintended negative consequences — will depend on using those advances more effectively throughout all of society.
Climate change illustrates the paradox of progress extremely well. The social and technological advances that powered the Industrial Revolution vastly improve our quality of life and well-being, but also drive our global disruption of the climate system. All the while, scientific and technological advances help us understand the causes, consequences, and potential risk management solutions to climate change.
It’s a serious concern that these massive advances in scientific knowledge have had little impact on public understanding of climate science, its implications, or society’s risk management efforts.
Given the importance of circumventing the paradox of progress, for climate change and more broadly, I was pleased to learn that Google was initiating a Science Communication Fellowship Program and thrilled to be named a member of the inaugural class of 21 fellows. Still, the question, to me, is this: Can the combination of the technological capabilities of one of the world’s leading IT companies and the expertise of the scientific community transform scientific communication for climate change and, more broadly, for all socially-relevant scientific disciplines?
The fellowship program centered on a workshop held in June at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. There were, in my view, three specific goals of the workshop and the fellowship:
– to promote collaboration among the fellows;
– to develop transformative project ideas that could harness new media and information technology (IT) for more effective communication of the science of climate change; and
– to help develop communication approaches that would be broadly and generally transferable to other scientific disciplines.
The workshop included perspectives from outside experts, presentations from Googlers (the internal moniker for Google staff) on new media and advances in IT, and brainstorming activities designed to generate new ideas.
The Googlers’ presentations were impressive, perhaps even a little daunting. They brought home, in a way I hadn’t realized before (despite my heavy reliance on new technology), how rapidly the IT world is advancing and how much potential IT has to transform society. At times, seeing what these Googlers could do with information technology left me questioning what was left for me to contribute. Fortunately, the brainstorming provided an answer.
I had gone to Google with two ideas for climate science communication and I had two more ideas while there. That seemed fairly standard among the fellows so by the end we were awash in new, interesting, and potentially transformative ideas for communicating climate science.
Of course, with so many ideas and a need to winnow them to a tractable number of actual project proposals, everyone was bound to see some of their favorite ideas end up forlorn and abandoned on the bottom of a white board. I had two ideas that I was sorry to see stall during the vetting but that I intend to pursue separately nonetheless. (At this stage it is appropriate and consistent with the workshop protocol, in my view, to discuss only those ideas that were both my own and that are not moving forward formally within the fellowship program).
The first is a multi-media show featuring leading climate experts. Each show will follow a one-on-one interview format and will showcase the expert’s knowledge and understanding. The discussion will explore what the expert does, why their work is important, what the current state of knowledge is (what is known and understood and with what level of confidence), what key questions remain unresolved or contentious, and the broader implications of their work to society.
The show would meet three critical needs: 1) it would help educate the public about climate change; 2) it would provide a new venue for rapid responses to important events (e.g., ground-breaking research findings and public controversies and misunderstandings), and 3) it would help develop the communication skills of climate experts.
The second idea involves development of an interactive game that would give users a chance to assess and manage climate change risks for themselves. Subjective preferences have major implications, good and bad, for policy choices, and this tool could help reveal and encourage reflection over those opinions. Are you risk averse? If so, how do you balance your risk aversion between policy choices that are too aggressive (e.g., that risk excessive increases in energy and transportation prices) or too weak (i.e., that risk disruption of key life-support services)? How do your answers change as you learn more about the nature of the risk management problem (i.e., with additional information from the physical, natural, and social sciences)?
Breakthroughs in Science and Public Understanding
Over the next few weeks, the 21 fellows will refine project ideas and submit proposals to Google for possible seed funding. Whether these ideas can ultimately transform science communication will take time to determine. Regardless, the process of generating new ideas during the workshop was profoundly successful. That’s a good first step because resolving the paradox of progress will depend on achieving breakthroughs not only in science but also in how society uses the knowledge and understanding that results.
With more effective use of scientific knowledge and understanding, we can make choices with the greatest chance to benefit society overall. So far the massive advances in scientific understanding of climate change appear to have little impact on public understanding of climate science, its implications, or society’s risk management efforts. But perhaps Google’s Science Communication Fellowship Program over time can do for civic engagement of science what Google has done for information technology.
Championing Ideas … Your Own and Those of Others
The combination of talks and brainstorming made for an invigorating three days but also a grueling workshop experience. By the end of each day, many participants were clearly spent and more than a little confused about best paths forward. That is what happens when people’s horizons are expanding and they are confronting new challenges.
Fortunately, by the following morning, I had integrated what I’d learned the day before and found what I thought would be a good path forward.
For me, the most critical breakthrough was to recognize and accommodate two complementary approaches: 1) to champion the idea(s) that I thought most promising, regardless of whether others at the workshop liked my vision or not; and 2) to help, however possible, champions of other ideas successfully implement their visions.
This two-pronged approach for me captures the nature of scientific pursuit at its best. Science relies on personal autonomy, individual incentives, and unique contributions, but also depends on collaboration and cooperation to help make everyone’s work more effective. The first component reflects the importance of individual insight and ability, the second the importance of staying focused on broader, shared goals: the pursuit of knowledge and understanding in the case of scientific research, increased public understanding in the case of science communication.
Author
Paul Higgins is the Associate Director of the American Meteorological Society’s Policy Program in Washington, D.C.
Psychoanalysis and climate change
Renee Lertzman: The Myth of Apathy
At the Garrison Institute’s 2011 Climate, Mind and Behavior Symposium.
The Myth of Apathy: Why People Don’t Seem to Care About Sustainability
Social Sustainability Colloquium at Portland State University (PSU), Portland, Oregon on February 4, 2010.
Climate Change Sparks Battles in Classroom (Science)
Science 5 August 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6043 pp. 688-689 DOI: 10.1126/science.333.6043.688
SCIENCE EDUCATION
Sara Reardon
The U.S. political debate over climate change is seeping into K-12 science classrooms, and teachers are feeling the heat.
Growth potential. Students gather acorns for a middle school science project. CREDIT: JEFF CASALE/AP IMAGES
This Spring, when the science department of Los Alamitos High School in southern California proposed an advanced class in environmental science, members of the elected school board for the small district in Orange County thought the course was a great idea. Then they read the syllabus and saw a mention of climate change.
The topic, the board decided, is a “controversial issue.” Its next step was a new policy requiring teachers to explain to the school board how they are handling such topics in class in a “balanced” fashion. And the new environmental science course, which starts this fall, will be the first affected.
Local teachers immediately deplored the board’s actions. “It’s very difficult when we, as science teachers, are just trying to present scientific facts,” says Kathryn Currie, head of the high school’s science department. And science educators around the country say such attacks are becoming all too familiar. They see climate science now joining evolution as an inviting target for those who accuse “liberal” teachers of forcing their “beliefs” upon a captive audience of impressionable children.
“Evolution is still the big one, but climate change is catching up,” says Roberta Johnson, executive director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association (NESTA) in Boulder, Colorado. An informal survey this spring of 800 NESTA members (see word cloud) found that climate change was second only to evolution in triggering protests from parents and school administrators. One teacher reported being told by school administrators not to teach climate change after a parent threatened to come to class and make a scene. Online message boards for science teachers tell similar tales.
Hot topic. Teachers can bone up on climate science in workshops and classes. CREDIT: SOURCE: ROBERTA KILLEEN JOHNSON, NATIONAL EARTH SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION
Unlike those biology teachers who have borne the brunt of the century-long assault on evolution, however, today’s earth science teachers won’t have the protection of the First Amendment’s language about religion if climate change deniers decide to take their cause to court. But the teachers feel their arguments are equally compelling: Science courses should reflect the best scientific knowledge of the day, and offering opposing views amounts to teaching poor science.
Most science teachers don’t relish having to engage this latest threat to their profession. “They want to teach the science,” says Susan Buhr, education director at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder. “They’re struggling to be on top of the science in the first place.”
CIRES and NESTA offer workshops and online resources for educators seeking more information on climate change. But teachers also say that they resent devoting any of their precious classroom time to a discussion of an alleged “controversy.” And they believe that politics has no place in a science classroom.
Even so, some are being dragged against their will into a conflict they fear could turn ugly. “There seems to be a lynch-mob hate against any teacher trying to teach climate change,” says Andrew Milbauer, an environmental sciences teacher at Conserve School, a private boarding school in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin.
Milbauer felt that wrath after receiving an invitation to participate in a public debate about climate change. The event, put on last year by Tea Party activists, proposed to pit high school teachers against professors and climate change deniers David Legates and Willie Soon in front of students from 200 high schools. Organizers said the format was designed “to expand knowledge of the global warming debate to the youth of our state.” When Milbauer and his colleagues declined to participate, organizer Kim Simac complained to the local papers about their “suspicious” behavior. Milbauer corresponded for a time on the organization’s blog until Simac wrote that Milbauer, “in his role as science teacher, is passing on to our youth this monstrous hoax as being the gospel truth.”
Milbauer regards the episode as an unfortunate but telling example of misguided science and uses it in class discussions. “I explain this is the trap the [other side] is building,” he says.
Some teachers would disagree, however. In comments in the NESTA survey, a handful of teachers called climate change “just a theory like evolution” or said they firmly believed that opposing views should be presented with equal weight.
Sowing confusion
Given the ongoing and noisy national debate over climate change, it’s not surprising that those disagreements are seeping into K-12 schools, too. Science educators are scrambling to figure out how to deliver top-quality instruction without being sucked into the maelstrom. The issue is acute in Louisiana, which enacted a law in 2008 that lists climate change along with evolution as “controversial” subjects that teachers and students alike can challenge in the classroom without fear of reprisal.
A hotter climate? The phrase “climate change” came up often when NESTA asked its teacher members what classroom concepts trigger outside concerns. SOURCE: ROBERTA KILLEEN JOHNSON, NATIONAL EARTH SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION
When a state law suggests that established scientific theories are controversial, says Ian Binns, a science education researcher at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, “it tells our students and teachers that there are problems that there aren’t.” That ambiguity, he and others fear, can distort a student’s understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry. “Science is not about providing balance to every viewpoint that’s out there,” says Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization in Oakland, California, that has begun to monitor controversies regarding climate change in addition to battles over evolution. To Rosenau, staging debates over science in schools or on the floors of Congress “is madness.”
In Los Alamitos, the course will follow the curriculum laid out by the nonprofit College Board for its Advanced Placement (AP) course in environmental science, which presents the scientific evidence for climate change. This curriculum, which prepares students to take an end-of-year test for college credit, is what irritated Jeffrey Barke, a Los Alamitos school board member and physician who led the push to revise the district’s policies after learning about the course. Barke has spoken publicly about his concern that “liberal faculty” members would use the course to present global warming as “dogma.”
Science department head Currie criticizes the board’s new policy and feels that it may confuse students when they answer multiple-choice questions relating to climate change on the final AP exam. “When a kid comes across that on the AP test, what are they supposed to bubble?” she asks. “The fact, or [Barke’s] belief that it’s not a fact?” The school board, however, has said that the new policy is simply a way to prevent political bias from entering the classroom.
Currie and her colleagues are spending the summer working up a lesson plan for the new course, but she isn’t sure what will satisfy the board. “I’m going to fight for scientific facts being presented in the classroom,” she says. “I want to keep politics out.”
Arming for battle
The extent to which politics is affecting geoscience courses around the country is hard to measure, Rosenau says: “Just like with evolution, it’s difficult to know what a given teacher in a given classroom is teaching.”
To improve the quality of that instruction, both CIRES and NESTA are trying to put up-to-date, data-rich climate science materials into the hands of teachers and students to supplement textbooks. They’re not the only ones; even government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, spurred by language in the 2007 America COMPETES Act about their role in improving science education, have beefed up their teacher training programs.
But it’s not enough to say that “you just need to teach people more,” Rosenau says. Teachers also have to learn how to defend themselves against parents or administrators wearing “ideological blinders,” he says. CIRES has analyzed the strategies that teachers used in the creationism debates and repurposed them for discussions about climate change. That includes citing state science standards—30 states include climate science in their description of what should be taught—and enlisting the support of administrators before tackling the subject in class.
Those who have taught geoscience or environmental science may feel more confident than colleagues who teach general physical science in managing a classroom discussion. Parents and students trying to poke holes in what they are being taught often “can’t articulate what the opposing view even is,” says Karen Lionberger, director of curriculum and content development for AP Environmental Science in Duluth, Georgia.
Of course, some attacks on climate change come from well-heeled sources. In 2009, the Heartland Institute, which has received significant funding from Exxon-Mobil, expanded its audience beyond teachers and students with a pamphlet, called The Skeptic’s Handbook, mailed to the presidents of the country’s 14,000 public school boards.
Heartland Institute senior fellow James Taylor, who sent out the pamphlet, says the underlying message is that educators need “to understand that there is quite a bit that remains to be learned” about climate change. Taylor also applauds the actions of the Los Alamitos school board, saying that “if the science is unsettled on any topic, of course you should present all points of view.”
The AP course itself doesn’t take a position on the issue, Lionberger says. The handful of multiple-choice questions on the final exam relating to climate change are not “slanted in any way,” she says, and none explicitly asks whether climate change is occurring. But because AP courses can be taken for college credit, she says, “we’re going to follow what colleges and universities are doing” by teaching students about the factors that contribute to climate change and its effects on the planet. Although researchers are always adding to that pool of knowledge, she says “for now, we will fall on the side of consensus science.”
VOCÊ SABE COM QUEM ESTÁ FALANDO? (TRIP)
Roberto da Matta reflete sobre como limites são as maiores conquistas e os maiores riscos
TRIP 196 – 14.02.2011 | Texto por Roberto da Matta
Fotos http://www.flickr.com/commons
Não deixa de ser curioso que o ser vivo mais consciente da própria morte, o animal mais certo de que sua única certeza é um limite final e definitivo — a morte —, seja o bicho que mais inventa e questiona limites. Os seus limites e os dos outros. Mais os dos outros que os seus.
A reflexão sobre os limites, sobre o que é suficiente ou bastante para cada um de nós (e consequentemente para os outros), é o resultado de mais igualdade, liberdade, oportunidade, poder de consumo e daquilo que se chama de “modernidade”: de mercado e competição eleitoral e de democracia. Da operação consistente de um sistema que tem no centro o indivíduo-cidadão livre e igual perante a lei. Todas as sociedades que passaram por uma aguda transformação no sentido de maior igualdade, acoplada a uma consciência mais aguda de liberdade, vivem um aparente paradoxo. Como usufruir a liberdade e a igualdade sem ofender os outros e, mais que isso, sem levar o sistema a uma anarquia e a um caos no qual alguns podem fazer tudo, o outro não existe e — como consequência — quem ocupa cargos importantes sobretudo no governo e do Estado acaba virando um mandão (ou mandona) de modo que, em vez de igualdade e limite, temos o justo oposto: uma hierarquia e o enriquecimento dos poderosos por meio daquilo que é o teste mais claro do limite e da igualdade: o sistema eleitoral que os elegeu.
— II —
Neste momento em que o Brasil consolida sua democracia e torna-se um ator global, é crucial discutir esse equilíbrio entre o que aspiramos construir como coletividade mais justa e humana e as leis e normas que agindo sobre todos nós e governando por assim dizer esse jogo democrático que vem sendo jogado faz um tempo considerável, considerando nossa história republicana, limitam os nossos movimentos indicando o que é correto e ético realizar.
Não nos parece uma tarefa fácil conciliar desejos (que geralmente são ilimitados e odeiam controles) e a questão fundamental de cumprir regras, seguir leis e construir espaços públicos seguros e igualitários, válidos para todos, numa sociedade que também tem o seu lado claramente aristocrático e hierárquico. Um sistema que ama a democracia, mas também gosta de usar o “Você sabe com quem está falando?”, que é justamente a prova, conforme disse em Carnavais, malandros e heróis, um livro publicado, imagine, em 1979!
Ali, eu descobri o nosso amor simultâneo pela igualdade e, a seu lado, o nosso afeto pelo familismo e pelo partidarismo governados pela ética de condescendência tão nossa conhecida, que diz: nós somos diferentes e temos biografia; para os amigos tudo, aos inimigos (e estranhos, os que não conhecemos) a lei!
Não há nada mais claro da nossa aversão aos limites do que essa recusa de obedecer a lei, o cargo público para o qual fomos eleitos ou o sinal de trânsito. Uma pessoa, como digo no citado ensaio, que não foi criada para pensar em limites, porque todos somos (ou fomos) filhinhos de mamãe e criados em ambientes onde sabíamos perfeitamente bem quem era superior, quem era subordinado, quem mandava e quem obedecia, não pode funcionar igualitariamente na rua, onde ninguém é de ninguém ou sabe quem são os outros.
A dificuldade em usar com tranquilidade o “Você sabe com quem está falando?” decorre da massificação da sociedade brasileira, que, com o aumento de renda e dos mecanismos destinados a melhorar o consumo das camadas mais pobres, torna todo mundo muito mais parecido e de certo modo obriga tanto o milionário filho de família tradicional quanto o pedreiro, o padeiro, o garçom, o estudante, o operário e o empregado doméstico a entrar numa fila. E, nela, a pensar que somos todos realmente iguais em certas situações públicas porque o limite do outro garante o meu limite.
O resultado dessa tomada de posição, básica numa democracia, é simples, mas muitas vezes ignorado entre nós: a minha liberdade teoricamente ilimitada tem que se ajustar à sua e as duas acabam promovendo uma conformidade voluntária com limites, com fronteiras cívicas que não podem ser ultrapassadas, como a de furar a fila ou a de dar uma carteirada.
Na sua simplicidade, a fila é um dos melhores, se não for o melhor, exemplos de como operam os limites numa democracia. Seus princípios são simples e reveladores: quem chega primeiro é atendido em primeiro lugar. Numa fila, portanto, não vale o oculto. Ou temos uma clara linha de pessoas, umas atrás das outras, ou a vaca vai para o brejo. Quando eu era menino, lembro-me bem como era impossível ter uma fila no Brasil. As velhas senhoras e as pessoas importantes (sobretudo os políticos) não se conformavam com suas regras e traziam como argumento para serem atendidos, passando na frente dos outros, ou a idade, ou o cargo, ou conhecimento com quem estava atendendo, ou algum laço de família. Afinal quem vai deixar a vovó esperando para depois tomar uma bronca em casa? Hoje, sabemos que idosos e deficientes não entram em fila. Mas estamos igualmente alertas para o fato de que um cargo ou um laço de amizade não faz de alguém um supercidadão com poderes ilimitados junto aos que estão penando numa fila por algumas horas. O princípio do quem primeiro chega é primeiro atendido revela uma outra dimensão da democracia e dos limites que deve ser igualmente discutida.
Refiro-me ao fato de que a fila anda (ou deve andar!). Ela é construída, como tudo que é governado por regras simples e conhecidas de todos, pelo princípio da rotatividade. Se “a fila anda”, ela faz com que o último acabe em primeiro e quem estava na frente seja obrigado a sair depois de ter sido atendido. Mais: se ele (ou ela) quiser voltar, vai para o “fim da fila”. Ora, isso não é um belo exemplo dos limites que tornam todos iguais, fazendo-os primeiros ou últimos e, consequentemente, tornando o primeiro e o último relativos? Numa hora e em dado lugar sou o primeiro, noutro sou um cara comum e apenas sigo as normas gerais da cidadania. Mas sei — e esse é um ponto capital — que, mesmo em primeiro lugar ou no último, tenho limites, tolerâncias, direitos sem dúvida, mas um monte de deveres. Uma vez atendido, cedo lugar a um outro que faz o mesmo com o seguinte e assim, meus amigos, a fila da democracia anda!
Tal como num jogo de futebol ou numa disputa política liberal e competitiva, a fila requer conformidade com as regras, com os limites impostos pela disputa, bem como um mínimo de honradez diante delas. Se entro na fila, espero que todos honrem o meu e os seus lugares. Isto é: o meu senso de limites é despertado pelo senso de limites dos outros. Se, numa disputa política, um partido não segue as regras e compra políticos e votos, então o sistema de disputa fica abalado ou deixa de existir. Todo jogador quer vencer, todo atacante quer o gol da vitória, mas ele não pode vencer quebrando as pernas dos seus adversários.
Do mesmo modo e pela mesma lógica, ninguém pode ser sempre o primeiro da fila (e nem o último), como ninguém pode ser campeão para sempre. Se isso acontece, ou seja, se um time campeão mudar as regras para ser campeão para sempre, então o futebol vai pros quintos dos infernos. Ele simplesmente acaba com o jogo como uma disputa. Na disputa, o adversário não é um inimigo, do mesmo modo que, numa fila, quem está na frente não é um superior. O poder ilimitado e congelado ou fixo em pessoas ou partidos, como ocorre nas ditaduras, liquida a democracia justamente porque ele usurpa os limites nos quais se baseia a fila. Justamente porque ele acaba com a disputa e a esperança banal, mas básica, de que a fila anda e que amanhã podemos ser campeões! O fim do rodízio do poder que obriga o respeito aos limites de todos é a raiz dos autoritarismos que são hoje impensáveis no Brasil. Sem ele, a oposição e a esquerda não estariam no poder honrando e ajudando a provar que, onde há disputa, alguém vai perder ou ganhar.
— III —
Termino com uma história que é, de fato, uma parábola que fala tanto de democracia quanto de capitalismo, com seu poder de despertar inveja e aristocratizar pelo dinheiro.
Conta-se que, numa reunião na mansão de um milhardário americano, o escritor Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (autor, entre outros, do incrível Matadouro 5) perguntou ao seu colega Joseph Heller (autor do não menos perturbador Ardil 22): “Joe, você não fica chateado sabendo que esse cara ganha mais num dia do que você jamais ganhou com a venda de Ardil 22 no mundo todo?”. Heller respondeu: “Não, porque eu tenho alguma coisa que esse cara não tem”. Vonnegut olhou firme para ele e disse: “E o que é que você pode ter que esse sujeito já não tenha?”. Resposta do Heller: “Eu conheço o significado da palavra suficiente”.
Ora, é justamente esse suficiente que nos torna resistentes tanto ao poder do dinheiro como fim valor absoluto, capaz de suspender limites numa sociedade de iguais, quanto a uma dimensão muito importante da vida. É ele que permite valorizar o que somos e temos, o modo como vivemos, os nossos prazeres e escolhas. É essa reflexão sobre o que nos basta que nos faz ver a olho nu que ninguém pode ter (ou tem) tudo. E, se ninguém pode ter tudo, todos temos alguma coisa.
A ideia de suficiência e de limite, portanto, traz de volta uma dimensão humana importante e não conformista. A dimensão que assegura por linhas tortas, é certo, que nenhum ser humano pode ser belo, bonito, rico, saudável e feliz ao mesmo tempo. Os reveses da vida, que nos fazem estar sempre no fim ou no início da fila, que nos dão a impressão de impotência ou onipotência, têm muito a ver com essa reflexão que pouco fazemos no Brasil. A saber: o que queremos do nosso país e deste mundo? O que precisamos e em que quantidade ou escala? Será que sendo quem sou eu não tenho mais do que o mais rico dos ricos ou o mais poderoso dos poderosos? Afinal de contas, a igualdade na diferença é uma alternativa para estilos de ser. Não se pode negar o valor do dinheiro, mas não se pode aceitar que o dinheiro seja tudo e que o amor, a compaixão, a honestidade, a honradez e a alegria de viver em harmonia consigo mesmo sejam inferiores à riqueza ou ao poder. Afinal de contas, o que seria da vida sem esses pequenos-grandes prazeres e gozos que são de fato o seu sal e a sua pimenta? Vale a pena ser infeliz com uma grande conta bancária, ou ser feliz com uma conta bancária? Ou, quem sabe, viver sem ir ao banco?
Porque, afinal de contas, o limite não está apenas nas coisas externas, ele está em todos nós — mortais complexos destinados ao gozo e ao sofrimento neste maravilhoso e único vale de lágrimas, nesta interminável fila que, andando, nos obriga a dialogar com os nossos limites e com o lado ilimitado de cada um de nós.
*Antropólogo, escritor e professor da PUC-RJ. Autor de vários ensaios sobre sociedades tribais e o Brasil, como Um Mundo Dividido; Carnavais, malandros e heróis; O que faz o Brasil, Brasil; Relativizando: uma introdução à antropologia social, todos editados pela Rocco. Seu último livro, Fé em Deus e pé na tábua, é um ensaio sobre o trânsito no Brasil. DaMatta tem uma coluna semanal nos jornais O Estado de São Paulo, no Globo e Diário de Fortaleza
Beyond space-time: Welcome to phase space (New Scientist)
08 August 2011 by Amanda Gefter
Magazine issue 2824
A theory of reality beyond Einstein’s universe is taking shape – and a mysterious cosmic signal could soon fill in the blanks
Does some deeper level of reality lurk beneath? (Image: Luke Brookes)
IT WASN’T so long ago we thought space and time were the absolute and unchanging scaffolding of the universe. Then along came Albert Einstein, who showed that different observers can disagree about the length of objects and the timing of events. His theory of relativity unified space and time into a single entity – space-time. It meant the way we thought about the fabric of reality would never be the same again. “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade into mere shadows,” declared mathematician Hermann Minkowski. “Only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”
But did Einstein’s revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, doesn’t think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space.
If this radical claim is true, it could solve a troubling paradox about black holes that has stumped physicists for decades. What’s more, it could set them on the path towards their heart’s desire: a “theory of everything” that will finally unite general relativity and quantum mechanics.
So what is phase space? It is a curious eight-dimensional world that merges our familiar four dimensions of space and time and a four-dimensional world called momentum space.
Momentum space isn’t as alien as it first sounds. When you look at the world around you, says Smolin, you don’t ever observe space or time – instead you see energy and momentum. When you look at your watch, for example, photons bounce off a surface and land on your retina. By detecting the energy and momentum of the photons, your brain reconstructs events in space and time.
The same is true of physics experiments. Inside particle smashers, physicists measure the energy and momentum of particles as they speed toward one another and collide, and the energy and momentum of the debris that comes flying out. Likewise, telescopes measure the energy and momentum of photons streaming in from the far reaches of the universe. “If you go by what we observe, we don’t live in space-time,” Smolin says. “We live in momentum space.”
And just as space-time can be pictured as a coordinate system with time on one axis and space – its three dimensions condensed to one – on the other axis, the same is true of momentum space. In this case energy is on one axis and momentum – which, like space, has three components – is on the other (see diagram).
Simple mathematical transformations exist to translate measurements in this momentum space into measurements in space-time, and the common wisdom is that momentum space is a mere mathematical tool. After all, Einstein showed that space-time is reality’s true arena, in which the dramas of the cosmos are played out.
Smolin and his colleagues aren’t the first to wonder whether that is the full story. As far back as 1938, the German physicist Max Born noticed that several pivotal equations in quantum mechanics remain the same whether expressed in space-time coordinates or in momentum space coordinates. He wondered whether it might be possible to use this connection to unite the seemingly incompatible theories of general relativity, which deals with space-time, and quantum mechanics, whose particles have momentum and energy. Maybe it could provide the key to the long-sought theory of quantum gravity.
Born’s idea that space-time and momentum space should be interchangeable – a theory now known as “Born reciprocity” – had a remarkable consequence: if space-time can be curved by the masses of stars and galaxies, as Einstein’s theory showed, then it should be possible to curve momentum space too.
At the time it was not clear what kind of physical entity might curve momentum space, and the mathematics necessary to make such an idea work hadn’t even been invented. So Born never fulfilled his dream of putting space-time and momentum space on an equal footing.
That is where Smolin and his colleagues enter the story. Together with Laurent Freidel, also at the Perimeter Institute, Jerzy Kowalski-Glikman at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and Giovanni Amelino-Camelia at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, Smolin has been investigating the effects of a curvature of momentum space.
The quartet took the standard mathematical rules for translating between momentum space and space-time and applied them to a curved momentum space. What they discovered is shocking: observers living in a curved momentum space will no longer agree on measurements made in a unified space-time. That goes entirely against the grain of Einstein’s relativity. He had shown that while space and time were relative, space-time was the same for everyone. For observers in a curved momentum space, however, even space-time is relative (see diagram).
This mismatch between one observer’s space-time measurements and another’s grows with distance or over time, which means that while space-time in your immediate vicinity will always be sharply defined, objects and events in the far distance become fuzzier. “The further away you are and the more energy is involved, the larger the event seems to spread out in space-time,” says Smolin.
For instance, if you are 10 billion light years from a supernova and the energy of its light is about 10 gigaelectronvolts, then your measurement of its location in space-time would differ from a local observer’s by a light second. That may not sound like much, but it amounts to 300,000 kilometres. Neither of you would be wrong – it’s just that locations in space-time are relative, a phenomenon the researchers have dubbed “relative locality”.
Relative locality would deal a huge blow to our picture of reality. If space-time is no longer an invariant backdrop of the universe on which all observers can agree, in what sense can it be considered the true fabric of reality?
That is a question still to be wrestled with, but relative locality has its benefits, too. For one thing, it could shed light on a stubborn puzzle known as the black hole information-loss paradox. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes radiate away their mass, eventually evaporating and disappearing altogether. That posed an intriguing question: what happens to all the stuff that fell into the black hole in the first place?
Relativity prevents anything that falls into a black hole from escaping, because it would have to travel faster than light to do so – a cosmic speed limit that is strictly enforced. But quantum mechanics enforces its own strict law: things, or more precisely the information that they contain, cannot simply vanish from reality. Black hole evaporation put physicists between a rock and a hard place.
According to Smolin, relative locality saves the day. Let’s say you were patient enough to wait around while a black hole evaporated, a process that could take billions of years. Once it had vanished, you could ask what happened to, say, an elephant that once succumbed to its gravitational grip. But as you look back to the time at which you thought the elephant had fallen in, you would find that locations in space-time had grown so fuzzy and uncertain that there would be no way to tell whether the elephant actually fell into the black hole or narrowly missed it. The information-loss paradox dissolves.
Big questions still remain. For instance, how can we know if momentum space is really curved? To find the answer, the team has proposed several experiments.
One idea is to look at light arriving at the Earth from distant gamma-ray bursts. If momentum space is curved in a particular way that mathematicians refer to as “non-metric”, then a high-energy photon in the gamma-ray burst should arrive at our telescope a little later than a lower-energy photon from the same burst, despite the two being emitted at the same time.
Just that phenomenon has already been seen, starting with some unusual observations made by a telescope in the Canary Islands in 2005 (New Scientist, 15 August 2009, p 29). The effect has since been confirmed by NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, which has been collecting light from cosmic explosions since it launched in 2008. “The Fermi data show that it is an undeniable experimental fact that there is a correlation between arrival time and energy – high-energy photons arrive later than low-energy photons,” says Amelino-Camelia.
Still, he is not popping the champagne just yet. It is not clear whether the observed delays are true signatures of curved momentum space, or whether they are down to “unknown properties of the explosions themselves”, as Amelino-Camelia puts it. Calculations of gamma-ray bursts idealise the explosions as instantaneous, but in reality they last for several seconds. While there is no obvious reason to think so, it is possible that the bursts occur in such a way that they emit lower-energy photons a second or two before higher-energy photons, which would account for the observed delays.
In order to disentangle the properties of the explosions from properties of relative locality, we need a large sample of gamma-ray bursts taking place at various known distances (arxiv.org/abs/1103.5626). If the delay is a property of the explosion, its length will not depend on how far away the burst is from our telescope; if it is a sign of relative locality, it will. Amelino-Camelia and the rest of Smolin’s team are now anxiously awaiting more data from Fermi.
The questions don’t end there, however. Even if Fermi’s observations confirm that momentum space is curved, they still won’t tell us what is doing the curving. In general relativity, it is momentum and energy in the form of mass that warp space-time. In a world in which momentum space is fundamental, could space and time somehow be responsible for curving momentum space?
Work by Shahn Majid, a mathematical physicist at Queen Mary University of London, might hold some clues. In the 1990s, he showed that curved momentum space is equivalent to what’s known as a noncommutative space-time. In familiar space-time, coordinates commute – that is, if we want to reach the point with coordinates (x,y), it doesn’t matter whether we take xsteps to the right and then y steps forward, or if we travel y steps forward followed by x steps to the right. But mathematicians can construct space-times in which this order no longer holds, leaving space-time with an inherent fuzziness.
In a sense, such fuzziness is exactly what you might expect once quantum effects take hold. What makes quantum mechanics different from ordinary mechanics is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: when you fix a particle’s momentum – by measuring it, for example – then its position becomes completely uncertain, and vice versa. The order in which you measure position and momentum determines their values; in other words, these properties do not commute. This, Majid says, implies that curved momentum space is just quantum space-time in another guise.
What’s more, Majid suspects that this relationship between curvature and quantum uncertainty works two ways: the curvature of space-time – a manifestation of gravity in Einstein’s relativity – implies that momentum space is also quantum. Smolin and colleagues’ model does not yet include gravity, but once it does, Majid says, observers will not agree on measurements in momentum space either. So if both space-time and momentum space are relative, where does objective reality lie? What is the true fabric of reality?
Smolin’s hunch is that we will find ourselves in a place where space-time and momentum space meet: an eight-dimensional phase space that represents all possible values of position, time, energy and momentum. In relativity, what one observer views as space, another views as time and vice versa, because ultimately they are two sides of a single coin – a unified space-time. Likewise, in Smolin’s picture of quantum gravity, what one observer sees as space-time another sees as momentum space, and the two are unified in a higher-dimensional phase space that is absolute and invariant to all observers. With relativity bumped up another level, it will be goodbye to both space-time and momentum space, and hello phase space.
“It has been obvious for a long time that the separation between space-time and energy-momentum is misleading when dealing with quantum gravity,” says physicist João Magueijo of Imperial College London. In ordinary physics, it is easy enough to treat space-time and momentum space as separate things, he explains, “but quantum gravity may require their complete entanglement”. Once we figure out how the puzzle pieces of space-time and momentum space fit together, Born’s dream will finally be realised and the true scaffolding of reality will be revealed.
Bibliography
- The principle of relative locality by Giovanni Amelino-Camelia and others (arxiv.org/abs/1101.0931)
Amanda Gefter is a consultant for New Scientist based in Boston
Roy Wagner: Time Sensitive Cultures, Culture Sensitive Time (2009 AAA meeting)
Roy Wagner: paper Time Sensitive Cultures, Culture Sensitive Time (audio recording), delivered at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C.
The Mathematics of Changing Your Mind (N.Y. Times)
By JOHN ALLEN PAULOS
Published: August 5, 2011
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne introduces Bayes’s theorem in her new book with a remark by John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”
Illustration by Shannon May
THE THEORY THAT WOULD NOT DIE. How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy. By Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, 320 pp. Yale University Press. $27.50.
Bayes’s theorem, named after the 18th-century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, addresses this selfsame essential task: How should we modify our beliefs in the light of additional information? Do we cling to old assumptions long after they’ve become untenable, or abandon them too readily at the first whisper of doubt? Bayesian reasoning promises to bring our views gradually into line with reality and so has become an invaluable tool for scientists of all sorts and, indeed, for anyone who wants, putting it grandiloquently, to sync up with the universe. If you are not thinking like a Bayesian, perhaps you should be.
At its core, Bayes’s theorem depends upon an ingenious turnabout: If you want to assess the strength of your hypothesis given the evidence, you must also assess the strength of the evidence given your hypothesis. In the face of uncertainty, a Bayesian asks three questions: How confident am I in the truth of my initial belief? On the assumption that my original belief is true, how confident am I that the new evidence is accurate? And whether or not my original belief is true, how confident am I that the new evidence is accurate? One proto-Bayesian, David Hume, underlined the importance of considering evidentiary probability properly when he questioned the authority of religious hearsay: one shouldn’t trust the supposed evidence for a miracle, he argued, unless it would be even more miraculous if the report were untrue.
The theorem has a long and surprisingly convoluted history, and McGrayne chronicles it in detail. It was Bayes’s friend Richard Price, an amateur mathematician, who developed Bayes’s ideas and probably deserves the glory that would have resulted from a Bayes-Price theorem. After Price, however, Bayes’s theorem lapsed into obscurity until the illustrious French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace extended and applied it in clever, nontrivial ways in the early 19th century. Thereafter it went in and out of fashion, was applied in one field after another only to be later condemned for being vague, subjective or unscientific, and became a bone of contention between rival camps of mathematicians before enjoying a revival in recent years.
The theorem itself can be stated simply. Beginning with a provisional hypothesis about the world (there are, of course, no other kinds), we assign to it an initial probability called the prior probability or simply the prior. After actively collecting or happening upon some potentially relevant evidence, we use Bayes’s theorem to recalculate the probability of the hypothesis in light of the new evidence. This revised probability is called the posterior probability or simply the posterior. Specifically Bayes’s theorem states (trumpets sound here) that the posterior probability of a hypothesis is equal to the product of (a) the prior probability of the hypothesis and (b) the conditional probability of the evidence given the hypothesis, divided by (c) the probability of the new evidence.
Consider a concrete example. Assume that you’re presented with three coins, two of them fair and the other a counterfeit that always lands heads. If you randomly pick one of the three coins, the probability that it’s the counterfeit is 1 in 3. This is the prior probability of the hypothesis that the coin is counterfeit. Now after picking the coin, you flip it three times and observe that it lands heads each time. Seeing this new evidence that your chosen coin has landed heads three times in a row, you want to know the revised posterior probability that it is the counterfeit. The answer to this question, found using Bayes’s theorem (calculation mercifully omitted), is 4 in 5. You thus revise your probability estimate of the coin’s being counterfeit upward from 1 in 3 to 4 in 5.
A serious problem arises, however, when you apply Bayes’s theorem to real life: it’s often unclear what initial probability to assign to a hypothesis. Our intuitions are embedded in countless narratives and arguments, and so new evidence can be filtered and factored into the Bayes probability revision machine in many idiosyncratic and incommensurable ways. The question is how to assign prior probabilities and evaluate evidence in situations much more complicated than the tossing of coins, situations like global warming or autism. In the latter case, for example, some might have assigned a high prior probability to the hypothesis that the thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. But then came new evidence — studies showing that permanent removal of the compound from these vaccines did not lead to a decline in autism. The conditional probability of this evidence given the thimerosal hypothesis is tiny at best and thus a convincing reason to drastically lower the posterior probability of the hypothesis. Of course, people wedded to their priors can always try to rescue them from the evidence by introducing all sorts of dodges. Witness die-hard birthers and truthers, for example.
McGrayne devotes much of her book to Bayes’s theorem’s many remarkable contributions to history: she discusses how it was used to search for nuclear weapons, devise actuarial tables, demonstrate that a document seemingly incriminating Colonel Dreyfus was most likely a forgery, improve low-resolution computer images, judge the authorship of the disputed Federalist papers and determine the false positive rate of mammograms. She also tells the story of Alan Turing and others whose pivotal crypto-analytic work unscrambling German codes may have helped shorten World War II.
Statistics is an imperialist discipline that can be applied to almost any area of science or life, and this litany of applications is intended to be the unifying thread that sews the book into a coherent whole. It does so, but at the cost of giving it a list-like, formulaic feel. More successful are McGrayne’s vivifying sketches of the statisticians who devoted themselves to Bayesian polemics and counterpolemics. As McGrayne amply shows, orthodox Bayesians have long been opposed, sometimes vehemently, by so-called frequentists, who have objected to their tolerance for subjectivity. The nub of the differences between them is that for Bayesians the prior can be a subjective expression of the degree of belief in a hypothesis, even one about a unique event or one that has as yet never occurred. For frequentists the prior must have a more objective foundation; ideally that is the relative frequency of events in repeatable, well-defined experiments. McGrayne’s statisticians exhibit many differences, and she cites the quip that you can nevertheless always tell them apart by their posteriors, a good word on which to end.
John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, is the author of several books, including “Innumeracy” and, most recently, “Irreligion.”
A saúde em 2021 (Fapesp)
JC e-mail 4315, de 04 de Agosto de 2011.
Um dos grandes desafios a serem enfrentados pelo setor de saúde no Brasil em 2021 será o crescimento no número de idosos com o consequente aumento que se pode esperar nos quadros gerais de diversas doenças.
A constatação foi feita por especialistas de diversas áreas durante o Fórum Internacional Saúde em 2021, realizado nos dias 2 e 3 de agosto, em São Paulo, pela Associação Paulista pelo Desenvolvimento da Medicina (SPDM).
Dividido em seis módulos, “Brasil no mundo em 2021”, “O sistema de saúde brasileiro em 2021”, “Profissionais da saúde em 2021”, “Informação, comunicação e saúde”, “Ética na saúde” e “Mercado e complexo industrial da saúde em 2021”, o evento teve por objetivo identificar prováveis cenários do setor, assim como debater possíveis estratégias para a próxima década.
“O envelhecimento é inevitável e essa geração de idosos já nasceu”, disse Rubens Ricupero, diretor da Faculdade de Economia da Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), em palestra no fórum.
Ricupero citou dados do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) para destacar o envelhecimento populacional no país. Em 2001, 14,5 milhões de brasileiros (ou 9,1% do total) tinham acima de 60 anos. Em 2009, já eram 21,6 milhões (11,3%). Em 2025, a estimativa é que os idosos serão mais de 30 milhões (ou 15% do total). “Isso promoverá um grande impacto na economia do país”, disse.
De acordo com Maurício Lima Barreto, professor titular do Instituto de Saúde Coletiva da Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), problemas como diabetes e obesidade se tornarão ainda mais crônicos nas próximas décadas e, junto a novas doenças, poderão levar a um “estresse” no sistema de saúde brasileiro. “Temos de resolver os velhos problemas para podermos lidar com os novos no futuro”, ressaltou.
Para isso, o Brasil terá de investir ainda mais em ciência, tecnologia e inovação no setor. Isso tem ocorrido no Estado de São Paulo, por exemplo, em que a área de saúde é a maior destinatária dos recursos destinados pela FAPESP ao apoio à pesquisa.
“Em 2010, a Fapesp investiu R$ 215,3 milhões em pesquisas na área de saúde, o que representa 27,61% do total investido pela Fundação”, destacou Celso Lafer, presidente da Fapesp, no Fórum Internacional Saúde em 2021.
O desembolso da Fapesp com a Linha Regular – que compreende todas as modalidades de Bolsas e de Auxílios Regulares, excluindo as bolsas e os auxílios concedidos no âmbito dos Programas Especiais e dos Programas de Pesquisa para Inovação Tecnológica – totalizou R$ 595,91 milhões em 2010, correspondendo a 76,4% de todo o valor gasto pela Fundação. A área do conhecimento que recebeu maior volume de recursos dentro da Linha Regular foi saúde, com R$ 186,81 milhões (31,35%).
Glaucius Oliva, presidente do Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) e coordenador do Centro de Biotecnologia Molecular Estrutural, um dos Centros de Pesquisa, Inovação e Difusão (CEPIDs) da Fapesp, reforçou essa necessidade de investimentos no setor de saúde.
Segundo ele, o País também precisa superar a pequena presença de doutores no setor industrial. “Em 2008, 80% dos doutores atuavam em educação. Isso, dois anos após o doutoramento. O restante estava na administração pública e menos de 1% atuava com pesquisas em empresas”, ressaltou.
Para que a pesquisa avance para além do universo acadêmico, Oliva destacou a necessidade de internacionalizar ainda mais a ciência brasileira, assim como avanços na multi, inter e transdisciplinaridade. “O maior desafio é traduzir o conhecimento científico para a sociedade. E, para isso, precisamos de mais doutores nas empresas”, disse.
Mais informações: http://www.spdm.org.br/site/forum.
(Agência Fapesp)
Stuff white people like: denying climate change (Grist)
CLIMATE SKEPTICS
BY DAVID ROBERTS
2 AUG 2011 4:11 PM
There’s a study running soon in the journalGlobal Environmental Change called “Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States.” It analyzes poll and survey data from the last 10 years and finds that … are you sitting down? … conservative white men are far more likely to deny the threat of climate change than other people.
OK, that’s no surprise to anyone who’s been awake over the last decade. But the paper goes beyond that to put forward some theories aboutwhy conservative white men (CWM) are so loathe to accept climate change. The explanation is some mix of the following, all of which overlap in various ways:
- First there’s the “white male effect” — generally speaking, white males are less concerned with a variety of risks. This probably has to do with the fact that they are less exposed to risk than other demographics, what with running things and all.
- Then, as Chris Mooney notes, there’s the “social dominance orientation” of conservatives, who see social life as following the law of the jungle. One’s choice is to dominate or be dominated; that is the natural order of things. Such folk are leery of climate change solutions premised on fairness or egalitarianism.
- Then there are the well-understood “system-justifying tendencies” of conservatives. The authors explain that conservatives …
… strongly display tendencies to justify and defend the current social and economic system. Conservatives dislike change and uncertainty and attempt to simplify complexity. Further, conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.
- Finally, there’s “identity-protective cognition,” a notion borrowed from Dan Kahan at Yale. (See this PDF.) Here’s how Kahan and colleagues sum it up:
We propose that variance in risk perceptions — across persons generally, and across race and gender in particular — reflects a form of motivated cognition through which people seek to deflect threats to identities they hold, and roles they occupy, by virtue of contested cultural norms.
“Motivated cognition” refers to reasoning done in service of justifying an already held belief or goal. It helps explain why the CWM who know the most about climate science are the most likely to reject it; they learn about it in order to reject it. See Chris Mooney’s great piece on that. Point being: when facts (or the implications of those facts) threaten people’s social identities, they tend to dismiss the facts rather than the identity.
To all these reasons, I’d add “epistemic closure,” the extraordinary way that the modern right has constructed a self-contained, hermetically sealed media environment in which conservatives can be protected from ever encountering a contrary view. It’s an accelerant to all the tendencies described above.
Anyway, as you can see, the rejection of climate science among CWM is basically overdetermined. Climate change threatens their values, their privileges, and their worldview. They are reacting as one would expect them to react.
TV 10 weather forecasts worse than a crap shoot (City Pulse)
Media Muckraker
November 12, 2002
The surprise 3.1-inch snowfall last Monday, Dec. 2, resulted in more than 100 Lansing area accidents. Little did I know, as I chugged my car on U.S. 127 that morning, that over 20 of those accidents were taking place at the I-96 exchange just up around the bend. Fortunately, before I arrived at the ice-slick, my instincts got the better of me and I averted a possible accident by turning off I-127 early.
No thanks to the weathermen of WILX-10 (who share double duty as the forecasters for the Lansing State Journal). They had forecast snow, but had never said how much, hinting at just an inch or so.
Then it happened again. On Tuesday, Rockcole, Provenzano and Drummond predicted a low temperature “near 10.” In fact the mercury fell to 18 degrees below zero, the day’s lowest temperature since 1869!
How could the weathermen be so wrong? I decided to do a little weather muckraking.
In Britain, earlier this year, Ben Magoo wondered about the accuracy of the BBC’s weather reporting after the sunny vacation day they predicted for him turned out soggy. “Is the super computer in the [BBC] office accurately modeling the world’s climate, or is it resting its brain and picking out sun and rain symbols at random? We will find the answer!” Magoo developed a computer program to automatically analyze their weather data at 10 sites, including York, the Tower of London and Cambridge. Here’s what he found at Cambridge:
|
Cambridge, England | Days Monitored: 126
|
||||
| Days Ahead |
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
| Accuracy |
55%
|
50%
|
43%
|
35%
|
Incredibly, the chance of the next day’s forecast being right was just 55 percent. Note that Magoo ignored the same-day predictions, making “the assumption that predicting today’s weather is dead simple, so the BBC couldn’t possibly get this wrong.” Really now?
Turning to Lansing, I analyzed 14 days of WILX-LSJ forecasts between Nov. 24 and Dec. 7. I determined a forecast to be in error if at least one of the following occurred: 1) the predicted temperature was incorrect by 5 degrees or more (for either the high or low); 2) precipitation did not occur as predicted (e.g… they predicted snow, but there was none, or the converse), or 3) the precipitation prediction was off by 100% or more (e.g.,. they predicted 1 inch of snow, but it snowed 3 inches, a 200 percent difference).
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Lansing, MI | Days Monitored: 14
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|||||
| Days Ahead |
Same Day
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
| Accuracy |
50%
|
38%
|
50%
|
55%
|
20%
|
Remarkably, my analysis demonstrated that the WILX-LSJ forecasters were unable to predict the day’s weather – for the same day – a full seven of 14 days (50 percent)! The British chap had evidently presumed way too much. Distant predictions tended to be about 50/50, with fifth day a poor 20 percent.
You’d figure that predicting the weather a few hours hence would be a breeze. But they missed 3.1 inches of snow on Dec. 2 and were off by 28 degrees on Dec. 3. On Nov 29, the LSJ predicted that day’s weather would have a high in “the upper 30s,” which was significantly lower than the actual high of 46. And on Dec. 4, the LSJ predicted a low temp in the “low teens,” which was a far cry (for the freezing news carriers delivering the newspaper to your doorstep) from the actual low of 4 degrees below zero.
All tolled, of 60 days forecast, the accuracy rate was just 43 percent. Don’t believe it? Check it out for yourself, the evidence is in the library (the other TV weathermen do not have evidence so accessible). Lansing’s numbers are remarkably close to the Cambridge study, suggesting that this level of miscalculation might be consistent over the entire year.
One moral is to not rely on the forecasts to plan time off work.
At the very least, weathermen should humbly state the truth; there is a 50/50 chance that our forecasts will be wrong in at least one important area.Incompetence? Arrogance? It goes much deeper than that.
In Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Jack comments on the weather thus, “Charming day it has been, Miss Fairfax.” To which Gwendolen Fairfax replies, “Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.”
It’s true. Weather forecasts are less about the weather than about cementing social relations – telling you who has authority. While weather seems so bloody innocuous, in fact, culturally speaking, the weather forecast is a covert agent of social control.
It doesn’t matter to the mainstream media bosses that weathermen are wrong most of the time (if they even know it). What’s important is that weathermen exude an aura of certainty (precision numbers) while expressing an undercurrent of fear (of the possible storm). Just like the IRS, the traffic cop or your boss, no matter how wrong, he’s the person in charge – with certainty. There’s no way out. That’s one hidden message.
The good news is that they’re wrong!
Here’s what needs to be done. Lose the “Stormtracker” and hire a muckraker. Don’t circumvent serious issues like the amount of PCBs in the morning’s snowfall, or the amount of soot in a Lansing fog. And tell the viewers/readers where the historic danger spots are (like I-127& I-96) before the next snowstorm.
Here’s my forecast. Under the current corporate structure, they’ll never do it.
Alex Peter Zenger is the pen name for the Media Muckraker. It is inspired by the work of John Peter Zenger, one of the founding fighters for press freedom in the United States.
Let’s Take Back the Sky! (City Pulse)
by Brian McKenna
November 7, 2001
Saturday, Nov. 3, just hours before the planned confrontation with the enemy, our intelligence assessed its radar, consulted U.S. satellite imagery and identified the front. It would be a good day for bombing, “sunny with a high of 58 degrees.”
The U.S. war on Afghanistan?
No, Stormtracker 6’s weather prediction efforts for the Spartan/Wolverine football game, Michigan’s civil war.
Historically, weather forecasting came of age with the D-Day assault on Normandy Beach in 1944. A half-century later weather-work still retains its militant glow.
Consider the language. Channel 10’s “Sky Team” and “Stormtracker 6” punctuate their TV reports with alerts, watches, warnings, outbreaks, damage, hazards and threats. Like the Joint Chiefs, they monitor the scene with satellites, radar, chase vans, web cams and computerized maps. On occasion, they’ll interrupt our TV viewing with dire warnings of impending disaster, using the shrill three-note cry of the Emergency Broadcast System, originally intended for nuclear alerts. Channel 6’s WLNS will even e-mail you the warnings upon request.
The shift in terminology from the innocuous “weather report” to the ominous “Stormtracker 6” serves notice of a perennial threat.
There are rarely serious storm-related casualties in Lansing, yet Channels 6 and 10 have three full-time weathercasters apiece (yet not a single full-time environmental reporter).
What’s going on? According to several media critics, the latent function of the weather forecast is to reassure you that our boys (the “Sky Team”) are patrolling the heavens and carefully tracking any potential invaders. It’s 11 o’clock prayers, a psychological tonic. All is right with the world as you lay your head upon the pillow.
It’s no mistake that TV weather borrows the metaphorical ammunition of football and war. For, at its heart, U.S. culture is awash in fear and aggression. Has been for decades. And the “cultural cops,” be they Marines, Spartans or middle-aged weathermen with video map-clickers, are on guard, making us safe from “The Other.” Be they terrorists, a football rival or a storm.
Weather has become “the discourse of reactionary time,” says Alex Cockburn, social critic. Weather is supposed to be about our ability to “undergo or endure the action of the elements” in the open air. But weather reporters usually restrict analysis of those elements to the “natural” ones like H2O, lightning and tornadoes. Missing is coverage of human-made elements or compounds like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, mercury and hundreds of toxic chemicals spewing from General Motors car assembly plants, the Lansing Board of Water and Light’s coal fired utility or our car exhausts. These airborne elements – totaling hundreds of thousands of tons per year — account for untold levels of Lansing-area disease from cancer, hypertension and asthma.
There is some positive political movement around the edges of weather reporting. The cultural pressure on weathermen to report allergy alerts, ozone action days and high ultraviolet radiation days has highlighted the fact that, like it or not, weathermen are influential educators about nature and the environment.
Ironically, some local weathermen yearn to be seen as environmentalists. Channel 6 meteorologists highlight their relationship with the Ebersole Environmental Center, where once a month they escort a class of Lansing’s public school students for a nature study. Their Web site even has several links to interesting “Science and Astronomy” sites. Sadly, these fact-filled portals into the ecological and astronomical worlds are marginal to the TV show, where a de-politicized rhetoric of temperatures, clouds and the obvious abound.
Let’s imagine that TV weatherfolk really covered “the elements” in all their ecological diversity. Let’s fantasize about weathermen who enlighten, not just put us to sleep. Here are two items that I would have reported on last week:
October 2001 was the fourth wettest on record. It rained 5.69 inches. That equates to 123.5 million gallons of raw sewage that overflowed into the Grand River last month, a record amount for October.
On Thursday, Nov. 1, an environmental group named PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) released the third report that was suppressed by the Ingham County Health Department (the others are on water and food). It found an asthma epidemic among African American youth and particularly high asthma rates in the 48915 area code. (See the report at: http://www.peer.org/michigan/Ingham_air.pdf)
I’d include stories or guest spots by naturewatch folk in every broadcast. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that the red salamander had just come out of hibernation that day? Or that the full moon was rising on the “Give Peace a Chance” concert next Saturday night?
http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/lansing/archives/011107/health/index.html
Some People’s Climate Beliefs Shift With Weather (Columbia University)
Study Shows Daily Malleability on a Long-Term Question
2011-04-06
Photo by domediart, FlickrSocial scientists are struggling with a perplexing earth-science question: as the power of evidence showing manmade global warming is rising, why do opinion polls suggest public belief in the findings is wavering? Part of the answer may be that some people are too easily swayed by the easiest, most irrational piece of evidence at hand: their own estimation of the day’s temperature.
In three separate studies, researchers affiliated with Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) surveyed about 1,200 people in the United States and Australia, and found that those who thought the current day was warmer than usual were more likely to believe in and feel concern about global warming than those who thought the day was unusually cold. A new paper describing the studies appears in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science.
“Global warming is so complex, it appears some people are ready to be persuaded by whether their own day is warmer or cooler than usual, rather than think about whether the entire world is becoming warmer or cooler,” said lead author Ye Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Columbia Business School’s Center for Decision Sciences, which is aligned with CRED. “It is striking that society has spent so much money, time and effort educating people about this issue, yet people are still so easily influenced.” The study says that “these results join a growing body of work show that irrelevant environmental information, such as the current weather, can affect judgments. … By way of analogy, when asked about the state of the national economy, someone might look at the amount of money in his or her wallet, a factor with only trivial relevance.”
Ongoing studies by other researchers have already provided strong evidence that opinions on climate and other issues can hinge on factors unrelated to scientific observations. Most pointedly, repeated polls have shown that voters identifying themselves as political liberals or Democrats are far more likely to believe in human-influenced climate change than those who identify themselves as conservatives or Republicans. Women believe more than men, and younger people more than older ones. Other, yet-to-be published studies at four other universities have looked at the effects of actual temperature—either the natural one outside, or within a room manipulated by researchers—and show that real-time thermometer readings can affect people’s beliefs as well. These other studies involve researchers at New York University, Temple University, the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley.
In the current paper, respondents were fairly good at knowing if it was unusually hot or cold–perceptions correlated with reality three quarters of the time—and that the perception exerted a powerful control on their attitude. As expected, politics, gender and age all had the predicted influences: for instance, on the researchers’ 1-to-4 scale of belief in global warming, Democrats were 1.5 points higher than Republicans. On the whole though, after controlling for the other factors, the researchers found that perceived temperatures still had nearly two-thirds the power as political belief, and six times the power as gender, to push someone one way or the other a notch along the scale. (The coming NYU/Temple study suggests that those with no strong political beliefs and lower education are the most easily swayed.)
In one of the studies described in the paper, the researchers tried to test the earnestness of the responses by seeing how many of those getting paid $8 for the survey were willing to donate to a real-life charity, Clean Air-Cool Planet. The correlation was strong; those who said it was warmer donated an average of about $2; those who felt it was cooler gave an average of 48 cents.
The researchers say the study not only points to how individuals’ beliefs can change literally with the wind. Li says it is possible that weather may have influenced recent large-scale public opinion polls showing declining faith in climate science. Administered at different times, future ones might turn out differently, he said. These polls, he pointed out, include the national elections, which always take place in November, when things are getting chilly and thus may be empowering conservative forces at a time when climate has become a far more contentious issue than in the past. (Some politicians subsequently played up the heavy snows and cold of winter 2009-2010 as showing global warming was a hoax—even though scientists pointed out that such weather was probably controlled by short-term atmospheric mechanisms, and consistent with long-term warming.) “I’m not sure I’d say that people are manipulated by the weather. But for some percentage of people, it’s certainly pushing them around.” said Li.
The other authors are Eric J. Johnson, co-director of the Center for Decision Sciences; and Lisa Zaval, a Columbia graduate student in psychology.
Original link: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2794
Biased but Brilliant (N.Y. Times)
GRAY MATTER
Biased but Brilliant
By CORDELIA FINE
Published: July 30, 2011
Cordelia Fine, a senior research associate at the Melbourne Business School, is the author of “A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives.”
HOW’S this for a cynical view of science? “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Scientific truth, according to this view, is established less by the noble use of reason than by the stubborn exertion of will. One hopes that the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck, the author of the quotation above, was writing in an unusually dark moment.
And yet a large body of psychological data supports Planck’s view: we humans quickly develop an irrational loyalty to our beliefs, and work hard to find evidence that supports those opinions and to discredit, discount or avoid information that does not. In a classic psychology experiment, people for and against the death penalty were asked to evaluate the different research designs of two studies of its deterrent effect on crime. One study showed that the death penalty was an effective deterrent; the other showed that it was not. Which of the two research designs the participants deemed the most scientifically valid depended mostly on whether the study supported their views on the death penalty.
In the laboratory, this is labeled confirmation bias; observed in the real world, it’s known as pigheadedness.
Scientists are not immune. In another experiment, psychologists were asked to review a paper submitted for journal publication in their field. They rated the paper’s methodology, data presentation and scientific contribution significantly more favorably when the paper happened to offer results consistent with their own theoretical stance. Identical research methods prompted a very different response in those whose scientific opinion was challenged.
This is a worry. Doesn’t the ideal of scientific reasoning call for pure, dispassionate curiosity? Doesn’t it positively shun the ego-driven desire to prevail over our critics and the prejudicial urge to support our social values (like opposition to the death penalty)?
Perhaps not. Some academics have recently suggested that a scientist’s pigheadedness and social prejudices can peacefully coexist with — and may even facilitate — the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
Let’s take pigheadedness first. In a much discussed article this year in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that our reasoning skills are really not as dismal as they seem. They don’t deny that irrationalities like the confirmation bias are common. Instead, they suggest that we stop thinking of the primary function of reasoning as being to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Reasoning, they claim, is for winning arguments. And an irrational tendency like pigheadedness can be quite an asset in an argumentative context. A engages with B and proposes X. B disagrees and counters with Y. Reverse roles, repeat as desired — and what in the old days we might have mistaken for an exercise in stubbornness turns out instead to be a highly efficient “division of cognitive labor” with A specializing in the pros, B in the cons.
It’s salvation of a kind: our apparently irrational quirks start to make sense when we think of reasoning as serving the purpose of persuading others to accept our point of view. And by way of positive side effect, these heated social interactions, when they occur within a scientific community, can lead to the discovery of the truth.
And what about scientists’ prejudices? Clearly, social values should never count as evidence for or against a particular hypothesis — abhorrence of the death penalty does not count as data against its crime-deterrent effects. However, the philosopher of science Heather Douglas has argued that social values can safely play an indirect role in scientific reasoning. Consider: The greater we judge the social costs of a potential scientific error, the higher the standard of evidence we will demand. Professor A, for example, may be troubled by the thought of an incorrect discovery that current levels of a carcinogen in the water are safe, fearing the “discovery” will cost lives. But Professor B may be more anxious about the possibility of an erroneous conclusion that levels are unsafe, which would lead to public panic and expensive and unnecessary regulation.
Both professors may scrutinize a research paper with these different costs of error implicitly in mind. If the paper looked at cancer rates in rats, did the criteria it used to identify the presence of cancer favor over- or under-diagnosis? Did the paper assume a threshold of exposure below which there is no cause for concern, or did it assume that any level of exposure increases risk? Deciding which are the “better” criteria or the “better” background assumptions is not, Ms. Douglas argues, solely a scientific issue. It also depends on the social values you bring to bear on the research. So when Professor A concludes that a research study is excellent, while Professor B declares it seriously mistaken, it may be that neither is irrationally inflating or discounting the strength of the evidence; rather, each is tending to a different social concern.
Science often makes important contributions to debates that involve clashes of social values, like the protection of public health versus the protection of private industry from overregulation. Yet Ms. Douglas suggests that, with social values denied any legitimate role in scientific reasoning, “debates often dance around these issues, attempting to hide them behind debates about the interpretation of data.” Professors A and B are left with no other option but to conclude that the other is a stubborn, pigheaded excuse for a scientist.
For all its imperfections, science continues to be a stunning success. Yet maybe progress would be even faster and smoother if scientists would admit, and even embrace, their humanity.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 31, 2011, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Biased But Brilliant.
Climate Chaos (Against the Grain)
Tues 6.28.11| Climate Chaos
Christian Parenti speaking at a KPFA benefit on July 14th, on Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, Nation Books, 2011
Listen to this Program here.
Download program audio (mp3, 49.82 Mbytes)
Residents of the Global North may be justly wringing their hands about flooding, droughts, and freak weather, but the most worrying effects of climate change are expected to hit the countries of the Global South, especially those in the broad regions on either side of the equator. Christian Parenti has reported from that vast area and discusses the shape that climate-related social dislocation is already taking, as well as the militarized plans of the rich countries to keep poor climate refugees out.
© Against the Grain, a program of KPFA Radio, 94.1fm Berkeley CA and online at KPFA.org.
I am, therefore I’m right (Christian Science Monitor)
By Jim Sollisch / July 29, 2011
If you’ve ever been on a jury, you might have noticed that a funny thing happens the minute you get behind closed doors. Everybody starts talking about themselves. They say what they would have done if they had been the plaintiff or the defendant. They bring up anecdote after anecdote. It can take hours to get back to the points of law that the judge has instructed you to consider.
Being on a jury (I recently served on my fourth) reminds me why I can’t stomach talk radio. We Americans seem to have lost the ability to talk about anything but our own experiences. We can’t seem to generalize without stereotyping or to consider evidence that goes against our own experience.
I heard a doctor on a radio show the other day talking about a study that found that exercise reduces the incidence of Alzheimer’s. And caller after caller couldn’t wait to make essentially the opposite point: “Well, my grandmother never exercised and she lived to 95, sharp as a tack.” We are in an age summed up by the aphorism: “I experience, therefore I’m right.”
This isn’t a new phenomenon, except by degree. Historically, the hallmarks of an uneducated person were the lack of ability to think critically, to use deductive reasoning, to distinguish the personal from the universal. Now that seems an apt description of many Americans. The culture of “I” is everywhere you look, from the iPod/iPhone/iPad to the fact that memoir is the fastest growing literary genre.
How’d we get here? The same way we seem to get everywhere today: the Internet. The Internet has allowed us to segregate ourselves based on our interests. All cat lovers over here. All people who believe President Obama wasn’t born in the United States over there. For many of us, what we believe has become the most important organizing element in our lives. Once we all had common media experiences: Walter Cronkite, Ed Sullivan, a large daily newspaper. Now each of us can create a personal media network – call it the iNetwork – fed by the RSS feeds of our choosing.
But the Internet doesn’t just cordon us off in our own little pods. It also makes us dumber, as Nicholas Carr points out in his excellent book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains.” He argues that the way we consume media changes our brains, not just our behaviors. The Internet rewards shallow thinking: One search leads to thousands of results that skim over the surface of a subject.
Of course, we could dive deeply into any one of the listings, but we don’t. Studies show that people skim on line, they don’t read. The experience has been designed to reward speed and variety, not depth. And there is tangible evidence, based on studies of brain scans, that the medium is changing our physical brains, strengthening the synapses and areas used for referential thinking while weakening the areas used for critical thinking.
And when we diminish our ability to think critically, we, in essence, become less educated. Less capable of reflection and meaningful conversation. Our experience, reinforced by a web of other gut instincts and experiences that match our own, becomes evidence. Case in point: the polarization of our politics. Exhibit A: the debt ceiling impasse.
Ironically, the same medium that helped mobilize people in the Arab world this spring is helping create a more rigid, dysfunctional democracy here: one that’s increasingly polarized, where each side is isolated and capable only of sound bites that skim the surface, a culture where deep reasoning and critical thinking aren’t rewarded.
The challenge for most of us isn’t to go backwards: We can’t disconnect from the Internet. Nor would we want to. But we can work harder to make “search” the metaphor it once was: to discover, not just to skim. The Internet lets us find facts in an instant. But it doesn’t stop us from finding insight, if we’re willing to really search.
Jim Sollisch is creative director at Marcus Thomas Advertising.
Dancing, Climate Change, and Human Perseverence
Posted by Douglas Joseph La Rose at the EANTH list. 23/07/2011 12:20
“This Wednesday, I had one of the most powerful experiences of my life. I went to a small village in the Upper West Region of Ghana named Bakbamba to help conduct research on climate change and social-cultural adaptations to a changing environment. I have been doing this work for a few weeks now, beginning in coastal eastern Ghana and moving north. But what I experienced today was a life-changing experience. I will do my best to convey my feelings here, but no words would ever be ample to describe the emotion, compassion, and appreciation I felt in this community.
The Upper West Region of Ghana is the poorest region in the country. Outside of the regional capital, Wa, there is really nothing else but vast savanna covered with Shea and baobab trees. The people are primarily subsistence farmers and fishers. The farmers plant guinea corn, maize, yams, beans, bambara beans, millet, groundnuts, and some other crops. Fishers set traps and mobilize nets in the black Volta river that separates Ghana from Burkina Faso. Women also gather Shea nuts and sell them to foreign buyers who process them into cosmetics and edibles. Over the past ten years, rainfall has become sporadic, inconsistent, unpredictable, and unreliable. In these Wala, Fulani, and Lobi communities that have been surviving for centuries, people are beginning to give up and move out. They are suffering from observable climate change and often becoming climate change refugees.
In the course of doing interviews with rural farmers, fishers, and gatherers I heard many stories about failed crops, declining catches in fish, and even lack of fruits from Shea trees, which have been a productive alternative economic resource for decades. Their story is a bleak one. Most crops fail and the only foods Wala and Lobi people can depend on are fish and maize, which takes three months to grow and can be opportunistically planted. Though they plant other crops, many of them are failing because rains are becoming increasingly unpredictable and deluges and floods more common. There is no source of potable water, so people in the village drink from stagnant, muddy ponds. Guinea worm is still a widespread problem. There is no other option. Most of the people we were able to interview were only in their 30s and 40s – because that is about as old as they live. In this village of 300 people, 20 have already died this year. One particular woman I interviewed was 30 years old, but she looked like she was 60. Poor nutrition, hard work, and no access to clean water are taking their toll.
At the end of the day, the women in the town gathered in a circle and began a traditional dance. The women around the circle were clapping poly-rhythmically and singing with beautifully sculpted, angelic voices. I watched as, one by one, the women would enter the circle and do an energetic, stomping dance. At the end of the dance they would throw themselves into the surrounding circle and be caught by the other women. This went on for almost 45 minutes. I asked one of our local research assistants what they were singing and he explained that the dance was about a fighting couple, and they were saying that if the husband no longer loved the wife he should leave her. The women who were catching each other represented the community. “We should support each other,” a woman told me. I sat down and watched the dance, how the women were moving around in passionate whirls, heaving themselves into the boundaries of the circle to be caught by other community members. In this poor village of hunger, desperation, and confusion about a changing environment they were finding the energy to remember and celebrate the perseverance of the human spirit. It was an overwhelming experience to watch frustration and unity translated into cultural performance.
Throughout our interviews and participation in the community, I felt both alarmed and reassured. Alarmed that the situation in this part of upper Ghana is much worse than I expected, and reassured that people are forging ways to adapt.”
Why Global Warming Slowed in the 2000’s: Another Possible Explanation (Climate Central)
Published: July 21st, 2011
By Michael D. Lemonick
The world is getting progressively warmer, and the vast majority of evidence points to greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere by humans — carbon dioxide (CO2), especially — as the main culprit. But while the buildup of greenhouse gases has been steadily increasing, the warming goes in fits and starts. From one year to the next it might get a little warmer or a lot warmer, or even cooler.
That’s because greenhouse gases aren’t the whole story. Natural variations in sunlight and ocean currents; concentrations of particles in the air, manmade and otherwise; and even plain old weather variations can speed the warming up or slow it down, even as the underlying temperature trend continues upward. And while none of those factors is likely to change that trend over the long haul, scientists really want to understand how they affect projections of where our climate is heading.
The latest attempt to do so just appeared in Science Express, the online counterpart of the journal Science, where a team of climate scientists is reporting on their investigations of airborne particles, or aerosols, in the stratosphere. It’s well known, says co-author John Daniel, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., that these particles have a cooling effect, since they reflect sunlight that would otherwise warm the planet.
Mt. Pinatubo’s erruption in the Philippines, in 1991. Credit: USGS.
It’s also well known that major volcanic eruptions, like Mt. Pinatubo’s in the Philippines in 1991, can pump lots of aerosols into the stratosphere — and indeed, Pinatubo alone temporarily cooled the planet for about two years. The explosion of Mt. Tambora in 1815 had even more catastrophic effects, which you can imagine given that 1816 came to be known as “the year without a summer.” But what lots of people thought, says Daniel, “is that since there haven’t been any eruptions on that scale recently, aerosols have become relatively unimportant for climate.”
That, says the study, is not true: even without major eruptions, aerosols in the stratosphere increased by about 7 percent per year from 2000 to 2010. Plug that figure into climate models, and they predict a reduction in the warming you’d otherwise expect from the rise in greenhouse gases by up to 20 percent.
In the real world, as it happens, the rise in temperature slowed during that same decade. “That,” says Daniel, “was the motivation for doing this research. It could have just been natural climate variability, but we wondered if it could be something else.” Some climate scientists attribute the slowdown to heat being temporarily stored in the deep oceans, but stratospheric aerosols could clearly be part of the answer as well.
Whether these aerosols are natural or manmade, however, is something the scientists didn’t address. Just last week, a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggested the cause was a construction boom of coal-fired power plants in China over the same decade. The new study doesn’t necessarily contradict that. “Human emissions could play a role,” says Daniel, although the PNAS study was talking about aerosols in the lower atmosphere, not the stratosphere. “But even in the absences of colossal volcanic eruptions,” he says, “smaller eruptions could still add up.”
The other difference between the two studies is that the one from last week looked at the relatively slow temperature rise over the most recent decade and tried to tease out what might have changed since the previous decades, when the warming was faster. The new one took actual observations of aerosols and tried to predict what the temperature rise should be. That sort of approach tends to produce more credible results, since an incorrect prediction would stick out like a sore thumb.
Where the two studies emphatically agree is that if the level of aerosols goes down — due to a lull in eruptions, or a reduction in coal-plant pollution, or both — the pace of warming would likely pick up. That would mean that current projections for up to a 4.5°C increase in global average surface temperatures by the end of the century might turn out to be an underestimate. And if aerosol levels increase, the temperature in 2100 could be lower than everyone expects.
80 Percent of World Climate Data Are Not Computerized and Readily Available (Science Daily)
Science News
ScienceDaily (July 20, 2011) — In order to gain a better knowledge of climate variations, such as those caused by global warming, and be able to tackle them, we need to understand what happened in the recent past. This is the conclusion of a research study led by the Rovira i Virgili University (URV), which shows that the scientific community today is only able to access and analyse 20% of the recorded climate information held. The remaining data are not accessible in digital format.
Some climate data in Europe go back to the 17th Century, but “not even 20% of the information recorded in the past is available to the scientific community,” Manola Brunet, lead author of the study and a researcher at the URV’s Centre for Climate Change, said.
This situation is even worse in continents such as Africa and South America, where weather observations did not begin until the middle of the 19th Century. These are the results of a study published in Climate Research, which highlights the need to urgently recover all the information recorded in perishable formats.
“Failure to decipher the messages in the climate records of the past will result in socioeconomic problems, because we will be unable to deal with the current and future impacts of climate change and a hotter world,” says Brunet.
Spain, along with the USA, Canada, Holland and Norway, is one of a small number of countries which allows partial access to its historic climate data. The rest of the world does not make these data available to the scientific community or the general public, despite recommendations to this effect by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
In order to overcome the political and legal hurdles posed by this currently poor access, “governments should adopt a resolution within the United Nations on opening up their historical climate data,” the researcher suggests.
Predicting heat waves
Weather services in all countries are faced with the overwhelming job of converting all their paper-based historical climate information, which is stored in archives, libraries and research centres, into digital format. The wide range of forms in which the information is held makes access harder, as do the purposes for which the meteorological service itself was actually created.
“The main objective is to provide a weather service to public, who want to know what the weather will be like the next day,” explains Brunet. This has led to climate science (which studies the range of atmospheric conditions characterising a region rather than focusing on weather forecasting) becoming the great ‘victim’, receiving fewer funds with which to digitise, develop and standardise data.
However, climate services do play a significant role in some European countries, the United States and Canada. It was these services that were able to explain last summer’s heat wave in Eastern Europe and put it into context, as well as the high temperatures recorded on the Old Continent in 2003.
“If we had access to all the historical data recorded, we would be able to evaluate the frequency with which these phenomena are likely to occur in the future with a higher degree of certainty,” the expert explains.
This kind of information is of scientific, social and economic interest, with insurance companies setting their premiums according to expected climate changes, for example. City councils and governments also “want to understand climate conditions and how these will change in future in order to improve land zoning and prevent urban development from taking place in areas likely to be affected by flooding,” concludes Brunet.
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