Guest Post from Associate Editor of Nature Climate Change Bronwyn Wake.
Nature Climate Change and Nature Geoscience are joining forces to bring you another NPG journal club. The focus of the discussion will be the recent slowdown in global warming, which will address the physical aspects of climate science and its communication by scientists and the media. In their March issues, the journals have published a collection of articles, original research and opinion pieces.
Rising ocean acidity threatens reefs like this stony coral in Micronesia.{credit}NOAA Photo Library{/credit}
Scientists who study ocean acidification must confront a fundamental problem: it is hard to measure exactly by how much the ocean’s pH is changing. Today’s sensors don’t work well at depth or over long periods of time, and they are too expensive to deploy widely. That is where the US$2-million Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health X Prize comes in.
The 22-month competition will award two $1-million prizes, one to the best low-cost sensor and one to the most accurate. The competition’s organizers decided to award two prizes because the two goals present different engineering challenges. Registration opens on 1 January 2014.
As carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere, ocean water takes up some of the gas and becomes more acidic. This can harm shell-building marine life such as coral, whose calcium carbonate skeletons dissolve in the increasingly acidic water. All of this research is bedeviled by the simple lack of technology to monitor ocean pH in real time across the world.
“I’m so excited for the potential of this prize because then we will have real understanding,” said Jane Lubchenco, former administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in an announcement broadcast today on Huffington Post Live.
This is the second collaboration between the X Prize Foundation of California and Wendy Schmidt, who co-founded the Schmidt Ocean Institute with her husband Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman. In 2011, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge awarded $1.4 million to projects cleaning up oil spills.
As Nature reported in March, Schmidt and her institute — which launched the private research ship Falkor — are stepping in to replace dwindling public research funds. The X Prize is also meant to attract entrepreneurs and tinkerers who may be outside the traditional science research complex.
The X Prize Foundation’s best known competitions have involved space, such as the Ansari X Prize competition to design commercial spacecraft and the Google Lunar X Prize to explore the Moon. The group had to cancel its genome-sequencing competition earlier this year after receiving only two entries. Critics said the sequencing industry was competitive enough that an X prize didn’t provide much extra incentive.
Our freelance writer Biplab Das dug out an interesting research paper from Geophysical Research Letters this week. Though the authors are from Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois; NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York; they have been working on the contribution of aerosols to climate change in India and China.
It is worth pointing out here that there has been very little study of the contribution of aerosol emissions from India and China to radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is the process through which about 30 per cent of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface is reflected back into space as invisible infrared light. Aerosols generated by human activities reflect infrared light generated by reflected sunlight, thereby trapping it in the atmosphere. This alters radiative forcing, resulting in climate change. Recent studies have identified aerosol emission, particularly black carbon emission from industrializing countries like India and China, as emission control targets for mitigating climate change.
Coal burning is one of the key contributors to aerosol emissions.{credit}Joerg Boethling / Alamy{/credit}
So the researchers have found that these small airborne particles called aerosols (for example, black carbon particles in diesel exhaust and sulfate particles produced by coal burning) in India and China may indirectly contribute to climate change. Higher black carbon levels in the atmosphere lead to warming, whereas increased sulfate levels cause cooling.
To find out the situation in India and China, the researchers examined emissions from the most important aerosol sources in the two neighbouring countries and estimated the net radiative forcing from each source, both locally and globally. In this analysis, they used models developed by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Major emission sources of black carbon are diesel truck and bus exhaust and residential biofuel and fossil-fuel combustion. For organic carbon, residential biofuel and fossil-fuel combustion are important sources. The study found that fossil-fuel combustion in the power sector accounts for 52.3 per cent of sulphur dioxide emission in India.
The researchers reveal that residential biofuel combustion in both India and China gave rise to significant positive direct radiative forcing through black carbon emission. They say that aerosol emission from diesel trucks and buses also makes a positive contribution to radiative forcing in India.
References
1. Streets, D. G. et al. Radiative forcing due to major aerosol emitting sectors in China and India. Geophys. Res. Lett. (2013) doi: 10.1002/grl.50805
{credit}photodisc/imagesource{/credit}
The programme will start in 2013 and envisages using natural resources in a more sustainable, efficient way to protect the environment. According to a release by the organisations, the programme will try to do this by enhancing the knowledge base on Himalayan ecosystems and ecosystem services, raising awareness on the effects of environmental degradation, climate change and adaptation; strengthening collaborative action research in the region. It will also build capacity in higher education and train institutions and civil society across the region to scale up best practice for improved resilience to climate change.
At a recent meet of climate change communicators in Kathmandu, a documentary film called ‘A Degree of Concern’ by Syed Fayaz got the attendees talking animatedly. The film made in the last decade, projected a scenario in a distant future when one degree rise in temperature would play havoc with the glaciers, make agriculture unsustainable and, in short, impact every aspect of our life. It ended with an ominous and alarming warning: “Just one degree”. Though cinema-wise sound, the foremost criticism for the film was its poor scientific assumption — it relied on a baseline data of just three years, in which the temperatures in the freeze zones of upper Himalayas was found to be fluctuating increasing by two degrees every year. That was the basic flaw — a poor baseline.
N H Ravindranath{credit}IISc{/credit}
Today, a media report quoting an upcoming paper in the Indian science journal Current Science says the temperature rise scenario isn’t far away. It is just around the corner — by 2030 — and the predicted rise in temperature, primarily due to green house gas emissions, is not one degree but somewhere between 1.7 to 2 degrees! Now that comes as a real alarm. The scientists, including lead author R K Chaturvedi say they have arrived at the conclusion through an average of 18 climate models with a smaller margin of error. This kind of rise will actually be quite severe — N H Ravindranath, a professor at the Centre for Sustainable Technologies and Centre for Ecological Science at IISc and co-author is quoted as saying.
Such temperature rise will make Northern India unbearably hot — as of now the heat wave in peak summers kills many and pushes groundwater levels further down. In northeast India, Arunachal Pradesh will be the worst hit, according to the report.
S K Dash, head of the department of Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at IIT Delhi, quoted in the same report, has been studying regional temperature rises for a long time now. He said in a phone chat that there are a number of open source models predicting temperature rise scenarios across the world and it is possible to collate them and arrive at a figure. He is, however, willing to wait till the scientific paper is out to make a comment one way or the other on the veracity of these findings.
On its own, IIT Delhi is currently undertaking what it calls regional climate modelling (RegCM) to be able to project a future scenario till 2100. “We have studied the temperature rise scene up to the year 2003 and found that in the 100 years preceding it, the rise has been about 1.2 degrees,” he said.
Dash is cautious in making any further remark — and he makes the right scientific query: what is the baseline for this new study? Since when has the data been measured?
Like him, we shall wait for the Current Science paper. It would be interesting to see the climate models used for this study.
Climate change seems to be our favourite punch bag, whatever the calamity — droughts, failed monsoons, floods or cyclones. How much science goes into deciding which of these natural phenomena are an offshoot of the global climate change phenomenon? Is climate change reporting as robust (or weak?) as the scientific evidence to back accentuated glacial melts or sea level rise?
The workshop
A regional meet of climate change communicators from the SAARC nations currently underway in Kathmandu, Nepal (August 24-30, 2012) is seeking to look at all that is good with our reportage and all that we need to improve. It would look and feel like any of the umpteen such well meaning ‘workshops’ which fail to make much headway but for the presence of some real ‘experts’ who have toiled it out on the ground. From Nepalese journalists who have trekked the Hindukush range to Sri Lankan scribes who have shrugged off the ‘small island nation’ tag to influence policy across south Asia; spirited Editors of newspapers, magazines and television channels from SAARC countries to radio reporters whose voices reach the farthest corners of our villages — the mix at the meet organised by PANOS is eclectic and therefore works.
The basic premise of their coming together is to corroborate what we know all along but need occasional nudging to recall — that the rules of science and the rules of journalism are actually the same: to question, to inquire and to investigate.
The rigour of the week-long workshop and its academic nature notwithstanding, the stand-out feature has been the brilliant anecdotal asides that each session throws up, which the editor of a Bhutanese daily described as media’s ‘dazzle’ stories on climate change.
For instance, shepherds in the Hindukush Himalayas are actually happy with the tiny lakes being formed from glacial melts — it means fresh water and more pastures for their sheep. Women in some Indian villages have been rendered unmarriagable because of the water scarcity in the region (who wants water-stingy in-laws?) . No cars can ply on the roads of Bhutan on Tuesdays, even if you are dying and need to be rushed to a hospital — an example of an extreme step taken by the government to keep the effects of climate change at bay. While wildlife activists in Colombo might be fighting hard to protect their cultural emblem — the elephant –, villagers facing the wrath of the pachyderms want the beasts to die. They just won’t cast their votes unless the government ensures electric fencing around villages to keep wild elephants away.
Climate change communicators from across South Asia are attending the workshop.
These lesser known stories and many more such have thrown open another debate on the sharp urban-rural perception divide on issues such as environment, wildlife and climate change. While we were busy framing protocols and worrying about wording them correctly, people most affected by climate change were sitting in faraway foothills and forests oblivious of the threat posed by the burning global issue.
That said, all victims certainly are not ignorant or unperturbed. A number of cases of indigenous knowledge in action also got into the anecdotes lore of the workshop. Like the heart-warming story of 75-year-old civil engineer Chewang Norphel who is building artificial glaciers in the driest villages of Ladakh for perennial water supply. Or the Lahore man who lives in a quiet ‘green’ house in a neighbourhood hopelessly drowned in the whir of generators.
The media’s coverage of climate change came in for scrutiny as data from University of Colorado was pulled out to show peaks in the graph only during significant annual events such as the Copenhagen climate change conference of 2009 or the Cancun or Durban conferences. The graph also peaked when there was a natural calamity — a drought, a flood, a cyclone — presumably linked to climate change. This, the workshop felt, needs to be changed with more regular policy features, success stories and informed opinion. The media’s role to warn policy makers and imminent victims in the run up to a natural disaster through science-backed reportage was also discussed at length.
And since I must end with a smiley, here it is. They are hunting like crazy for the unique half-plant-half-insect Cordyceps sinesis in the highlands of Bhutan, Nepal and India. It sells for a couple of lakhs of rupees a kilogram for its aphrodisiac virtues. As we know, Bhutan measures its progress with the Gross National Happiness (GNP) index (into which an environment component is built in, by the way). I’m sure there are a lot of happy people in the beautiful ‘60% forests country’ right now!
Climate change has affected farmers in so many ways, it’s difficult to count on your finger tips. The popular view on climate change altering crop patterns, skewing yields and changing regional economies has triggered the interest of most livelihood researchers over the last decade.
Technology will play a key role in ensuring food security.{credit}Photodisc/ImageSource{/credit}
In India, a new grant was announced this week to improve livelihoods and food security of farmers in three states — Punjab, Gujarat and either Bihar or Jharkhand. These states have a significant stake in India’s overall food security. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will award a $1.7 million grant to the Centers for International Projects Trust (CIPT).
The Trust will implement what is being called the ‘Water-Agriculture-Livelihood Security in India’ programme. The grant will be used towards public and private sector collaborations and will look at innovations that ensure better agricultural practices.
The programme will support local farmers set up innovative and integrated water and energy saving technologies and practices thereby trying to ensure better yields and incomes for farmers. It will look at introducing best practices in groundwater management, improving water and energy policies.
Partners in this programme include state governments, agricultural universities and research institutes, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, Columbia University in the US, and agri-businesses.
The key to the success of such programmes will be empowering farmers with technology. As father of India’s Green Revolution M. S. Swaminathan argues in this article in Nature India: “This impending food crisis can be solved to some extent if we can turn the small and marginal farmers, now eligible for institutional credit, to science and technology based farming methods.”
Hope programmes such as these fall back on technology to create sustainable models that last a while and not end with a couple of yields.
To tie in with the latest Nature Outlook, Lenses on Biology, the Nature Communities team asked five biological scientists at different stages of their education or careers to tell their personal stories in a guest blog post. Each scientist studies, works or has an interest in one of the five research fields featured in Lenses on Biology ― cancer, stem cells, synthetic biology, ocean health and climate change ― and they share what motivates them in their chosen subject. You can read their stories below, and discuss your own motivations here or on the posts in question.
Jerome Ravetz wrote Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971, 1996) and (with Silvio Funtowicz) Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy (1990). They created the NUSAP notational system and the theory of Post-Normal Science. He is currently associated with the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford University.Our modern scientific view of knowledge was defined by a throwaway line in Descartes’ Discourse on Method. Referring to his dissatisfaction with his education at school, he claimed,
“I was convinced I had advanced no further in all my attempts at learning, than the discovery at every turn of my own ignorance”.
He was careful to say that his school was not to blame, although a little later he did a brilliant assassination job on the whole humanistic curriculum. Readers now might not notice the irony in Descartes’ complaint. It was not merely another case of late-adolescent angst. For in the mention of the discovery of ignorance, his educated readers would have recognised an echo of Socrates. This founder of philosophy was remembered as saying that his whole life’s work was the discovery of his ignorance. By the criteria of Socrates and all who followed, the education of the young Descartes had been a great success: so early in life he had succeeded in discovering his ignorance! With both Descartes and his readers knowing this background, they would recognise his complaint as the casual discarding a couple of millennia of moral philosophy. “Know thyself” was out, “Discover truth” was in.
This point is not of merely scholarly historical interest. The Scientific Revolution produced a variety of accounts of scientific knowledge, differing in their balance of reason and experience, and also in the strength of their claims to certainty. But they all agreed in their tacit elimination of ignorance from their pictures of the acquisition of knowledge. Of course, publicists for science recognise ignorance, but mainly as something out there to be conquered by the advance of science. When scientists have undergone a lengthy and rigorous training in which they learn that for every real problem there always one (and only one) correct answer, there is little danger of them sharing Descartes’ school-leaver’s predicament.
The relevance of this issue today is, to what extent should we incorporate ignorance, as distinct from tameable uncertainty, into our reasonings about science and science policy? I would argue that the suppression of ignorance in our debates, perhaps even its repression in our thinking, seriously impedes our management of our scientific affairs.
There is evidence that, particularly in climate science, ignorance is something of a taboo idea, even when it might seem to be most relevant. I have two illustrative examples from the climate science area. The first relates to a proposed scale of uncertainty, designed by James Risbey and Milind Kandlikar [1], and adopted by the IPCC [2]. This has the merit of providing a single robust scale of degrees of uncertainty, based on the notations for expressing it in numerical form. It could be of great use in resolving the confusing variety of schemes that are employed in the various special fields that contribute to climate science. The scale includes five degrees of increasing uncertainty, concluding with a sixth category for ignorance. The authors were pleased to see the scale adopted by the IPCC, but then surprised to see that the category for ignorance had been deleted in the IPCC version [3].
Another example provides even stronger evidence of a consistent attitude. Two authors who are eminent in their own fields, Sir Nicholas Stern and Leonard Smith, recently published a paper on the characterisation of uncertainty in climate science [4]. The paper is truly magisterial, bringing deep analytical clarity to this very confused subject. But, again surprisingly, a search for ‘ignorance’ in the text produces only three citations, and two of those are incidental (p. 16 twice). The only substantive reference relates ‘ignorance’, rather ‘recognised ignorance’, back to ‘ambiguity’ or ‘Knightian uncertainty’ (p.4). It would seem that ignorance, in its own right as a qualitatively deeper sort of uncertainty, is not relevant here. The absence must be deliberate, for the whole essay can be read as a detailed warning of the many pitfalls of mismanagement of uncertainty, along with the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ in relation to models. Indeed , it can be read as a Socratic exercise in all but name and vocabulary.
Particularly for that reason, I confess that I cannot agree with the absence of ignorance. Suppose that a senior planner, responsible for the long-range defences of the Thames Estuary, approaches experts for an estimate of the sea-level rise to the end of the century. It would be technically correct to say, “It will probably be somewhere between one and four metres, but where inbetween is a matter of ambiguity”. The planner might prefer to be told simply, “`I don’t know,” with a review of the reasons for speculating on the likelihood of one range of values over another.
It is not as if ignorance were totally banned from policy-relevant science. In medicine, for example, we know that we don’t know the causes of some important diseases, as indeed we are aware of our ignorance of the course of future epidemics. The sciences do not lose public prestige because of their frankness about their deep limitations in relation to some urgent issues. Rather, they gain trust because of their honesty with their publics.
We can see the explicit recognition of ignorance as part of the programme of a ‘technology of humility’ proposed by Sheila Jasanoff of Harvard University [5]. It would fit particularly well with climate science, since this is after all a part of a great humanitarian project rather than a quest for profit, power or privilege. The message of Socrates, rejected with such ultimately devastating effect by Descartes, could inform such a science and provide it with an enriching humane element.
References
[1] Risbey, J. & M. Kandlikar, 2007: Expressions of likelihood and confidence in the IPCC uncertainty assessment process. Climatic Change, 85 (1-2), 19-31.
[2] Mastrandrea, M., C. Field, T. Stocker, O. Edenhofer, K. Ebi, D. Frame, H. Held, E. Kriegler, K. Mach, G. Plattner, G. Yohe, and F. Zwiers 2010: Guidance notes for lead authors of the IPCC fifth assessment report on consistent treatment of uncertainties, Available at https://www.ipcc.ch
[3] Risbey, J. and T. O’Kane 2011: Sources of knowledge and ignorance in climate research: Climatic Change, 108 /4, 755-773,
[4] Leonard Smith and Nicholas Stern 2011, Uncertainty in science and its role in science policy, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369, 1–24.
[5] Sheila Jasanoff 2003, Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science, Minerva 41: 223–244.
Richard Betts is Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre and a visiting Professor at the Universityof Exeter. He was a lead author on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report with Working Group 1 (Physical Science Basis) responsible for the assessment of radiative forcing due to land cover change. For the Fifth Assessment Report he is a lead author, assessing impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. Richard was also a lead author on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He is a regular contributor to climate blogs such as https://bishophill.squarespace.com/ and https://judithcurry.com/ and can be found on Twitter as @richardabetts
Richard Feynman used to bemoan the fact that much of the communication of science was focussed on whether a particular discovery provided a cure for cancer. An analogous situation seems to apply to communication of climate science – the message often seems to be about whether a new piece of work has shown anthropogenic climate change to be either a greater or lesser problem than previously thought, and hence whether cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are even more urgent or completely unnecessary.
But climate science is not a single-issue subject. It is not carried out solely to see whether cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed or not. A further and increasingly important issue is to understand the changes and variability we are seeing in order to help us live with the ever-changing weather and climate. Also, of course, it is important simply to increase the sum total of human understanding simply as an end in itself. Like art and music, gaining deeper insights into how the world around us actually works can enrich our lives and bring enjoyment.
Unfortunately, these other aspects of climate science are rarely seen outside of the scientific community, giving a skewed impression of the science. Public discussion of the science mostly focuses on the implications for policy, and also increasingly on attacking or defending the integrity of the science rather than on its intellectual content. A very large proportion of the commentary on climate science is not actually from working scientists, it is from others who have a political rather than scientific interest. When scientists are involved, they are often discussing it within the usual policy context. It seems that in an increasingly polarised debate on climate policy, science can get sucked in and used as a political football.
In any policy debate, opponents of a policy will naturally seek to question and challenge the evidence base underpinning the need for the policy. They may perceive or claim the evidence to be unreliable or even biased. Promoters of the policy will naturally be defensive of the evidence base. This is all expected behaviour in the policy world.
The difficulty comes when those responsible for gathering the evidence feel under attack and respond in a defensive manner themselves. If they perceive themselves as opponents of those challenging the evidence whilst being allies of those defending the evidence, and start behaving accordingly, this only reinforces the perception of bias from the opponents, and positive feedback sets in. This appears to have happened with climate science in the context of mitigation policy. The scientific aspects of the wider climate debate have become increasingly focussed on one end of the policy debate or the other. It is much less common to see discussion of the implications of the science for other questions such as adaptation planning, and even rarer to see public discussion of climate science merely for intellectual interest. Climate scientists have consequently become perceived as being part of the debate on a single policy issue, rather than as just scientists seeking to advance knowledge.
This leads to the risk of loss of trust in scientists as objective advisors. If climate science communication remains focussed on a single policy issue then of course the science can be perceived or presented as being part of the policy and not merely informing it. Despite repeated protestations that the science is objective, the constant framing of it within a narrow policy discussion does nothing to back this up.
What to do about this? I think the only solution is to talk about the science as science, in the context of all its implications and also for its own academic interest – and talk about it to everyone irrespective of their position in the policy debate. This includes talking with sceptics, and not in defensive mode but as scientists willing to talk around the issue. It used to be the received wisdom that climate scientists should not engage with “sceptics” beause, it was said, it only wasted time and gave credibility to arguments that had already been countered many times before. In my view this is no longer a helpful strategy, if it ever was. Counter-arguments to criticism are given from a distance, but without direct engagement they may be ignored, and without a proper conversation it is often hard to get the real heart of the issue and address the real nature of the disagreement. Also, while arguing from a distance may address some of the scientific issues, it is hard to clarify misconceptions of motivation. If “sceptics” believe scientists to be motivated by political agendas or simply protecting their jobs, and scientists believe sceptics to be “anti-science” or promoted or even funded by vested interests, each side merely claiming otherwise is unlikely to make a difference. Proper discussion is required if true motivations are to be understood.
Of course this needs to happen in a wide variety of communications arenas, but social media offers great opportunities for such engagement. A large number of blogs cover climate change issues, but with one or two exceptions these cover scientific discussions with little direct engagement from critics, or feature discussions amongst groups of largely like-minded individuals who merely reinforce each others views. There are signs that this is starting to change, for example with some scientists engaging with sceptic blogs, and while discussions can often be robust they can be constructive if participants take care to remain civil. Twitter, with its completely open and unmoderated format and easy facilities for tracking and searching topics, increasingly features discussions from across the traditional divide. However, there is still room for much greater engagement outside of traditional interest groups.
Importantly, such discussions need to move on from being anchored in the usual one-dimensional policy debate. Scientists need to be willing to discuss uncertainties, controversies and technical challenges (ie: the interesting bits!) rather than just feeling they need to defend themselves against attack. Only by scientists being clearly seen to operate as scientists will trust be maintained – and this means being seen to explore the issues, challenge each other and not worry about how this will be seen or presented in the mitigation policy debate.
As Feyman said, ““Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.” Focussing only on the nearly sure may suit the policy debate but it doesn’t help advance the science or engage others in it. Let’s talk about it all, with everybody.