Tomorrow we dock at Fremantle, Australia, and the day after that I fly to Los Angeles where crazy things await me. In late March/early April, I’ll make a brief side trip to Cambridge to pick up some stuff and then I’ll return to LA where crazy things await me.
I guess I’ll make just a few more posts before I close Danparktica forever... this here will be my last “serious” or “substantial” post containing some last thoughts on global warming. I’ll also clarify the relationship between what goes on this boat and the larger picture. And I promise I’m feeling a bit more optimistic today... Then later I’ll have one last post about a dream I had about a pod-robot named RSR-5. That one is a sad story... but sort of funny in a way too. Then that’s it, I promise! Sorry if this blog has gotten heavy or boring lately, but I guess it’s mostly what I’ve been thinking about these days. Can’t wait for some Starbucks.
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MY LAST SERIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC POST:
A few days ago, I had a conversation with my bunkmate Dave, who, just for the record, is a very intelligent and friendly dude with piercing blue eyes. Ladies, he is also an optimist. Anyway, our discussion looped around and around: we both agreed that overpopulation was probably a big part of the problem, and any proposed solutions were distant and difficult and brought up myriad other problems. But Dave brought up an interesting point: for all this talk about global warming, for all you hear about “saving the planet” or “preserving biodiversity”... in the end, that’s not what people care about. Short of blasting the thing to bits with bombs or whatever, the issue at hand is not about saving the Earth. It’s about humans... it’s about saving lives.
Some skeptics will speak about how the world has frequently gone through huge swings in climate and cite that as reason not to worry... they’re right in one sense: through the geological history of the earth, there have been even larger climate swings than anything we are seeing now. But to then conclude that there is no reason to worry is nonsense: for one, there is no clear evidence that mankind would survive a severe change in climate. The past 10 or 12,000 years have been the most stable time climatically in many millennia (relatively)... it is even possible that people could not have developed agriculture without having been granted this boon. Will agriculture still be possible in a changed earth? How many people will diminished food supplies be able to support?
The earth will continue to exist, and it will continue to have land, oceans, a fiery core, whatnot... that is almost assured. Many species of plants and animals may become extinct, and yes I think that stinks, but the Earth, were it conscious, would not care less. The biggest question facing us is: having done what we’ve done, will we even be able to survive? All signs point to an impending warming climate that may yet be tempered by human efforts. One thing you can conclude from the IPCC Working Group I Summary for Policy Makers is that the the intensity and rapidity of the coming change are still up in the air, as seen from the report’s use of several forecasting models for different possible economic states of the world.
Perhaps some of the most heartwarming things I’ve read have come from Ms. Brice’s 8th graders... if I may quote Ms. Brice:
“Many (about 70%) of my students are from immigrant families and have lived in countries with much less than what they have here. The point was readily taken that even though they enjoy the new luxuries, their old life was still a happy one. Most were willing to give up things to help the environment and the community. That is why I love teaching 8th grade, no matter how bad the news is, I walk into a classroom with adolescent 14 year olds and they always give me hope the world will be ok...
“The most insightful comment I heard all day was one student who said: ‘So Dr. Swift says the world is what we make of it, that means we can make it better too.’”
In earlier posts, I’d referred to Jim Swift’s summary of the problem, that in order to correct for overpopulation, social structures will have to become less ‘fair,’ or there will have to be drastic reductions to our ways of life. It may sound to older generations unthinkable to have to get rid of our 2nd or 3rd television set, to eat steak half as often, to commute to work on a bike or train... but an educated younger generation may find it easier to adapt to a changing world.
Back to my earlier conversation with Dave, some of the solutions we came with were birth control—but then you have religions and cultures that specifically deny this option—or huge energy-reduction mandates—but what politician would put this on his platform and still have a chance at winning?—or technological fixes—but all attempts at carbon sequestration and iron fertilization have yet to be proven cost-effective and even heat-efficient, and climate tampering has never before solved more problems than it has created... plus it’s merely a band-aid covering up a still-growing source of greenhouse gases—or the development of clean forms of energy—but it has been determined that solar and wind power simply cannot provide for all of the world’s energy needs as is, and hydrogen power has not proven efficient, nor do western nations seem ready to support cleaner nuclear power in places like Iran—or the continuation of the social structure of energy-rich and energy-poor—but as young idealists we don’t like the thought of there always being a huge gap in quality of life between people of the world... and so on.
The real answer probably lies in some combination of all the above at moderate degrees... some family planning controls, development of some technological solutions, construction of many windmills and solar panels, and social recommendations but not mandates: turn off the lights when you leave the room, switch incandescent bulbs to efficient spiral bulbs, take public transportation... and perhaps mankind’s chance at effecting such moderate but blanket change will require the extra efforts of a younger generation who better understands the world—because the world today is certainly not the world of 1970 or whenever it was that all those old people came from. It’s all about education.
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To be more specific, we need to improve quality of education by enabling more people to learn how to think logically. How many Americans really know what the scientific method is? Most people use it without even blinking; oh, the light’s out? Maybe the fuse is gone, or the bulb is out, or the switch is broken. Check the fuse, nope that’s fine. Replace the bulb, still out? Must be wiring or something else. Etc. Actually I don’t personally know what you’d do then other than call the electrical company, or Dad, but that’s still the basic logical process. Problem, hypothesis, experiment, observation, result.
But how many people approach academic problems with this sort of mindset? Research for a paper is conducted in the same fashion: have a prompt, think about several different methods to approach it, outline or try each out, okay you decide one is the best, continue and write. Or: what’s all this about global warming? Maybe I’ll just read a little bit about it, get some facts, start digesting those facts, decide which is best, then think about the consequences. Ok, so the consequences are scary: what can be done about it? Etc.
The problem is when you have people turning to the easy avenue for answers, such as getting opinions straight from the television... when the true thinker should initially be a skeptic. Even those scientists who support the conclusion that climate change is due to mankind’s influence should still be skeptics at heart; they’ve just been convinced by a preponderance of evidence in one direction. But every new piece of data must be carefully examined, and nothing should be taken for granted.
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On the Revelle, such activity has been going on at full speed for four solid weeks. Data has been gathered nonstop by rotating shifts of scientists and technicians, and has been regularly sent to the beach for examination and use in new models. Being in the field, I’ve come to appreciate this necessary effort—and it is a huge effort—in the context of developing and clarifying ocean and climate models.
The work on the Revelle does not directly have to do with making policy, but it is instead the first step in that process. Better data inform better models which in turn will forecast climate to the benefit of society. Not having this cruise would be akin to losing some pages of a book: reading it, you’d still get the bigger picture, but depending on what those pages were, the meaning of the book could be slightly altered or even greatly changed.
Anyway, it’s been fun, and you’ve just been the first of my outreach victims.
Friday, March 16, 2007
17 Hours to Fremantle
(By Pien)
The Captain estimates that we will arrive in Fremantle on the morning of the 17th, a full day ahead of schedule. We completed the science program two days ago, ending the day/night shift split, and the dining area has become too crowded to accommodate everyone at once. Jim’s motto “sleep beats eat” has been replaced with the Captain’s “eat it and beat it.” We’ve since become preoccupied with low-stakes poker and a ship-wide game of "Murder,” which was a surprisingly short diversion. In “Murder,” all participants draw cards, and receive a pair of steel nuts. The Queen of Spades goes around “murdering” people by cornering them and demanding their nuts. On a 55-person boat, where you know exactly where everyone else is at any given time, this game moves quickly. Two-thirds of the “villagers” were killed the first day, and the rest were dead by the next afternoon.
It took us the second-to-last shipboard sunset to catch the “green flash.” As the sun sinks past the horizon, the rays are refracted through the atmosphere and separated into colors, as in a prism. One of the last visible wavelengths is green. On a very clear day, the sun as it disappears is replaced for a split second by a flash of green, which is one of the last visible wavelengths. We filmed the sunset from the flying bridge, the highest deck on the boat, but the camera wasn’t sensitive enough to capture the color.
All the guide books are out, and there is much talk of hotels, surfing, flights. 17 hours to Fremantle!!
The Captain estimates that we will arrive in Fremantle on the morning of the 17th, a full day ahead of schedule. We completed the science program two days ago, ending the day/night shift split, and the dining area has become too crowded to accommodate everyone at once. Jim’s motto “sleep beats eat” has been replaced with the Captain’s “eat it and beat it.” We’ve since become preoccupied with low-stakes poker and a ship-wide game of "Murder,” which was a surprisingly short diversion. In “Murder,” all participants draw cards, and receive a pair of steel nuts. The Queen of Spades goes around “murdering” people by cornering them and demanding their nuts. On a 55-person boat, where you know exactly where everyone else is at any given time, this game moves quickly. Two-thirds of the “villagers” were killed the first day, and the rest were dead by the next afternoon.
It took us the second-to-last shipboard sunset to catch the “green flash.” As the sun sinks past the horizon, the rays are refracted through the atmosphere and separated into colors, as in a prism. One of the last visible wavelengths is green. On a very clear day, the sun as it disappears is replaced for a split second by a flash of green, which is one of the last visible wavelengths. We filmed the sunset from the flying bridge, the highest deck on the boat, but the camera wasn’t sensitive enough to capture the color.
All the guide books are out, and there is much talk of hotels, surfing, flights. 17 hours to Fremantle!!
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Dear Mrs Brice's 8th Grade Class
First of all, I’m no global warming expert! I’m merely relaying information from one source to another, so I’m really happy to see you’re reading and learning about the problem—and quite a bit too, judging from your questions. By now you seem to know more about global warming than I do, so I left it to Chief Scientist Jim Swift and Professor of Oceanography Chris Measures to compose answers for you. I have posted their letters in their entirety as responses to your comment below, found here. I made some very small edits, and I also took the liberty of highlighting some of the more salient points. They are absolutely worth the read, so please check them out.
Jim’s response in particular makes a few striking statements which get at the heart of the climate change issue while also saying something you’ll never hear from a politician: the real problem is overpopulation. I’ll quote the relevant paragraph here:
If you lived in a poor village in some far-away land, would you like to live as we do? If each of the planet's citizens used same amount of energy daily that underlies the lives of each of us in the USA (not just the energy we use directly at home, but our part of the sum of all the energy that goes into making what we use), and even if that energy were made via an extremely efficient process that did not involve CO2, all of it eventually gets turned into heat, so the sum over the whole planet of everyone living as we do would warm the planet, CO2 or not CO2. Either (1) there are too many human beings, (2) we need to hugely change our lifestyle (in ways that may be very harsh indeed), or (3) we have to maintain a social structure of energy-users and energy-poor.
It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s probably close to the truth... there are too many humans to support as good a lifestyle as we’d like to bring to everyone. We’re headed toward a crisis which puts hundreds of millions of the world’s poor in great danger—an upcoming report from the IPCC will state some predicted troubles which include severe water shortages and rising sea levels. It seems that the measures necessary to mitigate the long term effects of the disaster (but not avoid, as Mrs. Brice’s 8th grade class noted is probably not possible) will require practically draconian measures... either a drastic reduction in population, a drastic reduction of everybody's energy use, or some combination of the two that would result in an unhappy social structure. It may be too much change to voluntarily accept. I think it boils down to this: Humans are an infinitely competitive species living in a finite world.
This is not to say that there’s nothing that can be done, because there’s still a lot that one person can do. If every single person were to take some steps toward reducing their energy use (that would include eating less meat, using fewer things that require lots of energy to build, etc), that would make a big difference. It wouldn't make "all the difference," but certainly it would be productive. It just would be nice if a feeling of social and environmental responsibility were a valuable evolutionary trait... for example, apparently there’s a cleric in Australia (I won't name which religion since I'm interested in the environmental not political ramifications) who is urging those of his religion to have as many babies as possible so they can “out breed” other religious groups. Such an attitude exhibits dangerous environmental irresponsibility.
Jim’s response in particular makes a few striking statements which get at the heart of the climate change issue while also saying something you’ll never hear from a politician: the real problem is overpopulation. I’ll quote the relevant paragraph here:
If you lived in a poor village in some far-away land, would you like to live as we do? If each of the planet's citizens used same amount of energy daily that underlies the lives of each of us in the USA (not just the energy we use directly at home, but our part of the sum of all the energy that goes into making what we use), and even if that energy were made via an extremely efficient process that did not involve CO2, all of it eventually gets turned into heat, so the sum over the whole planet of everyone living as we do would warm the planet, CO2 or not CO2. Either (1) there are too many human beings, (2) we need to hugely change our lifestyle (in ways that may be very harsh indeed), or (3) we have to maintain a social structure of energy-users and energy-poor.
It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s probably close to the truth... there are too many humans to support as good a lifestyle as we’d like to bring to everyone. We’re headed toward a crisis which puts hundreds of millions of the world’s poor in great danger—an upcoming report from the IPCC will state some predicted troubles which include severe water shortages and rising sea levels. It seems that the measures necessary to mitigate the long term effects of the disaster (but not avoid, as Mrs. Brice’s 8th grade class noted is probably not possible) will require practically draconian measures... either a drastic reduction in population, a drastic reduction of everybody's energy use, or some combination of the two that would result in an unhappy social structure. It may be too much change to voluntarily accept. I think it boils down to this: Humans are an infinitely competitive species living in a finite world.
This is not to say that there’s nothing that can be done, because there’s still a lot that one person can do. If every single person were to take some steps toward reducing their energy use (that would include eating less meat, using fewer things that require lots of energy to build, etc), that would make a big difference. It wouldn't make "all the difference," but certainly it would be productive. It just would be nice if a feeling of social and environmental responsibility were a valuable evolutionary trait... for example, apparently there’s a cleric in Australia (I won't name which religion since I'm interested in the environmental not political ramifications) who is urging those of his religion to have as many babies as possible so they can “out breed” other religious groups. Such an attitude exhibits dangerous environmental irresponsibility.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
1 degree
Ok, so let’s say you agree with the scientific community and accept that global warming is occurring and is due to anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gases. But you might wonder why everyone is so worried about what ultimately amounts to only a few degrees difference. Even the IPCC’s worst-case scenario—rapid global economic growth characterized by intensive use of fossil fuels—leads to rise of global average temperature by only 7 degrees Fahrenheit. Individually a bit uncomfortable, but not a big deal, right? By the way, the IPCC uses Celsius, but I use Fahrenheit, because whatever, I’m American.
Let’s say that instead of rushing headlong off a cliff, the world governments decide that the best course of action would be to save the world, so greenhouse gas emissions are reduced in a best-case scenario... we’d still be looking at between 2 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit change over the next 100 years (if all emissions were to completely cease, the temperature would still rise by about a degree or 2). What would a 1-degree change matter? After all, summer in Boston wouldn’t be much more unbearable at 101 degrees than at 100.
Well, a 1 degree rise leads to a number of gradual changes, including the thermal expansion of water, increased precipitation, acidification of the ocean, and others... but here’s one concrete reason why it matters: a global average change of 1 degree might mean that Boston has a slightly more murderous summer, but more importantly, somewhere in the world, the temperature would rise from, say, 31.5 degrees to 32.5 degrees. And suddenly you have a real problem. The freezing point of water is a threshold temperature in that polar regions could warm 5 degrees and not make a significant difference, but as soon as that boundary is reached, ice starts to melt. And melting ice means more melting ice. The albedo effect refers to sunlight being reflected by ice; the more ice there is, the more light is reflected from the surface, and that cools the earth. This feedback effect works both ways: when ice melts, there’s less ice to reflect sunlight, so warming accelerates, and more ice melts.
A global rise of 1 degree on average actually means a several degree rise in the Arctic, as the Arctic is expected to be most affected by warming. This is due to the climate system. Essentially, the climate is the redistribution of heat around the globe. In Chief Scientist Jim Swift’s own words, “The sun shines, solar energy is taken in more strongly at the equatorial regions, and radiated more strongly in the polar region. And the climate is how the earth solves that puzzle of redistributing heat. Not as opposed to weather—the local manifestation—the climate is the overall big process.”
An example of this heat distribution process is the Gulf Stream, which carries tropical water up and across the Atlantic, where it cools off in the high northern latitudes. By “cooling off” I mean that it dumps a tremendous amount of heat into the Arctic region. There are similar currents and winds all around the world that generally pull heat away from the tropics up to the poles. Well, what some scientists are looking into is whether the “climate puzzle” has multiple solutions. Sophisticated climate models point to multiple solutions that get heat from the equator to the poles, but switching from one circulation pattern to another may be like a step function. Once a stable system is upset enough, it may suddenly and irreversibly shift (“suddenly” in geological time, of course). One fear—still considered “behind-the-scenes” as it is not yet verified—is that we may be headed toward one such point of no return. If changes are gradual, people can gradually adapt. But if a change took place in 10 years that was expected to take place over 1000 years, it could be disastrous. But are we accelerating such a process, or reversing it, or changing it in an unknown way? We just don’t know yet. It’s been said before, but we are undertaking the greatest experiment ever, and we don’t know what we’re doing.
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By the way, The Host is out. It’s a Korean monster film. I was in Seoul at the time of its production, and thanks to a wildly cool family connection I was able to visit the set—a dank sewer under the overpass—when they shot one of the monster sequences. It’s always fun being behind the scenes: the star, Bae Doo-na, was relaxing and drinking coffee while her stunt double repeatedly ran from the camera, spun around, got whacked by a guy in a monster costume, and then got yanked back by an awesome wire contraption. They did that shot like ten times over. I hope that shot made the film... I feel bad for the stunt double. Can’t wait to see the movie! And, curiously enough, NY Times Reviewer Manohla Darghis likens it to An Inconvenient Truth.
Let’s say that instead of rushing headlong off a cliff, the world governments decide that the best course of action would be to save the world, so greenhouse gas emissions are reduced in a best-case scenario... we’d still be looking at between 2 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit change over the next 100 years (if all emissions were to completely cease, the temperature would still rise by about a degree or 2). What would a 1-degree change matter? After all, summer in Boston wouldn’t be much more unbearable at 101 degrees than at 100.
Well, a 1 degree rise leads to a number of gradual changes, including the thermal expansion of water, increased precipitation, acidification of the ocean, and others... but here’s one concrete reason why it matters: a global average change of 1 degree might mean that Boston has a slightly more murderous summer, but more importantly, somewhere in the world, the temperature would rise from, say, 31.5 degrees to 32.5 degrees. And suddenly you have a real problem. The freezing point of water is a threshold temperature in that polar regions could warm 5 degrees and not make a significant difference, but as soon as that boundary is reached, ice starts to melt. And melting ice means more melting ice. The albedo effect refers to sunlight being reflected by ice; the more ice there is, the more light is reflected from the surface, and that cools the earth. This feedback effect works both ways: when ice melts, there’s less ice to reflect sunlight, so warming accelerates, and more ice melts.
A global rise of 1 degree on average actually means a several degree rise in the Arctic, as the Arctic is expected to be most affected by warming. This is due to the climate system. Essentially, the climate is the redistribution of heat around the globe. In Chief Scientist Jim Swift’s own words, “The sun shines, solar energy is taken in more strongly at the equatorial regions, and radiated more strongly in the polar region. And the climate is how the earth solves that puzzle of redistributing heat. Not as opposed to weather—the local manifestation—the climate is the overall big process.”
An example of this heat distribution process is the Gulf Stream, which carries tropical water up and across the Atlantic, where it cools off in the high northern latitudes. By “cooling off” I mean that it dumps a tremendous amount of heat into the Arctic region. There are similar currents and winds all around the world that generally pull heat away from the tropics up to the poles. Well, what some scientists are looking into is whether the “climate puzzle” has multiple solutions. Sophisticated climate models point to multiple solutions that get heat from the equator to the poles, but switching from one circulation pattern to another may be like a step function. Once a stable system is upset enough, it may suddenly and irreversibly shift (“suddenly” in geological time, of course). One fear—still considered “behind-the-scenes” as it is not yet verified—is that we may be headed toward one such point of no return. If changes are gradual, people can gradually adapt. But if a change took place in 10 years that was expected to take place over 1000 years, it could be disastrous. But are we accelerating such a process, or reversing it, or changing it in an unknown way? We just don’t know yet. It’s been said before, but we are undertaking the greatest experiment ever, and we don’t know what we’re doing.
--------------------
By the way, The Host is out. It’s a Korean monster film. I was in Seoul at the time of its production, and thanks to a wildly cool family connection I was able to visit the set—a dank sewer under the overpass—when they shot one of the monster sequences. It’s always fun being behind the scenes: the star, Bae Doo-na, was relaxing and drinking coffee while her stunt double repeatedly ran from the camera, spun around, got whacked by a guy in a monster costume, and then got yanked back by an awesome wire contraption. They did that shot like ten times over. I hope that shot made the film... I feel bad for the stunt double. Can’t wait to see the movie! And, curiously enough, NY Times Reviewer Manohla Darghis likens it to An Inconvenient Truth.
Under Pressure
Here's a fun thing: at 4000 meters below, the pressure is about 400 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level. I used this force wisely.
Before:
And after:
Before:
And after:
Keeling
(By Pien Huang)
If the I8S route was mapped antipodally (on the direct opposite side of the world), we would have started south of France at the Bay of Biscayne, steamed for two weeks to the Northwest Territories, sampled parallel to the Hudson Bay, through the Great Lakes and down to Alabama, and out to Bermuda. As it is, we’ve seen nothing but ocean for the past three weeks.
There is less land in general in the southern hemisphere. This has to do with the way the continents drifted apart some 200 million years ago, and it is partly the reason that the Keeling plot looks the way it does. The original Keeling plot was published in 1961, based on measurements taken by Charles Keeling on Mauna Loa. It was the first time anyone had documented the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, and its revolutionary nature is featured in Al Gore’s /An Inconvenient Truth/. The term “Keeling plot” has since become synonymous with any graph that shows the rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over recent time. Beyond recording the rise in CO2 levels, this Keeling plot shows that CO2 fluctuates seasonally, and much more so in the northern hemisphere. This is because there is more land, and therefore more plants, in the northern hemisphere. Plants absorb CO2 to photosynthesize, and they release the CO2 when they die in the winter.
Climate change skeptics will try to use this fluctuation against you. They might argue that CO2 levels get higher and lower all the time, and they will point to the fact that we’ve had major ebbs and flows in the atmospheric CO2 content in the geological past (a really, really long time ago). What they won’t do is use exact numbers. You can refute them with the 180-240-370 rule, which they teach you in college: from ice core studies, scientists have determined that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have fluctuated between 180 and 240 ppmv (just a measurement label) as far back as we can tell. Our current levels exceed 370 ppmv.^1
It’s not entirely true for me to say we’ve seen nothing but ocean. We’ve seen plenty of birds, mainly albatross, petrels, and sometimes skuas. Tonight there was a squid alert from the winch operator (he sits in a tower outside controlling the wire during equipment launches), which took most of us from the control room out to portside. According to the sea veterans, squids are attracted to the flood lights which illuminate our night-time casts. We leaned overboard, squirting seawater from a hose (the same sea vets say the squids think it might be anchovies). Something white skippered across the waves. It might have been a small squid, but for the while after, every blob we saw disintegrated into seafoam.
Props to JJ Becker, and a shout-out to the school board of San Diego.
^1 Fischer, Gaston. Atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide. Population and Environment, 10:3, March 1989.
If the I8S route was mapped antipodally (on the direct opposite side of the world), we would have started south of France at the Bay of Biscayne, steamed for two weeks to the Northwest Territories, sampled parallel to the Hudson Bay, through the Great Lakes and down to Alabama, and out to Bermuda. As it is, we’ve seen nothing but ocean for the past three weeks.
There is less land in general in the southern hemisphere. This has to do with the way the continents drifted apart some 200 million years ago, and it is partly the reason that the Keeling plot looks the way it does. The original Keeling plot was published in 1961, based on measurements taken by Charles Keeling on Mauna Loa. It was the first time anyone had documented the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, and its revolutionary nature is featured in Al Gore’s /An Inconvenient Truth/. The term “Keeling plot” has since become synonymous with any graph that shows the rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over recent time. Beyond recording the rise in CO2 levels, this Keeling plot shows that CO2 fluctuates seasonally, and much more so in the northern hemisphere. This is because there is more land, and therefore more plants, in the northern hemisphere. Plants absorb CO2 to photosynthesize, and they release the CO2 when they die in the winter.Climate change skeptics will try to use this fluctuation against you. They might argue that CO2 levels get higher and lower all the time, and they will point to the fact that we’ve had major ebbs and flows in the atmospheric CO2 content in the geological past (a really, really long time ago). What they won’t do is use exact numbers. You can refute them with the 180-240-370 rule, which they teach you in college: from ice core studies, scientists have determined that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have fluctuated between 180 and 240 ppmv (just a measurement label) as far back as we can tell. Our current levels exceed 370 ppmv.^1
It’s not entirely true for me to say we’ve seen nothing but ocean. We’ve seen plenty of birds, mainly albatross, petrels, and sometimes skuas. Tonight there was a squid alert from the winch operator (he sits in a tower outside controlling the wire during equipment launches), which took most of us from the control room out to portside. According to the sea veterans, squids are attracted to the flood lights which illuminate our night-time casts. We leaned overboard, squirting seawater from a hose (the same sea vets say the squids think it might be anchovies). Something white skippered across the waves. It might have been a small squid, but for the while after, every blob we saw disintegrated into seafoam.
Props to JJ Becker, and a shout-out to the school board of San Diego.
^1 Fischer, Gaston. Atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide. Population and Environment, 10:3, March 1989.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Public Perception of Science
I was informed today that, thanks to the power of Google, an 8th grade class is learning from my blog—Hi kiddos, welcome to Danparktica!! ... so if I seem stilted in tone, forgive me; I am afraid. I’m sure I’ve done more than enough irreparable harm. Sorry, kiddos.
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The closer we get to the Equator, the more Internet access we have... so I’ve been doing a little reading up on papers and stuff. As you know, reading leads to thinking, and thinking leads to blogging. Here we go:
What makes us believe what we believe? Do you believe in global warming? Do you believe in God? Well, do you believe in your neighbors? I wouldn’t say that I believe in Gaurav, my former roommate, but I can say with at least 95% certainty that he exists, or did exist. Let’s say I were to find a current phonebook from Tucson, AZ, a place I’ve never been to, and in it I found an entry about an Ernie MacTaggart. Would I be right in believing that such a person existed and lived in Tucson? What if, instead of personally seeing the phonebook, I was separately told by 20 people that they had found similar phonebooks and that each of them had come to the conclusion that Ernie MacTaggart really did exist and that he lived in Arizona? And then what if on top of those 20 accounts, I was then approached by 1 other person who told me that they had seen the phonebook and that they had concluded that no such person existed? What if those people, including the 1 dissenter, all held PhDs as evidence of their competence in gathering and interpreting data? Who would you believe? How much certainty is required of belief?
According to a 2005 survey in a paper by Jon Miller (“Public understanding of, and attitudes toward, scientific research: what we know and what we need to know”), scientific literacy, as defined by knowledge of basic terms and understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry, among Americans is under 20%. I personally wish this number were higher, but it’s also understandable: the average person is busy, so he or she directly or indirectly hires specialists to take care of gathering and interpreting scientific data. For example, by paying your taxes, you assume that the government will provide grants for relevant scientific research. But then you see a statistic like this, found in a 2006 ABC poll: “64% of Americans perceive ‘a lot of disagreement among scientists’” regarding the existence of global warming.
I can say from personal experience that the existence of global warming is not a point of contention among the majority of scientists; it’s rare that you’ll even find anyone on the Revelle even casually mentioning it in conversation. It’s a moot point. One of Al Gore’s favorite statistics—a statistic which is now undisputed—is from Naomi Oreskes’s 2004 paper that found that of 928 reviewed scientific articles, none were in disagreement about the existence of global warming. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, released in February, is the official document representing the opinion of thousands of leading scientists, as approved by 113 countries before its release, and it reiterates that agreement. Some simplified conclusions from the report (with some of my added notes):
1. Global warming is unequivocal. Temperatures have been rising. Even so-called “GW Skeptics” admit that this is happening.
2. The large majority of the scientific community is at least 90% certain that the recent trend in global warming since the 1950s is due to man-made greenhouse gas output.
3. Human influences are now visible in other climatic aspects, notably temperature extremes and wind patterns.
4. Ramifications of global warming include a rise in sea level, melting ice cover, increased intensity of tropical cyclones, and acidification of the ocean.
(This is an extremely brief summary of what already is a summary for policy-makers, so I’d recommend checking out the PDF file yourself, it’s quite interesting.)
The point I’m making is that the scientific community as a whole sees data that points to a troubling situation, and yet they are faced with a dilemma: how do they get the word out? The natural instinct is to turn to the media; after all, people watch TV! People read newspapers, they listen to the radio, they listen to people who watched TV. It should stand to reason that if the scientific community is largely aligned in its opinion then the public, as informed through the media, should also be aligned in its opinion, or at least aligned in thinking that the scientific community is mostly in agreement.
There are a few skeptics out there, however, whose main claims are that global warming, while evident, is due to natural causes such as fluctuations in solar radiation and cosmic rays. Then there are a few scientists who contend that global warming will have consequences that are mostly beneficial for mankind. Frankly, their opinions have been refuted by the larger scientific community, and yet they receive special media attention. Why? Because they’re the stubborn underdogs, and underdogs sell. The media attempts to present a ‘balanced’ opinion of global warming by giving equal coverage to the skeptics, thereby overrepresenting a minority. Just open up the Drudge Report and chances are you'll find a few main-page articles about global warming skeptics, and none about affirmers.
But not only is coverage ‘balanced,’ it’s also being reported by a media replete with journalists who don’t have clear knowledge of global warming. A study of 249 environmental reporters found that only 30% correctly identified nitrous oxide as one of the most important greenhouse gases. Only 14% knew of the almost total agreement that precipitation would increase due to global warming (Kris Wilson, “Drought, debate, and uncertainty: measuring reporters’ knowledge and ignorance about climate change”).
It’s no wonder that the public is so confused. You even have 12% of the American population seeing ozone depletion as the main negative consequence of global warming (Anthony Leiserowitz, “American Risk Perceptions: Is Climate Change Dangerous?”). CFCs are indeed a greenhouse gas, but their role in creating the ozone hole above Antarctica is not directly related to their heat trapping effect. Relating the two is like making a false link between Iraq and Afghanistan.
What can be done about this? Clearly Al Gore is making some headway through film, but even then he may just be preaching to the already-converted. And then you have sites like The Drudge Report that, immediately after An Inconvenient Truth won its Oscars, reported to the effect that Al Gore was a hypocrite and spending too much on his utility bills, or that he should eat less meat if he’s really environmentally conscious; they’re shooting the messenger to kill the message.
I was talking to a post doc here on the Revelle about what he thought was an ideal situation for scientists and public policy, and he said off-handedly that scientists should be making environmental policy; they know the most, after all. In a way, this is already happening: scientists are finding themselves in the difficult position where the public is not listening, or is not able to listen due to media blocks, and where they are standing witness to some pretty scary things. Scientists are human beings too, with families and concerns for their society. Some of them might do something simple like tell their families to move to higher ground, but many are finding that they are feeling obligated to take an advocacy approach. Some in the scientific community are struggling to find a political voice in order to inform the public directly of some of the dangers we will likely be facing.
This is scary. In an ideal world, science is apolitical. In an ideal world, the enlightened policy-makers listen to the scientists and then make judgments based on the given information... hard to imagine such a world, but that’s no reason to abandon the ideal. Politics and science must be separated. Scientists who are actively performing research should not be politically motivated. Why? Because of the basic nature of scientific inquiry. One of the important tenets is that a hypothesis must be discarded if it is contradicted by evidence, and a scientist-advocate whose career has become staked on their hypotheses can no longer make objective measurements and deductions. In the unlikely event that evidence is found proving that global warming is not man-made, we should rest assured that the IPCC would report its new findings.
Shortly after the release of the IPCC summary, reporters interviewed Dr. Susan Solomon, one of its two lead editors and one of the scientists famed for linking synthetic chemicals to the ozone hole. The New York Times reported on this:
When a reporter asked Dr. Solomon “to sum up what kind of urgency this sort of report should convey to policy makers,” she gave the furthest thing from a convenient sound bite.
“I can only give you something that’s going to disappoint you, sir, and that is that it’s my personal scientific approach to say it’s not my role to try to communicate what should be done,” Dr. Solomon said. “I believe that is a societal choice. I believe science is one input to that choice, and I also believe that science can best serve society by refraining from going beyond its expertise.
“In my view, that’s what the I.P.C.C. also is all about, namely not trying to make policy-prescriptive statements, but policy-relevant statements.”
I’ll close here. I’m no Dr. Solomon, so I will present you with a prescriptive statement: read the IPCC report because that comes directly from scientists, read but beware media reports that do not provide citations, read but beware scientists who are also advocates, and form an educated opinion. And then do something about it. Watch for informed politicians, and watch for politicians who make vague or moralistic statements about global warming. And find out what you can do to reduce your carbon imprint. After all, as the mandatory Scripps vessel safety video morbidly informed us last Sunday, “The alternative to being prepared is to panic.” Oh, and don’t watch and worry about the movie The Day After Tomorrow, as the IPCC report states that such a situation is “very unlikely.”
---------------------
The closer we get to the Equator, the more Internet access we have... so I’ve been doing a little reading up on papers and stuff. As you know, reading leads to thinking, and thinking leads to blogging. Here we go:
What makes us believe what we believe? Do you believe in global warming? Do you believe in God? Well, do you believe in your neighbors? I wouldn’t say that I believe in Gaurav, my former roommate, but I can say with at least 95% certainty that he exists, or did exist. Let’s say I were to find a current phonebook from Tucson, AZ, a place I’ve never been to, and in it I found an entry about an Ernie MacTaggart. Would I be right in believing that such a person existed and lived in Tucson? What if, instead of personally seeing the phonebook, I was separately told by 20 people that they had found similar phonebooks and that each of them had come to the conclusion that Ernie MacTaggart really did exist and that he lived in Arizona? And then what if on top of those 20 accounts, I was then approached by 1 other person who told me that they had seen the phonebook and that they had concluded that no such person existed? What if those people, including the 1 dissenter, all held PhDs as evidence of their competence in gathering and interpreting data? Who would you believe? How much certainty is required of belief?
According to a 2005 survey in a paper by Jon Miller (“Public understanding of, and attitudes toward, scientific research: what we know and what we need to know”), scientific literacy, as defined by knowledge of basic terms and understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry, among Americans is under 20%. I personally wish this number were higher, but it’s also understandable: the average person is busy, so he or she directly or indirectly hires specialists to take care of gathering and interpreting scientific data. For example, by paying your taxes, you assume that the government will provide grants for relevant scientific research. But then you see a statistic like this, found in a 2006 ABC poll: “64% of Americans perceive ‘a lot of disagreement among scientists’” regarding the existence of global warming.
I can say from personal experience that the existence of global warming is not a point of contention among the majority of scientists; it’s rare that you’ll even find anyone on the Revelle even casually mentioning it in conversation. It’s a moot point. One of Al Gore’s favorite statistics—a statistic which is now undisputed—is from Naomi Oreskes’s 2004 paper that found that of 928 reviewed scientific articles, none were in disagreement about the existence of global warming. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, released in February, is the official document representing the opinion of thousands of leading scientists, as approved by 113 countries before its release, and it reiterates that agreement. Some simplified conclusions from the report (with some of my added notes):
1. Global warming is unequivocal. Temperatures have been rising. Even so-called “GW Skeptics” admit that this is happening.
2. The large majority of the scientific community is at least 90% certain that the recent trend in global warming since the 1950s is due to man-made greenhouse gas output.
3. Human influences are now visible in other climatic aspects, notably temperature extremes and wind patterns.
4. Ramifications of global warming include a rise in sea level, melting ice cover, increased intensity of tropical cyclones, and acidification of the ocean.
(This is an extremely brief summary of what already is a summary for policy-makers, so I’d recommend checking out the PDF file yourself, it’s quite interesting.)
The point I’m making is that the scientific community as a whole sees data that points to a troubling situation, and yet they are faced with a dilemma: how do they get the word out? The natural instinct is to turn to the media; after all, people watch TV! People read newspapers, they listen to the radio, they listen to people who watched TV. It should stand to reason that if the scientific community is largely aligned in its opinion then the public, as informed through the media, should also be aligned in its opinion, or at least aligned in thinking that the scientific community is mostly in agreement.
There are a few skeptics out there, however, whose main claims are that global warming, while evident, is due to natural causes such as fluctuations in solar radiation and cosmic rays. Then there are a few scientists who contend that global warming will have consequences that are mostly beneficial for mankind. Frankly, their opinions have been refuted by the larger scientific community, and yet they receive special media attention. Why? Because they’re the stubborn underdogs, and underdogs sell. The media attempts to present a ‘balanced’ opinion of global warming by giving equal coverage to the skeptics, thereby overrepresenting a minority. Just open up the Drudge Report and chances are you'll find a few main-page articles about global warming skeptics, and none about affirmers.
But not only is coverage ‘balanced,’ it’s also being reported by a media replete with journalists who don’t have clear knowledge of global warming. A study of 249 environmental reporters found that only 30% correctly identified nitrous oxide as one of the most important greenhouse gases. Only 14% knew of the almost total agreement that precipitation would increase due to global warming (Kris Wilson, “Drought, debate, and uncertainty: measuring reporters’ knowledge and ignorance about climate change”).
It’s no wonder that the public is so confused. You even have 12% of the American population seeing ozone depletion as the main negative consequence of global warming (Anthony Leiserowitz, “American Risk Perceptions: Is Climate Change Dangerous?”). CFCs are indeed a greenhouse gas, but their role in creating the ozone hole above Antarctica is not directly related to their heat trapping effect. Relating the two is like making a false link between Iraq and Afghanistan.
What can be done about this? Clearly Al Gore is making some headway through film, but even then he may just be preaching to the already-converted. And then you have sites like The Drudge Report that, immediately after An Inconvenient Truth won its Oscars, reported to the effect that Al Gore was a hypocrite and spending too much on his utility bills, or that he should eat less meat if he’s really environmentally conscious; they’re shooting the messenger to kill the message.
I was talking to a post doc here on the Revelle about what he thought was an ideal situation for scientists and public policy, and he said off-handedly that scientists should be making environmental policy; they know the most, after all. In a way, this is already happening: scientists are finding themselves in the difficult position where the public is not listening, or is not able to listen due to media blocks, and where they are standing witness to some pretty scary things. Scientists are human beings too, with families and concerns for their society. Some of them might do something simple like tell their families to move to higher ground, but many are finding that they are feeling obligated to take an advocacy approach. Some in the scientific community are struggling to find a political voice in order to inform the public directly of some of the dangers we will likely be facing.
This is scary. In an ideal world, science is apolitical. In an ideal world, the enlightened policy-makers listen to the scientists and then make judgments based on the given information... hard to imagine such a world, but that’s no reason to abandon the ideal. Politics and science must be separated. Scientists who are actively performing research should not be politically motivated. Why? Because of the basic nature of scientific inquiry. One of the important tenets is that a hypothesis must be discarded if it is contradicted by evidence, and a scientist-advocate whose career has become staked on their hypotheses can no longer make objective measurements and deductions. In the unlikely event that evidence is found proving that global warming is not man-made, we should rest assured that the IPCC would report its new findings.
Shortly after the release of the IPCC summary, reporters interviewed Dr. Susan Solomon, one of its two lead editors and one of the scientists famed for linking synthetic chemicals to the ozone hole. The New York Times reported on this:
When a reporter asked Dr. Solomon “to sum up what kind of urgency this sort of report should convey to policy makers,” she gave the furthest thing from a convenient sound bite.
“I can only give you something that’s going to disappoint you, sir, and that is that it’s my personal scientific approach to say it’s not my role to try to communicate what should be done,” Dr. Solomon said. “I believe that is a societal choice. I believe science is one input to that choice, and I also believe that science can best serve society by refraining from going beyond its expertise.
“In my view, that’s what the I.P.C.C. also is all about, namely not trying to make policy-prescriptive statements, but policy-relevant statements.”
I’ll close here. I’m no Dr. Solomon, so I will present you with a prescriptive statement: read the IPCC report because that comes directly from scientists, read but beware media reports that do not provide citations, read but beware scientists who are also advocates, and form an educated opinion. And then do something about it. Watch for informed politicians, and watch for politicians who make vague or moralistic statements about global warming. And find out what you can do to reduce your carbon imprint. After all, as the mandatory Scripps vessel safety video morbidly informed us last Sunday, “The alternative to being prepared is to panic.” Oh, and don’t watch and worry about the movie The Day After Tomorrow, as the IPCC report states that such a situation is “very unlikely.”
Monday, March 5, 2007
Working Out
(by Pien Huang)
We work out from 4-4:30. First the Boatswain, then the 2nd Mate, then me. We complete three cycles each, isolating the biceps one day, and the chest the next; back, shoulders and triceps come later. The bench and the weights are in a cozy den. But the hatch opens to a private deck, and we bench looking onto the ocean.
We're on the “Endothil” program, minus the supplements, Jim’s program where we max out on each set. The two of them do, at least. They watch me carefully, pushing me, spotting me. "One more," Jim yells. "I lied. Another one!" But when I say stop, it is enough.
Jim is the motivator. "Let's go, Big Joe," he shouts. “No pain, no gain.” When he's up, his grunts are heard on the science deck. At first, I make the mistake of helping him count. Joe puts his fingers to his lips. "He likes to count double sometimes," he says. "Like seven, seven."
There’s always the Lebanese tape playing in the background. It cuts short of the workout, so we pause twenty minutes in to turn it around. The tape is Joe’s. It is one of the few physical things he has picked it up in his myriad travels; the rest exist in memory, as stories and photographs. There is a picture of Joe posted on the wall, sporting a cowlick and a leopard-print thong. “For motivation,” he laughs. He fell briefly into male-modeling in Mexico. He was a movie extra in China, where his character was killed off by a prosthetic elephant trunk. Eventually, he wants to settle in Colombia.
Jim’s favorite is tricep day. When I struggle on my fifth rep, he shouts, “Come on, now! No arm flab in the future!” Working out is always personal for him. He talks himself up and beats himself down. “I said I can’t,” he yells. “I should never say I can’t!” But the next moment, he is philosophical. “No pain no gain,” he says, bouncing lightly, taking jabs. “We’re like gorillas!”
He deflects on cardio day, smoking cigarettes while Joe and I jog laps on deck. We can only run on half the deck, and the rest of the loop is spent walking around cables and scientific equipment, climbing up and down stairs. Even so, I am winded by the third lap. We take a break, stretching in the salt spray, looking at the birds. “I was going crazy,” Joe shouts over the clamor of the engines. “I had to go outside.” He got serious about working out when he hit thirty last year. He is teaching himself Spanish, by workbook and podcast. In his off-time, he reads Borges.
My arms are sore, but they yield a satisfying firmness. They insist that the regimen builds tone instead of bulk. Even so, I'm told that I'll be benching more than my weight when we're through. Joe lends me his Buddha Balm, a tingling salve from Cambodia. “The scientists aren’t this much fun, are they?” he asks.
We work out from 4-4:30. First the Boatswain, then the 2nd Mate, then me. We complete three cycles each, isolating the biceps one day, and the chest the next; back, shoulders and triceps come later. The bench and the weights are in a cozy den. But the hatch opens to a private deck, and we bench looking onto the ocean.
We're on the “Endothil” program, minus the supplements, Jim’s program where we max out on each set. The two of them do, at least. They watch me carefully, pushing me, spotting me. "One more," Jim yells. "I lied. Another one!" But when I say stop, it is enough.
Jim is the motivator. "Let's go, Big Joe," he shouts. “No pain, no gain.” When he's up, his grunts are heard on the science deck. At first, I make the mistake of helping him count. Joe puts his fingers to his lips. "He likes to count double sometimes," he says. "Like seven, seven."
There’s always the Lebanese tape playing in the background. It cuts short of the workout, so we pause twenty minutes in to turn it around. The tape is Joe’s. It is one of the few physical things he has picked it up in his myriad travels; the rest exist in memory, as stories and photographs. There is a picture of Joe posted on the wall, sporting a cowlick and a leopard-print thong. “For motivation,” he laughs. He fell briefly into male-modeling in Mexico. He was a movie extra in China, where his character was killed off by a prosthetic elephant trunk. Eventually, he wants to settle in Colombia.
Jim’s favorite is tricep day. When I struggle on my fifth rep, he shouts, “Come on, now! No arm flab in the future!” Working out is always personal for him. He talks himself up and beats himself down. “I said I can’t,” he yells. “I should never say I can’t!” But the next moment, he is philosophical. “No pain no gain,” he says, bouncing lightly, taking jabs. “We’re like gorillas!”
He deflects on cardio day, smoking cigarettes while Joe and I jog laps on deck. We can only run on half the deck, and the rest of the loop is spent walking around cables and scientific equipment, climbing up and down stairs. Even so, I am winded by the third lap. We take a break, stretching in the salt spray, looking at the birds. “I was going crazy,” Joe shouts over the clamor of the engines. “I had to go outside.” He got serious about working out when he hit thirty last year. He is teaching himself Spanish, by workbook and podcast. In his off-time, he reads Borges.
My arms are sore, but they yield a satisfying firmness. They insist that the regimen builds tone instead of bulk. Even so, I'm told that I'll be benching more than my weight when we're through. Joe lends me his Buddha Balm, a tingling salve from Cambodia. “The scientists aren’t this much fun, are they?” he asks.
Friday, March 2, 2007
We are not alone
The crew has discovered my blog! I guess I better stop posting mean things about them! I'll continue posting from my 'rather disturbing view' however. haha~ Anyway it turns out that Joe Ferris, the Second Mate, keeps a blog. He's a real life adventurer, and he's full of great stories. It's a funny blog, and you can also read all the Chief Scientist's weekly reports there. Definitely worth checking out:
The Nuclear Powered Whaling Vessel Blog
Some other interesting links from Joe:
Shellback Ceremony
Red Nose Ceremony
Potty Mouth Sailor Adventure #1
Potty Mouth Sailor Adventure #2
A wog is someone who has not yet made an equator crossing, and they have to do a few things to become a shellback...
The Nuclear Powered Whaling Vessel Blog
Some other interesting links from Joe:
Shellback Ceremony
Red Nose Ceremony
Potty Mouth Sailor Adventure #1
Potty Mouth Sailor Adventure #2
A wog is someone who has not yet made an equator crossing, and they have to do a few things to become a shellback...
Contemplation
It’s been a little while since I last updated, or it feels like it anyway: time passes a little strangely on a boat. Sometimes I feel like a minute is about 4 minutes long, and sometimes I feel like an hour is about 63 minutes long. Anyway, I’ve been busy. Too busy to post! Why? Because I’ve been contemplating things!
With only 2ish weeks left on our voyage, it’s time to start putting it all together. What’s the meaning of all this stuff? So I’ve been doing a lot of contemplation, and contemplation, as they say, is 1% inspiration and 99% napping. That being said, the whole contemplation thing only works if you have something to contemplate about. Actually, the search for something to contemplate is not at all contemptible; it is a contemplatible thing in itself. It took me a while, but I eventually found my contemplatee, and it’s everything.
So I’ve started to put together a larger picture... what is my purpose on this research vessel and what is the purpose of this research vessel? Well, I’ve decided that my purpose is to do my job. I’m pretty lucky in that my purpose is aligned with what I’m paid to do: film and stuff. Public Outreach. I wasn’t able to clearly state the purpose of this research vessel, which made me realize that I have a lot to figure out. So to help me wrap my head around all this stuff, I’ve started writing a bit of an essay. Page 1 is about how I got on the boat, but you don’t need to see that. Here is page 2 of the essay:
It is an odd circumstance of nature that advanced scientific understanding is often based on factors invisible to the unaided eye; there is a certain amount of trust that the public must put into the work of scientists. Wise old fogeys frequently say we know nothing at all, but that is misleading. Knowing even just a little bit is a world apart from knowing nothing at all. We certainly know enough to require high degrees of specialization among scientists in different fields, and enough to render that degree of specialization arcane to the average person. There is a distinct problem, however, in the channeling of information from specialized scientists to the public; distortions occur.
Popular understanding of global warming depends on the public hearing about the work and words of a small scientific community. I do not imply that—against all scientific evidence—global warming does not exist; after all, the sky being intangible hardly disproves its existence. Nor do I imply that even given the existence of global warming it is largely inconsequential; all we have to do is look at the rather obvious and deleterious side effects, which include the aggravation of extreme weather patterns and the endangerment of climate-dependent animal and plant species. There was a recent stir about polar bears found drowning for the first time in recorded history as a direct result of warmer temperatures melting their ice floe homes. The trying circumstances of the warming phenomenon, however, are not considered immediately apparent or serious enough to enact swift policy change; the media and politicians have claimed that not enough is known, or that nothing is yet proven. Those are blatantly false statements, as global warming is readily observed, but it is still true that there is much left to be investigated. The climate is a giant, complicated mix of processes: air and sea gas exchange, oceanic transport, heat transfer, cloud formation, rainfall patterns... the list goes on. Ultimately, however, the study of climate variability depends on the detection of minute changes in the chemical and physical properties of the air, water, and land. And prior to this cruise, I had no clue what that meant.
So when I think about it, I have been an extremely privileged person to have witnessed the workings of a research vessel first-hand, and so I consider it as much an honor as a duty to report even the little I’ve come to understand. It’s like being at an exotic zoo, or better yet in the natural habitat of exotic species. I can finally see the scientific process at its source, before it gets dissolved and diluted in a two-minute news blurb. I’m getting close to the beast, for a scientist is a rare creature: often pale, often shy, sometimes noisy, and sometimes brilliant.
Pages 3 to 20 are about me, the things I like to do, and the things I will like to do when I get older. I’m still working on it. Anyway, thought you’d want to know what I’ve been up to.
With only 2ish weeks left on our voyage, it’s time to start putting it all together. What’s the meaning of all this stuff? So I’ve been doing a lot of contemplation, and contemplation, as they say, is 1% inspiration and 99% napping. That being said, the whole contemplation thing only works if you have something to contemplate about. Actually, the search for something to contemplate is not at all contemptible; it is a contemplatible thing in itself. It took me a while, but I eventually found my contemplatee, and it’s everything.
So I’ve started to put together a larger picture... what is my purpose on this research vessel and what is the purpose of this research vessel? Well, I’ve decided that my purpose is to do my job. I’m pretty lucky in that my purpose is aligned with what I’m paid to do: film and stuff. Public Outreach. I wasn’t able to clearly state the purpose of this research vessel, which made me realize that I have a lot to figure out. So to help me wrap my head around all this stuff, I’ve started writing a bit of an essay. Page 1 is about how I got on the boat, but you don’t need to see that. Here is page 2 of the essay:
It is an odd circumstance of nature that advanced scientific understanding is often based on factors invisible to the unaided eye; there is a certain amount of trust that the public must put into the work of scientists. Wise old fogeys frequently say we know nothing at all, but that is misleading. Knowing even just a little bit is a world apart from knowing nothing at all. We certainly know enough to require high degrees of specialization among scientists in different fields, and enough to render that degree of specialization arcane to the average person. There is a distinct problem, however, in the channeling of information from specialized scientists to the public; distortions occur.
Popular understanding of global warming depends on the public hearing about the work and words of a small scientific community. I do not imply that—against all scientific evidence—global warming does not exist; after all, the sky being intangible hardly disproves its existence. Nor do I imply that even given the existence of global warming it is largely inconsequential; all we have to do is look at the rather obvious and deleterious side effects, which include the aggravation of extreme weather patterns and the endangerment of climate-dependent animal and plant species. There was a recent stir about polar bears found drowning for the first time in recorded history as a direct result of warmer temperatures melting their ice floe homes. The trying circumstances of the warming phenomenon, however, are not considered immediately apparent or serious enough to enact swift policy change; the media and politicians have claimed that not enough is known, or that nothing is yet proven. Those are blatantly false statements, as global warming is readily observed, but it is still true that there is much left to be investigated. The climate is a giant, complicated mix of processes: air and sea gas exchange, oceanic transport, heat transfer, cloud formation, rainfall patterns... the list goes on. Ultimately, however, the study of climate variability depends on the detection of minute changes in the chemical and physical properties of the air, water, and land. And prior to this cruise, I had no clue what that meant.
So when I think about it, I have been an extremely privileged person to have witnessed the workings of a research vessel first-hand, and so I consider it as much an honor as a duty to report even the little I’ve come to understand. It’s like being at an exotic zoo, or better yet in the natural habitat of exotic species. I can finally see the scientific process at its source, before it gets dissolved and diluted in a two-minute news blurb. I’m getting close to the beast, for a scientist is a rare creature: often pale, often shy, sometimes noisy, and sometimes brilliant.
Pages 3 to 20 are about me, the things I like to do, and the things I will like to do when I get older. I’m still working on it. Anyway, thought you’d want to know what I’ve been up to.
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