Understanding science

A couple of days ago I was ambling along a walkway in the Children's Museum at which I volunteer, when I saw a lady examining a brass sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Because it is one of my responsibilities to interact with the visitors, I remarked that the sculpture was an old version of how we envisioned T-Rex and then pointed to an adjacent sculpture and said "this is what we think they really looked like." She replied strongly that she was glad that I used the word "think." I was instantly aware that I was face to face with someone who had no inkling of the science that provides the foundation for these exhibits. I kept my composure and amiably continued with, "This sculpture is based on scientific data obtained from research and from the actual fossil bones in our T-Rex skeletons downstairs.".Her face hardened and she walked away without a reply. She had her opinion and my attempt to alter it was to no avail.

There are, I'm afraid , many people who have no inkling of what scientists do. This large mass of humanity, even in our gadget-filled land of America, know little or nothing about research, the scientific method, the many branches of science, the history of science and the many benefits that the practice of science has brought to humanity.This ignorance can be consequential if the persons who deride the scientific evidence as baloney and are also in positions of political power.

Suppose that you are accused of a heinous crime of which you are innocent. Your attorney addresses the jury with the statement, "I believe that this person is innocent." Well, you are happy that he believes that but how can he convince the jury without evidence? Would you trust that lawyer to save you?

Of course you wouldn't. You would rather trust someone who has investigated the facts of your case and has presented evidence that proves that you are innocent and that no thinking juror could think otherwise.That is what scientists do: gather data, investigate what that data means, provide a working explanation, test that explanation, publish the results and cooperate with all other scientists who attempt to replicate or disprove the explanation.

Here are some facts that even an unscientific person can understand:

Rank of 2006 as hottest year on record in the continental United States.

Rank of America as top global warming polluter in the world.

Percent increase of America's carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels since 1990.

Percent increase of America's carbon dioxide emissions forecasted by 2020 if we do not cap pollution.

Percent decrease in U.S. global warming pollution required by 2050 to prevent the worst consequences of global warming.

Number of days by which the US fire season has increased over the past 20 years - tied closely to increased temperatures and earlier snowmelt.

Number of people around the world who could be displaced by more intense droughts, sea level rise and flooding by 2080.

Number of U.S. mayors (representing 55 million Americans) who have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement pledging to meet or beat Kyoto goals in their communities.

Number of federal bills passed to cap America's global warming pollution.

Number of times President Bush has mentioned "climate change" or "global warming" in his previous six State of the Union speeches.

The above has been borrowed with thanks from the following blog:

http://www.environmentaldefense.org

I recommend that readers of my blog frequent and join this one for up-to-date information.

How dry I am

The above chart shows the degree of drought during the next year in the regions of the United states as forecast by the United States weather Service. Note the southwest corner as well as the Southeast. At this moment in Southern California wildfires are exploding and raging among the hills. At this moment almost one million people have been displaced from their burning homes!

The drought has made this annual trial for the affluent residents of the hills much worse than in most years. In another region on the southeast, Georgia has requested that President Bush declare a state of emergency because of drought effects. Georgia's Lake Lanier is less than three months from depletion. Actually, more than a quarter of the Southeast has been labeled an "exceptional" drought area (The National Weather Service worst drought category).

Inexplicably, the Great lakes are exhibiting a drop in depth which, if continued, can have a devastating effect on the water supply for several states and Canadian provinces. While these disturbing occurrences may be transitory for the present, they can give us an inkling of what is in store in the future.

There are already similar changes going on in Africa and some small nations. While the Southwest and Southeast of North America may have continuing effects, the harm to individual people is minimal compared with the poor of other more vulnerable states and territories.

Although President Bush has, at long last, acknowledged that the scientific consensus on Global Warming is real, he is still showing a bias toward holding to the status quo rather than taking action.

How about this latest gem: Yesterday Dr. Julie Gerberding addressed a Senate hearing on the impact of climate change on the health of Americans. On questioning from the Senators she mentioned specific diseases likely to affect our health because of Global Warming. After White House review of her presentation, her document was cut from the original 14 pages to only four!

We should look forward to White House statements on the California wildfires and the Georgia thirst.

According to NASA, June through September 2007 brought record sea ice melt in the Arctic. The amount of ice was well below the previous record low, set in September 2005, 38 percent below average and 24 percent below the 2005 record. This particular agency operates the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer Instrument on the Aqua satellite, so--skeptics are reminded that most of the Global Warming supporters are scientists. A corollary would be that most of the skeptics are not.

It's hard for non-scientists to comprehend the tools of the researchers. It's harder still to understand how the results can be used to predict the future of anything so difficult as the temperature in future years. It's quite normal for anyone unfamiliar with scientists, their use of computer simulations or baffling equations to say "How can you possibly say that the temperature of the world will be so many degrees higher than now! We can't even predict the weather in Podunk next week!"

One major difference between predicting weather changes and predicting climate changes is that weather is a local phenomenon. A hurricane in Florida may mean that there will be rain in the Northeast (somewhere) and that it might be heavy (or light) and it may come in three days (or next week). Climate is another animal. The key word in Global Warming is "GLOBAL." Data from around the world is accumulated and fed into the many computer programs that provide the results that the atmospheric scientists use to come to their conclusions.

Well, why is the loss of ice in the Arctic so important?

What color is ice? White, of course. What happens to the sunlight that falls on white objects? It is reflected. What if it wasn't reflected? It would be absorbed. If we were talking about a white shirt, the wearer would not feel hot because of the reflection. If it is a dark shirt the heat from the sun would be absorbed by the shirt and the wearer would feel hot.

Then a loss of ice in the arctic would mean that less sunlight would be reflected into space and that it would be absorbed by the Earth instead.

O Canada!

It has been a pleasant visit to New Westminster, a city that is part of Greater Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. Even more pleasant were the green efforts in this part of the Northwest that are evident in many ways.


The first thing we noticed were the three separate boxes in our daughter's home that she and her husband diligently filled. Three? The local government mandates that paper, glass and other recyclables be separated so that they can be collected and sold more easily.


Yes, sold. This stuff doesn't go into a landfill. There are companies that derive profit from chewing up this junk and producing saleable materials. So what do many municipalities in the USA do? They charge homeowners for placing this material on the curb. Advice? Check on how your municipal garbage collection is handled and then raise hell about any governmental stupidity that is detected. By the way, residents here are not charged for this service. Why should they, when the city benefits financially. A definite win-win.


Here are a few other things that help save the environment and some bucks as well.


Do you have a fireplace? Have you heard of Ecologs? These are made from compressed hardwood waste with no glue or wax used to bind them. So, when used in a fireplace they burn clean without any buildup in the chimney. Save the forest that sucks up the CO2. Don't use logs but get these Ecologs instead.


The winter will be coming on soon enough in the northern reaches of the USA where I'm located. What do we do when the cold winds blow? We shut our windows and turn up the thermostat, thereby turning our indoors into a biological hazard zone. Our carpets and cleaning agents give off enough poisonous vapors to land some of us in the hospital! Unless, that is, we use some things available to stop that contamination. Heard of HEPA filters? Some of the better vacuum cleaners use them to take out the fine particles that ordinary filters pass right on through. There are filters available at your nearby hardware store that stop these particles from your furnace or air handler especially with HEPA.

Is the summer hot and humid in your place? Do you use a dehumidifier? Good! You don't? Oh,oh. Mold and mildew make asthmatics out of your kids and sicken you as well. Not only the health of your family is at risk, however. The drywall and wood in your home can be ruined by fungus and mold. Investigate antifungal coatings that can be applied to your interior.

That's enough for now. We have to save the environment from the warming threat. At the same time we should not neglect the environment within our own homes

Good News

The local paper brought the good news that global warming is a fixable situation and we have enough time to do the fixing.

I believe this is true.

What is missing from this assessment is that governments, industries and individuals will actually face up to the amount of fixing necessary to keep the chaos of population shifts, storm intensity rise with attendant habitat destruction, crop failures, coastal erosion and myriad effects on animal and plant life. We are told that China and India will continue to pollute the skies inasmuch as they are developing nations.

The U.S. is the world champ at the moment, throwing up some 24.5 tons of greenhouse gas per person. China is a close second. The problem is that China and India have over two billion people while the U.S. has only 300 million--and they are catching up to us , fast.

We can do some things on an individual basis, like equipping our homes with compact fluorescent lamp bulbs (CFLs), trading in our 15-MPG SUV's for 50-MPG Prius's, installing energy-efficient air conditioners and heat pumps, riding bikes or walking instead of driving, etc.

But all that will have only a minuscule effect on the warming of the Earth. What is the real source of all the greenhouse gas that is causing the deepening problem?

We must look into our own behavior to understand how difficult it will be to curb our appetite for all the goodies with which our industrial empire continues to shower on us. If we want to continue to drive in lonely splendor from our suburban pads to our spanking new industrial plants, if we want to continue to flit in airliners from here to there around the world, if we can't do without our electronic gadgets, if we must expand our cities at the expense of forest and farm land, all to enhance the bottom line for more and more entrepreneurs and industrialists, then we will continue to see the inexorable rise in temerature.

The change will hurt. We have to pay a price for avoiding catastrophe or else the price that will fall on our children and grandchildren will be unbearably severe. What price? Tune in later. I'm in Canada at the moment and learning a great deal about how our neighbors to the north are changing their life style.

Die Off

A few years ago I was commiserating with a neighbor over the beastly temperatures we were experiencing. (They were even worse than those of this year!) I made the mistake of mentioning Global Warming. I say mistake because my neighbor, face flushed with anger, said through his tight lips, "God would not let that happen to his world!"

It became obvious to me that my neighbor had as his religious belief a profound trust in a deity that operated this planet and all things on or in it. I never argue or try to minimize the beliefs of others and I attempt to be truly respectful of them. In this case I mumbled that I understood his point and left it at that.

Over the years I have been regaled by Young-Earth believers, Jews for Jesus, and agnostics as well as well-meaning but insufferable bores with their own take on God and the universe. As far as Global Warming is concerned I've come to see conservative republicans along with the oil, coal, automobile, and logging industries as total non-believers (or minimizers) of the global warming threat.

Let's see how the Hebrew Bible (otherwise known as the "Old Testament") handles the role assigned to us humans. Now this can be a problem because reading the bible and extracting meaning by us modern civilized beings could cause us to miss some major points. The rabbis, from ancient times to the present, have developed a system of exegesis or interpretation that they call midrash that has helped generations of Jews understand their own Bible. Since we started by talking about global warming, here's a midrashic explanation of the story of creation:

In the hour when the Holy One created the first human being, God took Adam before all the trees of the Garden of Eden and said: "See My works, how fine and excellent they are! All that I have created I have created for you. Think upon this, and do not corrupt and desolate My world; for, if you corrupt it, there is no one to set it right after you."

Rabbis Albert Vorspan & David Saperstein, Tough Choices, Jewish Perspectives on Social Justice, UAHC Press, NY 1992


Well, darn! You mean that Brazil shouldn't be leveling the Amazon Forest or that the U.S. shouldn't be sawing down the Tongass National Forest in Alaska? You mean that the Japanese shouldn't be decimating the shark population to make shark fin soup, or that we shouldn't
be dumping waste from our oil wells in the Caribbean and killing the coral reefs?

Did you know that we are in the midst of the greatest die off of animal and plant spoecies in the Earth's history?

What's it all about?

And why should you bother to read it?

Mazel is a yiddish word that is loosely translated as luck. It is usually paired with "tov" (good) which phrase is usually meant as a wish to another person as "May you have good luck."

Ah, but way back when, in ancient Israel, mazel, in old Hebrew, meant roughly, "May the stars be aligned for you." Oh, no! Not the people of the Book! Astrology? Ah, yes, those ancestors of mine, attuned to the customs of the day, were very much influenced by what they thought were "outside forces."

In this Blog I wish to convey that there are "inside forces" that influence us, and therefore we have "Mazel tough" instead of "Mazel tov."

Yeah, today we have tough luck!

Here's an example. Some 25 years ago I found myself teaching a course in Industrial Safety Management. The previous professor had died suddenly from an overdose of twinkies. I had to place myself as his replacement because I was the department chair at the time. There was no time to find a substitute, so I found the text to be too elementary and began supplementing the text with lectures from other sources. I began to read widely and diligently (hey! I was a professor after all) and began learning some interesting things. One of these things was about an air sampling station on Mauna Loa volcanu in Hawaii.

This station collects air samples over the course of each day, measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide. Being high above vegetation and away from human activities, this is a source of data that is considered the most reliable in the world. The graphical record over many, many years shows a steady increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

I brought this up in class one day, remarking that this could have an impact on the climate of the world. I compared the way that CO2 acted like the pane of glass in a greenhouse to keep heat from dissipating. I mentioned that they should be aware of this phenomenon inasmuch as they would be employed (if not already employed) by industries that could be generating this CO2.

I invite you to Google "Mauna Loa carbon dioxide monitor." See for yourself. The shnooks who say that the science underlying global warming is wrong can't seem to understand the data or refuse to acknowledge it.

And that is our mazel tough!