Educational Transition

Posted on March 18, 2013 by climatechangefork

In my previous two blogs (Feb. 25 and March 4), I discussed some of the issues in our K-12 education that attracted my attention during the AAAS special session meeting in Boston. My focus was on what seems to be a fossilized course subject structure through the grades, that doesn’t allow multidisciplinary topics that relate to our interaction with the physical environment to be addressed. Since most of us become eligible to vote upon finishing high school, it becomes incredibly important that we understand the issues that we are being asked to vote on.

In the US, enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 11% between 1990 and 2000. It then increased another 37%, from 15.3 to 21 million between 2000 and 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of 18-24 olds in the country increased from 27.3 to 30.7 million, an increase of 12%. The percentage of students in this age bracket enrolled in college rose from 35% in 2000 to 41% in 2010.  Even accounting for the roughly 500,000 young adults that are enrolled in non-degree-granting institutions, for more than half of our 18-24 olds, K-12 classes constitute the final level of their education; one that needs to prepare our children to participate in our collective decision-making.

The recent technological revolution has attempted to contribute to the success of the educational process at all levels. Recently, News Corporation began vying for the public school market. They have announced (New York Times, March 8, 2013) the new Amplify Tablet for K-12 schoolchildren. In addition to tablets and curriculum, Amplify will store students’ data. The capability that most attracted my attention, was, as mentioned in the NY Times piece,

If a child’s attention wanders, a stern ‘eyes on teacher’ prompt pops up. A quiz uses emoticons of smiley and sad faces so teachers can instantly gauge which students understand the lesson and which need help.

Since my wife’s expertise used to be eye tracking in infants, this got my full attention. Teachers, with their crowded classrooms, cannot compete on that level.

The same New York Times issue also covered the other half of the 18-24 population: those that continue their educational experience beyond K-12, to attend college.

Thomas L. Friedman, in an Op-Ed article titled “The Professors’ Big Stage” (New York Times – March 6, 2013) reported on a conference that was organized by MIT and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education.” Friedman posed the following question: “How can colleges charge $50,000 a year if my kid can learn it all free from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)?” For perspective, at my school (City University of New York (CUNY)), the tuition for New York State residents is $5,430 for a senior college and $3,900 for community college. For non-residents, the corresponding tuitions are $14,550 for the senior colleges and $7,800 for community colleges.

His key take-away message from the conference was:

Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquire the competency – in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class – and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.

How he thinks universities should adapt?

Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor. There seemed to be a strong consensus that this “blended model” combining online lectures with a teacher-led classroom experience was the ideal. Last fall, San Jose State used the online lectures and interactive exercises of M.I.T.’s introductory online Circuits and Electronics course. Students would watch the M.I.T. lectures and do the exercises at home, and then come to class, where the first 15 minutes were reserved for questions and answers with the San Jose State professor, and the last 45 were devoted to problem solving and discussion. Preliminary numbers indicate that those passing the class went from nearly 60 percent to about 90 percent. And since this course was the first step to a degree in science and technology, it meant that one-third more students potentially moved on toward a degree and career in that field.

As it happens, the challenges online education presents to the traditional university structure are not restricted to schools with a $50,000 tuition. The primary driving forces are economical, not educational.

As Charles M. Blow observes in the New York Times Op-Ed (March 9, 2013):

As college tuitions rise and state and local funding for higher education falls — along with median household incomes — students are taking on staggering levels of debt. And many can’t find jobs that pay well enough to quickly pay off the debt.

The proposed adaptation mechanism is easily applied to many aspects of life and education. For instance, I am now taking part in my school’s effort to improve classroom instructions through Team Based Learning (TBL). This structure is completely disconnected from economic considerations, and is based instead on observations that students learn better from each other. The changes also emphasize collective problem solving. As with Friedman’s adaptation to MOOC, students read the assigned material on their own, then come to class to work in groups and do almost exactly what Friedman describes. In both cases, as in some other “revolutionary” approaches, the content, and its delivery methods, seem to be secondary, while everything shifts to the broaden students’ opportunities to engage with what they are learning.

In the next blogs I will try to focus how these transitions can be used to expand educational opportunities on all levels, to facilitate addressing complex, interdisciplinary, topics such as Climate Change.       

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Guest Blog Post: Christopher Bohl

Posted on March 11, 2013 by climatechangefork

Last week, I mentioned my class on Physics and Society, and the open blog where I have my students posting. This week, I thought I’d try something new, so I have invited one of my students, Mr. Christopher Bohl, to expand on his class blog entry here, as a guest blog post.

Christopher Bohl is a graduate student in adolescent science education at Brooklyn College. He grew up just north of New York City and received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2007 from Tufts University. Following his undergraduate studies, he spent several years as a professional poker player, but has recently rededicated himself to the pursuit of science knowledge and education, specializing in physics.

The entry follows:

In Professor Tomkiewicz’s February 11th blog, he spoke of modeling economic growth using the growth of sourdough bread and then using the expansion of foams to fill the holes.  This methodology is admittedly not something I’ve spent much time thinking of, but my recent research on income/wealth distribution has opened my eyes to this type of system modeling. Physicists have recently begun using systems of flow to describe how money moves amongst people. By thinking of wealth as a measure of people, we can think of monetary transactions as a type of flow through the system of humans, similar to how water flows through a river or electric current through lightning bolts.  This model draws on the so-called Constructal Law, which holds that:

“For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.” –Adrian Bejan

We see this law in action on a daily basis – in the way that trees spread nutrients between trunks and leaves, how lungs transmute and distribute gases from the trachea down to the alveoli, or how raindrops combine on our windshield to form tiny streams. In these systems, you may note, maximum efficiency is achieved (i.e. energy use is minimized) by having one or two large structures coupled with progressively smaller and increasingly numerous subsidiary elements. This is the applied structure of Constructal Law: a few large elements and many small ones. Look around you and you will begin to notice the pattern everywhere in nature – a few huge animals and millions of tiny ones, a few huge trees and lots of tiny plants. Indeed, humans have modeled our systems in the same way, from the way we distribute water to the way we organize our roads. It is worth taking a moment to ponder whether these human systems are any different from their natural counterparts and if they too, are evolving organically in time to improve flow.

The necessary consequence of applying Bejan’s model to wealth distribution, of course, is that there are a few very wealthy people and a great many poor.  At a time when wealth is more easily accessible than ever (ATM’s everywhere and an over-abundance of loans), it seems that flow is increasing and that the wealth disparity is thus being cemented. As a society, we are then left with the choice of either letting this “living” system of wealth naturally maximize flow or intervening (that is, deciding that there are more important aspects to our economy and society than simply having money move easily). We clearly have made efforts throughout history to more evenly distribute wealth in order to create social and political equality, but, as it’s been reported all over the media, this distribution has become increasingly imbalanced of late. When we allow markets to be deregulated, or “flatter” taxes to be implemented, we are removing our barriers to wealth flow and inviting a distribution that reduces equality of opportunity and, I believe, reduces our potential as a species.

Professor Tomkiewicz’s February 4th blog mentioned that the means to sustainability is to endeavor to create equality of opportunity, and I’m inclined to agree. The way to accomplish this is to not simply “redistribute” wealth then, but to fund social programs that enable people to access equal education. It’s interesting to consider this equalizing process through the lens of Constructal Law: perhaps what we need to work on is a way to maximize the flow of knowledge by removing the social constraints that make equal education impossible today. But if knowledge too can be thought of as a relatively finite system, then by Constructal Law, this means that knowledge thrives when we have a few geniuses and a great many idiots, which doesn’t seem ideal. So, I’m left wondering if this is really a “flow” that we should allow to move as freely as possible or if there is perhaps another way to model the system of opportunity that can help us learn to distribute it equally.

For more on Constructal Law now, check out: The Constructal Law of Evolution and Design in Nature, which I referenced in writing this post.

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Education and Authority: Where do We Learn to Think?

Posted on March 4, 2013 by climatechangefork

In the previous blog (February 25, 2013), I focused on K-12 school standards. I emphasized the difficulty in using such standards to ensure that graduates are able to understand and exercise their vote on issues that require collective action, such as energy use and climate change.

As it turns out, I am certainly not the only one concerned about this issue. This semester at Brooklyn College, I have started teaching a new course that focuses on Physics and Society. The students’ inquiries will be posted on an open blog, inviting comments both from other students and from the world at large. We will then discuss them in class. One of the students in the course, Ms. Jenna Peet, posted her first blog on education. The blog was triggered by a short article in a recent issue of Scientific American (the Forum section of the March 2013 issue) by Dennis M. Bartels, the Executive Director of the Exploratory Museum in San Francisco. I am a subscriber, and just received the issue, but I had so far missed this article, and I am thankful to Jenna for the referral. The title of the article is “What is the Question? Critical thinking is a teachable skill best taught outside the K-12 classroom.” The article starts with the following two sentences:

A democracy relies on an electorate of critical thinkers. Yet formal education, which is driven by test taking, is increasingly failing to require students to ask the kind of questions that lead to informed decisions

The rest of the article focuses on the premise that some skills are better suited to be taught outside the classroom. The concrete example discussed is a controlled attempt to answer the question “what type of ecosystem supports eagles.” The article makes the point that museums’ settings are more suitable for accomplishing such an objective.

As was discussed in the last blog, federal attempts to make a national standard are a work in progress. All states have standards at least in core subjects. I have chosen the Washington State report on science standards as an example. The standards are partitioned by grades, methods (systems, inquiry, applications, etc..) and disciplines (Physical Sciences, Earth and Space Science and Life Science).

 Mathematical standards are mentioned separately, with attempts to use them to support appropriate science standards in the higher grades.

A typical result for the Physical Science is shown in the table below:

K-12 Washington Physical Science Standards

The helical structure of Force and Motion through the grades is shown in the graph below. It is typical of most of the entries.

Force and Motion Helix Model - K-12 LearningBy the time that the student finishes high school, (s)he will be familiar with Newton’s laws, as well as likely being familiar with other laws and facts. However, as Dennis Bartels mentioned, it doesn’t look like (s)he will be learning to ask questions and search for the answers. When the student comes to Brooklyn College, regardless of whether (s)he majors in Physics (the next blog will focus on the General Education program in Brooklyn College) (s)he will study Newton’s Laws again. Unfortunately, I have no way of incorporating Climate Change, Genetic Engineering, healthcare issues and other politically important science-centered topics into such a curriculum.

By the age that students finish high school, regardless of how they choose to proceed in life, they will be called upon to vote on such issues and collectively determine our future. Dennis Bartels is right- an isolated classroom is not the place where students acquire the skills to ask the necessary questions and look for corresponding answers. Neither is the museum, although both can be partners in this important task. Science museum visitors are a “biased” audience (see the July 9, 2012 blog). The outside world can, however, be brought into the classroom to be fully analyzed.

In previous blogs (June 4 and June 11, 2012) I have referenced examples of teaching models such as the use of paperclips to teach young children about the Holocaust. I wrote that I was searching for the “equivalent” environmental paperclips to teach about issues such as Climate Change – I am still looking. A friend, a grandmother of a 4th grader, gave me a suggestion.  It involved her grandson, Chapin. Chapin’s teacher asked the class to come up with a 6-week-long research project. His parents, grandparents and I gave him some initial help in brainstorming, but he had veto power. His chosen project requires him (with some parental help) to map the use of all the light sources in his house, as well as measuring the energy use of all other electrical utilities, using a gadget such “Kill a Watt.” He must then compare his home’s use of electricity with the electricity bill, and suggest saving strategies. Parallel to that he is also reading an online summary of Climate Change that was written for 4th graders. From what I’ve heard so far, the family is having fun with this project. I will keep you posted as I learn more.

What I’m trying to establish here, is that we need a combination of sources for teaching. It is problematic that in the current system, students aren’t learning critical thinking in school. Teaching to the test does not encourage inquisitiveness, which is exactly what we need our future generations to have in plentiful supply, especially if we want new solutions to current and upcoming problems. Schools have their part to play in education (one whose standards will hopefully improve), but in order to maximize student potential and encourage understanding, we need to supplement that role with other sources. This includes institutions such as museums, but it also includes bringing learning home, making it a fun family activity.  After all, “It takes a village…”

Posted in Climate Change, Education | 3 Comments

School for Voting

Posted on February 25, 2013 by climatechangefork

A few days ago, I attended a special session of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) in Boston. The session was titled “International Teacher-Scientist Partnership Conference,” and emphasized collaboration. I attended the session in my role as Co-Director of my school’s GK-12, NSF funded, program. The program is focused on a combined effort between graduate students and a few of our local high schools. It is a very successful program that is about to end because of budget constraints. Both our participating graduate students and a few of the high school teachers that are working with us took part in the conference.

Suzanne Donovan, Executive Director of the Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute and Heidi Schweingruber, Deputy Director at the National Research Council, delivered the first plenary presentations at this meeting. Their talks focused on the role of partnership in education, with an emphasis on K-12 education standards.

Every state now has its own school standards, at least in core subjects. The continuous debate is about the desirability of federal standards. The talks discussed federal standards in science and math. The main argument supporting the need for national standards rests on the discrepancy between state standards and our lag in international competitiveness.

I was listening politely, waiting to hear if part of the discussion would center on participation in important policy decisions that require an understanding of science. It did not. The main issue that I was concerned about was Climate Change, but the need for understanding applies to many more issues, including general environmental policy, health care, and genetic engineering. All of these are affected by political decisions regarding both the allocation of resources and regulation of activities. In order to make informed decisions to ensure a better future, the policymakers must first have an in-depth understanding of the subjects.

I grew up in Israel, where, after high school, at age 18, almost everybody is drafted into the army. At the same age, we are also entitled to vote.

The two figures below compare the global voting age distribution with the global distribution of military conscription.

 Map of Voting Age by Country

 

Map of Military Conscription Policy by Country

In the US, the compulsory draft ended in 1973, but males between 18 and 25 are still required to register to the Selective Service System in case a reintroduction of conscription becomes necessary.

When a youngster enters military service, he or she goes through basic training that can be very demanding. If he or she desires or is assigned to a leadership position or a specialized role, he or she must first undergo further training before being allowed to take part in any combat activity.

The age threshold for voting in most countries is 18. The preparation, in the optimum case is high school. I am absolutely not trying to advocate a reintroduction of literacy tests for voting. I do, however, think that we should use every opportunity available to educate our children on the nature of the choices on which they are being asked to vote.

Since I didn’t hear any mention in the talks about including voters’ education as part of the standards, I asked the speakers to comment on this with an emphasis on Climate Change.

The answer that I got was that the speakers are aware of the issue but in their opinion, to address it properly, we need to revisit our entire educational system and make broad changes – changes for which we are not yet prepared.

Next week I will try to make the case that in many instances, we are not only not addressing ignorance at the voting booths but we are also fossilizing disciplinary boundaries that make it very difficult to acquire the necessary education on our own.

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Conflicts and Navigation

Posted on February 18, 2013 by climatechangefork

The perspective of sustainability that I have advocated in the last three blogs was aimed toward the horizon and focused on maintaining equilibrium with the physical environment. I proposed reaching this equilibrium through a combination of recycling our resources, a shift to sustainable energy sources, and internal growth to globally equalize individual opportunities for a better future. Quoting President Obama, the horizon was defined not in terms of fixed time span but as an aspiration to be balanced by present needs. The need to satisfy present needs while at the same time trying to ensure the needs of future generations will be met, often constitutes conflicts that require great societal skills.

Such conflicts are not new. Many economists tend to discount the future (John Maynard Keynes – “In the future we are all dead…” February 4 blog) yet most environmental regulation requires an aspect of economic impact analysis. On a related note, one of the main topics occupying decision makers today is how to rein in the federal deficit without slowing growth. If we truly discount the future, however, both of these become unnecessary exercises – after all, in such a case all environmental regulations are unnecessary, not to mention – why worry about the deficit? When most of us invest, whether in the stock market, real estate or in any other form, our main objective is to secure a future return on our investment, while at the same time minimizing the risk that should things turn sour, we will find ourselves without our much-needed resources. Here, it is the same principle, only with much larger stakes.

On January 16 – 2013, the New York Times conducted an online debate on its forum “Room for Debate.” The subject of the debate was “When Growth is not a Good Goal.” Four opinions were presented with short descriptions given below:

What was completely missing in the debate was the notion of reaching and maintaining all four objectives simultaneously.

I have discussed the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) phenomenon in previous blogs (June 18, July 2, August 27, December 3) – it’s one of the main obstacles that we encounter in trying to put any framework for a sustainable future into practice. It revolves around the conflict between perceived adverse impacts on the individual or a community versus the agreed upon benefit to the larger community. This affects international agreements – if the impact is global, why should we mitigate while others are doing nothing? Or, to once again quote Governor Romney’s excuse for advocating inaction, (December 24 blog) “Climate Change is called Global Warming not American Warming.” In other words, it embodies the oft-used sentence, “why me?” To resolve the NIMBY phenomenon in this instance, we need to be able to navigate seemingly conflicting interests and gain the ability to look at the horizon, as difficult as we may find this task.

I have been trying to address some of these conflicts through games. Recently, I have been collaborating with Prof. Lori Scarlatos from Stony Brook University to develop games that are designed to compare the real world with a simulated world whose conditions change based on the players’ decisions. The players must balance immediate local interests with long-term societal interests. They then have the ability to “check” how they are doing against real data. We have named such efforts “Reality Based STEM Instructions with Participatory Learning Systems.” Not surprisingly, our first example focuses on energy choices and is titled “Intelligent Energy Choices” (IEC) (See for example, Micha Tomkiewicz and Lori Scarlatos, “Bottom-up Mitigation of Global Climate Change”; The International Journal of Climate Change: Impact and Responses; Volume 4, pages 37 – 48, 2013). The game is designed to engage the general public (and possibly educators at high school and college levels) with an interactive, interesting, tool that allows users to “control” their countries and by doing so, control the fate of the world. The conclusion from playing and observing IEC is that Millennium Development Goals can be satisfied while both the countries that they rule and the world at large prosper. IEC is an agent-based simulation/game in which the world’s twenty-five most populous countries are represented either by autonomous agents (simulation) or players. IEC is focused on energy use and climate change and their global and national impact on climate and prosperity. The algorithm corresponds to a choice between purchasing the lowest cost energy sources or a Cap and Trade mechanism in which global emissions are regulated to constantly decline and the price of a “unit” of carbon dioxide is collectively adjustable. The reference year is taken as 2003 so data are available for comparing the bottom-up results of the world controlled by the players and the top-down recent data.

The players face a conflict between generating sufficient wealth in the country they control, while at the same time ensuring the world’s long-term survival. Players are graded on both ends. We know how to evaluate the game in instructional settings. The usual tool to gauge its effectiveness with the general public is to measure its popularity, however this is often a misleading criterion for an educational tool. Popular does not always relate to effectiveness or instructional value. The effectiveness as an educational tool for the general public should be tested in the ballot box. This issue is starting to receive some attention and will be discussed in the next blog.

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Economic Growth and Problems With My Sourdough Bread.

Posted on February 11, 2013 by climatechangefork

One of the three conditions that I have previously (blogs January 28 and February 4) identified as necessary for sustainable society is that we must maintain equilibrium with the physical environment.

Merriam Webster dictionary defines equilibrium in the following way:

equilibrium – a state of balance between opposing forces or actions that is either static (as in a body acted on by forces whose resultant is zero) or dynamic (as in a reversible chemical reaction when the rates of reaction in both directions are equal)

A related term, “steady state,” is defined as:

steady state: a state or condition of a system or process (as one of the energy states of an atom) that does not change in time; broadly : a condition that changes only negligibly over a specified time

The definition of equilibrium emphasizes the opposing forces, while the definition of steady state emphasizes the lack of change with time. These exemplify a cause and effect which in economic terms we might almost characterize as advocating stagnation.

Almost everybody hates stagnation, but this is especially true of Americans. Stagnation is for losers. The word “growth” is a battle cry in the mouth of every politician, irrespective of political affiliation. Investments in innovation, technology and education are justified with the arguments that these are proven vehicles for growth.

In previous blogs (October 22 and 29) I have advocated that the perception of an inevitable limit to growth because of limits in our capacity to innovate is hubris. Here, I am not contradicting myself. There is a limit to unbounded exponential growth when we use the physical environment for both input and output (source of material and garbage bin). With seven billion human inhabitants, we have reached that limit.

My third requirement for sustainable living was the need to maximize individual opportunities on a global scale. In my opinion, this is where the desired growth should take place. One of the main arguments for the United States’ decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol was that it excludes developing countries from the commitment to reduce greenhouse gases. During the recent election campaign, Governor Romney justified many of his policy statements on Climate Change with the position (December 24 blog) that as long as a large fraction of the global population is exempted from taking steps to reduce environmental impacts of their economic growth, the United States should stay an observer. This position is gaining strength now since China overtook the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, yet the average Chinese person emits only a small fraction of what the corresponding average American emits (December 3 blog).

An average American earns close to 50 times more than an average Indian, and close to ten times more than an average global citizen. Global zero growth policy would freeze this disparity.

Global zero growth is not an option. Neither is a “back to the cave” policy, given a population of 7 billion people that will grow to 9 – 16 billion by the end of the century.

We need a new growth mechanism that will be consistent with the requirement for equilibrium with the physical environment.

The idea came to me from a different area of my interest – bread. I love good fresh bread, and sourdough is my favorite. I usually buy my bread at a corner store in my neighborhood that gets its bread from the best bakeries in Brooklyn. Over the last few weeks, however, I have encountered serious problems with my sourdough bread. The taste is great, as usual, but the bread came out with huge holes that were annoying and made it very unwieldy to spread my favorite jam– disaster :-(.

My brain made some connections, and it came to me – the growth mechanism that we need is an internal growth in which dense parts of the dough fill up empty parts – brilliant :-). Well – I don’t know much about baking sourdough bread, so I asked a friend who is my baking guru (she is a professor of history, not a professional baker). She thought that I would be doing the baking, so she gave me few hints, while admitting that she is not an expert on sourdough. With a few more inquiries, I ended up with a list of steps to try that quickly convinced me that baking sourdough is more of an art than a science.

Then I thought that a better example might be foam – an area of bubbles surrounded by plastic (in the case of Styrofoam, that polymer is polystyrene). Styrofoam growth is a topic that scientists are interested in. For example, Moris Amon and Costel D. Denson try to determine the growth mechanism of foams in their work, “A study of the dynamics of foam growth: Analysis of the growth of closely spaced spherical bubbles” (Polymer Engineering and Science, 24, 1026-1034 (1984)).

To my mind, a factor of 50 in income disparity per person can be called an “empty” bubble. The growth needed to fill up the bubbles and maximize career opportunities cannot be translated into redistribution of wealth from givers to takers. The material that comes out of such a process is different – in fact, for many applications it is better. We must strive to maximize opportunities, not outcome. We can maximize opportunities through universal services such as health care, education, law enforcement and “peace on Earth.”  Accomplishments empower individuals, democratize decision-making and maximize individual contributions to great ideas that benefit us all. I am not qualified to suggest how to accomplish such an internal growth to the benefit of everybody – we need to use our collective wisdom to figure this one out.

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Sustainability – Through the Horizon

Posted on February 4, 2013 by climatechangefork

In the future we are all dead…the idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thoughts and behavior that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice.

– John Maynard Keynes 

In the previous blog (January 28) I used my definition of sustainability in terms of three “simple” criteria:

1.       For the time span applicability I am using President Obama’s definition of a future – not the Keynesian definition:

“We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall”.

The future is being treated as a horizon – the line that appears to separate the Earth from the sky; the line that we will never reach; the line that will always move with us and give us the option to adjust and re-evaluate. Yes – in the future we are all dead but our children and grand children and their families will always be with us (my definition of now in my book “Climate Change: The Fork at the End of Now”). It will be their decision to continue to keep their vision at the horizon and to act so their children will inherit a sustainable future. Our contribution to our children’s decision making will come through the education opportunities that we give our children and through the examples that we provide.

2.       Sustainable action requires equilibrium with the Earth’s physical environment (at least until such time as we can develop the technology to settle extra-terrestrially). This condition excludes unrestrained economic growth and requires that we strive to base our economy on complete recycling of the resources that we use. Since Physics tells us that energy cannot be fully recyclable, we will need instead to fully convert our energy sources to sustainable ones. The only practical way that we know of in which to do this is to base our energy needs on the solar energy that we currently sequester and use it in a way that doesn’t result in polluting our physical environment with non-recyclable residues. The possibility of mastering controlled fusion technology provides an interesting exception to this statement and will need to be reexamined once the technology that would make it feasible develops. (This possibility “short-circuits” the Sun by getting its own energy from fusion of hydrogen).

We have existing technology capable of converting solar energy into usable forms (in terms of electricity, heat and chemicals), but in its present state it requires a premium cost. The necessary equilibrium with the Earth’s physical environment also requires constant Life Cycle Assessments (LCA)  of our activities to discover and address all adverse impacts. We have already made great progress in this effort and in the corresponding effort to construct a database of Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) that will eliminate duplicate efforts and guide us in optimizing our activities.

3.       We must focus our economic growth (which is subject to the restrictions in criterion 2.) on maximizing individual opportunities for everybody on this planet. This requirement is less obvious than the previous two requirements and will require intense discussion. It requires a different form of growth – an internal growth to fill up the voids in the global opportunity distribution. Here again, I am following President Obama’s line of thought as was expressed in an address on Dec. 6, 2011 at Osawatomie High School in Kansas and quoted by Thomas B. Edsall on his blog:

This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try. We tell people — we tell our kids — that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. We tell them that your children will have a chance to do even better than you do. That’s why immigrants from around the world historically have flocked to our shores.

President Obama’s emphasis is on the US, mine is global.

The argument for the growth of equal opportunities is not based solely on ethical considerations or our struggle for social justice, although these are indeed very important. This requirement is not based on assuming collective responsibility. It does not involve dividing the World into givers and takers in the controversial way brought up in the last US presidential campaign. The argument is instead based on the life experience that expanded individual opportunities are necessary for the expansion of collective opportunities and hence, collective growth. Equal opportunities for all will probably also give us the best opportunity to avoid destroying ourselves by killing each other.

We do have the means to accomplish all three requirements. In my opinion these are important long-term goals that are achievable within a timescale that will prevent the type of irreversible damage to which it would be impossible to adapt. These goals are achievable and transferable with perpetual improvements from generation to generation through example and education on all levels. There is no question that as always, attempts to accomplish long-term goals will conflict with immediate needs. Keeping our eyes focused on the horizon should not blind us to the immediate needs. The challenge will always be to keep the balance between the two and try to do everything that we can to ensure that our children will continue to do the same.
Going back to the Fermi Paradox (January 28), as of now we have no evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life. In this vast Universe, as far as we know, we are unique. It would be a great shame, then, if we were to let ourselves be demolished as a result of either careless destruction of our habitat or intentionally killing each other, marking us as a curiosity in the history of the Universe that nobody would be able to study.
I have an undergraduate student, Ms. Aisha Dorta, who works with me in an attempt to quantify some of these concepts. She read the last blog (January 28) and in response she wrote to me the following comment:

It seems that at a time where this planet is at civil war (i.e. USA – Afghanistan), and there are so many chronic problems that have yet to show any chance of subsiding, the chances of Earth becoming a sustainable planet are dimmer. Of course this is all speculation and there is no tangible evidence of this being the case.

I find it to be an interesting response because it illustrates our individual and collective attitudes to the future of the planet and divides us into optimists and pessimists. This is another strong distinguishing factor that emerges from being part of the physical environment. When we investigate any system -be it a far away galaxy, a drug (provided that we are not the patient for whom the drug is directed) or any other “scientific” topic, we do not usually exhibit emotional attachments. We investigate the response of the system to perturbations that we provide and in the process, learn about the system. The science of Geology is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a: a science that deals with the history of the earth and its life especially as recorded in rocks, b: a study of the solid matter of a celestial body (as the moon)”. It excludes humans and it excludes the future.
We can study such systems in a rational way with no emotional attachments. With a population of 7 billion people, which is bound to increase to 16 or 9 (depending on the scenario) toward the end of the century, the equation changes. We are investigating ourselves and we are emotional. However, since we lack a truly objective party to do this study, we must make do with ourselves, focusing on the horizon in sight with the hope that by bettering our world today we can brighten that which future generations look upon.

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The Physics of Sustainability

Posted on January 28, 2013 by climatechangefork

Here is a key paragraph from  President Obama’s inauguration speech on Monday, January 21st. 2013:

For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.

The President was making a pledge, and was calling on all of us to join him, to act now for the benefit of future generations. The President was urging all of us to act now, to make the world a better place so that in four years, forty years or four hundred years, future generations can improve on what we are doing. In his short speech, he made a specific reference to climate change as an “obvious” place to start. In this and future blogs I would like to try and quantify this concept, as well as describe what, in my opinion, is involved. In my background, we call this effort sustainability.

There is a standing effort (including by my school and my students) to define sustainability, especially since the word is so often used in conjunction with environmental issues.

An article by Johnston, Everard, Santillo and Robèrt with the title “Reclaiming the Definition of Sustainability” (Env Sci Pollut Res 14 (1) 60 – 66 (2007)) starts with the following paragraph:

The idea of ‘sustainable development’ was first widely articulated in 1987’s Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development) from the United Nations. The ‘Brundtland definition’ of sustainable development was framed as “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It posits that the only truly sustainable form of progress is that which simultaneously addresses the interlinked aspects of economy, environment and social well-being.

In the subsequent two years, around 140 alternative and variously-modified definitions of ‘sustainable development’ emerged. Currently, it has been estimated that some three hundred definitions of ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ exist broadly within the domain of environmental management and the associated disciplines which link with it, either directly or indirectly.

Let me try here to add my own definition:

I will start with a story that over the years became a concept. The concept is called the Fermi Paradox. Enrico Fermi is considered to be one of the greatest physicists, ever. He was born in Italy and immigrated to the United States in 1938 (his wife was Jewish). In 1950, while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fermi had a casual lunch conversation with other physicists, among them Edward Teller. The topic was the recent spate of claimed UFO (Unidentified Flying Objects) sightings and the likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial life capable of reaching us from outer space. According to some accounts, Fermi did some quick calculations that resulted in a conclusion in the form of a question – if they are there – where are they?

The question was later formalized in the following form:

The Fermi paradox (or Fermi’s paradox) is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity’s lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations. The basic points of the argument, made by physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael H. Hart, are:

  • The Sun is a young star. There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older;
  • Some of these stars likely have Earth-like planets which, if the Earth is typical, may develop intelligent life;
  • Presumably some of these civilizations will develop interstellar travel, as Earth seems likely to do;
  • At any practical pace of interstellar travel, the galaxy can be completely colonized in just a few tens of millions of years.

According to this line of thinking, the Earth should have already been colonized, or at least visited. But no convincing evidence of this exists. Furthermore, no confirmed signs of intelligence elsewhere have been spotted, either in our galaxy or the more than 80 billion other galaxies of the observable universe. Hence Fermi’s question “Where is everybody?”

There is much more in the Wikipedia article that describes the efforts to resolve this paradox. There are concerted efforts to search for extraterrestrial life: These efforts include The SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), the Kepler space observatory to search for Earth-like planets and the search and life forms on Earth that develop in extreme environments. The only effort that directly relates to the Fermi Paradox is the SETI effort; they should be coming to look for us and not the other way around. We have yet to develop interstellar travel capabilities (the movie Avatar was not filmed on site 🙂 ). By the most optimistic estimates – if everything goes well (no self inflicted destruction of any kind) it will take us a few hundred years of technological development to accomplish this. Assuming that our civilization can last long enough to develop these capabilities, we must therefore necessarily be sustainable for at least that long.

We can reverse this scenario and imagine that a SETI institute, or something similar, exists somewhere in our galaxy (further away it gets really complicated) and is waiting for us to show up. I define sustainability as the condition that we have to develop here to flourish until we develop the technology for extraterrestrial travel that will allow us to move to another planet once we ruin our own.

In my opinion, the conditions to achieve this are very “straightforward”. They have to be able to answer two “simple” questions:

  • For how long? – Forever! To repeat President Obama’s language – We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall
  • How to do it? – To achieve the sustainable objectives on this time scale, we will have to establish equilibrium with the physical environment and at the same time maximize individual opportunities for everybody on this planet.

“Forever” can be considered as an unrealistic requirement. Actually, Physics tells us that nothing in the Universe is sustainable forever. Under normal conditions, in about 5 billion years our Sun will exhaust its fuel and convert to a giant fireball that will reach us. On a somewhat shorter time scale, our brightest star, Sirius, (which is actually a binary star that rotates with a corps [White Dwarf] around their mutual center of gravity), could lose enough mass to the White Dwarf to cause a massive explosion in the form of a supernova that would evaporate our Solar system. Other cosmological collisions within this time scale are obviously also possible. On a more human time scale, however, we can consider a few hundred years as forever.

It reminds me of the days that I had a contract with an industry to help dispose of radioactive waste that was accumulating at the Hanford Nuclear facility in Washington State. The effort was guided by the requirement of the surrounding community to have a guarantee that whatever disposal method is being used, it would remain stable for at least 100,000 years. Everybody with even a minimal technical background regarded a guarantee over such a time scale to be completely unrealistic. But, through the interpretation of “forever” through President Obama’s statement, the “forever” becomes doable. We just have to try hard, not be perfect. Keep our eyes at the target and correct as we go along and hope that future generations will continue with the effort.

With the current global population at 7 billion, estimated to stabilize at 9 billion toward the end of the century, the requirement to establish and maintain equilibrium with the physical environment and at the same time maximize individual opportunities for everybody on this planet, rules out “back to the cave” scenarios.

In future blogs, I will try to argue that we need the economists to be our social engineers who will show us how to achieve a sustainable world here.  Hopefully, they will be able to shift the emphasis from trying to understand the economy to trying to lead us how to optimize the way we live in order to achieve these long-term objectives. The first step will probably be to move away from a perpetual growth desire to a flexible, productive, equilibrium.

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Where is our Tipping Point?

Posted on January 21, 2013 by climatechangefork

The spring semester is about to start. I am preparing to teach a new course on Physics & Society. I was chatting about the new course with a friend – a distinguished physicist. His comment was – don’t “forget” to touch on economics. I promised to do as advised.

A few days later, I read the New York Times review of a new book titled, “The Physics of Wall Street” by James Owen Weatherall. Curious, I ordered the book. It arrived in two days and took me a weekend to finish. I found it interesting, even though I was already familiar with many of the cases that Weatherall describes.

The book discusses a number of cases in which people with a background in Physics and Mathematics did well in the financial markets. Its conclusion is that we need more of these types of people in the market, not less. This, in spite of the widely spread belief that the schemes concocted by these “quants” were partially responsible for some of the market’s painful bubble bursts recently.

I think that this would be a great book for my students to read before the course starts, mostly to familiarize them with some of the language. My objective for this course is to discuss man’s role as a part of nature, as well as explore career opportunities beyond the usual boundaries of textbooks physics, to include human activities.

The starting point in the course will be the generalized definition of Physics. One good example is the one given in the Miriam Webster Dictionary:

Physics –  science that deals with the structure of matter and the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe. Long called natural philosophy (from the greek physikos), physics is concerned with all aspects of nature, covering the behavior of objects under the action of given forces and the nature and origin of gravitational, electromagnetic, and nuclear force fields. The goal of physics is to formulate comprehensive principles that bring together and explain all discernible phenomena.

I am not an economist and I need help here. Weatherall is not an economist either, although he has advanced degrees in Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy. Climate Change should be an important part of this course (see my December 31st blog discussing the American Physical Society’s attitude on this issue). Despite my ignorance, I have included some economic considerations in many of the posts throughout this blog, simply because I felt I had to. I will try to amplify this trend – starting with this post. Hopefully, comments from readers and students will enable me to rectify many of the misconceptions that usually come along with ignorance.

From the start (April 22, 2012), I have described the impact of climate change under a business as usual scenario, as a “self-inflicted genocide.” The reason was the IPCC finding that a reliable, computer generated, average global temperature rise of more than 40C (70F) will result in global climate change that will destroy around 40% of the eco systems. I have assumed that since humans are part of these ecosystems, and their destruction will result in major loss of human life, the situation fits the dictionary definition of genocide. For a short period of time, this characterization (together with Andrew Revkin’s comment on this in his blog in the New York Times) made this blog “viral” with floods of disagreements.

In the September 24 and the December 10 blogs, I showed two IPCC socio-economic scenarios that constitute the base to these predictions – the A2 and B1 scenarios. The A2 represents business as usual, while the B1 represents an example of an environmentally “friendly” scenario that stabilizes the impact to around 2.50C.

There were two main differences in these scenarios: Toward the end of the century, the A2 scenario assumes a global population of 15 billion while the B1 scenario assumes that population will more or less stabilize at present levels of 7 – 8 billion. In addition, the A2 scenario assumes that fossil fuels will continue to be our main energy source at approximately the present level of 85% while the B1 scenario assumes that we replace more than 50% of our energy sources with sustainable sources that will not result in atmospheric chemical changes that impact the climate. Most of the other blogs that I wrote focused on how to achieve such a global energy transition.

I have so far omitted one important element from these discussions. The scenarios also include economic activities.

The IPCC SRES scenarios are listed here (version 1.1 – July 2000). The A2 and B1 scenarios for the global population and economic activity are listed in the table below.

Year

Population, Billions

GDP/GNP(MEX) in Trillion 1990 US$. () – Per person in US$.

A2

B1

A2

B1

2010

7.2

6.9

31.9 (4431)

37.3 (5406)

2050

11.3

8.7

81.6 (7221)

135.6 (15,586)

2100

15.1

7.0

242.8 (16,079)

328.4 (46,914)

MEX is the abbreviation for Market Exchange Rate.

Analyzing these data, one arrives at the astounding conclusion that the A2 scenario anticipates a 1.2% average growth in inflation-adjusted GDP/Capita from 2010 to 2050, with that growth accelerating to 1.6% from the year 2050 to 2100. It gets better with the B1 scenario, which foresees an inflation-adjusted GDP/Capita growth of 2.6% from 2010 to 2050 that decelerates to 2.2% between 2050 and 2100. At the end of the century, in the B1 scenario, an average human will live like an average American today. These averages include large developing countries with a GDP/capita 50 times smaller than that of the US. A dream come true.

These scenarios equate (at least in the case of A2) to “self-inflicted genocides,” with the survivors living like kings. That is very different from my own experience as a Holocaust survivor. One cannot escape the impression that the economic aspects of these scenarios were derived by applying a simple exponential growth equation, not taking into account anything that happens in the projected impacts on the physical environment (December 10 blog).

The most important parameter for projecting the impacts of climate change is called climate sensitivity. It projects the average global temperature rise as a function of the increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The uncertainty margin in this parameter is large (see the discussion and graph in the December 10 blog) mainly because it incorporates several significant non-linear elements, which are often referred to in common lexicon as tipping points. These include the melting of long-term ice, such as glaciers and icebergs. The melting of ice on such a scale causes changes in a parameter called “Albedo,” which describes the fraction of incoming solar radiation that is being reflected back to space by the white ice surface. Melting causes changes in the reflection properties of the surface of the earth, thus changing the amount of radiation absorbed that leads to the temperature change.

Another major tipping point is the melting of the permafrost in the arctic. The permafrost captures large amounts of carbon compounds that accumulated before the ground froze. Upon melting, the carbon is released, with a significant fraction ending up in the atmosphere, adding to the concentration of the greenhouse gases there.

One of the main trapped organic compounds is methane, the main constituent of natural gas. Every molecule of methane is 20 times more active as greenhouse gas than a corresponding molecule of carbon dioxide.

Additional, important tipping points are the state of the oceans and land biota as sequesters of carbon dioxide (see the June 25 blog). Right now, for every quantity of carbon dioxide that we emit, only about half ends up in the atmosphere. The oceans are net absorbers of half of the excess while the green biota is absorbing the other half. Both land and sea store large carbon reservoirs and their ability to absorb or emit carbon dioxide depends on the ambient temperature. The tipping points take place when the atmospheric conditions force the land and sea on the planet to convert from net absorbers to net emitters. We don’t fully understand these complex physical processes but we know from basic science that they take place and have major impact on the climate.

Yet – as far as we humans are concerned, by the SRES account, we can continue to live like kings (at least those of us that survive the flooding, droughts, sinking of islands and major coastal cities, collapse of our infrastructure, major increase in extreme events, etc…). It seems to me that the only reason that this is happening is because we still treat the physical environment (including our own bodies) as a completely separate discipline from our socio-economic-cultural environment. We insist on continuing this behavior even though Climate Change no longer allows us to do so.

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Voices from the Farm and Beyond

Posted on January 14, 2013 by climatechangefork

Turkana Farms is a small-scale producer of heritage breed livestock and a wide array of vegetables and berries on just over 39 acres in Germantown, New York. It is run by two friends who have sent me the following message for the New Year:

Hello All and Happy New Year (Peter here):

I think we are all, either from direct experience or reading about it, aware that the year 2012 has gone down in U.S. weather history as being the hottest since records have been kept. And those of us who enjoy local fruit or have orchardist neighbors are also aware that a two week record breaking heat wave last April took the temperatures up to the 90’s, causing apple, pear, and cherry trees to bloom prematurely in Columbia County, only to be followed by a killing frost a few weeks later, effectively decimating about half of the expected fruit crop.

Our sympathies go out to our near neighbors, the Riders, who lost virtually their entire 2012 apple, pear, and cherry crop. And, of course, to our disappointed pigs who usually look forward with great anticipation to the cast off apples that annually come our way from the Riders.

Other problems and disruptions caused by Climate Change are not so obvious but are subtly changing life at Turkana. We are becoming more and more aware of how changes in light and temperature control the life cycles of our livestock. The cues for our peacock to begin and end his mating period, for instance, somehow changed this season. Ordinarily in late spring, when his tail feathers have completely grown back, the peacock begins his displays, which usually continue to the end of July/early August when he molts his tail feathers, and the daily dances end. I was surprised in early spring, three weeks earlier than usual to see him displaying (with partially grown out tail feathers), and then to see him end his gorgeous show three weeks earlier than usual, as his tail feathers began to drop out.

But an even more dramatic disruption of the cycles was evidenced by our sheep lambing in early December rather than in mid January or February. We usually keep our ram together with his ewes and have let him in the past set the mating schedule. He in turn is programmed by weather conditions, and ordinarily would take his cue from the first cool night of around 55 degrees in August or September, the births taking place about five months from this date.

But it is only January 4th and we have already had over twenty lambs—all of these before the time we normally begin lambing. This would mean that the ram began making his conjugal rounds in July. Could there have been, we wonder, a string of changes in the environmental cycle that precipitated his activity? That both the peafowl and the sheep’s normal cycles were disrupted suggests that this is so.

The farm was affected not only by the excessively hot summer of 2012 but also by the almost non-existent winter of 2011-12. Quite early in the spring I began to notice a rat and mouse population moving into our barn and other outbuildings. Inquiring around I learned that this was a common problem at other local farms. Normally this invasion is something to be expected in late fall as the weather turns extreme and food sources begin to dwindle.

At first I attributed this early migration to the extremely wet spring weather, which raised considerably the water table, assuming that the rodents were being driven out of their holes and tunnels by water. But I have since heard a more persuasive explanation: that it was the extremely mild winter that is actually the cause, a mild winter that allowed the rats to, as they say in the Bible, “be fruitful and multiply.” Again a change in the environmental cycle, no freezing period to trigger hibernation and, therefore, more sexual activity, accounts for the early plague of rats.

The rat situation was not helped by the resistance of Mark and our farm helper, whose scruples apparently did not allow them to plant poison rat blocks in the affected places. Since there was no hope of a Pied Piper of Hamlin magically appearing on the scene, it would be up to me, I realized, to be the Darth Vader of the rat population.

Soon rats were not only working their way through the clapboarding of the barn and coop walls but also, amazingly punching holes, through the concrete floors. But the biggest disaster was finding one day that over a third of our chicks had gone missing from the brooder box. Upon inspection I found that the rats had gnawed through the several inch thick boards of the brooder box and been carrying off the chicks at will. The only solution was to move the surviving chicks into wire cages and suspend the cages by ropes from the ceiling.

When the chicks had outgrown the cages it was impossible until they reached a certain size to release them in the coop for fear of what would happen to them in the night. It became obvious that we needed to discover where the rats were nesting. My guess was under the brooder box they had gnawed into. When we moved the brooder box we found a nest of a dozen or so, obviously poisoned rats dead or dying, directly beneath it. How many healthy live ones absconded from there as we moved the box I had no idea. Ultimately I set in motion a determined campaign of setting poison, sealing holes in the concrete floor and walls, and removing food sources. I am happy to report that after my blitzkrieg that at last the rat population seems virtually decimated.

Our experiences this past year make it clear to us that Climate Change is and will be working its strange magic at the farm in all kinds of unexpected ways. Obviously, halting climate change is infinitely more complicated than halting the proliferation of rats, but as we saw with the rat situation, dragging one’s feet only compounds and increases the problem. Are we now that we are starting a new administration in Washington, at last ready to at least talk about addressing Climate Change once again?

They know, as well as most of us, that the variety of impacts that they observed on the farm and attribute to Climate Change, are not necessarily anthropogenic (man induced) in origin. The impact is not specific to their farm and has many contributions from a variety of non-anthropogenic sources. All the impacts that they list can be attributed to attempts to adapt to climate change – some more successful than others. We also know (my June 25th blog post) that our present energy use leads to a disruption of the global energy balance, which leads to major climate changes by way of changes to the chemistry of the atmosphere. The atmospheric changes are fast approaching the levels that trigger non- linear imbalances (tipping points in some jargon) that will leave us helpless to adapt to these changes. So, the local, observable changes in the weather serve (or should serve) as an alarm call.

None of Turkana Farms’ impacts are attributed to the increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. To show this, we would need more data.

Here is a summary of a very recent report compiled by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) for the United States on 2012’s extreme weather and climate events:

Today, NOAA released preliminary information on extreme weather and climate events in the U.S. for 2012 that are known to have reached the $1 billion threshold in losses. As of December 20, NOAA estimates that the nation experienced 11 such events, to include seven severe weather/tornado events, two tropical storm/hurricane events, and the yearlong drought and associated wildfires.

These eleven events combined are believed to have caused 349 deaths, with the most significant losses of life occurring during Sandy (131) and the summer-long heat wave and associated drought, which caused over 123 direct deaths (though an estimate of the excess mortality due to heat stress is still unknown).

The eleven events include:

  • Southeast/Ohio Valley Tornadoes — March 2–3 2012
  • Texas Tornadoes — April 2–3 2012
  • Great Plains Tornadoes — April 13–14 2012
  • Midwest/Ohio Valley Severe Weather — April 28–May 1 2012
  • Southern Plains/Midwest/Northeast Severe Weather — May 25–30 2012
  • Rockies/Southwest Severe Weather — June 6–12 2012
  • Plains/East/Northeast Severe Weather (“Derecho”) — June 29–July 2 2012
  • Hurricane Isaac — August 26–31 2012
  • Western Wildfires — Summer–Fall, 2012
  • Hurricane Sandy — October 29–31 2012
  • U.S. Drought/Heatwave — throughout 2012

More from NOAA…

“2012 was warmest and second most extreme year on record for the contiguous U.S.”

“The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3°F, 3.2°F above the 20th century average, and 1.0°F above 1998, the previous warmest year.”

The impact is not localized to the United States: England was flooding, China is freezing and Australia is burning as described  in Sarah Lyall’s January 10, 2013 article in the New York Times,  “Heat, Flood or Icy Cold, Extreme Weather Rages Worldwide.”

A map of the very recent fire distribution in Australia where temperatures have exceeded 500C (1220F) is given below.

 

The official global average temperature and some of the distributional properties of this record are expected in a week. The anticipation is not for a global record breaking because of La-Nina, but a statistical adjustment for La-Nina can probably confirm the trend.

My friend from Turkana’s obvious question was – what can we do about this? As we will see in the coming blogs, we need some help to address it.

 

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