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Some might say the storm has arrived–it’s a question of which category–how about category 5? In 2005, a bipartisan group of Congressmen requested the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)  to carry out an analysis of America’s status in the new competitive arena of science and technology and make policy recommendations based on their assessment. If American science and technology had problems in competing, could these problems be addressed with national legislation? The NAS analysis was done  at a time when the budget for biomedical research had just gone through a period in which the  funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the main source of biomedical research funds, had been doubled in a five year period (1998-2003); because of the seemingly rosy picture that had emerged for biomedical research (but see below), the report focused primarily on math, engineering and the physical sciences. The 2005 report, completed in less than a year after the request was published and entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future: it projected a dim view of America’s future competitiveness, if major, new investments in science, technology, math and science education were not immediately put in place to change the trajectory that science in America had been on for decades, through policies of national disinvestment in research. The emphasis of the 2005 report was that America had become too disengaged in science and technology and the report had an immediate impact which led directly to congressional passage of the  America COMPETES Act of 2007, which stirred debate at both the national and regional levels about how to respond to the challenges facing America in the new global market place.  While some new budgetary priorities emerged as a result of the report, the results fell far short of the recommended priority changes in spending and didn’t respond to the sense of urgency conveyed by the NAS report that largely fell on deaf ears. In addition, what little effort was made to actually fund these emergency needs, got downgraded in the economic recession that clouds our future to this day. Few Americans understand that the last thirty years of disinvestment in research and technology have made it far more difficult to recover from the current, serious  recession than would otherwise be the case. The 2005 recommendations also pointed out the destructive legislation that found its way into the Patriot Act, with its subsequent impact on visa denial for foreign Ph.D. candidates. This is particularly critical for America,  since foreign-born students comprised a big fraction of our doctoral students; getting them to come  to our universities and finding ways to keep them here were important components of the NAS plan. Thus, the public reaction to 9/11 has made the challenge in front of us even more difficult and the need for action more urgent.

To Obama’s credit, the American Re-investment and Recovery Act (ARRA) of 2009 at least partially funded some of the recommendations that came out of the 2005 NAS report. However, the two-year period of ARRA’s influence is now coming to an end and no programmatic energy seems available to build on ARRA, so we are likely to slide back into pre-stimulus conditions, rather than continue to move forward.  Five years after the NAS committee report, the same committee (consisting of scientists, educators and corporate heads) generated the current report of 2010,  Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 which attempts to re-evaluate the issues by summarizing what was done and what still lies ahead of us, if we are going to reverse a significant decline in the standard of living for most Americans.   The last link provided allows you to visit the NAS website and download a copy of the 100 plus page report as a pdf (for free) or you can buy a book of the report for $18. The central concept that all of us must debate is this: to what degree have middle class income levels stagnated over the past 30 years because businesses have changed their model from the Golden Watch (50 years of company service rather than the certain future of downsizing and corporate buyouts) to the golden parachute (businesses take increases in worker productivity and don’t reward the workers, but shift the corporate wealth to reimburse lavish executive salaries and the value of the company stock?).  Alternatively, to what degree have we failed our workers because we are not bringing on new innovative technology jobs that can replace and improve workers compensation and job security? The NAS report focuses exclusively on the latter issue, but we cannot forget or forgive the super capitalism conditions that brought one in seven Americans into poverty.

The report’s center of gravity is that our economy must generate good-paying jobs that rely on high skills and education and that we must stimulate and reward innovation that seeks to generate such jobs. The report emphasizes the fact that over the past few decades investments in science and technology have provided the vast majority of jobs created in our economy, including those created at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.  To recover our leadership will require  massive investments in how we educate our students in science and engineering, to inspire a new generation of creative, scientific solutions to our problems, while energizing the formation of a new economy, one that takes full advantage of our need to return to scientific and technical innovation within our own borders. The 2010 report emphasizes that we are falling seriously behind from where we once thought we should be. Right now the globalization of our economy heavily favors the Chinese, whose recent wealth, acquired through manufacturing, conforms to the same model that led to our own acquired wealth in the 19th and 20th centuries–that new Chinese wealth is now being invested and re-invested into economic expansion in manufacturing, including the high tech sector of the Chinese and global economy. Right now, China seems to have a lock on manufacturing solar panels and American companies are finding it tough going and hard to raise money to fund their own manufacturing capacity in this young industry. We gave away too much and we lost too much time during the GW Bush administration, whose focus primarily was on the financial sector of our economy and the privatization of government agencies. The culture of our country has become financialized and far too much attention is given to using money to make money, often by the same deceptive methods that led to our economic meltdown. If you want to read an alarming story, the NYT recently reported on the difficulty that American solar panel companies are having getting started and competing with the Chinese.

One section of the report provides factoid summaries that, by themselves, should ring alarm bells or evoke disgust that we should ever have let ourselves get so far behind, particularly since we seem to get politically distracted by thirty years of cultural wars.  As I read each factoid in the report, I couldn’t stop, as each new summary  seemed more telling than its predecessor, though there are many more in the publication. Here are a few (the numbers at the end are the references which can be obtained from the pdf article).

• Thirty years ago, ten percent of California’s general fund went to higher education and three percent to prisons. Today, nearly eleven percent goes to prisons and eight percent to higher education.1
• China is now second in the world in its publication of biomedical research articles, having recently surpassed Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Canada and Spain.2
• The United States now ranks 22nd among the world’s nations in the density of broadband Internet penetration and 72nd in the density of mobile telephony subscriptions.3
• In 2009, 51 percent of United States patents were awarded to non-United States companies.4
• The World Economic Forum ranks the United States 48th in quality of mathematics and science education.5
• Of Wal-Mart’s 6,000 suppliers, 5,000 are in China.6
• There are sixteen energy companies in the world with larger reserves than the largest United States company.7
• IBM’s once promising PC business is now owned by a Chinese company.8
• The legendary Bell Laboratories is now owned by a French company.9
• Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (computer manufacturing) employs more people than the worldwide employment of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Intel and Sony combined.10
• Only four of the top ten companies receiving United States patents last year were United States companies.12
• United States consumers spend significantly more on potato chips than the government devotes to energy R&D.13
• In 2000 the number of foreign students studying the physical sciences and engineering in United States graduate schools for the first time surpassed the number of United States students.15
• Federal funding of research in the physical sciences as a fraction of GDP fell by 54 percent in the 25 years after 1970. The decline in engineering funding was 51 percent.16
• Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is now lower than when the first personal computer was built in 1975.18
• In the 2009 rankings of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation the U.S. was in sixth place in global innovation-based competitiveness, but ranked 40th in the rate of change over the past decade.19
• China has now replaced the United States as the world’s number one high-technology exporter.20
• According to the ACT College Readiness report, 78 percent of high school graduates did not meet the readiness benchmark levels for one or more entry-level college courses in mathematics, science, reading and English.64

On and on it goes as the list grows larger with no entries in which we are number one, unless you want to include our per capita expenditures on health care or the fact that we have a deficient k-12 education system in science, with   many science and math teachers who lack accreditation in the discipline. Yet, we spend more per student on education than any other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) country, but we continue to fall behind in math and science. Are teachers are the problem? I say parents are the problem combined with a popular culture that downplays science and technology, while emphasizing pop cultural icons. The problem is our modern culture. Perhaps it will take further erosion of our standard of living before science can be implemented as it was when Sputnik was first launched in 1957. As the committee says in their report “The United States appears to be on a course that will lead to a declining, not growing, standard of living for our children and grandchildren.”

The committee’s top recommendation is to generate 10,000 new teachers trained in math and science and get them out into the k-12 school systems to benefit the students. Move American students to the best students in science and math education in the world. Also proposed is to “Strengthen the skills of 250,000 current teachers by such actions as subsidizing the achievement of master’s degrees (in science, mathematics, or engineering)
and participation in workshops, and create a world-class mathematics and science curriculum available for voluntary adoption by local school districts throughout the nation.”

You can’t have well-trained science teachers without increased scientific research in the universities that train them, so the committee supports the doubling of math and science research expenditures over a seven year period. Although the committee’s proposal was attempting to emulate the doubling of the NIH budget, those of us funded through NIH have discovered that after the doubling, GW Bush constrained the growth of NIH thereafter to an annual rate of 1%  and today, the budget of NIH is roughly where it would have been without the period of doubling, but  maintained on the traditional growth rate of 6% per annum. In other words,the NIH budget is now as imperiled as it was in the 1990s, with hundreds of quality research grants that go unfunded and our research enterprise reduced to grant writing. Some relief came from ARRA, but that is ending now and we will soon back to the days of less than 10% funding in many areas of NIH and a very bleak picture for research opportunities–even in biomedical research. The highest level of % GDP funding for NIH took place in the med 1960s and once the “threats” of Sputnik were deemed to be over-rated, funding for basic science research, even in medically related fields began to decline as a % of GDP. Obama has sworn to reverse the decline in research emphasis, but it is not clear whether the climate we are currently in will allow any new priorities to be implemented. The election we are facing could well postpone, if not outright kill any new initiatives to increase the scientific competitiveness of our American enterprise.

Those that remain in the financial sector probably feel OK about the country. These financial giants are not investing in rebuilding America, but seem content with continuity in creating new financial bubbles. In addition, they like the fact that America has a very big military and can protect the country and themselves should significant problems arise. So, the fact that they are making big bucks, means that nothing serious has to be done, except that Obama probably has to go, since he is the one force that meddles too much with the industry. The only healthy way to solve America’s highly risky future is to take over the banks, force them to make loans that help rebuild the country, provide incentives for American firms to keep jobs in America and expand the technological and innovative side of their manufacturing. If a company decides to relocate, then give the workers of that company the opportunity, with low interest Federal loans,  to buy the company and continue supporting the jobs. After all, we allow leveraged buyouts by rich people, why not leverage buyouts for the workers. This is not a serious breach with the policies we have in place today, it’s just adding a little more force to the arm twisting. Yes, you could describe this as an extension of socialism, but does anyone believe that government support of big business with tax breaks and subsidies is not a form of socialism. Are we that afraid of a word, especially when it’s something we already have in play?

What almost no one understands, including those that vigorously support or oppose the injection of more science into our educational and research objectives is that science itself is politically divisive. The right-wing of this country, including many in the financial sector, believe that too much influence that comes from science introduces a fifth leg of the governing stool and that it has the potential to completely swamp the politicians who want to remain in control and keep America as a playground for the wealthy. We have met the enemy and it is us!

RFM

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It’s admittedly odd to be juxtaposing these two topics, but in the midst of thinking about the coming fall election and the self-destructive divisiveness within the Democratic Party, I came across a temporary reprieve in the form of reading about a new, very innovative camera, recently announced by Sony. Ordinarily, it may seem a bit obtuse talking about an item of consumption in our consumerless economic downturn, but the review in the NYT this morning caught my eye and the camera itself seems like a major advancement over the conventional SLR cameras; it’s an improvement that I thought should have happened a long time ago, because the optical quality of beam splitters was improved dramatically many years ago. However, let’s first share a brief note about politics and the fall election:

Isn’t the Democratic Party supposed to have a big tent? Right now, it  seems more like an overnight backpackers tent. Aren’t the Democrats supposed to be opposing Republicans rather than the President? What’s all this fuss about Obama doing war within his own party? He’s condemning Democrats who are complaining because they didn’t get the Public Option in health care? Has he done the math? 86% of Democrats wanted the Public Option, so why shouldn’t they raise this as an issue and convey their disappointment? It’s an issue which clearly separates them from their Republican opponents who want to eliminate the new healthcare bill in its entirety. What we are seeing in election politics from the White House this year is what happens when you get elected by a surge of Democratic voters and Independents and then turn around and do the economy and the healthcare bill as if it was the Republicans that got you elected–well not really the Republicans, but serving the interests of those who serve Wall Street more than Main Street and keeping the for-profit healthcare industry satisfied with the healthcare bill, even though they betrayed their commitment to Obama on holding back their negative campaigns against reform.

Obama made the choice to keep the same Clinton-like relationship with Wall Street that Clinton had created in the 1990s, as Goldman Sachs was one of his largest campaign supporters. He owed them something but there is a big negative public reaction to the fact that Obama is keeping Wall Street happy, while doing virtually nothing for the troubled home owners. Many view this as a betrayal to those who elected him. Obama now knows that putting Larry Summers, the Clinton holdover, in as his financial adviser was a big mistake. With Summers stepping out of the picture, Obama now has an opportunity to fix his Presidency and focus on the needs of those that actually elected him. By now he must realize that in an economy which is 70% consumer-based, there is no way that we can restore economic vitality without developing a new economy with new consumers and that will take time, more so since banks won’t lend to small businesses. A bigger stimulus package and one focused in the right way would have helped insure against what appears to be more misery ahead of us. It is my impression that if the Democrats lose big this fall, it will be because Obama’s policies didn’t go far enough to the left, where polls were showing broad support for things like the Public Option and more punitive behavior and less financial support for Wall Street. Throw in the teabaggers and you have an election that is Wall Street vs Main Street, although very few will frame it in that way. Obama has muddied the water for this election all on his own; whether he can rescue his party and his image by blaming Republicans for holding up tax reduction legislation because they want to keep the millionaires happy, remains to be seen, but it appears to me that it is a strategy that is too narrowly focused to be a central theme for a hotly contested election. The best hope for the Democrats is that the teabaggers will turn Republicans and Independents off and they will stay home for this fall’s election. I hope I’m wrong, and there is a way to go before the election, but at this point it seems that Obama can generate great speeches, but evokes ambivalence because his policies don’t match his rhetoric. He’s a Clinton Democrat at a time when the country needed an FDR and, unfortunately, when he aroused the public into supporting him, we all thought we had elected an FDR. He gave speeches in the Spring of 2008 that made it seem like he understood everything. That’s why many of us are so disappointed. On the flip side, yes we are relieved to wake up from the nightmare of GWB, a former president that should by now be on trial for war crimes, but that’s another story and one that also involves Obama.

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At the level of scientific detail, most of us don’t know much about global climate change, though we tend to accept the idea that human activity is somehow changing our weather and that the root cause is the abundant use of fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels at the accelerated global rate that is now underway means that we are too late to avoid some impact from greenhouse gases and subsequent rising sea water. Our global future is now, though what remains to be determined is how far we will let carbon dioxide accumulate in the atmosphere before we start to apply a brake that will prove effective. The best we can hope for now is changing the slope or the rate of rise of CO2, rather than reverse the levels, which seems completely unattainable. Will we run out of oil before we take action? We are now seeing recorded  temperatures that are warmer than those of any on record, accompanied by weather disasters that include flooding and increased desertification. It is too late to completely  reverse what we have started, for it looks like the earth will still be warming perhaps for decades if not centuries on the basis of what we have added to the environment already and the question that  remains is whether nations that are burning high rates of fossil fuels, beginning with the United States, have the political and social fabric to make serious changes in their energy usage to avoid what climatologists call a “tipping point”–the point at which a new permanent, altered climate cycle comes about with much hotter temperatures and much higher ocean levels, such that many coastal cities will be threatened. The tipping point could involve a positive feedback system that removes humans from any possibility of controlling the outcome. Let us hope that this option is avoided, though one’s faith in capitalism as a system that can solve such problems is at an all time low. While we are already witnessing the impact of greenhouse gases on our weather system, it is likely that some of us will be around to see even more dramatic changes in our global climate patterns within the next few decades.

Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   The Earth behaves like a blackbody source of radiation, in that it absorbs light energy from the Sun, whose wavelengths are generally short (in the visible wavelength spectrum and below (including ultraviolet light)) and then gives off energy at longer wavelengths, mostly in the infrared region, which is invisible to our eyes. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, it would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

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