CLEAN Selected

Posted on June 14, 2011 by mccaffrey

The Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network, or CLEAN, a National Science Digital Library Pathway that I am a Co-Principle Investigator, is a collection of existing online resources focusing, as the name would suggest, on climate and energy science and solutions.

Over the past year and a half, CLEAN, which is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of their effort to advance the Presidential Priority on Climate Change Education, has developed a review process and begun identifying existing resources that link to key climate and energy principles and concepts.  Thus far, some 90 learning activities were selected for the CLEAN collection, and more were just approved through a review camp held in Boulder, Colorado. (I participated in the camp via Skype from home because I had a contagious bug, which ended up working well for all concerned; the other members of the review team had me displayed on an iPad propped up in a chair while I participated in the conversations from home.)

In addition to a detailed section on “Teaching About” climate and energy topics, including addressing confusion and misconceptions, some of the highlights in the CLEAN collection now include activities ranging from the “Effect of the Sun’s Energy on the Ocean and Atmosphere” from NASA to an activity on “Energy Consumption Rates across the USA and Around the World” to an exploration of “Climographs: Temperature, Precipitation, and the Human Condition” from National Geographic.

CLEAN helps educators and the public find vetted materials that are scientifically sound and well presented, and ideally adds value to existing resources by correlating them to appropriate concepts and benchmarks and adding annotations on how the resources can be used to address important ideas and foster understanding.

More learning activities are in the pipeline, and CLEAN is also now examining high quality and relevant “useful bits” such as animations, interactive visualizations, videos and short investigations, so stay tuned. In the long term, CLEAN may become an integral part of the NOAA-led Climate.gov website, although details are still being discussed.

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Not Just A River

Posted on June 8, 2011 by mccaffrey

Image: NASA/JPL

First off, congratulations to Naomi Oreskes,  author of Merchants of Doubt and Pic Walker and the crew from the Alliance for Climate Change Education for winning the 2011 Climate Change Communicators of the Year given by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications.  The event will be archived on the Center’s website for anyone interested who couldn’t attend.

Over the past year I’ve had the honor of being on a panel with Naomi at a town hall meeting with Chris Mooney last October and with Pic Walker at the American Renewable Energy Day last August in Aspen.  Their individual and collective efforts to cut through the decades of climate confusion and obfuscation and denial and delay are important… and a terrific segue to Thomas Friedman’s piece “The Earth is Full” in the New York Times this morning.

Friedman, quoting Australian environmentalist Paul Gilding, picks up on the topic Al Gore eluded to in the Academy Award winning motion picture “An Inconvenient Truth“, namely, “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.”

Friedman writes:

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Not to worry, though.  Gilding is an “eco-optimist” who is convinced we’ll wake up in time to shop less and transform society in the nick of time.

As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

But cutting through denial clearly won’t be painless or necessarily as straight forward as Gilding seems to suggest. As Kari Norgaard has examined and we’ve explored previously, the seeds of denial run deep.

Moreover, we– specifically the one billion people who are the primary emitters of heat trapping gases on the planet- are the primary culprits and, although potentially in the future we are “the solution” through transformative technologies and systems, we are currently largely responsible for “the problem”.

Using the recovery metaphor from addiction, the first step is realizing we have a problem, that we essentially are powerless over our modern, fossil fuel driven affluent (or relatively affluent) lives, and that we need help.

We may be facing foreclosure.  We may be out of a job. We may be struggling to make ends meet, but nevertheless, we– those living in North America, Europe, Australia and a few other clustered centers around the world– are responsible for the vast majority of the emissions and are thereby the primary cause of climate change.  We can blame China or the Koch brothers or the energy companies, but we share the responsibility.

As Paul Polak has noted, a homeless person in the United States surviving on $600 a month is substantially more affluent than billions of people around the world living on a few dollars or pennies a day.

Many of us, myself included, jump on jets, drive to work, use electrical devices powered primarily by burning coal or gas to make heat to turn turbines to generate steam to make electricity, adding in a substantial way to growing global carbon emissions.

Some large percentage of us in the United States and elsewhere in the collective one billion plus population who are the primary culprits causing climate change certainly feel moments of guilt about our negative impact on the planet as we live our modern, fossil fuel dependent lives.

But the rub is, other than promoting greater awareness, better education and literacy and more effective policies, supporting clean energy and the like,  we don’t know exactly what to do about “it”– the Great Disruption– in our everyday lives. We point the finger at energy companies or other merchants of doubt.  We find distractions and rationalizations to avoid looking at the monster in the mirror.

But what happens when we do cut through the denial and see the horror of the situation?  That’s the ultimate existential question of our age. We still need to go to work, or look for work or, if we’re homeless and unemployable, we need to find ways to stay warm and fed.

I certainly don’t have answers to these conundrums, but I do have a few favorite quotes that help me move forward in times of uncertainty and doubt and disillusionment.  One is from David Orr:

The crisis of sustainability, the fit between humanity and its habitat,  is manifest in varying ways and degrees everywhere on Earth. It is not only a permanent feature on the public agenda; for all practical purposes it is the agenda…

Sustainability is about the terms and conditions of human survival, and yet we still educate at all levels as if no such crisis existed . . . David Orr (1992) Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World

Another is by Paul Hawken:

If you look at the science about what is happening on Earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this Earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.

 

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Not a Pretty Picture

Posted on May 31, 2011 by mccaffrey

Jakobshavn/Ilulissat Glacier retreat since 1851. Credit: NASA image by Cindy Starr, based on data from Ole Bennike and Anker Weidick (Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland) and Landsat data.

The May 24 Science Digest headline gets right to the point: Two Greenland Glaciers Lose Enough Ice to Fill Lake Erie.

A new study aimed at refining the way scientists measure ice loss in Greenland is providing a “high-definition picture” of climate-caused changes on the island. And the picture isn’t pretty.

In the last decade, two of the largest three glaciers draining that frozen landscape have lost enough ice that, if melted, could have filled Lake Erie.

The study, Mass Balance of Greenland’s three largest outlet glaciers (PDF), is one of several recent articles on the dynamics and decline in glaciers and icesheets in Geophysical Research Letters (also see Acceleration of the contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise) and elsewhere ( see  Sundal et al Melt-induced speed-up of Greenland ice sheet offset by efficient subglacial drainage in Nature and Radić and Hoc’s Regionally differentiated contribution of mountain glaciers and ice caps to future sea-level rise in Nature Geoscience, which suggests only a 12cm sea-level rise from glaciers and ice sheets by 2100.)

Clearly, the unknowns of these dynamics and rates of change in mass balance are an area where there are many enormously important unanswered questions, but as Frank Paul of the University of Zurich summarizes in his article “Sea-level rise: Melting glaciers and ice caps” in Nature Geoscience:

The quantitative estimates presented by Radić and Hock will need to be updated as more and better glacier data and climate models become available. But in the light of their analysis, and considering potential positive feedbacks, there is little doubt that the fate of glaciers and ice caps looks gloomy on the century timescale, even in the more strongly glacierized regions of the world.

On a related note, here’s a narrated video of a time-lapse made of the Jakobshavn/Ilulissat Glacier in Greenland from the Extreme Ice Survey.


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Tornado Time Lapse

Posted on May 27, 2011 by mccaffrey

The video above from NOAA data shows the surge of record tornado activity– 875 total– during the month of April of this year.  According to the Washington Post, the previous April record was 267 set in 1974.  While May has been somewhat quieter, the same article notes:

The extraordinary Joplin twister [May 22] — the single deadliest tornado since officials began keeping records in 1950 — was a rare destructive phenomenon known as a “multi-vortex,” hiding two or more cyclones within the wider wind funnel.

The storm smashed the southwest Missouri city’s hospital Sunday, left nothing but splintered trees where neighborhoods once stood and killed at least 116 people, with the death toll expected to rise. The storm injured an additional 500 people and damaged or destroyed at least 2,000 buildings.

Meanwhile, over at GRIST Joe Romm, who in the past has dismissed climate adaptation as “triage,”  sums up the media frenzy about whether or not there is or isn’t a climate change connection to the recent surge of tornadoes, and in a Washington Post Op-Ed piece Bill McKibben offers some suggestions on how not to connect the dots.

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Teachable Moments

Posted on May 25, 2011 by mccaffrey

Two DOE Secretaries– U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu and U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan– along with Dr. Francis Eberle, Executive Director of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), launched a new energy education initiative in Washington DC on May 24th: America’s Home Energy Education Challenge.  In the press release for the launch event, the program was presented as a teachable moment for young people to become more energy savvy:

This initiative is working to educate America’s youth about the benefits of energy efficiency, motivate students to play an active role in how their families use energy, and help families across the country save money.  The program will encourage students, teachers, and families to learn more about energy consumption and efficiency and become more aware of how homes, schools, and utilities are interconnected within the community, while inspiring students to pursue studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“Energy efficiency is all about helping families save money by saving energy,” said Secretary Chu.  “America’s Home Energy Education Challenge leverages the passion and curiosity of students to encourage families across the country to reduce energy waste in their homes while inspiring the next generation of America’s energy leaders.”

“We all need to pitch in to make our homes and schools more energy efficient. America’s Home Energy Education Challenge will teach students how science and common sense efforts can help all of us to do our part to save energy and  save money as well as protect the environment,” said Secretary Duncan.

“Science teachers nationwide will recognize that America’s Home Energy Education Challenge is a valuable teaching tool that encourages active learning about energy and science and will help students to connect science to real world applications,” said Dr. Francis Eberle.

Submissions to the program begin in six months, with Sept. 1 to December 31 being the baseline period.  There are some $200,000 in prizes for winners, plus lots of recognition Full details and rules can be found on the homeenergychallenge.org website.

In theory the new Energy Literacy framework that the U.S. Department of Energy is leading, which is modeled largely on the Climate Literacy framework, will be ready by the fall of 2011 and complement/add depth to the collective and individual teachable moments of the challenge.

 

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Imagine Climate Change Circa 1990

Posted on May 17, 2011 by mccaffrey

Over the past twenty plus years we’ve tried to message our way out of climate change. This video would seem to have all the right elements– cute babies, music by John Lennon, Tom Cruise in his prime narrating, humor, science and solutions, more cute babies.

This NRDC star-studded overview on the urgent need and possible solutions to address human impacts on climate and the environment even by today’s standards has it all.

Now, more than two decades later, it’s impossible to watch this without wondering “What happened? Why haven’t we made more progress in dealing with the problem?”

Obviously the answers are multiple and complex:

1) Climate science is daunting, often non-intuitive;

2) The science education community hasn’t effectively addressed gaps and misconceptions around climate and energy topics;

3) The naysayers and vested interests have successfully sown seeds of doubt;

4) The global economy is driven on fossil fuels and has tremendous, exponential momentum behind it; and

5) The one billion of us who are affluent and responsible for the bulk of emissions easily find justifications to continue our fossil-fuel intensive lifestyles.

But could the lesson also be that even well produced commercials with music by John Lennon and narration by Tom Cruise haven’t really make a dent in the problem?   In addition to major technological breakthroughs, like solar nantennas that could be 95% efficient, we need to foster a much deeper level of literacy and informed decision-making throughout society, which is clearly very challenging in an era of ever shorter attention span and fear fatigue. But it can and must be done.

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Adopting Adaptation

Posted on May 13, 2011 by mccaffrey

The National Research Council recently released a series of new videos including the one above on adaptation, and this one on Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change, as well as a final report.  The Report in Brief (PDF) states:

The significant risks that climate change poses to human society and the environment provide a strong motivation to move ahead with substantial response efforts. Current efforts of local, state, and private sector actors are important, but not likely to yield progress comparable to what could be achieved with the addition of strong federal policies that establish coherent national goals and incentives, and that promote strong U.S. engagement in international-level response efforts. The inherent complexities and uncertainties of climate change are best met by applying an iterative risk management framework and making efforts to: significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions; prepare for adapting to impacts; invest in scientific research, technology development, and information systems; and facilitate engagement between scientific and technical experts and the many types of stakeholders making America’s climate choices.

Meanwhile, here in Boulder at my host institution, CIRES, a group of professionals involved with forming the Climate Preparedness Learning and Adaptation Network (CPLAN) have been meeting the past few days to sketch out what the network should look like.  The follow-up to a meeting held in Boulder last Spring, this meeting has been organized by Steve Adams of Resource Innovation Group at the University of Oregon through a Rockefeller Foundation grant.

I had a chance to drop in yesterday and briefly catch up with Susi Moser, who is co-editor of Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change (Cambridge University Press) and involved with the upcoming IPCC Special Report on Extreme Events (SREX).  Several people from CAKE, the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange, which publishes a terrific “Slice of CAKE” e-newsletter, were participating, as well as Joel Smith of Status Consulting.

The diversity of CPLAN, whatever it ends up becoming, is impressive. One plan for CPLAN being discuss is for it to become a professional rather than project based organization.  One participant in the workshop admitted thinking the acronym meant “Climate Professionals and Leaders Action Network,” but the one thread that links everyone together is their keen interest in adaptation, which as I’ve noted before, has been anathema in some climate circles.

 

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The Climate Curricular Conundrum

Posted on May 5, 2011 by mccaffrey

In the current American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) newsletter published by Second Nature, I have an article entitled “The Climate Curricular Conundrum.”

Because ACUPCC and its signatories focus on higher education, the article focuses on Jon Miller’s concept of “civic science literacy,” which he attributes largely to college graduates being required to take a science course for graduation, and the challenges of infusing climate science into higher education, as is required for those schools signing the ACUPCC. (The requirement is that “courses and other educational experiences” relating to climate and sustainability be offered to all students.)

If you are interested, please read the entire article, but here’s the gist of the article:

While students graduating from college don’t need to be climate experts, they should ideally appreciate the basic nuts and bolts of how carbon and climate are connected and what options, opportunities and hard choices there are in mitigating and adapting to climate change by the time they graduate.

Signatories of the Presidents’ Climate Commitment have agreed to the goal of providing courses and other educational experiences about climate and sustainability to all students. But providing courses and other experiences specifically about climate (as opposed to more general sustainability) is not easy. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, instructors in the Program of Writing and Rhetoric have been meeting with climate scientists to learn more about the science themselves so they can better integrate the topic into their courses, which all students must take at some point.

In part through the development of the Climate Literacy Essential Principles and the designation of climate change education as a Presidential Priority in 2009, over 90 climate literacy projects have been funded by federal agencies such as NSF, NOAA and NASA, with several including a focus on Higher Education. One of the funded projects is called CLEAN, the Climate Literacy & Energy Literacy Network (CLEAN) funded by NSF, which includes teaching tips as well as a catalog of high quality learning activities. About a third of the current CLEAN collection is geared toward the undergraduate level, and in the coming months, CLEAN selected learning activities will be augmented with other “useful bits” such as videos and visualizations.

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Forest, Chemistry & Climate

Posted on May 3, 2011 by mccaffrey

Above is a four minute video I’ve drafted as an attempt to weave together the 2011 International Year of Forests, headed by UNEP, and the 2011 International Year of Chemistry, led by UNESCO and IUPAC, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

The idea behind the demo is to hold a video and/or presentation contest before year’s end so that young people in particular could share their creative ideas on how to make the links between sun’s energy—-} photosynthesis—} carbon dioxide—-} carbohydrates/sugar as chemical energy—-} fossil fuels as concentrated buries solar energy—-} burning fossil fuels—-} climate change—-} destruction of forests—-} and ocean acidification.

In other words, how to tell the story of the long term and short term carbon cycle and how it relates to the food we eat, the forest that help sustain us, geologic processes, modern technological society, and everything in between.

It turns out there’s a German group that has their own video contest about forests that’s very impressive, and they’ve suggested I submit this video (still a draft, mind you,) to their contest, which is international.

Here’s their short, very evocative videos to promote the contest:

The U.S. State Department, which had a video contest about climate change that we noted here, has announced the winners of their contest, although the links to the videos don’t seem to work.

Meanwhile, NASA announced on Earth Day its own video contest– very short (three minutes tops) videos about The Home Frontier.

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Teens’ Tilted Climate Knowledge

Posted on April 21, 2011 by mccaffrey

Image courtesy of NREL

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication has just released a report on American Teens’ Knowledge of Climate Change.  The results, while sobering, help establish a baseline against which we can start to measure whether current climate change education efforts are starting to make some headway toward a more climate science savvy society.  Tony Leiserowitz, who is one of the Principle Investigators, summed up the survey results in a recent email:

Overall, we found that 54 percent of American teens believe that global warming is happening, but many do not understand why. In this assessment, only 6 percent of teens have knowledge equivalent to an A or B, 41 percent would receive a C or D, and 54 percent would get an F. Overall, teens know about the same or less about climate change than adults. The study also found important gaps in knowledge and common misconceptions about climate change and the earth system.

These misconceptions lead some teens to doubt that global warming is happening or that human activities are a major contributor, to misunderstand the causes and therefore the solutions, and to be unaware of the risks. Thus many teens lack some of the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about climate change both now and in the future as students, workers, consumers, homeowners, and citizens.

(The Energy Literacy research being conducted by Jan DeWaters and Susan Powers at Clarkson University shows similar gaps, lack of knowledge and failing grades around energy topics with teens and adults.)

The Yale study indicates that while teens are generally less concerned about global warming than adults,

American teens have a better understanding than adults on a few important measures. For example:

·      57% of teens understand that global warming is caused mostly by human activities, compared to 50% of adults;
·      77% of teens understand that the greenhouse effect refers to gases in the atmosphere that trap heat, compared to 66% of adults;
·      52% of teens understand that carbon dioxide traps heat from the Earth’s surface, compared to 45% of adults;
·      71% of teens understand that carbon dioxide is produced by the burning of fossil fuels, compared to 67% of adults.

But the survey results, from a total of 517 teens (13-17 years old,) suggest teens also recognize the limits of their understanding.

American teens also recognize their limited understanding of the issue. Fewer than 1 in 5 say they are “very well informed” about how the climate system works or the different causes, consequences, or potential solutions to global warming, and only 27 percent say they have learned “a lot” about the issue in school.

Importantly, 70 percent of teens say they would like to know more about global warming. Likewise, 75 percent say that schools should teach our children about climate change. Finally, teens are much more likely than adults to visit zoos, aquariums, natural history, science or technology museums than adults, suggesting that informal education venues are important places for teens (and adults) to learn about complex issues like climate change.

This survey (which I played a small role in developing questions for) suggests much less interest in and knowledge about climate change among youth than the 2008 and 2009 Ocean Project survey, which posed the question: Are certain segments of the public more interested in climate change than others?

Yes, youth are much more concerned. While more than 80% of Americans now self identify as either an “active participant” (22%) or “sympathetic to” (59%) the environmental movement, these numbers are strongest for those between the ages of 12 and 17. On the specific question of confronting the challenge of climate change, approximately 75% of those under 20 said this was a top priority, while only 50% of those over 65 said the same. Moreover, the research indicated that parents look to their teens and tweens for guidance on environmental issues.

The results of the full survey, which interviewed over 22,000 Americans including teens, are available here.  The survey indicated in the vast majority of households with teens, they are becoming opinion leaders in their households, with strongly held attitudes (+80%, substantially more than any other age group) that personal responsibility toward the environment is important.

Incidentally, the Ocean Project has researched Youth in Action: Motivating Teens and Tweens to Protect the Ocean, looking at the potential for tapping social media tools to engage teens.

Why the two surveys had such substantially different results may have a little to do with the timing and perhaps more to do with the questions asked and how they were framed. Nevertheless, a closer look at why these studies seem to support divergent conclusions is needed.

On a somewhat related tangent, in his insightful article in Mother Jones entitled “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science,” Chris Mooney describes a topsy-turvy world that sounds more like Alice in Wonderland than a rational, 21st Century society where enlightened thought and evidence rule the day.

If you wanted to show how and why fact is ditched in favor of motivated reasoning, you could find no better test case than climate change. After all, it’s an issue where you have highly technical information on one hand and very strong beliefs on the other. And sure enough, one key predictor of whether you accept the science of global warming is whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. The two groups have been growing more divided in their views about the topic, even as the science becomes more unequivocal.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that more education doesn’t budge Republican views. On the contrary: In a 2008 Pew survey, for instance, only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college educated Republicans. In other words, a higher education correlated with an increased likelihood of denying the science on the issue. Meanwhile, among Democrats and independents, more education correlated with greater acceptance of the science.

Examining social science research on a wide range of topics ranging from evolution to WMD in Iraq, Mooney points out what many social scientists have observed for decades: humans tilt toward thoughts that are in sync with previous beliefs, and then build arguments to challenge new ideas.

In other words, when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers (PDF). Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

Which takes us back to teens and the fact that they are open to admitting that they don’t know about many aspects of climate (and energy.) Rather than arguing opinions, which tends to be the way adults “debate” issues, whether scientific or political, teens may be more open to “teachable moments” if they are presented with them in an engaging way and relevant context.

 

 

 

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