I'll wrap things up with an image. These two maps illustrate global temperature increases in 2050 and 2100. Much as the "hockey stick graph" became an icon for global warming itself, the "Angry Red Chart" became a symbol of the science that was driving negotiations back in the year 2015. It is also available without words.

The idea here is that regardless of what we do today, we are in store for some warming over the coming decades due to the delayed effects of greenhouse gases we have already pumped into the atmosphere. Thus the imperative to "adapt" in the 2050 scenario. But if we act quickly we might be able to avert the worst, notably the extreme "business as usual" scenario depicted in 2100.

One other thing: These are real results. Oak Ridge National Laboratory ran the numbers, and the presentation is courtesy of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. The simulation is based off of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's worst-case scenario, which mixes high growth with lots of fossil fuels, but that might not be unreasonable given that emissions have been growing faster than expected in recent years.

The Angry Red Chart proved to be an effective tool in the climate war game. Podesta slammed a paper copy on a negotiations table at one point, and digitally invoked it in the main hall more than once. We'll see if it, or something like it, proves useful in the real world in the years to come.

Look out for next week's Nature, where we'll take one last look at the climate war game and what it can tell us.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 30, 2008
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10:15 a.m.
The game ends. Delegates worked out compromises on the emissions targets, with regard to both India and China, and then spent another 45 minutes poring over the rest of the agreement. What’s remarkable is how fast a role-playing “game” turned into a seemingly interminable political and bureaucratic exercise. Notes were passed, objections were raised. No word was too small to dispute.

But United Nations Secretary General John Podesta finally rang the bell, acknowledging that a number of issues – including his own proposal to create a major new international fund for clean technology – were left on the table.

Significantly, the game ended without a binding agreement on emissions reductions. The United States and Europe committed to a 30 percent reduction in emissions by 2025, and all of the parties agreed to shoot for the same targets at a global level. But China, while endorsing the idea of numeric targets, did not actually agree to any specifics. India walked away with specific targets, but with some contingencies as well. And even these concessions might not have been possible without a substantial cash infusion from the West.

On migration, the countries agreed on the need to recognize climate refugees as such, while stressing that they must be distinguished from people who are displaced by other natural disasters, such as earthquakes. “Non-coercive repatriation” to the country of origin should be the preference, and international assistance should be forthcoming to smooth this process.

The draft agreement broadly supports new agricultural programs and regional partnerships for managing water resources, although there is little in the way of specifics. It would also create a new “International Disaster Relief Organization” to help coordinate emergency operations around the globe.

The complete agreement will be posted on the CNAS website.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 30, 2008
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9 a.m.
I haven't even finished my morning coffee and already there's a crisis in the climate negotiations. Country teams have convened a final meeting in hopes of approving the framework for a new international climate agreement, but a new impasse has developed between India and the West. India says its commitment to reducing emissions is (and always was) contingent on assistance with technology transfer and the idea that reductions will be allocated among nations on a per-capita basis. The United States and the European Union say they never agreed to such conditions, which would make India's "commitment" an empty promise.

Delegates have 45 minutes (according to the agenda) to resolve their differences.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 30, 2008
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Harry Eastlack looked like any other baby when he was born in Philadelphia in 1933, save for an inward-turned big toe, but at age ten, he developed a swelling and stiffness in his neck and back. The group of Philadelphia doctors that treated Harry would soon discover that the soft tissues of his body including muscles and cartilage were slowly, painfully transforming into bone, twisting and fusing the young man’s body until his death at age 40. His plight is known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), and it’s caused by an autosomal dominant mutation, usually arising de novo in 2 out of every million people. In the last talk at the 2008 Society for Developmental Biology meeting in Philadelphia, Eileen Shore from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine talked about her work from bedside to bench with children with FOP.
After a long search over many years for a handful of families who have passed on the trait across generations, she and a group of researchers were able to link the disease to a single base substitution in a gene for a bone morphogenetic protein type I receptor called ACVR1 in 2006. In the years since, Shore and a group of collaborators has worked to define how this tiny mutation could cause such a devastating disease. In cell culture, in zebrafish, and biochemically, a picture began to emerge of a pathway that is not completely turned on but is very sensitive to a ligand. Recently Shore and colleagues have had success in engineering a mouse with the mutant gene knocked in. Though they haven’t finished developing the line, chimeras containing both the mutant gene cells and normal mouse cells have a similar inward turned big toe on their feet and are beginning to show signs of bone formation in soft tissues. Hopefully, using these chimeras, her group will be able to breed a pure line of mice with the disorder in which drugs to treat the disease can be screened and tested.
It was a stirring story and a great preparatory talk leading up to the meeting’s closing celebration at Philadelphia’s hallowed Mutter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Harry Eastlack decided at age 20 that he would donate his skeleton to advance research on the disease that plagued his life, and it is a centrepiece to the Mutter’s amazing exhibits. See pictures here. They’re a chilling reminder of what can happen when development goes awry.

Posted by Brendan Maher on July 30, 2008
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Okay folks, I’ll try not to belabour the point here because we still have no resolution to the talks and I’m curious about the chocolate confections (and chocolate martinis, it is rumoured, although that's not really my style) at Co Co. Sala. It seems a little decadent, but it’s been a long day of difficult negotiations. Honestly.

Things almost broke down among the Chinese team members, who talked for hours about “baselines” and “targets,” emissions intensity versus real reductions, technology transfer and the ever-popular “low-hanging fruit.” At a time when most China delegates appeared ready to throw in the towel, Jiahua Pan (executive director of the Research Centre for Sustainable Development in Beijing) stood his ground. For hours he valiantly fended off all talk of strict emissions cuts, insisting that no amount of money from the West could make up for a lack of technology. At one point toward the end, I distinctly heard the words “this is a game” uttered in exasperation.

“It’s a very serious debate, and it reflects how enthusiastic people are about the game,” China team member Lianhong Gu (one of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists) told me toward the end. “That’s one positive aspect of the game. I’m very much hopeful that something good will come of it.”

Suffice it to say that Pan and his colleagues now appear to have agreed to an offer for monetary aide from the United States and Europe. Under this framework, the nations would split three-ways the cost of any emissions reductions below China’s original commitment under the 2012 Copenhagen agreement (a 20 percent reduction in emissions intensity by 2020) through 2025. Of course, there are various ways you can read that, and it’s not clear exactly who is assuming what. Once again, we’ll see how things turn out at the final session tomorrow.

I suspect I’ve failed in my initial promise not to belabour the point, but I’m now off to join the crew at Co Co. Sala.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 30, 2008
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The Center for a New American Security has now established a website for this week's war game. Not all of the current materials are up, but CNAS officials assure me they will be soon.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 29, 2008
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So I finally got around to checking out the website for Earth2100 , which is the documentary that will ultimately house the ABC News footage of this week's war game. Or at least some of it - there would appear to be a dozen cameras here filming everything that walks, talks or types.

Actually, it's a bit more than a straight-up documentary. ABC is working with scientists to develop (and eventually portray) future climate scenarios. The network is even soliciting short films from viewers depicting life in a warmer world, so it's time for all of you aspiring filmmakers to get busy. An ABC producer I spoke to yesterday assured me that the network is open to using the volunteer footage - if it makes the final cut.

Some of the early entries are posted on the site. Monologues appear to be a popular form of self expression in 2015, and from them we learn that one can of cat food costs $8.49 in New York City, a gallon of gasoline costs more than $9 per gallon in Alaska and Los Angeles residents have running water only three days a week.

The network has released its climate briefings for 2050, available individually for several countries and regions; briefings for 2070 and 2100 will be forthcoming. The documentary will be released sometime early next year.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 29, 2008
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4 p.m.
United Nations Secretary General John Podesta (Center for American Progress) is increasing the pressure. When negotiations in a special break-out group handling emissions stalled out a while ago, Podesta intervened, slammed a copy of the modelling results down on the table and beseeched Chinese delegates, and others, to keep their eye on what is at stake (the planet). “We are not meeting our commitments,” he declared. Whether or not the UN secretary general’s word carries this kind of weight in the real world is debatable, but in the war game, the Chinese delegates in this particular meeting relented shortly thereafter.

This is an interesting development for Gary Jacobs, a science advisor in the game and director of the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. First because Jacobs initially recommended that Podesta intervene, and second because Jacobs’ team performed the modelling that underpins the entire game. In addition to ensuring that the science is “plausible and credible,” Jacobs is interested in how the science gets used by policymakers in the war game. “I thought it would be valuable to see what others are asking of the science,” he says.

In some cases, those questions have focused on some difficult issues, including the threat of additional environmental refugees due to climate. Recall that there are some 250 million Bangladeshis camped on the border of India in 2015. For these and other people who might be affected by increased drought, flooding or sea level rise, “the questions is where are they going to go,” says Budhendra Bhaduri, an Oak Ridge modeller who, as it happens, is currently working on the issue. “This is virgin territory.”

The country teams are now back together, going over their positions on the suite of issues. All eyes are on the China, which is still struggling with a bit of internal dissension regarding the proposal to set specific targets for emissions reductions. The teams have less than an hour to complete their negotiations, and Podesta has once again been called in.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 29, 2008
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11 a.m.
This slide, depicting atmospheric carbon dioxide levels under various scenarios, provides a basic update for where we stand so far in the war game. The “proposals to date” scenario might be a little optimistic, given that it assumes the 2012 Copenhagen agreement will ultimately be upheld. There is ongoing debate about the significance of that agreement, but we’ll see how it plays out today. It was produced by the Sustainability Institute, which is taking part in the game.

The main proposals yesterday came from India and the United States, which pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2025. The green line assumes that the rest of the world joins in the action, aside from China, which has yet to agree to any kind of numeric target; the pink line assumes unanimity moving forward.

As discussed yesterday, India’s proposal to commit to specific targets (in exchange for agreements on technology transfer and investment) is a bit more complicated than it sounded at the time. India said it was willing to commit to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by mid-century, but the end target should be a world in which the per-capita emissions are roughly equal. Under this scenario, the United States would need to reduce its emissions by some 96 percent, compared to a reduction of just 39 percent in India, according to an analysis by war game organizers. China would need to curb emissions by 86 percent.

The country teams have now broken up into smaller groups to take on simultaneous negotiations on the full range of topics: emissions; environmental refugees; resource scarcity; and disaster relief. Delegates hope to iron out more-detailed policies that will ultimately gain the approval of their respective countries. Again, the goal is to create a new framework for a comprehensive international climate agreement by the end of the day. Tall order.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 29, 2008
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9:30 a.m.
I've had my morning coffee, perused the 6 October, 2015, edition of the Climate Change Times and am now listening to Diana Farrell talk about energy efficiency. Farrell heads the McKinsey Global Institute, which put out a study earlier this year indicating that the world could cut energy demand growth in half - at a profit - through productivity gains. "This is the single most important lever for addressing climate change," she says.

I'm never sure whether I should be pleased or depressed hearing such optimistic numbers about energy efficiency, because action in this arena is often limited to large groups of experts nodding their head in agreement on the need to act quickly. As Farrell astutely points out, here we are on a balmy day in the US capital, sitting in a super-cooled conference room, continuously blasted by arctic winds, talking about how difficult it is to reduce fossil fuel demand.

United Nations officials are now reviewing yesterday's activities and going over today's war game events. More to come soon.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 29, 2008
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Update: US responded to EU proposal, not Buetikofer as originally posted

6 p.m.
If the purpose of a war game is to reveal and explore alternate futures, then perhaps we have a winner here. Indeed, the year is 2015 and we now find ourselves in a world in which the United States is pushing for strong binding emissions limits on the rest of the world. By contrast, Europe appears to be pushing a more vague approach that focuses on tools, or “instruments,” including a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, that might be necessary if the existing (largely aspirational) targets are to be met.

Check out the response from the US team: “Do you have any specific targets?”

“Deciding targets without providing the instruments doesn’t do us a lot of service,” countered European delegate Reinhard Buetikofer (leader of the German Green Party). “We felt that since we have targets now, the real challenge is to provide the instruments.”

I could only scratch my head. Have the United States and Europe traded places politically in 2015? I asked UN Secretary General John Podesta (again, of Bill Clinton/Center for American Progress fame) if it was my imagination. He laughed. “The EU may have learned from bitter experience that when they take on these commitments, they are out in front of the parade and nobody is following.”

Buetikofer was a bit more cautious in his assessment of the situation. He pointed out that Europe, in 2015, is closer to meeting its targets than anybody else, and he questioned the value of new targets given the ongoing failure to meet previous targets.

Make of all that what you will.

The surprise of the day was without a doubt India’s proposal to take on mandatory cuts. Or was it? I talked to an inside source, and he pointed out that at one point somebody on the India team said something that nobody understood about “per-capita” something or other when talking about the emissions reductions.

Per-capita, of course, tends to be code for vastly increasing energy use in the developing world. And fair enough, why should we in the West live in luxury while India tightens its belt? But the question remains: What, exactly, did India propose? “We’ll have to check on that,” the source told me.

He promised to report back tomorrow, when we’ll see if the delegates can pull all of this together into some kind of a new global climate agreement. Stay tuned.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 29, 2008
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5 p.m.
The teams are now reporting back to the main group during the final plenary session of the day. Each country is going through its positions on each of the issues proposed by the UN secretariat. Lots of language encouraging one thing or another and lots of agreements “in principle.” But there would not appear to be any major breakthroughs on the biggest question, that of emissions, at this stage in the game.

The surprise announcement came from India, which appears to have agreed to reduce its emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels between 2015 and 2025, which is identical to the US proposal. This seems hard to believe and would, if true, put China in a lonely corner. Pressed on its lack of a specific commitment, however, China is holding firm.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 28, 2008
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4 p.m.
US negotiator Eileen Claussen (President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Washington, D.C.) began the US-China negotiation by calling energy and climate the No. 1 national priority over the coming decades, as well as a “centrepiece” of US investment policy. Although the US enacted a cap-and-trade program in 2012 and is now trying to get it off the ground, Claussen acknowledged that more needs to be done. She said the US will commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent (compared to 2005) between 2015 and 2025. The only way to bring down the long-term emissions curve is with near-term action, she said.

If this is the attitude of the US administration in 2015, it would appear that Claussen is right in calling the United States “a different place” in the year 2015. But the sour taste of the George W. Bush administration’s intransigence earlier in the millennium appeared to be lingering on the palate of at least one Chinese negotiator, who expressed surprise at anything resembling a willingness to talk on the part on the United States.

“I was surprised by the attitude of the US,” Lianhong Gu (research scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee) told reporters after the meeting. “They are willing to negotiate. … They are willing to work with China. … I’m very, very happy.”

That said, Gu and the other Chinese negotiators held strong to their position that China will not be bound by specific emissions limits at this stage in its development. He also specified the need to address emissions from manufacturing of goods that are ultimately exported to the West, the so-called “world factory” problem. The US, however, is continuing to push for some kind of firm commitment from China.

“Even understanding that your emissions will grow in absolute terms, we think they should grow as little as possible,” Claussen stressed to her Chinese counterparts.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 28, 2008
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I once had an English teacher who gave copious quizzes. Once, when someone complained about the work, he replied, “If you think my quizzes are bad you should see my testes.” It was an all-boys Catholic school, which explains how he could get away wish such crude sentiments. Nevertheless, I saw a talk about an organism that would put him and his abundant quizzes to the shame he deserves. The planarian, a flat, freshwater dwelling worm with comical eyespots and a superlative reputation for regeneration has another surprise under its belt. In addition to two ovaries just south of its tiny brain, the sexual form of some planarians has dozens of testes spread throughout its body. These are hardly exempt from the famous regenerative qualities of the planaria which can regenerate from just a tiny portion, but they grow back in ways that were interesting to the attendees at this morning’s talk on stem cells and development. Philip Newmark of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign showed how when you decapitate a planarian, the testes in the body disappear as the head regrows, only once the whole animal is intact does it resume it’s production of sperm. And when starved the animals resorb the plentiful sex organs until the food returns. When Newmark’s group fed the worms bacteria engineered to produce short interfering RNAs for a specific gene called nanos, they were able to block the testes regeneration even though the animal developed fine and had no obvious defects, looking somewhat like their asexual counterparts. They’re using this model to find other genes that might be important in testes regeneration and development.

Posted by Brendan Maher on July 28, 2008
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In a stem cell development talk this moring, Haifan Lin, director of the Yale Stem Cell Center showed a picture of a pie he had decorated with the letters R-N-A. What was he celebrating? Something that quite frankly frightens me.
His group has been investigating piRNAs. These are short strands of RNA, generally 30 nucleotides long in mice and a little bit shorter in Drosophila. These are similar in some ways to microRNAs and short interfering RNAs (siRNAs), but the name piRNA (literally pronounced "Pie-R-N-A") comes from the fact that they interact with a protein called PIWI. They’re found in abundance in the testes of mice and flies and appear not only to stifle gene expression by interacting with PIWI and corresponding DNA sequences (similar to other short RNAs) but also to stabilize and promote expression (possibly similar to other short RNAs as well). Just distinguishing these elements from other short RNAs is tricky enough. The janus-like nature of piRNAs could make for a real headache. What dictates whether they turn things on or off? Then there’s abundance. Studies have counted as many as 50,000, and Lin estimates that there are as many as four times that amount. When he realilzed how long that would keep his lab busy, Lin brought in some RNA pie to celebrate (the picture looked like apple). Still he’s not completely comfortable with all the implications of his work. The testes produce thousands of different piRNAs all coming from DNA that was formerly considered junk. “Does that make the testis a genetic junkyard?” Lin asked. He quipped: “At least emotionally I have a problem with that.”

Posted by Brendan Maher on July 28, 2008
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3:30 p.m.
The four country teams technically have less than an hour to complete their negotiating positions, and they are now in a frenzy of negotiations. Nothing concrete came of the India-China talks, although both appear to be pushing for technology transfer and consideration of historical or per-capita emissions - methods of calculating emissions that leave considerable room for growth in the developing world.

The US team first sought talks with China (which delayed in order to speak with the European Union first) and then met with the rest of the world. China and Europe were able to agree on the need for technology transfer, although Chinese negotiators had to press Europe repeatedly on what, exactly, that means. But at long last, China and the United States, the world's largest energy users, are now in their first discussions. More to come...

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 28, 2008
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At last night's poster session I met Scott Gilbert of Swarthmore College and editor of a definitive text on Developmental Biology. He told me that before his last invited talk, at a symposium honouring the retirement of his former mentor, most in attendance wondered what turtleshell was all about. The scientists, figuring the title of his talk referred to some wacky Drosophila gene name, were surprised to find that Gilbert actually works on turtle shell development. Here he is with colleague Judith Cebra-Thomas at last evening’s poster session.

Gilbert and his colleagues have found that the bones that make up a turtle’s upper and lower shells develop by a bone development program called “intramembranous ossification” much like skull bones. They do their studies in the red-eared slider, a common pet-shop favourite. Controversially, they’ve proposed that the shell develops from neural crest cells that migrate out from the neural tube after it closes. They injected a dye into the neural tube of turtle embryos and find them in the carapacial ridge (what will become the top shell of the turtle). They believe these cells then migrate to help form the bottom shell.
I had to get a shot of their spiffy turtle shirts. I mentioned that they might not want their poster data showing up in the picture as I’d want to put it on the internet. But they waved off those concerns saying they weren’t worried about being scooped. OK, there probably isn't a whole lot of competition in this field. Besides, I like to think they’ve taken their Aesop seriously.

Posted by Brendan Maher on July 28, 2008
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I met Scott Gilbert http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/sgilber1/ of Swarthmore College and editor of a definitive text on Developmental Biology. He had told me that before his last invited talk, at a symposium honouring the retirement of his former mentor, most in attendance wondered what turtleshell was all about. The scientists, figuring the title of his talk referred to some wacky Drosophila gene name were surprised to find that Gilbert actually works on turtle shell development. Here he is with colleague Judith Cebra-Thomas at last evening’s poster session.

Gilbert and his colleagues have found that the bones that make up a turtle’s upper and lower shells develop by a bone development program called “intramembranous ossification” much like skull bones. They do their studies in the red eared slider, a common pet-shop favourite. Controversially, they’ve proposed that the shell develops from neural crest cells that migrate out from the neural tube after it closes. They injected a dye into the neural tube of turtle embryos and find them in the carapacial ridge (what will become the top shell of the turtle). They believe these cells then migrate to form the bottom shell.
I had to get a picture of their spiffy turtle shirts. I mentioned that they might not want their poster data showing up in the picture as I’d want to post it here. But they waved off those concerns saying they weren’t worried about their competition scooping them. OK, there probably aren't a whole lot of other turtle shell development labs. Besides, as one might expect, they’ve taken their Aesop seriously.

Posted by Brendan Maher on July 28, 2008
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2 p.m.
Breaking news: India has initiated separate negotiations with China as well as the rest of the world (think: control team).

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 28, 2008
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1:22 p.m.
Lunch has been served (lasagne, ravioli and stuffed chicken courtesy of Wolfgang Puck, the celebrity chef behind the Newseum’s in-house restaurant), and the various country teams are busy working out their negotiating positions. No negotiations have been initiated yet, according to the control team, which handles questions of all sorts and effectively represents the rest of the world in case Brazil, Russia or any other country is invoked.

For the most part things are quiet, but Andrew Jones and Lori Siegel are frantically tweaking an emissions model in response to a technical question from the US team: Assuming that the developing world meets its commitment to reduce emissions intensity by some 20 percent by 2020, what would the United States need to do if it wanted to take a leadership role and begin to drive global emissions down on its own? The question is a big one, given that developing nations have no commitment beyond 2020, and the 80-percent reduction in global emissions in the 2012 agreement is an “aspirational goal” with no legal or regulatory teeth. This would also go a long way toward explaining why the targets aren’t being met.

Jones and Siegel have been working on the problem for 23 minutes so far, and hope to have an answer soon. For his part, Jones is impressed with the question because it focuses on what can be done today as opposed to what needs to be done several decades from now.

“If you are driving from New York to San Francisco, don’t start out talking about where you are going to park in San Francisco,” he says. “Talk about how the hell you are going to get out of Manhattan.”

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 28, 2008
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10:10 a.m.
The war game begins with a short ABC news segment (dated 2015, although ABC crews are also filming the game in real-time for an upcoming documentary) on global warming and the lack of progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Screens throughout the room are awash in images of droughts, floods, fires and riots, an increasingly common response to rising energy and food prices. The United States is reeling from a category 5 hurricane that hit Miami earlier in the year.

“Our time is running out,” says UN Secretary General John Podesta. He calls for cooperation among negotiators from China, the United States, Europe and India. “You are the four biggest emitters. You are also the four largest economies. … You must show the world the path to addressing climate change.”

Negotiators are now receiving a briefing on the latest climate science as well as a state-of-the-world update from UN officials. Headline: environmental refugees could number between 200 million and 1 billion people by 2050.

Next up: Participants break into their respective teams to develop country positions.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 28, 2008
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It took a couple of minutes to get Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, situated squarely in front of the camera. He is now hammering home the idea that the world community needs to plan for the worst, including potential international conflicts that could arise as global warming runs its course. In particular, he says policymakers need to think less about global averages and more about those areas, generally in the developing world, that are most susceptible to climate change.

Pachauri points out that climate change could aggravate the food crisis by stifling agriculture in many of the poorest areas, suggesting that the world may need to “revamp” the entire agricultural research system. Entire island nations might disappear, he says, and the impact in terms of population is likely to be even greater in low-lying countries like Bangladesh.

“All of this clearly is going to cause conflict,” he says. “This is something that we need to take into account.”

Pachauri acknowledged rising concerns about energy prices, which won’t make it any easier for politicians to tax or regulate greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. But he put a hopeful spin on the issue. The public and policymakers are now searching for “deeper meaning” in the energy crisis and global warming, Pachauri says, which is one trend that bodes well for a more comprehensive response.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 28, 2008
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I’ve now got a cup of coffee and have had time to peruse today’s edition of the Climate Game Times, which has a story about the conference and a review of the last major climate agreement (ratified in 2012, you will remember).

According to the Times, UN Secretary General John Podesta (who currently heads the Center for American Progress, which is sponsoring the war game, and formerly served as chief of staff to US President Bill Clinton) plans to push for some kind of “legal recognition” for environmental refugees. Podesta also wants to see additional resources for adaptation and the creation of a new international disaster relief agency.

The Times also reports that “very few signatories” to the 2012 agreement are on track to meet their initial obligations to reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Regardless, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that unless carbon dioxide emissions decline this year, in 2015, “catastrophic climate change could be the result by the end of the century.” In this context, Podesta also plans to push for a new round of deep and immediate emissions cuts.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri is about to speak from India, so I’ll stop here for now.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 28, 2008
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I've just arrived at the Newseum, where one of the first "war games" to tackle the subject of global warming will play out over the two and a half days. About 45 participants from around the world have converged in Washington, D.C., for the exercise, organized by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). It began with cocktails and dinner last night, along with a discussion about global warming policy and the purpose of such “scenario planning” exercises. Take home lesson? The future tends to be a surprising place.

Peter Schwartz, co-founder and chairman of the Global Business Network, discussed how a map showing California as an island persisted for more than a century and a half, and how IBM once projected cumulative home-computer sales at 240,000 units, peaking in 1983. As smart and capable people, Schwartz told his audience, “you are highly susceptible to self-deception.”

Today the participants woke up in the year 2015, and the outlook on global warming is significantly worse than it was just seven years earlier. The international community has negotiated and ratified a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol requiring an 80 percent cut in emissions by mid-century, but it’s already apparent that more needs to be done. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment, released in 2014, suggested that the climate is heating up faster than anticipated. Droughts, heavy rains, floods and other extreme weather events are on the rise. Some 250,000 refugees from Bangladesh are camped out on the border of India, two years after their country was ravaged by a typhoon.

In an effort to avert potential international conflicts, the United Nations Secretary General is calling for increased cooperation regarding resource shortages, disaster relief, climate-induced migration and the reduction of greenhouse gases. Four teams representing China, India, Europe and the United States – each of which has been given basic information about its basic economic and political conditions – are now charged with negotiating a new agreement dealing with both adaptation and greenhouse gas emissions.

CNAS is coming at this issue as a national security think-tank, although it has partnered with several high-profile organizations focused on business, science and environmental policy. Senior fellow Sharon Burke says the idea is to bring the kind of long-term strategic planning regularly conducted by the military to bear on climate change. “Granted it’s just a game, and reality is often different," she says, "but it forces people to test their assumptions.”

Schwartz says the key to a war game, like theatre, is suspension of disbelief. It feels a bit like a grown-up version of Dungeons and Dragons to me, but I'm willing to give it a try. The game begins at 10 a.m. this morning after a talk by IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, via satellite from India. I’ll be posting regular updates on the progress during the next couple of days.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 28, 2008
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Just before a violent downpour at Philadelphia’s UPenn campus, I got to chat with Society for Developmental Biology president Eric Wieschaus of Princeton University. (An aside: His quirky sense of humour set a nice tone at the opening symposium last night. When the powerpoint presentation he was working off of broke down, he admitted “My lab doesn’t let me get too close to machines.” Later clarifying: “I’m allowed near the microscopes, just not the ones with moving parts.”). He told me he didn’t quite have the clarity of thought to offer me any overarching trends in development in general or at the meeting in particular. Indeed having been to a symposium this morning that dealt with a different organism for nearly each speaker (Amphioxus, Arabidopsis, Ascidian, Bat, Cardamine, Lamprey, Mouse, Nematode and Zebrafish, oh my!), it can be hard to pick out trends. Wieschaus was nonetheless chuffed about the quality of the talks, and the locale. Passing on the usual route of using a conference centre meant a smaller meeting for SDB. Costs for attendees may be a bit lower (student housing is available, but I’ve heard some groans about the amenities), but Weischaus says the costs for the Society end up being about the same. Ultimately it was the connection with the University of Pennsylvania community that the organizers wanted to achieve. And I’ll admit the site has quite a bit more character and charm than the sterile Pennsylvania Convention Center. Still it’s strange to have posters split between three different tiny meeting rooms on two different floors. As far as attendance, Weischaus said the site was comparable to Cancun, where the conference was held last year. As I looked to the darkening sky and reminded Weischaus that we were nearly 100 miles from the beach, he pulled back. “Well it’s less than we could fit at San Francisco.” About 750 to 800 are in attendance. I hope the rest managed to stay dryer than I did.

Posted by Brendan Maher on July 27, 2008
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Most have abandoned Haeckel's old chestnut that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, but when two organisms actually appear to have identical embryonic development, how close are the genetic programs that underlie each. In a wide ranging symposium on evolutionary genetics at the Society for Developmental Biology 67th annual meeting, Itai Yanai from Craig Hunter’s lab at Harvard looked at two nematode worms that are practically indistinguishable, the lab workhorse Caenorhabditis elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae from which it diverged some 80 to 100 million years ago. Evolutionarily, that puts them about as distant as humans and mice, but morphologically they’re practically indistinguishable. So, what can Yanai say about how these organisms use those different genes during what he calls the “200 most exciting minutes in the life of the worm”? This is the time in which the worm goes from four cells to 190, and genes are turned on and off in what one would assume is a tightly controlled regulatory regimen program. Yanai constructed microarrays to look at gene expression in the two species of worm. Specifically he looked at expression of genes that are so-called one-to-one orthologs (meaning the genes look a lot alike in both organisms and haven’t been duplicated in either species since they diverged).
There are about 12,000 orthologs, and 3,500 of these gave a good profile. Of these, roughly a quarter of the genes are highly divergent in their expression. To see that much divergence during this crucial developmental period was sort of shocking, but Yanai presents some potential explanations. Shuffling of the genome, for example, could put a gene necessary for development next to one not really needed at the time. So, less necessary genes go along for the ride. It serves as a reminder that gene expression is a very rough tool for extrapolating function. Yanai noted that there’s actually quite a lot of variability in expression for different strains of C. elegans. Someone in the audience asked if that means that there’s considerable flexibility and tolerance for misexpression during development, such that there may be no canonical set of genes required. Yanai answered that to the contrary, such comparative work may help to whittle down to those genes that really are necessary. He plans to continue study in two related species of the frog Xenopus.

Posted by Brendan Maher on July 27, 2008
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The opening symposium for the 67th annual Society of Developmental Biology meeting was held in the Irvine Hall on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. The cavernous auditorium is quite ornate with a massive pipe organ lining the front wall and arresting décor and proportions. Still more arresting was a word several slides into a talk on development and genomics by Joseph Ecker of The Salk Institue. He presented a list of ‘ome words like Proteome (cataloguing proteins), Promoterome (developing lists of DNA promoters), Phenome (cataloguing of phenotypes), Orfeome (catalogue of open reading frames), and more. But several in the hall were mumbling “What the heck is a YFome?” Before moving on to the next slide, Ecker shed some light on the mystery. Since someone invariably accuses him of missing some area of study he said, he added “Your Favourite ‘Ome.”

Posted by Brendan Maher on July 27, 2008
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“Our scientists are working like CSI detectives to combat nuclear terrorism.”
Gabriele Tamborini of the European Commission compares the scientists of Europe’s Joint Research Centre to a popular American television show.

“They come up with an answer in 45 minutes. We take a bit longer.”
Klaus Mayer, also of the JRC, outlines one of the differences between the scientists and their television counterparts.

“The Carbon Slaughterhouse.”
Philip Teller tells the conference what his company BioGasol calls its process for turning plants into fuel.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 21, 2008
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Given that he has been a health minister in the UK, is still in politics and was addressing a science conference you might think that Norman Warner would obviously think scientists and politicians can be partners.

Addressing this question in his keynote speech though, it’s clear that it is not all plain sailing.

“Governments tend to have a slightly bi-polar approach to science. On the one hand they are excited by the possibilities of harnessing science to economic growth, prosperity and life-saving interventions,” he says. “On the other, they would prefer not to have to deal with some of the ethical dilemmas and controversy that often accompany advances in knowledge.”

Scientists, says Warner, have to realise that science is part of our social and political systems. How scientific advances are handled has to be negotiated, and “scientists are often unaware or reluctant to acknowledge that a negotiation is going to have to take place before there is public understanding and acceptance of particular advances”.

Warner’s conclusion is that scientists and politicians can and need to be partners. But from some of the other things in his speech it sounds not so much like the two groups can be partners but that they already are, and need to get better at talking to each other.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 21, 2008
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Alan Leshner, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, spoke today on European and American views of science. There were too many good quotes to pick just one…

“We just whisper the ‘American’ part…”
On AAAS being an international association, despite its name.

“People still respect science and technology. … There is a problem however. They have no idea what science is.”
Explaining why one survey can show people appreciating the benefits coming from science while another can show they think astrology is scientific.

“We’re one of the few countries in the world that didn’t have climate change until three months ago. And now we do.”
On American government science policy.

“I used to have a t-shirt with all of the acronyms used by the NSF [National Science Foundation] and nobody knew what they all meant, including me.”
Regarding science’s love of acronyms.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 20, 2008
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Sir David King knows a thing or two about science policy. For seven years he was chief scientific advisor to the UK government, telling it what it needed to know (and a few things it would probably rather not have known) about everything from climate change to animal diseases.

So it’s worth listening to him when he says that the European Union should have proper independent science advice and a scientific advisor to deliver it.

“There isn’t a pro-active system of scientific advice within the [European] Commission,” he says.

Which is slightly concerning when you consider the annual science budget of the union is measured in millions of Euros.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 19, 2008
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How can you scrutinise a scientific decision that has to remain secret? And if you can’t, how can you be sure the right decision has been taken?

At today’s session on nuclear weapons policy James Acton argued that we should be more open on even such sensitive topics.

Acton, of King’s College London’s War Studies department, has been looking at the UK’s move to build new nuclear submarines rather than refurbishing its existing fleet. Was this the right decision? His rather frustrating conclusion: “it is impossible to judge; we just can’t know”.

“In an open democratic society that is deeply unsatisfactory,” he says. “Governments love to say a decision was taken on the basis of purely technical factors. This becomes deeply problematic when the essential technical details are classified.”

What we need, says Acton, is some kind of peer review for classified decisions. The answer could be a version of the American Jason Group, a set of security cleared but independent experts who can scrutinise and criticise government plans. Another possibility would be setting up version of the American National Academies in countries such as the UK and France.

“If there were people who were influential and were calling for it it could happen,” says Acton.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 19, 2008
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“The main decision is for a government to be extremely careful and respectful with the beliefs of the people; but at the same time making laws that help everyone.”
Bernat Soria, Spain’s national health minister, on creating legislation for stem cell research in religious countries.

“I don’t mind that the US has closed itself off to innovative scientists because I hope they’ll come to the UK instead.”
Sir Richard Mottram sees the positives in the American clampdown on overseas researchers (more on this topic).

“You can be part of government and have an independent mind.”
Bruno Tertrais, of Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique France, tackles the question of whether governments can get independent advice internally.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 19, 2008
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Science can be a great help for those fighting terrorism but there’s an unpleasant flipside to this, Sir Richard Mottram told ESOF this morning.

“There’s the awkward fact that lots of terrorists are scientists, engineers or doctors,” says Mottram, a former secretary of intelligence in the UK. “… You can’t have an open society and open science in the traditional way without running some very significant risks.”

In his keynote speech on science and terrorism he also claimed that some of the scientific advances in the fight against terrorism, such as biometrics and exploiting new surveillance techniques, could eventually “have significant impact on the character of the free society we are seeking to sustain against the efforts of terrorists to undermine it”.

I grabbed a few moments with him…

How can science contribute to the fight against terrorism?

It can contribute particularly in relation to social sciences and thinking about what drives radicalisation. It can contribute then in very clear ways to our intelligence effort, police efforts, forensic support for criminal justice systems, new advanced ways of getting inside terrorist networks and bringing the people concerned to justice and blocking their attacks. That’s the way forward; thinking about how we can make our society more resilient and helping to design in resilience to our society. These are really valuable ways science can work.

Do we have to accept more limits on scientific freedom now than we have in the past, because of the threat of terrorism?

I think we do. Particularly in relation to the biological sciences, because it’s not difficult to conceive of ways in which developments in the biological sciences could be exploited by small numbers of people in ways which created very significant dangers. So we have to think of ways of governing that risk which still enable us to achieve scientific progress; particularly because scientific progress in that area is so important in the fight against disease.

This is a very difficult balance which we’re going to have to try and find.

Is the balance in right place at the moment?

I think it probably is. This isn’t a risk I personally lie awake at night worrying about. But I do think that going forward, because of the pace of scientific change it’s something that will increasingly become an issue.

So what risk is it that keeps you awake at night?

If I was worried about risks in that area in the UK I would worry more about the risk of a flu pandemic. A flu pandemic … could lead to say 400,000 excess deaths, that’s a high consequence risk which is of high probability.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 19, 2008
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Those looking at the logo of this year’s meeting might have noticed a rather large island missing from its stylised outline of Europe.

Today Patrick Cunningham, the Irish Government’s chief scientific adviser, is speaking at the conference. We shall see if he has any comment on the matter.

Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into a row of the size that occurred when the European Union left Wales off a map in 2004.

UPDATE

Dublin is actually bidding to host the 2012 forum. As you can see on this website the bid team have had to redraw the ESOF logo in order to mark their city on it. This appears to have had the consequence of dragging Canada onto the map

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 19, 2008
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In 2005 the European Commission produced a researchers’ charter. This voluntary code* is supposed to set out researchers’ rights and responsibilities.

Since that time there have been about 100 signatories covering 900-odd institutions and the Commission is keen to raise awareness of the document.

But a rather strange fact emerged at a conference session on the topic today: some people are working under the code without even knowing about it. “Even the institutions that have undertaken the code, some have not undertaken awareness raising internally,” said Massimo Serpieri, of the Commission’s Directorate-General Research.

This did not impress Jean Patrick Connerade, former president of Euroscience and a man not afraid to cross swords with powerful people.

“We’ve got to be careful,” he says. “There could be a tendency for institutions to sign up for it because it sounds great and then to put this thing away in cupboards and hide it from their personnel.”

So to our researcher readers: is your institution on this list? And have you ever heard of the code?

*officially called: a Code of Conduct for the recruitment of researchers and a European Charter for Researchers.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 18, 2008
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“This population explosion will present a series of interconnected challenges that are qualitatively different from those facing humanity at the start of the 20th century – ranging from food and energy security to increased terrorism and the impacts of climate change.”
David King, former head of the UK’s Government Office of Science, explains why population growth is one of the subjects of his keynote lecture on the environmental challenges of the 21st century

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 18, 2008
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Today in Barcelona the Euroscience Open Forum 2008 kicks off, with the auspicious slogan ‘Science for a Better Life’. Probably the largest interdisciplinary science conference in Europe, ESOF (generally pronounced eee-soff) has an array of talks covering everything from science in policy to science in art.

This is the place to be if you want to hear Nobel Laureates in Chemistry discuss poetry, argue over whether links between academia and industry are evil, and find out the answer to the question ‘are science journalists vulnerable to intellectual and moral corruption?’ That’s just me opening the programme at random in three different places; but I hope to know more about all three topics by the time the conference ends on Tuesday.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 18, 2008
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