Warning Signs and Tipping Points

Posted on May 28, 2013 by climatechangefork

Erica Goode’s recent article in the New York Times (NYT – March 15, 2013), “Focusing on Violence Before It Happens,” describes a growing effort to identify and prevent major catastrophic events such as school violence. Two paragraphs from the article summarize the issue:

The young men had been brought to the attention of the School Threat Assessment Response Team program overseen by Dr. Beliz, one of the most intensive efforts in the nation to identify the potential for school violence and take steps to prevent it. The program, an unusual collaboration involving county mental health professionals, law enforcement agencies and schools, was developed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2007, after the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University, and was taken countywide in 2009 by Dr. Beliz, a deputy director of the mental health department.

In the national debate that has followed the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, much of the focus has been on regulating firearms. But many law enforcement and mental health experts believe that developing comprehensive approaches to prevention is equally important. In many cases, they note, the perpetrators of such violence are troubled young people who have signaled their distress to others and who might have been stopped had they received appropriate help.

The government in the US is now starting to believe that by paying attention to warning signs, properly trained professionals can help prevent or mitigate disasters before they reach their catastrophic tipping points. The logical next step is to adopt the same preventative approach to the planetary tipping points that we predict will result from human caused (anthropogenic) climate change.

I have described climate change tipping points in previous blogs (June 25, 2012 and January 21, April 9, 16, 2013). My April 9 blog describes tipping points in the following way:

In a recent survey in Science magazine (Marten Scheffer et al. (11 co-authors) – Science – 19 October 2012, Vol 338, p. 344), Tipping Point was defined as a “Catastrophic Bifurcation,” a term which was taken from mathematical Chaos Theory, and has its own well developed definition. Bifurcation indicates a splitting into two branches; the “fork” in the title of both my book and this blog, refers to the same phenomenon. Tipping Points are predictable, an aspect that attracts a great deal of interest for obvious reasons. The financial markets have seen intense activity in this area (see James Owen Weatherall’s The Physics of Wall Street, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), with attempts to predict upcoming financial bubbles. The main premise behind the ability to predict bifurcation is that one monitors the driving forces that tend to restore a system to its state of equilibrium. As the system approaches the tipping point, these restoring forces tend to decrease until they completely disappear.

An image can do wonders to illustrate a concept, and this one accurately depicts our collective reaction to climate change.

 Bose Noise Reduction Headphones - Waterfall Ad

I found this image (through Google Image Search) on a blog that illustrates and analyzes various advertising concepts. This ad for Bose sound cancellation headphones asserts that they are powerful enough to prevent the guy from hearing the approaching waterfall (Bose strongly advises not trying their product in these settings).

We can anticipate a waterfall long before we reach it, due to the noise and the strong prevailing currents. In fact, we can usually detect the signs early enough to row toward shore and prevent the fall that would be inevitable were we to keep a steady course. If, however, we ignore the warnings, or are ignorant enough not to recognize them, we pay the price. This holds true for collectives as well as individuals.

For a physicist, projecting individuals’ destructive tipping points seems a much more imprecise exercise than doing so for the global tipping points of the physical environment. At least in the latter case, the projections are based on well-defined, if not always fully understood, mechanisms. But as a country, after seeing the immediate effects of violence on our youths, we are willing to take chances and make the effort to implement such assessments because even one clear success might be worth it. Applying the same spirit to planetary tipping points has the potential to save many, many more children in the long run.

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Adaptive Rebuilding

Posted on May 21, 2013 by climatechangefork

Hurricane Sandy, which struck the East Coast of the United States more than six months ago (October 2012), was the second-costliest hurricane in the recorded history of the United States . While climate scientists said that the storm was not directly caused by climate change, they did correlate it, and its intensity with the increasingly frequent extreme climatic events and rising sea levels that we associate with climate change. This, in turn, has been linked to human choices of energy sources. (Nov 5, 13 & 19, 2012; Jan 14, Apr 30, 2013 blogs). We have just passed an important marker in surpassing 400 parts per million in the Keeling Curve that measures the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Meanwhile, the frequency of extreme weather events is predicted to rise. Society’s response to the threats is focused on attempts to mitigate and adapt. I have written extensively about both, throughout this blog, recently (April 30 blog) focusing on some selective steps toward adaptation being taken by individuals that can afford them. There is an ongoing effort along the East Coast to rebuild after the destruction caused by Sandy – some of this effort is being pursued in a way that is designed to minimize future damage caused by such storms. I am naming such efforts adaptive rebuilding. It is a positive development that has the potential to be applied in various forms in poorer countries, while avoiding the polarizing class struggle the Hamptons are facing.

One of the most effective efforts toward bringing about adaptation is to create disincentives for people to live in areas prone to flooding (Zone A in the NYC lingo). I believe this technique should be globalized as widely as possible. A recent article by Tara Siegel Bernard (NYT-May 10, 2013) titled, “Rebuilding After Sandy, but With Costly New Rules,” summarized the post-Sandy situation. A new federal flood insurance law that was issued last year has resulted in a sharp rise in some premiums.

A specific example with numbers taken from this article demonstrates the new strategy:

The insurance premiums are determined, in part, by where your home stands relative to that base. The higher you go, of course, the less you pay. Consider a single-family home in a zone with a moderate to high risk of a flood, that has a flood policy with $250,000 of coverage: if the home is four feet below the base flood elevation, the homeowner would pay an annual premium of about $9,500, according to FEMA. But if the home was elevated to the base, the premium would cost $1,410. Hoist the home three feet higher, and the premium would drop to $427.

A recent map of New York City’s Hurricane evacuation zones is shown below:

New York governor Andrew Cuomo also recently announced (NYT-Feb 4, 2013) that he wants to spend as much as $400 million (obtained from the federal recovery money) to buy and raze damaged homes in the flood plains of New York State, with the aim to convert them into parks, bird sanctuaries, dunes or open beaches.

There is no compulsion here, but it is a very strong encouragement to get out of the water. The population of New York City is more than 8 million people, while that of the metropolitan tri-state area is more than 20 million. As we can see from the map above, the government is trying to put into place economic incentives for many people to move away from the shore.

The motivations for these efforts are mainly economical: storms of Sandy’s magnitude cost a lot of money- both for individuals, and all forms of government. As the frequency of such storms increases, there is a growing reluctance to pay. The payment essentially amounts to a transfer of money from people who live in safe, higher ground areas, to those that like to live near the sea (or were forced to move there in the past when society was not aware of the dangers).

The direct damage to property is not the only issue. More than two years after the tsunami hit Japan, rubble from the storm continues to wash out to the West Coast of the United States and the coastal areas of many other countries. Heavily populated, flood-prone sea shores become rife with potential debris, while the oceans provide a transit system to spread the damage around.

Many of the available flood maps are old and out of date. Future predictions of flood zones are even more uncertain. It is one issue to devise policies to encourage large population shifts away from existing flood areas; trying to draw flood maps based on projections of future floods is completely different issue.

That said, incentives to move away from projected flood zones, combined with frequent updates of the areas included in these projections, are a good first step towards flexible adaptation- one that can and should be implemented globally to include as many people as possible.

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Bilingualism

Posted on May 14, 2013 by climatechangefork

The semester is almost over, so I needed some sort of challenging take-home message for my Climate Change course. The course is part of an upper-tier general education program, open to students of all disciplines.  One aspect that I have found challenging to convey to my students has been the extent to which the global population (now 7 billion and growing) affects our physical environment. We as humans have become an important part of the physical environment and any understanding of the physical environment requires understanding of humans and any understanding of the human society requires understanding of the physical environment. Geologists informally call this the Anthropocene– an era of heightened human impact on the Earth. We developed the language of Science to understand and convey our physical environment; likewise, we use economics to describe essential parts of human interaction with regards to material prosperity. If we want to understand and guide our behavior in the Anthropocene, we need to be as bilingual as possible in these two languages. That does not necessarily require fluency- just that we know enough to be able to talk and listen across these disciplinary barriers.

As it happens, this week’s New York Times was helpful to a guy like me who comes from the science end of this spectrum. A magazine article by Adam Davidson, entitled, “Boom, Bust or What? Larry Summers and Glenn Hubbard Square Off on Our Economic Future” (NYT-May 5, 2013) has tried to capture the essence of two apparently opposite economic approaches by interviewing the two influential economists. I have included a few illustrative snippets below:

Summers segued to an explanation for how he chose a career in economics. The field, he said, provided tools that can be used to make the world, or a basketball team, better. The key is reading data and recognizing what it tells you.

[Hubbard] ticked off a series of empires: Rome, medieval China, Spain, 19th-century Britain — and argued that they fell because their leadership ossified and squashed free trade, technological progress or other forces of economic growth.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, they were young academic stars, part of a revolution in economics taking place at Harvard. New computer technology and large data sets allowed them to explore with unprecedented precision how government policy affected the economic behavior of people and companies. Many of their peers went on to become influential public figures. Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke and Greg Mankiw were all at Harvard or nearby M.I.T. around the same time. But by the 1990s, it was Hubbard and Summers who, above others, translated the leading economic research into Washington policy.

Through their own work and that of their protégés, much of the economic policy now advocated by moderate Democrats can be traced to the ideas of Summers. (“I’m progressive, but not of the ideological left,” Summers told me.) And many Republican policies, especially dealing with taxation, can be credited, in some way, to Hubbard on the right. (“I’m a pragmatist,” he says of his conservatism. “I’m not doctrinaire.”) The space between their views roughly defines the American center.

Hubbard argues that the imperative of the moment — our 3-point shot — is rolling back federal benefits for wealthier and middle-class Americans. If it’s done right, he says, taxes will fall and “more entrepreneurs will start businesses. Corporate investment would rise, creating more jobs. Individuals will work harder and save more. The country would have faster growth. The benefits are quite broad.” If we stay the present course, though, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will keep growing unchecked, and the United States, paralyzed by debt, could burn like Rome. Summers, who once told me “I don’t do apocalypse,” acknowledged that some entitlement reform is inevitable, but that it is not the real adjustment that needs to be made. “That is playing defense,” he said. “It is essential but insufficient.” Instead, Summers wants the country to start playing offense: the crisis that demands our attention now, he says, is long-term unemployment. Millions of Americans have been out of work for more than half a year, many for much longer; not only are they suffering, but the overall economy is poorer without their contribution. Summers argues that the U.S. government can address this problem in several ways, especially by committing to more government spending, notably on infrastructure.

For two men who are so smart and analytical, neither could fully articulate how they came to understand their field in such fundamentally different ways. During our many conversations, each referred to opinions shaped early in life. Summers and Hubbard were born in the 1950s, but they had remarkably different upbringings. Summers’s parents were well-respected economists at the University of Pennsylvania. Two of his uncles won Nobel Prizes in the field, including Paul Samuelson, who advised President Kennedy and wrote “Economics,” an enormously influential textbook. His family and their friends were committed Democrats who celebrated the expansionary programs under Lyndon Johnson. Some of them even helped design those programs.

Hubbard, on the other hand, grew up in a remote agricultural town in Central Florida. His parents were public-school teachers. The programs that were beloved by Summers’s family struck many Southerners as another sign of government growing too large. Hubbard told me that a favorite book in high school was Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” a 1944 treatise against big government that remains a sacred text among conservatives, including Paul Ryan.

These two men are of the same age, with the same educational background, and underlying tool sets based on data, yet they have come to completely opposite conclusions as to how society should run its economy. The only noticeable difference that Davidson was able to identify was the environment in which they grew up. They do seem to agree that society needs economic growth to function, though they argue about how to achieve the growth.

There are many commonly cited justifications for our supposed constant need for economic growth, including the demand to satisfy growing populations, and the perception that no-growth means decline (the decline of the big empires in Hubbard’s argument). I have written extensively on the perceived need for economic growth (see the February 11 blog), positing that no growth does not have to equal decline, but can instead mean an effort toward a productive, stable and flexible steady-state. The figure below describes three United Nation scenarios for population growth.

 Graph of three population projections based on different fertility assumptions

The most credible of these scenarios, and the one to withstand validation over many years, is the medium growth scenario that forecasts asymptotic stabilization over the second half of the century (in other words, the population levels off to a semi-constant number). To an ignorant physicist, Summers’ and Hubbard’s arguments, as presented by Davidson, look a lot like using hand-picked data to justify the heavily loaded philosophies they cultivated during their upbringing with heavily discounted future (February 4th blog). A correction in outlooks is badly needed.

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Lessons from Pompeii

Posted on May 7, 2013 by climatechangefork

A recent article in the New York Times by Rachel Donaldo and  Elisabetta Povoledo (NYT, April 21 2013) titled  “The Latest Threat to Pompeii’s Treasures: Italy’s Red Tape,” starts with the following:

POMPEII, Italy — Destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, Pompeii survived excavation starting in the 18th century and has stoically borne the wear and tear of millions of modern-day tourists. But now, its deep-hued frescoes, brick walls and elegant tile mosaics appear to be at risk from an even greater threat: the bureaucracy of the Italian state. In recent years, collapses at the site have alarmed conservationists, who warn that this ancient Roman city is dangerously exposed to the elements — and is poorly served by the red tape, the lack of strategic planning and the limited personnel of the site’s troubled management.

The site’s decline has captured the attention of the European Union, which began a $137 million effort in February that aims to balance preservation with accessibility to tourists. Called the Great Pompeii Project, the effort also seeks to foster a culture-driven economy in an area dominated by the Neapolitan Mafia.

The rest of the article describes the difficulties encountered in the efforts to save the site.

Pompeii is not unique in this respect. Almost every other major archeological site, especially those that receive a major influx of cruise ship tourism, suffers from the corresponding degradation and damage. These are, of course, a major concern to everybody that cares about preserving our common heritage. Many of these sites do not have access to the same extensive public intervention to curb damage that Pompeii enjoys.

Pompeii is one of the 962 UNESCO sites (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)  worldwide. UNESCO designates these sites as having special cultural or physical significance to humanity’s common heritage. The legal protection of the sites is anchored in international law:

UNESCO designation as a World Heritage Site provides prima facie evidence that such culturally sensitive sites are legally protected pursuant to the Law of War, under the Geneva Convention, its Articles, Protocols and Customs, together with other treaties including the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and international law. Thus, the Geneva Convention treaty promulgates:

Article 53. PROTECTION OF CULTURAL OBJECTS AND OF PLACES OF WORSHIP. Without prejudice to the provisions of the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of 14 May 1954, and of other relevant international instruments, it is prohibited:

(a) To commit any acts of hostility directed against the historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples;

(b) To use such objects in support of the military effort;

(c) To make such objects the object of reprisals.

Unfortunately, our planet as a whole is not a designated UNESCO site. Planet Earth is not only of special cultural and physical significance to humanity’s common heritage; it is also essential to our continued existence. Sci-Fi visions of an evacuated Earth notwithstanding, we have no other place to go. Last year, our planet’s “visitor” count reached 7 billion- a growing number that leaves an irreversible collective impact. UNESCO designation does not shift responsibility for the designated sites from their sovereign countries, but it can provide some financial help when needed. The planet doesn’t have any centralized authority responsible for keeping its integrity intact to provide a suitable home for future generations. We badly need one.   

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Scaling up from the Hamptons to the World

Posted on April 30, 2013 by climatechangefork

Michael Schwartz’s New York Times article entitled “Dispute in the Hamptons Set Off by Effort to Hold Back Ocean” (NYT, April 18, 2013) starts with the following:

Soon after Hurricane Sandy hit last fall, Joshua Harris, a billionaire hedge fund founder and an owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, began to fear that his $25 million home on the water here might fall victim to the next major storm. So he installed a costly defense against incoming waves: a shield of large metal plates on the beach, camouflaged by sand.

His neighbor, Mark Rachesky, another billionaire hedge fund founder, put up similar fortifications between his home and the surf. Chris Shumway, who closed his $8 billion hedge fund two years ago, trucked in boulders the size of Volkswagens.

Across a section of this wealthy town, some residents, accustomed to having their way in the business world, are now trying to hold back the ocean.

But the flurry of construction on beachfront residences since the hurricane is touching off bitter disputes over the environment, real estate and class.

A White House Office of Science and Technology Policy blog summarizes the conclusions of a report that was recently submitted to the President, regarding the steps that the United States needs to take to confront climate change:

Today the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a letter to the President describing six key components the advisory group believes should be central to the Administration’s strategy for addressing climate change…

The six key components are:

  • Focus on national preparedness for climate change, which can help decrease damage from extreme weather events now and speed recovery from future damage;
  • Continue efforts to decarbonize the economy, with emphasis on the electricity sector;
  • Level the playing field for clean-energy and energy-efficiency technologies by removing regulatory obstacles, addressing market failures, adjusting tax policies, and providing time-limited subsidies for clean energy when appropriate;
  • Sustain research on next-generation clean-energy technologies and remove obstacles for their eventual deployment;
  • Take additional steps to establish U.S. leadership on climate change internationally; and
  • Conduct an initial Quadrennial Energy Review.

The PCAST’s first recommendation addresses adaptation. The other five recommendations involve mitigation. To various degrees, all six recommendations require the spending of money now, to prevent future disasters. In today’s fiscal environment, spending public money is not a popular activity. Adaptation and mitigation, however, are funded in different ways.

We all share a common atmosphere, so not only do mitigation efforts need to be globally coordinated, they must also involve a universal transition to more sustainable energy sources. Mitigation’s goal, after all, is to minimize the anthropogenic (human-caused) changes that result from using fossil fuels as our dominant energy sources.

Adaptation, on the other hand, is mainly a local activity, and therefore funded locally- it also comes with the open ended question – adaptation to what? The IPCC’s projection for a business as usual scenario estimates a 6oC global temperature rise (a change of 10.8oF) toward the end of the century, while an environmentally friendly scenario estimates the global temperature rise as only 2.5oC (4.5oF) over the same time period (September 24 and December 10 blogs). The two projections portray very different worlds. The 2.5oC scenario depicts a world where adaptation is not only possible, but has clear, fixed results; the 6oC scenario describes a world where open-ended adaptation has reached its limits, and the global population is at the mercy of drastic climate change.

The Hampton billionaires can build sea gates in front of their multi million dollar houses and, for a while, prevent damage to their estates. Physics will still come into effect, however, and the rising sea will only take a small detour from the sea gates to hit surrounding, less protected, structures. This is what has resulted from efforts to re-protect New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, and in every other place that has tried to implement similar local protection from sea-level or lake-level rise.

The Hamptons case can be extended globally: rich countries on a GDP scale, will be able, if they so choose, to temporarily protect themselves and shift the impact to poorer countries that do not have the resources to do so. The majority of the world’s population is, and increasingly continues to be, made up of citizens of what we consider developing countries. If they feel, as the “regular” citizens of the Hamptons do, that they are being ignored and taken advantage of, global mitigation efforts will never work and the recommendations by the PCAST will turn out to be internally contradictory. There needs to be some level of democracy and equality in adaptation for mitigation to function properly- we are all part of an inter-connected system, and will therefore be affected by the overall changes that occur in years to come.

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Earth Day

Posted on April 23, 2013 by climatechangefork

Earth Day is an annual day, observed on April 22, in which the World demonstrates its support of environmental protection. It also happens that it is my wife’s birthday and the one-year anniversary of this blog. 🙂 It is a special day that needs special celebration on all three fronts.

The day was recognized by the United Nation in 2009 and is celebrated in one form or another worldwide. The preamble to the United Nation’s declaration is given below:

GENERAL ASSEMBLY PROCLAIMS 22 APRIL ‘INTERNATIONAL MOTHER EARTH DAY’

ADOPTING BY CONSENSUS BOLIVIA-LED RESOLUTION

In Address, Bolivia’s President Says 60 Years after Human Rights, Declaration ‘Mother Earth Is Now, Finally, Having Her Rights Recognized’

As the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed today International Mother Earth Day, Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma applauded the Members of the world body who had “taken a historic stand for Mother Earth” by acknowledging humanity’s common interest in the protection of the planet and its environment.

“Sixty years after adopting the [Universal Declaration of Human Rights], Mother Earth is now, finally, having her rights recognized,” said President Morales, immediately following the Assembly’s unanimous adoption of a resolution designating 22 April each year as International Mother Earth Day (A/63/L.69).

Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann thanked Bolivia for having taken the lead in bringing the resolution to the Assembly and added that, by declaring the International Day, Member States recognized their responsibility, as called for in the Rio Declaration, adopted at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the “Earth Summit,” to promote harmony with nature and the planet to achieve a just balance among economic, social and environmental needs of the present and future generations of humanity.

By the text, the Assembly acknowledged that “the Earth and its ecosystems are our home,” and expressed its conviction that, in order to achieve a just balance among the economic, social and environmental needs of present and future generations, “it is necessary to promote harmony with nature and the Earth.”

Earth Day is coordinated globally through the Earth Day Network. On the Earth Day Network one can find various suggestions how to celebrate the day. These suggestions include:

  1. Become a climate reporter by uploading a picture of yourself being impacted by climate change or taking action against it and thus helping the network to construct a global mosaic.
  2. Protect our clean air by telling the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to enforce the “Clean Air Act.”
  3. Recycle your E-waste. Every year, thousands of old electronic devices are thrown into landfills, when they could have been recycled.
  4. Once you have decided what to do, submit your commitment through the network.

In order to honor the three events that I simultaneously celebrate, I have decided to try to dig deeper. One of the earlier manifestations of Earth Day was proposed by Senator Gaylord Nelson and was first celebrated on April 22, 1970 as an environmental “teach-in” day. Following this tradition, I feel that the best way to celebrate, with potentially the greatest impact, is to spread the word not by posting on a network on the internet, but through discussion with family and friends.

Yesterday, I had a class on Climate Change at my school. We talked about Earth Day, with a special emphasis on what we as individuals can do, as well as how we can convince our family and friends to do something of their own. We also discussed trying to get these friends and family to try to spread the word to their respective family and friends. I asked the students to write a comment to this blog that describes what they did and the reaction that they have experienced. I am calling on all of you, dear readers, to join my students in this effort.

My birthday is not far away (toward the end of May). It will be a good opportunity to dedicate another blog to this effort to find out the concrete results (and to remember that pledges and promises are not equivalent to actions).

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Am I Talking Out of Both Sides of My Mouth?

Posted on April 16, 2013 by climatechangefork

Last week’s blog was dedicated to Jim Hansen’s retirement and the central role that he has played in the Climate Change debate. It immediately garnered several comments from readers, none of which had anything to do with the blog.

All three comments focused on my personal life, referring to a local issue in which my wife played a major role, while I played a relatively minor one. The impression I got from the comments was that the individuals were attempting to get to her through me. Since this is my blog, and I am also the moderator, I could have easily blocked these comments.

However, the comments raised a few issues that are relevant to the main focus of this blog, so I will try to address them here. Some of these issues are personal and some are more general.

Some history:

On June 2010, the City of New York decided to narrow a street (Prospect Park West, Brooklyn, NY) and construct a two-way protected bike lane, as shown below.

Prospect Park West Bikelane

The city’s argument for the change was safety: the claim was that the multi-lane street caused speeding, which in turn led to traffic accidents. The street borders a large urban park (Prospect Park) that is already popular with bikers, especially during weekends.

The trend of replacing car lanes with bike lanes is not confined to New York City — it is global, and, almost everywhere, it triggers conflicts between car owners, bikers and pedestrians on how to share the common real estate. Two local organizations were formed to try to oppose the city’s change: “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” and “Seniors for Safety.” My wife is the president of the first organization and I am a member of the second. My wife and I happen to live in an apartment on the street in question, and our apartment was used to host a few of the meetings.

A common complaint raised in almost every such conflict – this one in Brooklyn being no exception – is that of a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mentality. NIMBY, according to Wikipedia, is “a pejorative characterization of opposition by residents to a proposal for a new development because it is close to them, often with the connotation that such residents believe that the developments are needed in society, but should be further away.”

Reading through the recent comments on my blog, I found common theme was an accusation that I am talking out of both sides of my mouth – preaching for the need to take steps to minimize the impact of Climate Change, while at the same time, fighting to block them if such steps take place near where I live.

In 2010, I was teaching an honors course in my College that was related to Climate Change with an emphasis on students’ investigation of NIMBY phenomena in New York City. The product of the students’ investigation can be seen at http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/tomkiewiczs11/.

As part of this course, I wanted to discuss the bike lane and try to figure out if such struggles can be classified as NIMBY. I wanted to invite my wife and the head of the local biking organization that was supporting the change to talk to the class. I couldn’t do it because the issue was litigated but I tried to address the issue through data analysis that included publicly available data that were collected by the pro-bikers group. The main question that I wanted to address with the class was whether or not this was an environmental issue in the first place. The city never claimed that it was an environmental issue; they claimed that this was a safety issue. Safety issues need to be backed by data. According to the groups that oppose the move, the data were not there. An environmental assessment of the move was never performed. If use was supposed, as the comments claim, to lower carbon footprints – there were strong arguments that it might achieve the opposite.

In terms of carbon footprints, NYC is one of the most sustainable cities in the United States. A recent inventory of NYC greenhouse gases is shown below:

GHG Emissions for C40 Cities

About 75% of NYC’s total emissions come from buildings, with another 22% coming from transportation. Among NYC’s commuters, 55% use public transportation. In fact, 54% of households are without cars and 10% of residents walk to work. The relative contribution from bikes is rather small in this area. Also, most of the bikers that use this bike lane are recreational bikers – not commuters.

Surprisingly, slowing traffic speed to below the average of 30 mph (the speed limit in residential streets in NYC), actually increases gas consumption by about 30%.

Analysis of the environmental impact of such a change doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, thus making it difficult to characterize this issue as a NIMBY issue. As a safety issue, on the other hand, is a completely local issue that needs to be supported by data. The main argument in this debate is that the data do not support the claim. NIMBYism is a major obstacle for policy implementation of steps that are designed to mitigate impacts. I did discuss many aspects of this in previous blogs (June 18, July and August 27 – 2012), but this doesn’t mean that conflicts between local communities and government should be avoided. The constant scrutiny is beneficial and actions that impact communities need to be supported by data and the data should withstand scrutiny.

Now that I have addressed this issue, I hope that my little fight over a road near my apartment will disappear as a topic from this blog. It doesn’t belong here.

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Jim Hansen’s Tipping Point

Posted on April 9, 2013 by climatechangefork

Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference – Little Brown – 2000) defines a Tipping Point as, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” Since Gladwell’s publication, the term has been “adopted” in various disciplines, some of which have applied more quantitative descriptions. The Tipping Point term plays an important role in Climate Change (see my June 25, 2012 blog), forming a set of markers to hopefully help us make changes, before we reach the point of no return that we are all trying to avoid. In a recent survey in Science magazine (Marten Scheffer et al. (11 co-authors) – Science – 19 October 2012, Vol 338, p. 344), Tipping Point was defined as a “Catastrophic Bifurcation,” a term which was taken from mathematical Chaos Theory, and has its own well developed definition. Bifurcation indicates a splitting into two branches; the “fork” in the title of both my book and this blog refers to the same phenomenon. Tipping Points are predictable, an aspect that attracts a great deal of interest for obvious reasons. The financial markets have seen intense activity in this area (see James Owen Weatherall’s The Physics of Wall Street, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), with attempts to predict upcoming financial bubbles. The main premise behind the ability to predict bifurcation is that one monitors the driving forces that tend to restore a system to its state of equilibrium. As the system approaches the tipping points, these restoring forces tend to decrease until they completely disappear.

Last week, Jim Hansen announced that he is retiring (he is 72) from NASA to continue pursuing political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases. His retirement has attracted widespread attention (Justin Gillis – New York Times – 4/02/2013). Hansen has been known for both his scientific work and his efforts to bring public attention to the inherent dangers of humanity’s current effects on changing the physical environment. He has focused primarily on climate change in both of these settings. Hansen has been the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) since 1981. In this capacity, he pioneered both the measurement of the Global Mean Temperature and the development of the General Circulation Model. These allowed for comparison between predictions and experiments, aiding in projecting the future under various scenarios. Hansen was shocked by what he saw, and gave his testimony before a congressional committee in 1988 to warn the rest of the world. That same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by two United Nation organizations: the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nation Environmental Program (UNEP). The IPCC published its first official assessment report in 1990. It then convened at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June of 1992 to establish the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This served as the precedent for the beginning of the Kyoto Protocol, whose implementation and progress have now more or less stalled.

Throughout this time Hansen was wearing two hats simultaneously: that of the “objective” scientist, whose work was scrutinized and refereed by the scientific community, and that of a “Cassandra,” warning us of the consequences of our current actions. NASA administrators and many scientists criticized him for his dual role (see my May 7, 2012 blog). Some in NASA have argued that NASA should not involve itself in trying to predict the future, worrying that any mispredictions might lead to a loss of credibility for the agency. Opponents claim that his science is colored by a political agenda. He was, however, one of the first to fully realize that with upwards of 7 billion people, each striving for a better standard of life, the future of science and political activities cannot remain separate. We are now part of the physical system. We are part of science. I often use one of the most important principles in science, called Le-Chatelier’s Principle, that states:

 Any system in chemical equilibrium, as a result in the variation in one of the factors determining the equilibrium, undergoes a change such that, if this change had occurred by itself, it would have introduced a variation of the factor considered in the opposite direction.

The equilibrium between humans and the physical environment is now being disturbed, and one possible way the system could restore its own equilibrium would be to wipe us from the face of the Earth.

In this sense, “objective” scientists must become more like physicians. It is not enough to investigate the patient’s symptoms; we have to find out what went wrong and how to cure it. The “patient” in this case is the planet and Jim Hansen is trying with all his might to cure it. The political process is part of that cure. He is one of the earliest “scientist – healers,” and I wish him the best in all his endeavors.

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Guest Blog Post: Randee Zerner: Learning From Our Children through Learning with Our Children

Posted on April 1, 2013 by climatechangefork

In mid January, while attending the AAAS meeting, I got an email from a friend that her grandson (a 4th grader) “needed” to do some science research for school and that the research was competitive and he would like very much to win a prize. Could I help? My first thought was to try an environmental “Paper Clips” (June 11, 2012) in the form of an energy audit and calculation of a carbon footprint. I had no idea if this would work with a fourth grader, but decided to put forward the suggestion and see how it played out. Through interactions with the parents, grandparents and indirectly with the fourth grader, the project eventually took shape.

Here is the result, followed by a guest blog written by the kid’s mother:

4th Grade Science Fair Project: Electricity Audit

 Guest Blog Post: Randee Zerner:

My son, who is in the 4th grade, is required to participate in a science fair project. Last year, we did a composting project, were he received honorable mention. This year, his goal was to surpass that and win the chance to go to Brookhaven Labs. So naturally, we asked our friend Professor Tomkiewicz what environmental project he would suggest. The recommendation was an energy audit of our home, with ideas for ways to reduce our carbon footprint. We then asked another of my mother’s coworkers, and she suggested a study about snails. My son, being who he is, chose the more complex project.

For the next 6 weeks, the energy audit became the central activity of our home. We first had to list all of the light sources in all the rooms in the house and record the wattages for each bulb. In order to get a seven day average of our electricity usage, my son put a piece of paper on every light switch in the house. For seven days, every member of the family had to write down the time the light was turned on and off in every room. At first we had fun calling out to each other, “Did you write down the time?” As the days passed, at times, we either kept the lights on (A rare occurrence, since we are very conscious of turning off the lights when leaving a room), or did not turn them on at all. Which led to our going to the bathroom in the dark more often than not (for boys, not an easy task).  Over time, we learned that the natural light during the day was usually sufficient for most activities.

My son used a Kill-A-Watt meter provided by Professor Tomkiewicz. We connected this device to our refrigerator, garage refrigerator, deep chest freezer, microwave, toaster, computer, TV/cable box, apple device charger, and telephone. We were unable to do this with the dishwasher, oven, washer and dryer, so we took the information from those appliances and asked our energy guru to help figure the kWh of these appliances.

Then the real fun began, and we did all of the math problems and converted the watts into kW and then into kWh (After figuring out the average time the lights were on). After many emails back and forth with Professor Tomkiewicz to make sure our formulas were right, we then figured out the sum of the kWh for both lights and appliances. At this point, we were calling our guru to check our work (Wondering if maybe, at this point, he regretted helping out?). We then compared our final sum of kWh usage to our electrical bill. The emails were going back and forth at a rapid pace – we were trying to show all of our work and to double-check everything. We were so proud of everything… and then our guru dropped the bomb: “Where is the carbon footprint?” At which point, my son and I looked at each other and said, “How do we figure that out?” As usual, we were then given yet another formula (I’m so happy my son loves math). My son then typed up some suggestions for us to do as a family to decrease our energy use.

The board was finally put together and handed in; we celebrated by leaving on some lights for a little while, (Shh, don’t tell anyone). Tuesday night, we went to school to see the board presented along with 100 others.  Of course, we thought ours was the best, but we had to admit there were some other great projects. The teacher told my husband and me that she recommended our son’s project for honorable mention; been there, done that – hoping for more! We will find out tomorrow.

We would like to thank Professor Tomkiewicz for all of his time and patience, and most of all, for not screening his calls!!

Posted in Climate Change | 5 Comments

Educational Transition II

Posted on March 25, 2013 by climatechangefork

The previous two blogs (Feb 25 and March 4) discussed some of the issues in our K-12 education that have attracted my attention during the special session of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) meeting in Boston. My most recent blog (March 18) extended to colleges and universities, and was anchored on Tom Friedman’s Op-Ed (New York Times – March 6, 2013) reaction to a conference on online learning that he attended.

Here I will continue on my line of reasoning.

I am about to experience the excitement of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). The session that I will teach on the Vanderbilt Virtual School’s website has nothing to do with Climate Change or Physics, and is directed not at college students, but at K-12 students all across the United States. The topic is the Holocaust and I will join forces with Matt Rozell, the History teacher from Hudson Falls, who brought to light the liberation of the train that carried me (together with 2500 other inmates) from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt concentration camps. His World War II Living History Project put me in touch with other survivors from the same train, as well as one of our liberators.

This will be my first experience with the impact of this technology. The virtual school that I will take part in does not compete with regular class activities. Each session is a unique event that students would not be able to experience without the technology. While Friedman was writing about a system in which, at best, schools would supplement technology, in this case, the session will instead serve as a supplement for schools. The Vanderbilt Virtual School serves as an additional instrument for learning, making direct use of existing dissemination technologies like TV and the internet in order to function.

There are already MOOC courses on sustainability, with sessions on Climate Change. For example, here is the Illinois course description:

The course is completely free, and delivered online. There will be a mixture of readings, short lectures, quizzes, collaborative projects and discussions. All participants who successfully complete the required activities (and tests!) will earn a completion badge.

As described, the course is not part of a degree program but an effort to educate willing members of the general public. Successful completion entitles the participants to a certificate of completion. There are online courses, all throughout the educational horizon, that are already part of the degree-granting curriculum. The discussions regarding these are in high gear in almost every academic institution. Pedagogic considerations are not the only issue. Budgetary considerations come into play as well, including online courses’ ability to accommodate larger student populations, saving a considerable percentage of the classroom space that is so tight in many educational institutions. Adding to the debate, are faculty fears that any objections they make to the new layout will be overridden by the State (A bill to this effect is already under consideration in California).

Let me now go back to Tom Friedman’s Op-Ed, where he shifts from his message to describe the man who drove him to the conference:

You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver in Boston disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.- Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me at the airport I saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers.

“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral dilemmas. Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players.”

There is no question that Prof. Sandel is a successful and great teacher. The description of his activities covers two separate elements: his upcoming teaching of the joint 1000 – student “Justice” course as the first humanities offering on the MIT-Harvard edX online learning platform and his “pop-star” treatment in South Korea where, among other honors, he was asked to lecture in an amphitheater to 14,000 people and the presentation of his lectures on Chinese web sites with an estimated 20 million viewers.

The MIT-Harvard edX platform that was recently launched is based on existing, faculty approved courses in both universities. As such, they can count towards a degree, whether they are being delivered online or in person. The objective of the platform is to expand it to be used in other universities. It is at the discretion of the faculty in every university to use such a platform either directly, by making use of the same courses, or indirectly, by posting their own courses on the platform. In either case, the courses have to be approved by the faculty to count for credit. The universities have access to the identities of their students so they can follow their learning goals, assisting and modifying the various aspects in order to optimize learning. Faculty will have the option to either act as “teaching assistants,” as Friedman’s Op-Ed implies, or to use the platform to assist their own teaching.

Prof. Sandel’s experience in South Korea and China are a different issue. In those cases, nobody has control or knowledge of who the students are. If some testing is performed and a certificate is given, the identity (name) of the student will be known only by the computer. The lecture and the associated tests are uniform for every participant. Since there are no prerequisites, and no prior knowledge is required, Harvard, MIT or any other university cannot use these courses to accredit these students without losing their reputation and their ability to charge students $50,000 tuition. These students now become part of the “general public,” whom the MOOC courses aim to educate on issues of national concern. Hopefully, this will have a positive influence when these students are asked to contribute to the collective decision-making process through voting. Public education can and should be available as a life long activity. As such, the technology presents new and expanding opportunities to educate the general public, ultimately contributing to better collective (political) decisions, and benefiting us all.

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