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From National Geographic

Week before last, temperatures in International Falls Minnesota reached 46 degrees below zero and that was the air temperature, without the windchill.  An Arctic blast of cold air broke free from its northern moorings and spread rapidly into Minnesota and nearby states. At those temperatures, breathing through your nose is a challenge, as ice crystals form within the nasal cavity and you quickly find it best to breathe through a scarf or some other device, like a face mask that quickly gets warmed by your breath. But in time, even these filters develop ice crystals and breathing through them can become more labored. Most Minnesotans know what to do under these conditions–they go outside only when they have to and spend more time indoors. Air hockey anyone?

All humans share a short nasal cavity; sufficient time has not elapsed to see if evolutionary adaptations might arise in Minnesotans, such as a longer nasal cavity that would serve to mitigate nasal ice crystal formation.  In response to this dry arctic air that crept into Minnesota week before last, I found myself shuttered inside, thinking about polar bears and the special adaptive features they have developed to make it through winters that actually don’t get a lot colder than what we observed recently in Minnesota (January temperatures in the Arctic get to about 58 degrees below zero, so we truly got a blast of real Arctic air), though they stay that way much longer. Polar bears are insulated by about 4 inches of blubber, lying immediately underneath their skin. They also have a larger head and a longer nasal cavity when compared to Brown bears. The longer nasal cavity is probably better at warming the cold air when breathing through the nostrils and polar bears have an olfactory apparatus that can detect minute odor levels miles away.  You have heard of the infrared cameras that one uses to gauge heat loss and identify areas in your home that are losing heat through poor insulation. Well, the polar bear is so well insulated that they are virtually invisible to an infrared camera. They are one of the most efficient animals for heat retention we know of.

Polar bears are the largest land-dwelling carnivores, with males reaching up to 1500 pounds; the largest polar bear on record weighed 2210 pounds. Yet, while they are the dominant predator of the Arctic circle, they are slated for extinction perhaps within the next 50 years. A guaranteed disappearance of a predator at the top of the food chain should bother the Hell of out of all of us, because we are predators at the top the biggest and widest food chain in the world. So if polar bears can disappear with the speed of essentially dimming a switch, why can’t this happen to us just as easily? Well of course, for one thing there are more of us–humans number more than 6 billion and by the middle of this century we are scheduled to reach 9 billion, while polar bears, restricted to the Arctic circle region, number about 20,000 to 25,000; their numbers are already declining while human numbers continue to grow. Then too, we occupy a different niche than polar bears and occupy more temperate zones and insure ourselves an adequate supply of food through agriculture and animal cultivation; most of us don’t have to hunt to eat. In contrast, the polar bears have an established a food chain niche that is critically dependent on the retention of sea ice for foraging. This projected elimination of the species is not because of threats from hunting or factors other than the expected conditions that will be brought about by global climate change and the early seasonal loss of sea ice that polar bears depend on for hunting their primary prey–seals. Persistent sea ice is essential for polar bears to hunt. Normally, the sea ice doesn’t break up until September, at which time polar bears are forced by circumstances to move off the sea ice onto land. In the fall, a pregnant female creates a hibernation den within the snow and enters into a state of semi-hibernation during which time, her cubs are born (2-4) and they feed exclusively on mother’s milk for three to four and a half months.

When a mother polar bear comes out of her winter hibernation, with cubs in tow, she will have lost several hundred of pounds of weight, as she had fattened up before hibernation in order to nurse her cubs that are born during the hibernation period. After the birth of the cubs, but still during the hibernation period, mother’s milk is the exclusive source of nourishment used to feed the cubs. So when she emerges with her cubs in the spring, they are old enough to have some mobility and her first need is to get food to nourish herself and keep producing mile to feed her cubs. It’s as if the termination of the hibernation period brings on a food crisis. Normally, when polar bears emerge from hibernation,  the arctic sea ice is still intact, which is far more conducive for catching seals, the main diet of polar bears.  Even when the sea ice begins to break up in the summer, large chunks of ice allow polar bears to hunt on the ice when seals break through their holes to breathe. But if the sea ice becomes too thin and breaks up into smaller chunks or disappears altogether, seals are no longer constrained to breathe through the ice and polar bears can no longer hunt efficiently.  There are reports of polar bears mating with grizzlies, the result of which is to produce hybrids that are less efficient as swimmers and at greater risk when marginal sea ice conditions appear.  So, the earlier that the sea ice melts or breaks up, the greater is the risk for polar bears. Reports of polar bear drownings have already appeared, presumably as a result of too much ice melting and making swimming distances between ice flows too great.

The story behind the threat of polar bear extinction began  in 2007 and was provided by a report from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), indicating that within 50 years, the shrinking sea ice will leave only a small remnant of polar bear populations on the islands of the Canadian Arctic; those along the Alaskan and Russian coasts, which are the populations most often studied, will all be gone. These reports were provided to Congress; a year later, the polar bear was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act by the United States Department of the Interior.

The report of 2007 made the news in the Anchorage Daily News (article written by  Tom Kizzia, September 8, 2007) and, until recently, nothing had changed to alter these grim projections, based on scientific expectations derived from climate change modeling studies, using what is known as a general circulation model (GCM). Those studies indicated that sufficient carbon dioxide had already accumulated such that a “tipping point” had been reached and nothing could be done to reverse the fate of sea ice in the Arctic as it was shrinking at a much faster rate than earlier models had predicted. In a relatively short time, it was predicted that sea ice would disappear and get broken up earlier and earlier in the year, putting more pressure on polar bears. In these studies, the tipping point concept was based on the idea that ice normally provides a reflection of sunlight and thus returns energy from the surface of the earth, preventing some solar radiation from warming the oceans and land surfaces. But as ice surfaces diminish in area, earth and water surfaces get more sunlight exposure. This phenomenon is referred to as the “albedo” effect; it constitutes a positive feedback from melting ice–the more ice that melts, the more sunlight hits the earth and water surfaces and in turn melts more ice. The ice melt of 2007 was especially worrisome. Thus, USGA report of 2007 suggested that this positive feedback system, had already reached a point that future sea ice would melt, perhaps very rapidly, and eliminate most of the polar bear population within 50 years. According to that report a tipping point had already been reached so that no matter what future reductions in carbon emissions might be achieved, the polar bears were doomed.

The 2007 USGA report was not seriously challenged until a recent article appeared in Nature in December 2010 (volume 468, p. 955-958). This report re-examined the idea of a tipping point for sea ice and the future of polar bears. However, in these new modeling studies, the issue was examined based on the assumption that some reduction in greenhouse gases would take place in the future. Using a similar model to that used to project a poor outcome for polar bears, the paper by Amstrup et al accepted different levels of reductions in green house gases as a basis for generating different models that simulated whether or not a normal  sea ice pattern could be retained under these conditions of reduced carbon dioxide emissions. Five different models of reduced carbon emissions were used, including one proposal to keep the carbon dioxide levels the same as those of the year 2000 (Y2K model); other models used different scenarios for reducing the level of carbon emissions. First, this study confirmed the 2007 USGA results, strongly supporting the idea that if nothing is done, most polar bears are either doomed or will have to dramatically change their hunting habits (and are probably poorly equipped to do so).  However, with reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide, the Amstrup modeling studies showed that the sea ice could be retained sufficiently to give safe harbor for polar bears. They did not find a “tipping point” that doomed the polar bears and for that reason alone, the study was very encouraging and carried an obviously reduced doomsday prediction. The December 2010 study is exemplary for several reasons. In addition to giving new hope to the polar bears if humans begin to reduce carbon emissions, the Amstrup paper also demonstrates the power of the internet. In a high impact journal such as Nature, papers are given a relatively small amount of space for a single paper–typically three pages or less for an article. But, because information can be stored on the internet, referred to and linked/downloaded while reading the on-line paper, the so called supplemental material can increase the length of the paper by several fold. The polar bear paper referred to was less than three double-sided printed pages in the magazine, but the supplemental material, which contained additional information on the models used, including more color figures and references, was 26 double-sided pages. A second mode of expansion can be seen in the reference section, where if you click on the section, it expands so that each reference has a “show content” link that takes you to an expanded explanation of the reference that has been quoted, what the reference says and why it may or may not be a source of valid observations and conclusions. In short, the Nature paper just described shows why there are no short papers anymore, particularly on a complex subject and within a high impact journal. Now we have three different levels of readership. First, there’s the casual reader, trying to get the general concept of the article, then there’s the serious reader who evaluates the main figures and can talk somewhat intelligently about the article and then there are the global climate change people and serious polar bear biologists who scour through the main article, all the figures, the material in the supplemental section and the expansion of the references, a sort of “why did I use this reference” section. The take home message of all this complexity is that first and foremost, the best and worst case for the future of our polar bears are both based on models–that is all we have to go on. But, increasingly, the models are fed by better and better data and such models are trying to reach down and resolve time limits not achieved in previous work. Instead of centuries long outcomes, models are getting down to half-century and even decades of time. We will see some of these changes within a single human lifetime. But, a single year of weather means nothing–the variables making up our annual weather patterns are too great to project our future from the weather that unfolds in a single season, tempting though it may be to project them forward in time. I seriously doubt that humans have the capacity to remember and log the long-term weather patterns, such that we can become reliable reporters of weather patterns that change over decades: most of us can’t really remember with certainty the weather events of last year. We remember really tough winters and hot summers and there is a sense that we are moving towards warmer conditions, but these transitions are not smooth hyperbolic curves we ride on and that’s why, as much as we like to talk about the weather, we rely on measurements to reveal the true weather trends. Those measurements show, that as the carbon dioxide emissions have increased, the air temperatures are rising, our oceans are warming and expanding, the ice masses are receding and species are threatened. Globally, 25% of mammalian species are threatened with extinction. Habitat loss is the main reason and for the polar bears, the threat of loss of sea ice is also a case of habitat loss, even though it is first and foremost attributed to global climate change and humanoid activity.

RFM

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Sputnik I

The announcement that the Tevatron particle accelerator will be closed by the Department of Energy (DOE) in September of this year, prompted the following:
At the close of WWII, when American science had produced the first atomic weapon, it seemed as if we had an insurmountable and unchallenged lead in nuclear science and technology. But that lead quickly faded into an  armaments race, once the Soviets developed their own atomic device as the Cold War began in earnest. Two other prominent developments in America at that time included the dawn of nuclear energy, developed under the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and basic science research into the structure of the atom, carried out largely within our research universities. Some of the latter had already begun when Robert Oppenheimer took a position at Berkeley and began to acquire scientific visibility in nuclear physics. Until that time, nuclear physics was an almost exclusively European enterprise. But after the war, nuclear physics rapidly acquired a new identity: Made in America. Some universities suddenly emerged as major science research institutions through the acquisition of a linear accelerator, like that developed at Stanford University in 1962. Within the American research university, the dominance of nuclear physics in the early days after the war, it the most visible scientific discipline on the American campus: in the 1950s it was common to judge the quality of an entire research university by knowing where its Physics department was nationally ranked. Though national laboratories continued to develop nuclear technology, largely expressed through improvements in military hardware, research university nuclear physics pursued the structure of the atom and a field known as “particle physics” emerged as physicists bombarded atoms with increasingly higher energy particles and watched for the appearance of subatomic particles released by the atomic scale collisions. It still challenges the imagination to realize that a single atom with its electrons flowing in orbit is mostly a vast empty space and once that is grasped,  then try to understand that, if this is true, why don’t we fall through the floor rather than being supported by it? The reason that we don’t fall through the floor is the same reason that splitting the atom unleashes enormous energy.

In the era of the physicist, it seemed like a permanent pecking order had been established in American research universities that would go on in perpetuity, with nuclear physics permanently installed as the head honcho: Federal funding guaranteed it. Of course, along the way, many nuclear physicists evolved into astrophysicists, but that is a different story. In a fairly dramatic way, the pecking order of science in America, with physics at the top,  began to change soon after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 (a month later the Russians launched Sputnik II).  This Russian achievement created such a shock during the Eisenhower administration such that there was a kind of mass hysteria to think that the Russians could beat us at anything–but they did.  Physicist Edward Teller, the patron saint of the hydrogen bomb, said, in response to Sputnik, that the United States had lost “a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor“ (you can recognize Teller’s attitude as that of someone with a personal investment in continuing with the arms race). In response to Sputnik, Eisenhower did what every self-respecting President does in a pinch–he turned to a committee charged with making recommendations and assessments on what to do. One of the major reports to come out of that period was the Seaborg report, which substantiated what many Americans had concluded already, that America had fallen behind the Russians in science and math education and a national consensus developed that not enough Americans had an opportunity to get their education at a major research university. The Seaborg report recommended a doubling of research universities in America. At the time of Sputnik,  based on the percentage of Ph.Ds generated in the prewar days (the basic university structure did not change significantly from the 1930s until Sputnik arrived), there were only sixteen research universities, most of which were in the Midwest or East Coast, with three on the West Coast; this “sweet sixteen” included (not ranked in order; * are public/state universities) (1) University of Minnesota*; 2) Stanford; 3) University of Chicago; 4) Columbia University; 5) University of Illinois*; 6) University of Michigan*; 7) University of California (Berkeley)*; Harvard; 9) Penn; 10) Princeton; 11) Cornell; 12) Johns Hopkins; 13) Yale; 14) MIT; 15) California Institute technology; 16) University of Wisconsin*. Collectively, these institutions generated the majority of doctorates (PhDs) in the 1930s.

Our national response to Sputnik was probably the single most intelligent decision we made as a nation during the entire fifty years of the Cold War: we made a conscious decision to embellish research universities and establish new ones such that qualified students could experience a more sophisticated and challenging education and research environment, as we made it easier, through student loans, scholarships and fellowships, to get a college education and enroll in graduate school. Thus, we launched the Golden Age of the American Research University which lasted roughly from 1958 to 1968. As a result of this energetic new enterprise, we hired large numbers of faculty and began to develop more sophisticated funding agencies. Infrastructure support, such as improved laboratory space, training grants and support for scientific meetings all took their modern form during those days of accelerated support. Federal funding for research reached its highest % of GNP (0.25% in 1968) during that era.  Today, we have a very large number of research universities. A recent classification system by Carnegie defines a research university as one which has granted at least 50 doctorates in fifteen different disciplines each year. Yours is very likely among them. When Lyndon Johnson was President, he made sure, in the post-Sputnik era, that the Federal funding agencies funded much more broadly than they did initially and his watchdog insistence helped to diffuse Federal research dollars more broadly than that observed initially. Thus, Federal funding has penetrated its way into most higher education institutions and of course,  not just through NIH/NSF funding.

Now, you might have thought that accelerated funding for research, induced by the shock of Sputnik, would primarily benefit the mathematicians and physicists, since deficiencies in these areas were supposedly where the problem was. However, the end result of Sputnik was not to reinforce physics and math, though some of that took place, but the real impact was to shift the emphasis of scientific research away from physics into the biological sciences. The largest recipient of Federal research dollars increasingly went to the National Institutes of Health, not the National Science Foundation (which assumed more responsibility for funding the physical sciences, but was delayed in its creation due to an argument between Vannevar Bush and the Truman administration). There were two reasons for this seeming paradox: first and foremost was Mary Lasker, in honor of whom the Lasker prize is given each year–it is America’s most prestigious scientific award. Lasker (a graduate of the University of Wisconsin) was instrumental in convincing congress to fund health-related research and elected officials realized that they could finally return to their districts and tell their constituents that something was now being done about cancer and heart and lung disease. Legislators discovered that they  could get re-elected that way. People were far more interested in those issues than hearing whether or not we were winning the Cold War. These two forces–Mary Lasker and re-electability based on emphasizing health-related research–merged to create institutional funding that allowed the biological sciences to begin dominating institutional research, first in molecular biology and later in neuroscience. Today, if you want to rank a university on the basis of its scientific reputation, you are far more likely to pick an area of biological or medical sciences rather than physics.

Though things drifted away from physics as the epicenter of the American research university, American physicists still dominated the fields of astrophysics and particle physics and the opening of the Tevatron accelerator in Illinois (as part of the Fermilab) in 1983, ushered in a three-decade period of creative particle physics, progress and continued American dominance of the field. But the glow of American physics was shattered when Congress ceased to fund the supercollider that was then under construction in Texas in the early 1990s. That failure created a huge wave of unemployment among particle physicists in America, many of whom went to Wall Street and helped design the equations and mathematical models for investment houses that helped bring down the economy and usher in our current deep recession.  The lack of a new generation of particle accelerators in America, allowed the Europeans to proceed with their plans for one, without U.S. competition; they constructed the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva at  CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which opened in 2010. If there exists a Higgs Boson, the particle that is hypothesized to give atomic particles much of their mass, then it will likely be discovered at the CERN accelerator, with Americans serving as participants, advisers and colleagues rather than leaders in the effort. That is why it is with a note of sadness that I personally view the Department of Energy’s decision to close the Tevatron accelerator: accompanying that announcement is the unannounced end of American exceptionalism in particle physics.

America still rules the biological sciences, but the eight years of Bush’s suppression of science and its harsh funding policies, particularly with regard to stem cell research, put American biological sciences on the same trajectory that American particle physics has undergone in the last few decades. Bush’s policies invited other countries to accelerate their own research activities and today we are no longer keeping the most talented scientists that come from other countries to study and obtain their PhD in the United States. I have seen our offers to them go unheeded as they go to South Korea, Europe or back to China. The tide of science has shifted, primarily because Americans are too naive to understand the importance of science in an industrialized society. It’s as if we have retreated back to the 1930s–like de javu all over again!  This recession, when it’s over, may be the single most devastating event to American science in its all too brief history.
RFM

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California said "NO"

During most of the GW Bush years, the response of our government to the threat of global climate change was largely one of denial. To aid in this posture of deception, the Republican-controlled Congress used author Michael Crighton and more recently George Will as their poster children to promote false, delusional stories against the overwhelming evidence that man is heating up the planet, with potentially dire consequences for our long-term and perhaps even our short-term future. I have commented many times on the anti-science policies of the Bush administration and the Republican Party’s undeclared, but very real war on science.  While the GW Bush years are now behind us, we are faced with Deja vu as the Republican Party is about to take power once again in the House of Representatives; as a result, we will see more anti-science propaganda and obfuscation in the place of clarity on an issue that should by now be part of our American reflexes and known by the youngest members of our culture. Knowledge of the science of global climate change and its implications for our future should be taught in every school at every level and be among the most common elements of discussion in our society–not just when we are about to lose the Polar bears. We live on a small planet in which everything is in a dynamic state of change, impacted by multiple factors, not all of which are currently understood. But with atmospheric carbon dioxide reaching 380 ppm, we are approaching the levels at which the ice trapped in the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses could melt, giving rise to an elevation of sea levels of more than 200 feet. But Republicans will once again try to make sure that discussion of global climate change does not become part of our national dialog.  We can rest assured that the Republican Party, while out of House control for four years, has not repented from its past sins of denying science and the objectivity required for its successful implementation.  Because of this, we can expect to see more anti-science behavior coming out of the House and more anti-science propaganda coming through the air waves, courtesy of Faux News.  The House is planning hearings and investigations which are intended to cloud the issue and the science of global climate change  rather than add some desperately needed clarity to this very complex, but unavoidable problem lying in our present trajectory.

In the desert years of the Bush administration, environmentalists concerned with anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions, took up the issue with state governments and largely abandoned efforts directed at the Federal level. Four years ago, through the state Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, Californians decided to cultivate an environment that would benefit all human and other biological organisms. This California law was one of the most important state laws ever passed to protect the environment and it set a bold new trajectory for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 25% of the 1990 levels by the year 2020. But in the last election, this law was directly challenged by the oil and gas industries who poured huge sums of money into California to force rejection of the emissions law by voting for proposition 23.  So, despite the distractions provided by the Tea Party, the 2010 election in California included the boldest attempt by any American entity to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and corporate America tried to make sure the environmental mechanisms established by the law would never see the light of day.  But, in the election of November 2010, 61% of Californians voted against proposition 23 and preserved the state’s strong greenhouse-gas emissions standards that will soon begin to take hold.  The California Air Resources Board is in the process of implementing the law and introducing a cap-and-trade system that will allow industries to decide where to make reductions in emissions. To me, cap-and-trade is not really a solution to greenhouse-gas emissions, but we have to start somewhere. Since California, with about 12% of the U.S. population, generally leads the nation in environmental laws, we can expect that other state governments will follow suit and that eventually the Federal Government, regardless of its political composition, will also have to bend to the growing public recognition of the problem. In fact, at the present time, seven other western states and four Canadian provinces have joined in the Western Climate Initiative and six other states and one Canadian province have formed the Midwestern Greenhouse-Gas Reduction Accord. These two programs promise to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 15% and 20% respectively. In addition, ten northeastern states have joined in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and committed themselves to a reduction of current emission levels by 10% in 2018. Thus, a total of 23 states and five Canadian provinces have recognized the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions and are doing something about it. Estimates are that the region covered by these states includes about half the US population and three quarters of the Canadian population.

The Obama administration is planning to introduce Federal greenhouse-gas emission regulations next year that will result in a 28% reduction from the 2008 levels by 2020. Unfortunately, with the House in control of the Republicans and the Senate unlikely to overcome a filibuster on greenhouse-gas legislation, Obama will have to use the power of the Federal purse in order to achieve such reductions. But we shouldn’t dismiss these efforts, particularly since the EPA is now in charge of CO2 regulation and the President’s control of the military budget can also be used to bring greenhouse-gas technologies on line. The success of this strategy will rely on being mostly clever but strong-willed action.

We must salute the state of California that sometimes does things in a crazy way, like electing Arnold Schwarzenegger, but with respect to proposition 23, they got it right.  We now face the intriguing  possibility that beating back proposition 23, may begin a small avalanche leading to an improved intellectual climate for more action on global climate change. The rejection of proposition 23 was not merely a victory for environmentalists; it showed that giant multinational corporations can sometimes be beaten back and lose on important issues that will affect our future existence and health. We have a President who appears primed for action on this topic and may, if carried out with sufficient cleverness, actually achieve major results on reductions of greenhouse-gas emissions. At least we have new hope that something might get done. Indeed we can further speculate that if done properly, it could be the beginning of the new economy that we desperately need to pull us out of the most serious recession since the Great Depression. Although not anticipated, the single bright spot produced by California’s action on proposition 23, could be the beginning of a fascinating year in politics. We should all perk up and stay tuned. Perhaps the environment will have a good year.

[Data for this posting was taken from a Nature editorial "States or the Union," , 468, p. 133, 2010]

RFM

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