The book provides basics on climate and energy, approaches to teaching about climate and energy, and of special interest for teachers, syncing the topics with existing standards. The main point of the book is to get teachers up to speed, but this is not restricted to teachers at a certain level, or for that matter, a certain topic, in that climate change and energy can be incorporated in a very wide range of electives and mainstream classes. The goal of teaching climate literacy is developed by focusing on the “seven essential principles”:

1. The sun is the primary source of energy for Earth’s climate system.
2. Climate is regulated by complex interactions among components of the Earth system.
3. Life on Earth depends on, is shaped by, and affects climate.
4. Climate varies over space and time through both natural and human processes.
5. Our understanding of the climate system is improved through observation, theoretical studies, and modeling.
6. Human activities are impacting the climate system.
7. Climate change will have consequences for the Earth system and human lives.

And, similarly, there are seven organizing concepts for teaching energy:

1. Energy is a physical quantity that follows precise natural laws.
2. Physical processes on Earth are the result of energy flow through the Earth system.
3. Biological processes depend on energy flow through the Earth system.
4. Various sources of energy can be used to power human activities, and often this energy must be transferred from source to destination.
5. Energy decisions are influenced by economic, political, environmental, and social factors.
6. The amount of energy used by human society depends on many factors.
7. The quality of life of individuals and societies is affected by energy choices.

There is a chapter on countering denialism, and a chapter on mainstream activism.

Mark McCaffrey is the Programs and Policy Director for these topics at the National Center for Science Education, and this book is an NCSE project. McCaffrey has blogged about the contents of the book on the NCSE blog; his first entry is here. In his own words:

…if well presented and handled with creativity and care, climate and energy issues are ideal interdisciplinary and integrating themes, potentially linking the sciences with mathematics, language arts, geography, history, arts, social studies and civics, and at the college level, bringing in psychology, sociology, writing and rhetoric, philosophy, business…. You get the picture.

Most importantly, climate and energy are topics that are imperative to teach if we are going to effectively respond to these challenges, and make informed climate and energy decisions.

Climate Smart & Energy Wise: Advancing Science Literacy, Knowledge, and Know-How is well written, well laid out, a good read but also an excellent on-the-shelf reference book for educators designing or updating courses. It is coming out later this month and costs only $25.00. A great gift for your favorite teacher!

The figure at the top of the post is from the book.

The upper sediment will come from erosion from the lake’s sub-ice shoreline, mostly chemical in nature, settling of the finest of clays that would have been in the water at the time the ice covered the lake, but mostly, I suspect, a combination of re-settled light minerals moved by currents that may or may not have been operating there and biological materials from whatever may or may not have been living in the water.

BBC broke the news (more or less) with this:

Russian scientists are reporting success in their quest to drill into Lake Vostok, a huge body of liquid water buried under the Antarctic ice.

It is the first time such a breakthrough has been made into one of the more than 300 sub-glacial lakes known to exist on the White Continent.

Researchers believe Vostok can give them some fresh insights into the frozen history of Antarctica.

They also hope to find microbial lifeforms that are new to science.

“This fills my soul with joy,” said Valery Lukin, from Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which has been overseeing the project,

“This will give us the possibility to biologically evaluate the evolution of living organisms… because those organisms spent a long time without contact with the atmosphere, without sunlight,” he was quoted as saying in a translation of national media reports by BBC Monitoring.

Shortly after this transmission communications with the distant research camp were cut off but just before that a large vegetable like humanoid was seen approaching the scientist’s webcam.

Only kidding.

Sheril Kirshenbaum notes:

… exploring Vostok is not that simple. We know it has high concentrations of oxygen and nitrogen so there is the potential of explosively “de-gassing” the lake. There’s also concern over contamination due to bacteria and drilling fluids on the way in.

We are watching with great anticipation.

Having said that, Anthropogenic Global Warming has resulted in only modest sea level rise to date, and it is at this point probably true that warming of the ocean causing thermal expansion has been at the same level of magnitude (or greater) than seas rising because of the influx of melted glacial water.

The problem is, it is very difficult to measure either sea level rise or ice loss very accurately, for a number of reasons. But there is a saving grace. Or should I say, GRACE. GRACE is a NASA project; Twin satellites measure changes in the Earth’s gravity field in such a way that it is possible to identify changes in the distribution of water. From the GRACE overview statement:

GRACE will be able to map the Earth’s gravity fields by making accurate measurements of the distance between the two satellites, using GPS and a microwave ranging system. It will provide scientists from all over the world with an efficient and cost-effective way to map the Earth’s gravity fields with unprecedented accuracy. The results from this mission will yield crucial information about the distribution and flow of mass within the Earth and it’s surroundings.

The gravity variations that GRACE will study include: changes due to surface and deep currents in the ocean; runoff and ground water storage on land masses; exchanges between ice sheets or glaciers and the oceans; and variations of mass within the Earth. Another goal of the mission is to create a better profile of the Earth’s atmosphere. The results from GRACE will make a huge contribution to the goals of NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise, Earth Observation System (EOS) and global climate change studies.

A major study of GRACE data by Thomas Jacob, John Wahr, W. Tad Pheffer and Sean Swenson was published moments ago in Nature. Jonathan Bamber supplies a summary:

Understanding, and closing, the sea-level budget (the relative contributions of mass and thermal expansion to ocean-volume change) is crucial for testing predictions of future sea-level rise. Estimates of the future response of [glaciers and ice caps] to climate change are, in general, based on what we know about how they have responded in the past. A better estimate of past behaviour, such as that obtained by Jacob and colleagues, will therefore result in better estimates of future behaviour. Discussion of the demise of the Himalayan glaciers has been mired in controversy, partly because of basic errors, but also because of the dearth of reliable data on past trends. Given their role as a water supply for so many people1, this has been a cause for concern and an outstanding issue.

The method works like this: Ice bearing region are defined as “mascons” (sampling units in fancytalk) where mass values are taken by the satellite. Factors that are not ice are subtracted from the changes in gravity in each mascon and a fancy modelling program that Global Warming Denialists will not understand and therefore claim to be a hoax is applied to the data. The result is something like this:

This shows the change in mass for numerous regions around the world.

Over the seven year period of this study, mountain glaciers and ice (outside of Greenland and Antarctica) contributed to about 0.041 cm of sea level rise a year, and the major ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica produced about 0.106 cm of sea level rise a year, for a total of 0.147, according to this study. This is in the same order of magnitude as other studies, though the new research tends to show less melt than previously thought. There is a major discrepancy between the new GRACE study and earlier work; The Tibetan Plateau is shown in other studies to have lost much more ice than GRACE indicates. The authors are convinced that they’ve got the number right. The main problem here is that gravitational studies (and the discrepancies are between different gravitational studies) measure the movement of major land masses. You can think of the Tibetan plateau as a big pile of stuff that is currently being shoved up into a bigger pile of stuff by tectonic movements. It is dyanamically moving for that reason. Then, glaciers grow and shrink on this elevated mass. That complicates the movement of the plateau over time. It is a little like measuring the exact location of a fishing bobber on a rippling pond.

To give you an idea of the relative magnitude of 0.147 cm a year of sea level rise, consdier that the total sea level rise since the last glacial (ice age), if averaged over 12,000 years (roughly the time since intensive melting started) would be about 1 cm a year. Of course, the actual rate of sea level rise was much greater than that when the glaciers first started melting and then slowed considerably later.

Current sea level rise is not very significant, but we expect the rate of glacial melting to increase if Anthropocentric Global Warming is not curbed. In fact, this study does not help us at all in estimating the rate of future melting. What it does do is refine our ability to measure ice wasting as it happens, in a way that is probably more accurate than previous method and more comprehensive, including all the ice globally.

Jacob, T., Wahr, J., Pfeffer, W., & Swenson, S. (2012). Recent contributions of glaciers and ice caps to sea level rise Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature10847

See also this press release from NASA.

Gleick is the new board member of the National Center for Science Education.

In a world first, University of Queensland and CSIRO scientists have measured the relationship between current climate, climate change and habitat loss on plants and animals on a global scale.

Their results, published recently in Global Change Biology indicate that areas with high temperatures and where average rainfall has decreased over time increase the chance of a species being negatively affected by habitat loss and fragmentation.

“Human population growth has caused significant habitat degradation across the globe, typically in support of agriculture and urban development,” lead researcher Chrystal Mantyka-Pringle said.

“This alone has negatively impacted many species, but combined with rises in temperature and reduced rainfall as a result of a changing climate, there could be catastrophic results for some populations. Serious declines are already a reality for many species.”

I’ve not yet read the study, but I thought you’d like to see the Press Release.

The book is exceptionally well documented and could actually be used as a supplementary text in a class on science policy or science and society.

Author’s bio from the pulbisher’s web site:

James Lawrence Powell was born and raised in Kentucky and graduated from Berea College. He received his Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has had a distinguished career as a college teacher, college president, museum director, and author of books on earth science for general audiences. He serves as executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, a partnership among government agencies and laboratories, industry, and higher education dedicated to increasing the number of American citizens with graduate degrees in the physical sciences and related engineering fields, emphasizing recruitment of a diverse applicant pool that includes women and minorities. He has taught at Oberlin College and has served as its acting president. He has also been president of Franklin and Marshall College, Reed College, the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointed Powell to the National Science Board.

WASHINGTON (Nov. 22, 2011)–In an apparent effort to discredit climate science, hackers again posted stolen emails from leading climate scientists online today, just days ahead of a United Nations climate meeting. According to the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, the emails released today are part of the same batch that was stolen from the university years ago. Only some of those emails were released in November 2009. Since then, multiple investigations exonerated scientists who had their emails stolen of misconduct.

“These leftover emails should be met with a collective yawn,” said Francesca Grifo, senior scientist and director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) Scientific Integrity Program. “It’s time to condemn the real perpetrators in this story: the hackers who stole and released university property. The hackers and their allies are resorting to desperate measures to distract the public when our focus should be on how to respond to climate change.”

Norfolk police who are investigating the original hacking told the British newspaper Guardian that the contents of the leftover emails will be “of interest” in their attempts to identify the hackers. UCS called on British authorities to escalate their investigation.

“Two years after the emails were stolen, the hackers have still not been brought to justice,” Grifo said. “British authorities should redouble their efforts to find the criminals who are behind this. To do otherwise sends a message that freedom of expression will only selectively be protected.”

UCS climate scientist Brenda Ekwurzel said the emails are a distraction from important scientific findings. “The stolen emails are an inconsequential sideshow compared to the main event: preparing ourselves for climate change and reducing emissions,” she said. “Stolen emails won’t cool us off during killer heat waves or prevent floodwaters from washing away our homes.”

Just last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report linking climate change to certain types of dangerous extreme weather, including heat waves and shifts in rainfall that lead, in many areas, to prolonged drought punctuated by heavy flooding.

Grifo also called on universities to better protect the privacy of researchers while honoring their obligation to respond to open records requests, warning that failure to do so could expose others to unwarranted attacks. UCS has closely followed requests for emails from scientists and academics in the United States.

“Attacks like these threaten not only the privacy of scientists, but also of students, faculty and the public,” said Grifo. “Universities need to adequately protect their own records.”

###

The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading U.S. science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. Founded in 1969, UCS is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also has offices in Berkeley, Chicago and Washington, D.C. For more information, go to www.ucsusa.org.

=======================
Aaron Huertas
Press Secretary
Union of Concerned Scientists
1825 K St. NW Suite 800
Washington, DC 20006

And here’s the web site.

Eventually, there will probably be a book.

Now that you’ve seen the talk, here’s your list of things to do:

• Buy the book here.
• Sign on to Science Debate.org here
• Sign the American Science Pledge here
• Join the Republican Party. Oh, and the NRA too!