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AAAS, Boston -

Whether technology can cure the world’s ills has been a hot topic at this year’s AAAS conference.

I joined Alok Jah and James Randerson as a guest commentator on the Guardian’s weekly science podcast yesterday to discuss, among other highlights from the AAAS meeting, whether we can rely on technology as our sole solution to climate change.

We recorded in Toscanini’s ice-cream café in Cambridge, MA, an institution as famous for its clientele (nobel and ignoble laureates and the Dalai Lama), as much as for it’s delectable ice-cream….the wort variety comes highly recommended!

The impetus for our technology discussion was the release of a report at AAAS by a specialist panel convened to predict the great engineering challenges that humanity will face in the 21st century.

A select group of big names and big thinkers, the blue ribbon panel included Larry Page, co-founder of Google, Craig Venter, entrepreneur, geneticist and billionaire, Lord Broers, a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Ray Kurzweil, futurologist, software engineer and alleged recipient of some 14 honorary doctorates.

Kurzweil sees no end to the possibilities of what technology can achieve this century – from creating artificial intelligence to match the human intellect to reversing the signs of aging. His basis for these assertions is the rate at which technology is advancing – a doubling every two decades. Though this may sound modest, its cumulative effect is worth contemplating – that’s 32 times more technical progress over the next 50 years than there has been in the past half-century!

The views of the panel are positively circumspect in comparison to Kurzweil’s, though are none-the-less fascinating.

Continue reading "Can technology stop the world from warming (and my ice-cream from melting)? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 18, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Conferences and Meetings, Energy, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston –

I went along to the COMPASS ‘marine mixer’ (picture an alcohol-laced gyre awash with journalists and marine science/policy types) last night. In the 7th year now, it has become quite the who’s who of marine science.

At one point, I was chatting to Jane Lubchenco, professor of marine biology at Oregon State University, who is moderating a panel here at AAAS today on the effects of climate change on the ocean.

Lubchenco and colleagues have a brief communication in this week’s Science, reporting the expansion of a low-oxygen or ‘dead’ zone off the US west coast, which they believe is partly attributable to climate change.

While scanning video footage off the seabed off the Washington and Oregon coast, Lubchenco and her fellow marine ecologists came across a mass of dead marine organisms. After some investigation, they found this was due to the expansion of a dead zone both toward the coastline and throughout 80% of the water column.

The region, known as the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem, is one the world’s four eastern boundary current systems, which are some of the most productive areas in the ocean and produce 20% of the world’s fisheries.

The number of such ‘dead zones’ throughout the world’s oceans has increased dramatically in recent decades. Most, however, such as the well-known Gulf of Mexico dead zone, are caused by excessive nutrient run-off from land increasing the nitrogen content of the water, and sucking out the oxygen.

Under normal conditions, the region off the US west coast is characterised by the upwelling of nutrients from deep waters, driven by strong winds. Plentiful nutrients provide the nutrition necessary for an algal bloom, which forms the basis of a rich food web.

But too much nutrition…and it all goes horribly wrong.

Continue reading "AAAS: Marine mixing, dead zones and climate change " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 17, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Correction Appended

AAAS, Boston-

One of the most interesting, and popular, sessions I’ve been to so far at AAAS was the panel discussion on how the media communicates climate change.

Though there wasn’t any news in the talks about news by various well known science communicators, the room was packed to the rafters and the lively discussion spilled over into the next session.

Andy Revkin of the New York Times , who recently started the excellent Dot Earth blog, spoke of the tyrannies of news and the difficulty of getting climate-related news on the front page without a peg like Hurricane Katrina. He also pointed out that the more complex a story is (as is so often the case in climate science), the less space it gets.

Matt Nisbet, who runs the Framing Science blog, talked about how sources of information frame people’s perceptions of the issue, with the example that Gore’s ‘climate crises’ gets referred to more frequently by the media than the IPCC, NOAA or NASA.

David Dickson, director of Scidev Net warned that journalism is at risk of losing its independence and becoming a voice for various NGOs, as they become increasingly strategic at media relations. Some NGOs apparently paid for a large contingent of journalists to attend the UN conference on climate change in Bali, with the explicit understanding that they would cover their stories*.

John Holdren, director of the Woods Hole Research Centre, aired his frustration at various aspects of how climate change is reported by the mainstream media, including references by journalists (other than Revkin) at the NYT to “global warming, [which] is caused by humanity, as many scientists believe”.

Holdren has been trying convince journalists to use ‘global climate disruption’ rather than the misrepresentative ‘global warming’. Good luck to him – it would up the word count, and, as we've heard, there just ain’t no space for that.

Yesterday morning, I took part, with a national environment reporter from a popular broadsheet, in an interview on how journalists communicate climate change. The interviewer was a grad student from MIT who is doing her PhD on the topic. She asked me a lot of questions about sources of information - the issue of NGOs came up again and also the question of where to draw the line with quoting scientists on policy recommendations. The differences between us and a national paper were very interesting - I get way less bumf from NGOs, for a start!

Olive Heffernan

*Dickson has since clarified that the agreement was that journalists would cover the conference rather than the activites of the NGO at the conference.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 17, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Communicating Climate Change, Conferences and Meetings, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston –

A host of unwelcome visitors could invade the Antarctic seafloor within the next ten to fifteen years, as ocean temperatures rise with global warming, said researchers today at the AAAS meeting here in Boston.

The scientists expect King crabs to be the first invaders, with sharks to follow.

The communities under threat from these invasions are extremely unique and highly diverse, with weird and wonderful inhabitants such as ribbon worms, sea spiders, and the aptly-named brittle stars, which break apart at the slightest touch, but can fortuitously regrow their limbs.

For hundreds of millions of years, these ancient communities have enjoyed a relatively safe haven in Antarctic waters, which are free of modern predators with crushing mouthparts such as crabs and sharks.

But a rise in sea temperature of a few degrees could change this, said marine biologist Richard Aronson of Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

At very low temperatures and high pressures, the concentration of magnesium in crab’s blood becomes toxic. As sea temperatures increase, crabs will be able to extend their range into areas that they are no longer off limits due to this physiological obstacle.

Similarly, sharks have a chemical called triethylamine oxide (TMAO), which is needed to counterbalance the build up of urea generated by their continuous movement. But TMAO is needed in greater doses at lower temperatures and so there appears to be a thermal cut off point of how much they produce.

The Antarctic has previously marked that cut off point, but the researchers highlighted that this is one of the fastest warming regions of the planet. It’s currently warming at a rate of approximately 1 degree Celsius each 25 years.

Cheryl Wilga, associate professor of physiology at the University of Rhode Island, described the Antarctica biodiversity as a “smorgasbord” for invading predators.

“There will be winners and losers”, said Aronson, who predicts that brittlestars will be “hammered” by the invasion, but that brachiopods, commonly known as lampshells, will probably hold up fairly well.

For further information, see the news coverage on Discovery News , National Geographic and the Telegraph.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 15, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m at the American Association for the Advancement of Science convention in Boston, which runs from Feb 14-18 and will be following the climate and energy streams over the next few days, so check here daily for the highlights.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 15, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)