How Can We Address Indoor Air Pollution?

Source: DoNow Science

Tags: cookstove, Delta-Mendota Canal, Do Now, featured, full-image, indoor air pollution





from QUEST http://ift.tt/1Dydkw7

Source: DoNow Science

Tags: cookstove, Delta-Mendota Canal, Do Now, featured, full-image, indoor air pollution





from QUEST http://ift.tt/1Dydkw7

Canada’s new Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications [Confessions of a Science Librarian]

Finally, the Canadian government’s Tri-Agency funding councils (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) have released the consolidated final version of it’s open access policy. The draft version came out some time ago. The consultation process garnered quite a few responses, which the Tri-Agencies were kind enough to summarize for us.

And finally it is here. I have to admit I was getting a bit concerned. The final version was rumoured to have been kicking around the various departments waiting for final sign-off for months. With the rumours of the Conservatives possibly dropping the writ and calling a spring election I was concerned that the policy would just fall off everyone’s radar and then a new government would just restart at least part of the process.

The press release is here. The FAQ is here as well as a toolbox of resources.

Here’s the official text of the policy:

Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications

1. Preamble

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (“the Agencies”) are federal granting agencies that promote and support research, research training and innovation within Canada. As publicly funded organizations, the Agencies have a fundamental interest in promoting the availability of findings that result from the research they fund, including research publications and data, to the widest possible audience, and at the earliest possible opportunity. Societal advancement is made possible through widespread and barrier-free access to cutting-edge research and knowledge, enabling researchers, scholars, clinicians, policymakers, private sector and not-for-profit organizations and the public to use and build on this knowledge.

Information and communications technology, and in particular the advent of the internet, has transformed the way that science and scholarly research is conducted and communicated. Indicative of this changing landscape has been the steady growth in open access publishing and archiving, which facilitates widespread dissemination of research results. Open access enables researchers to make their publications freely available to the domestic and international research community and to the public at large, thereby enhancing the use, application and impact of research results.

Momentum for open access has been growing as numerous funding agencies and institutions worldwide implement open access policies. The Agencies strongly support open access to research results which promotes the principle of knowledge sharing and mobilization – an essential objective of academia. As research and scholarship become increasingly multi-disciplinary and collaborative, both domestically and internationally, the Agencies are working to facilitate research partnerships by harmonizing domestic policies and aligning with the global movement to open access.

The following principles guide the Agencies in their approach to promoting open access to research publications:

1. Committing to academic freedom, and the right to publish;


2. Recognizing the critical importance of peer review to the scholarly communication ecosystem;


3. Maintaining the high standards and quality of research by committing to academic openness and responsible conduct of research;


4. Promoting recognized research best practices and standards across disciplines, and embracing and sharing emerging practices and standards;


5. Advancing academic research, science and innovation;


6. Effective dissemination of research results; and


7. Aligning activities and policies between Canadian and international research funding agencies.

2. Policy Objective

The objective of this policy is to improve access to the results of Agency-funded research, and to increase the dissemination and exchange of research results. All researchers, regardless of funding support, are encouraged to adhere to this policy.

3. Policy Statement

3.1 Peer-reviewed Journal Publications

Grant recipients are required to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Agency-supported research are freely accessible within 12 months of publication. Recipients can do this through one of the following routes:

a. Online Repositories

Grant recipients can deposit their final, peer-reviewed manuscript into an institutional or disciplinary repository that will make the manuscript freely accessible within 12 months of publication. It is the responsibility of the grant recipient to determine which publishers allow authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies.

b. Journals

Grant recipients can publish in a journal that offers immediate open access or that offers open access on its website within 12 months. Some journals require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) to make manuscripts freely available upon publication. The cost of publishing in open access journals is an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.

These routes to open access are not mutually exclusive. Researchers are strongly encouraged to deposit a copy of the final, peer-reviewed manuscript into an accessible online repository immediately upon publication, even if the article is freely available on the journal’s website.

Grant recipients must acknowledge Agency contributions in all peer-reviewed publications, quoting the funding reference number (e.g. FRN, Application ID).

3.2 Publication-related Research Data

CIHR only

Recipients of CIHR funding are required to adhere with the following responsibilities:

1. Deposit bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data into the appropriate public database (e.g. gene sequences deposited in GenBank) immediately upon publication of research results. Please refer to the Annex for examples of research outputs and the corresponding publicly accessible repository or database.


2. Retain original data sets for a minimum of five years after the end of the grant (or longer if other policies apply).This applies to all data, whether published or not. The grant recipient’s institution and research ethics board may have additional policies and practices regarding the preservation, retention, and protection of research data that must be respected.

4. Implementation Date

CIHR

For research funded in whole or in part by CIHR, this policy applies to all grants awarded January 1, 2008 and onward. While not required, researchers holding grants that were awarded prior to January 1, 2008 are encouraged to adhere to the requirements of this policy.

NSERC and SSHRC

For research funded in whole or in part by NSERC or SSHRC, this policy applies to all grants awarded May 1, 2015 and onward. While not required, researchers holding grants that were awarded prior to May 1, 2015 are encouraged to adhere to the requirements of this policy.

5. Compliance with the Policy

Grant recipients are reminded that by accepting Agency funds they have accepted the terms and conditions of the grant or award as set out in the Agencies’ policies and guidelines. In the event of an alleged breach of Agency policy, the Agency may take steps outlined in accordance with the Tri-Agency Framework: Responsible Conduct of Research to deal with the allegation. For research funded by the Agencies, the Institution shall enable researchers to comply with the Tri-Agency Open Access Publication Policy, as amended from time to time.

6. Policy Review
The Agencies will review and adapt this policy as appropriate.

7. Additional Information
A) Various resources to assist researchers in complying with this policy can be found in the Toolbox.

B) Further information regarding how to comply with the open access policy can be found in the Frequently Asked Questions.

How do I feel about the final version? Overall, happy to finally have a policy in hand that will move forward and get the research funded by the government of Canada out there and available to the public. Frankly, it is a bit disappointing to have waited so long for a final policy that is so close to the original draft. What could have possibly taken so long?

As such, my comments on the original very closely mirror my comments on this version. I’m disappointed that the Feds didn’t invest any kind of effort of new money into a process to ease the transition to open access or to bring stakeholders together. I’m disappointed that they aren’t topping up grants or making dedicated funds to pay for at least a little bit of publication charges. I’m disappointed that they didn’t extend data requirements beyond CIHR. I’m disappointed that the policy only applies to journal articles and not other funded research outputs. Twelve months is too long, it should be six months until materials need to be made open.

But at the end of the day, those are quibbles. We have a policy. Let’s get down to business.

Heather Morrison has some commentary here.

Back in June 2013 I did a post on open access resources in Canada. That post definitely needs updating!

And speaking of resources, Walt Crawford has done an amazing job of chronicling and analyzing open access and the open access movement in his online zine, Cites & Insights, especially over the last year or so with his coverage of “predatory” journals, the costs of open access and the Science journal “sting.” He’s kindly gathered together links to all those issues on one master post.

I’m copying those links here. Thanks, Walt!

• December 2012 v. 12 no. 12 – 38 pages [Single-column Edition – 73 pages]: Policy: The Rapid Route of RWA (pp. 1-25), and Libraries: Walking Away: Courage and Acquisitions (pp. 25-38).


• January 2013 v. 13 no. 1 – 40 pages [Single-Column Edition – 77 pages]: Intersections: Catching Up with Open Access (pp. 25-38)


• February 2013 v. 13 no. 2 – 40 pages [Single-Column Edition – 75 pages]: Intersections: Catching Up with Open Access 2 (pp. 3-40)


• June 2013 v. 13 no. 6 – 42 pages [Single-Column Edition – 81 pages]: Intersections: Hot Times for Open Access (pp. 1-42)


• April 2014 v. 14 no. 4 – 22 pages [Single-Column Edition – 41 pages]: Intersections: Ethics and Access 1: The Sad Case of Jeffrey Beall (pp. 1-14)


• May 2014 v. 14 no. 5 – 34 pages [Single-Column Edition – 65 pages]: Intersections: Ethics and Access 2: The So-Called Sting (pp. 1-20)


• July 2014 v. 14 no. 7 – 24 pages [Single-Column Edition – 45 pages]: Intersections: Journals, “Journals” and Wannabes: Investigating the List (pp. 1-24)


• October/November 2014 v. 14 no. 10 – 24 pages [Single-Column Edition – 49 pages]: Intersections: Journals and “Journals”: Taking a Deeper Look (pp. 1-24)


• December 2014 v. 14 no. 11 – 34 pages [Single-Column Edition – 77 pages]: Intersections: Journals and “Journals”: Taking a Deeper Look: Part 2: DOAJ Subset and Additional Notes (pp. 1-34)


• January 2015 v. 15 no. 1 – 28 pages [Single-Column Edition – 57 pages]: Intersections: The Third Half (pp. 1-21)


• March 2015 v. 15 no. 3 – 24 pages [Single-Column Edition – 46 pages]: Intersections: One More Chunk of DOAJ (pp. 1-10)


• April 2015 v. 15 no. 4 – 38 pages [Single-Column Edition – 72 pages]: Intersections: The Economics of Open Access (pp. 1-38)

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1DxvPRt

Finally, the Canadian government’s Tri-Agency funding councils (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) have released the consolidated final version of it’s open access policy. The draft version came out some time ago. The consultation process garnered quite a few responses, which the Tri-Agencies were kind enough to summarize for us.

And finally it is here. I have to admit I was getting a bit concerned. The final version was rumoured to have been kicking around the various departments waiting for final sign-off for months. With the rumours of the Conservatives possibly dropping the writ and calling a spring election I was concerned that the policy would just fall off everyone’s radar and then a new government would just restart at least part of the process.

The press release is here. The FAQ is here as well as a toolbox of resources.

Here’s the official text of the policy:

Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications

1. Preamble

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (“the Agencies”) are federal granting agencies that promote and support research, research training and innovation within Canada. As publicly funded organizations, the Agencies have a fundamental interest in promoting the availability of findings that result from the research they fund, including research publications and data, to the widest possible audience, and at the earliest possible opportunity. Societal advancement is made possible through widespread and barrier-free access to cutting-edge research and knowledge, enabling researchers, scholars, clinicians, policymakers, private sector and not-for-profit organizations and the public to use and build on this knowledge.

Information and communications technology, and in particular the advent of the internet, has transformed the way that science and scholarly research is conducted and communicated. Indicative of this changing landscape has been the steady growth in open access publishing and archiving, which facilitates widespread dissemination of research results. Open access enables researchers to make their publications freely available to the domestic and international research community and to the public at large, thereby enhancing the use, application and impact of research results.

Momentum for open access has been growing as numerous funding agencies and institutions worldwide implement open access policies. The Agencies strongly support open access to research results which promotes the principle of knowledge sharing and mobilization – an essential objective of academia. As research and scholarship become increasingly multi-disciplinary and collaborative, both domestically and internationally, the Agencies are working to facilitate research partnerships by harmonizing domestic policies and aligning with the global movement to open access.

The following principles guide the Agencies in their approach to promoting open access to research publications:

1. Committing to academic freedom, and the right to publish;


2. Recognizing the critical importance of peer review to the scholarly communication ecosystem;


3. Maintaining the high standards and quality of research by committing to academic openness and responsible conduct of research;


4. Promoting recognized research best practices and standards across disciplines, and embracing and sharing emerging practices and standards;


5. Advancing academic research, science and innovation;


6. Effective dissemination of research results; and


7. Aligning activities and policies between Canadian and international research funding agencies.

2. Policy Objective

The objective of this policy is to improve access to the results of Agency-funded research, and to increase the dissemination and exchange of research results. All researchers, regardless of funding support, are encouraged to adhere to this policy.

3. Policy Statement

3.1 Peer-reviewed Journal Publications

Grant recipients are required to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Agency-supported research are freely accessible within 12 months of publication. Recipients can do this through one of the following routes:

a. Online Repositories

Grant recipients can deposit their final, peer-reviewed manuscript into an institutional or disciplinary repository that will make the manuscript freely accessible within 12 months of publication. It is the responsibility of the grant recipient to determine which publishers allow authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies.

b. Journals

Grant recipients can publish in a journal that offers immediate open access or that offers open access on its website within 12 months. Some journals require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) to make manuscripts freely available upon publication. The cost of publishing in open access journals is an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.

These routes to open access are not mutually exclusive. Researchers are strongly encouraged to deposit a copy of the final, peer-reviewed manuscript into an accessible online repository immediately upon publication, even if the article is freely available on the journal’s website.

Grant recipients must acknowledge Agency contributions in all peer-reviewed publications, quoting the funding reference number (e.g. FRN, Application ID).

3.2 Publication-related Research Data

CIHR only

Recipients of CIHR funding are required to adhere with the following responsibilities:

1. Deposit bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data into the appropriate public database (e.g. gene sequences deposited in GenBank) immediately upon publication of research results. Please refer to the Annex for examples of research outputs and the corresponding publicly accessible repository or database.


2. Retain original data sets for a minimum of five years after the end of the grant (or longer if other policies apply).This applies to all data, whether published or not. The grant recipient’s institution and research ethics board may have additional policies and practices regarding the preservation, retention, and protection of research data that must be respected.

4. Implementation Date

CIHR

For research funded in whole or in part by CIHR, this policy applies to all grants awarded January 1, 2008 and onward. While not required, researchers holding grants that were awarded prior to January 1, 2008 are encouraged to adhere to the requirements of this policy.

NSERC and SSHRC

For research funded in whole or in part by NSERC or SSHRC, this policy applies to all grants awarded May 1, 2015 and onward. While not required, researchers holding grants that were awarded prior to May 1, 2015 are encouraged to adhere to the requirements of this policy.

5. Compliance with the Policy

Grant recipients are reminded that by accepting Agency funds they have accepted the terms and conditions of the grant or award as set out in the Agencies’ policies and guidelines. In the event of an alleged breach of Agency policy, the Agency may take steps outlined in accordance with the Tri-Agency Framework: Responsible Conduct of Research to deal with the allegation. For research funded by the Agencies, the Institution shall enable researchers to comply with the Tri-Agency Open Access Publication Policy, as amended from time to time.

6. Policy Review
The Agencies will review and adapt this policy as appropriate.

7. Additional Information
A) Various resources to assist researchers in complying with this policy can be found in the Toolbox.

B) Further information regarding how to comply with the open access policy can be found in the Frequently Asked Questions.

How do I feel about the final version? Overall, happy to finally have a policy in hand that will move forward and get the research funded by the government of Canada out there and available to the public. Frankly, it is a bit disappointing to have waited so long for a final policy that is so close to the original draft. What could have possibly taken so long?

As such, my comments on the original very closely mirror my comments on this version. I’m disappointed that the Feds didn’t invest any kind of effort of new money into a process to ease the transition to open access or to bring stakeholders together. I’m disappointed that they aren’t topping up grants or making dedicated funds to pay for at least a little bit of publication charges. I’m disappointed that they didn’t extend data requirements beyond CIHR. I’m disappointed that the policy only applies to journal articles and not other funded research outputs. Twelve months is too long, it should be six months until materials need to be made open.

But at the end of the day, those are quibbles. We have a policy. Let’s get down to business.

Heather Morrison has some commentary here.

Back in June 2013 I did a post on open access resources in Canada. That post definitely needs updating!

And speaking of resources, Walt Crawford has done an amazing job of chronicling and analyzing open access and the open access movement in his online zine, Cites & Insights, especially over the last year or so with his coverage of “predatory” journals, the costs of open access and the Science journal “sting.” He’s kindly gathered together links to all those issues on one master post.

I’m copying those links here. Thanks, Walt!

• December 2012 v. 12 no. 12 – 38 pages [Single-column Edition – 73 pages]: Policy: The Rapid Route of RWA (pp. 1-25), and Libraries: Walking Away: Courage and Acquisitions (pp. 25-38).


• January 2013 v. 13 no. 1 – 40 pages [Single-Column Edition – 77 pages]: Intersections: Catching Up with Open Access (pp. 25-38)


• February 2013 v. 13 no. 2 – 40 pages [Single-Column Edition – 75 pages]: Intersections: Catching Up with Open Access 2 (pp. 3-40)


• June 2013 v. 13 no. 6 – 42 pages [Single-Column Edition – 81 pages]: Intersections: Hot Times for Open Access (pp. 1-42)


• April 2014 v. 14 no. 4 – 22 pages [Single-Column Edition – 41 pages]: Intersections: Ethics and Access 1: The Sad Case of Jeffrey Beall (pp. 1-14)


• May 2014 v. 14 no. 5 – 34 pages [Single-Column Edition – 65 pages]: Intersections: Ethics and Access 2: The So-Called Sting (pp. 1-20)


• July 2014 v. 14 no. 7 – 24 pages [Single-Column Edition – 45 pages]: Intersections: Journals, “Journals” and Wannabes: Investigating the List (pp. 1-24)


• October/November 2014 v. 14 no. 10 – 24 pages [Single-Column Edition – 49 pages]: Intersections: Journals and “Journals”: Taking a Deeper Look (pp. 1-24)


• December 2014 v. 14 no. 11 – 34 pages [Single-Column Edition – 77 pages]: Intersections: Journals and “Journals”: Taking a Deeper Look: Part 2: DOAJ Subset and Additional Notes (pp. 1-34)


• January 2015 v. 15 no. 1 – 28 pages [Single-Column Edition – 57 pages]: Intersections: The Third Half (pp. 1-21)


• March 2015 v. 15 no. 3 – 24 pages [Single-Column Edition – 46 pages]: Intersections: One More Chunk of DOAJ (pp. 1-10)


• April 2015 v. 15 no. 4 – 38 pages [Single-Column Edition – 72 pages]: Intersections: The Economics of Open Access (pp. 1-38)

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1DxvPRt

Science Denialists Have Delayed Action On Climate Change: Soon vs. the Hockey Stick [Greg Laden's Blog]

If you have not been living in a cave, and had you been, I’d respect that, you know about Willie Soon Gate. Willie soon is a researcher on soft money at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Soon is well known for producing research of questionable quality that anemically attempts to buck the scientific consensus that human caused greenhouse gas pollution is rapidly raising the Earth’s temperature. Soon’s links to the fossil fuel industry have been known for some time, but recently, he has gotten into even more hot water over having published papers without properly disclosing that the work was funded by Big Fossil. The story is complex and I will not recite it here. What I want to do instead is to place the story in a larger context.



Soon did not arrive on the horizon recently. His involvement with anti-climate change science activism goes back over ten years. The rise of Willie Soon and the early effects of his ‘research’ on policy have been well documented in Michael Mann’s book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

Let me give you the short version first, followed by elaboration using a handful of quotes from Mann’s book. Really, though, you should just go read the book. (By the way, if you do read it, consider leaving a review at Amazon; there has been a concerted effort by science denialists to leave bogus one star and otherwise horrid, inaccurate reviews on that site!)

The following graphic shows the march of global surface temperatures over the period we call the “Instrumental record,” which is the period of time best measured by thermometers and, later, satellites. The inset is a version of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph produced by Michael Mann and colleagues, showing recent warming in the context of previous natural variation.

This shows a the very end of period of mainly “natural variation” followed by a dramatic increase in surface temperatures owing to increased greenhouse gas pollution.

Here is a closeup of the same graph showing just the period of time over which the surface temperature variation, which amounts to an average increase, that is unambiguously anomalous compared to the past. This increase is pretty much entirely due to the effects of humans.

I’ve marked off a section of this graph that shows just the data since about 2003. This is the year that these two things happened: 1) Willie Soon co-authored two papers arguing that global warming wasn’t really happening, or was not human caused; and 2) Senator Jim Inhofe held Congressional hearings on climate change at which Soon, Mann, and others, testified.



There is no doubt whatsoever that action to reduce climate change has been slowed or even simply stopped in some cases by Big Fossil funded anti-science activism, which generally has involved an unholy marriage between crappy science and political maneuvering in Congress and elsewhere, a marriage involving a big dowery from fossil fuel interests. Willie Soon’s papers and Inhofe’s use of bad science is only part of the picture, but a key part, and at least, illustrative of the process. The following are brief quotes from Mann’s book describing part of the story. Again, read the book to get the full context and all of the details.

Soon after Mann and his colleagues published the Hockey Stick research, there was a range of reactions among which were attacks from the denialist community. One of these was a non peer reviewed piece put on a web site.

“The Summer of Our Discontent” (August 1998), had been invited from Sally Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. [Suggesting] that we had extended the MBH98 hockey stick no further back in time than A.D. 1400 for fear of encountering the warmer temperatures of the medieval warm period—a charge that … is nonsensical, since the stopping point was entirely determined by objective statistical criteria. Second, they claimed that our reconstruction suffered from an issue known as the “divergence problem”…

(I’ve discussed the divergence problem at length elsewhere on this blog.)

In a section of his book called “The Paper That Launched a Half-Dozen Resignations,” Mann talks about the Soon and Baliunas paper. Both Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon were at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Soon being a protege of Baliunas’. She had previously worked on the role of the sun in the Earth’s climate system.

The two went on to publish a number of articles analyzing the relationships between records of past solar variability and climate. … the Soon and Baliunas article took the form of two nearly identical papers published simultaneously in two different journals in spring 2003. One version of the paper appeared in the journal Climate Research while the other (which, it turns out, was simply a longer, unedited version of the first, but with three more coauthors added) was published in the journal Energy and Environment. Duplicate publication of a paper is highly unusual, and in fact is strictly forbidden by most academic journals. That both the authors and the study had been supported by the American Petroleum Institute—each of the authors had a long history of fossil fuel industry funding—combined with the highly unusual dual publication of the paper raised some eyebrows. Questions had been raised, moreover, about the two journals that jointly published the paper. Climate Research had in the recent past published a spate of contrarian papers of questionable scientific merit. Some members of the editorial board had already expressed concern that one editor at the journal known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry.

[One of the journal’s editors,] Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen … quite remarkably confessed in an interview … “I’m following my political agenda—a bit, anyway. But isn’t that the right of the editor?” The Soon and Baliunas study claimed to contradict previous work—including our own—that suggested that the average warmth of the Northern Hemisphere in recent decades was unprecedented over a time frame of at least the past millennium.

Mann goes on to explain in detail why the papers were scientifically flawed, and notes that …

The authors in many cases had mischaracterized or misrepresented the past studies they claimed to be assessing in their meta-analysis … Paleoclimatologist Peter de Menocal of Columbia University/LDEO, for example, who had developed a proxy record of ocean surface temperature from sediments off the coast of Africa, indicated that “Mr. Soon and his colleagues could not justify their conclusions that the African record showed the 20th century as being unexceptional … My record has no business being used to address that question.”

In response to Soon and Baliunas,

A group of twelve leading climate scientists joined me in authoring a rebuttal to Soon and Baliunas in Eos, the official newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. … The American Geophysical Union considered our rejoinder important enough to issue a press release entitled “Leading Climate Scientists Reaffirm View That Late 20th Century Warming Was Unusual and Resulted from Human Activity” in early July 2003, just prior to the article’s publication. Nevertheless, the Soon and Baliunas study was immediately taken up by the U.S. Senate’s leading climate change denier, Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

This brings us to the use of Soon’s and other denialist work as a tool to develop a contrarian argument in a Senate Hearing. Senator James Inhofe, famous for claiming that climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public, chaired the hearing which was held in July 2003. Again, you should read Mann’s account for all the amazing details; it is a rousing story! In essence, Soon and his work were being used to argue against the importance of Global Warming, and Mann represented the scientific view. The story also involves Hillary Clinton (in case you were wondering about her position on climate change). Here’s the part of Mann’s recounting I want you to see:

Midway through the hearing, [ranking member] Jeffords dropped a bombshell. He announced that his staff had received a note from Hans Von Storch announcing his resignation as chief editor of the journal Climate Research, in protest over the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper. Von Storch was no scientific ally of mine. Indeed … he and I had had disputes in the past regarding the relative merits of statistical climate reconstruction methods. But ally or not, Von Storch was outraged that such a transparently flawed paper had been published in his journal. His note, which Jeffords read aloud, was to the point: “My view … is that the review of the Soon et al. paper failed to detect significant methodological flaws … The paper should not have been published in this forum, not because of the eventual conclusion, but because of the insufficient evidence to draw this conclusion.” Von Storch’s resignation had been precipitated by the refusal of the journal’s publisher, Otto Kinne, to allow him to publish an editorial expressing his view that the peer review process had clearly failed with the Soon and Baliunas paper. Several other editors quit as well (ultimately six editors—half the editorial board—would quit in protest over the incident)….

Perhaps the single most troubling issue to arise from the Soon and Baliunas affair was that of apparent editorial malpractice. At the two journals that published versions of the paper, the peer review process appears to have been compromised to produce a study in the scientific literature that could be seized upon by those with a contrarian policy agenda. … It is particularly pernicious when that process is compromised or co-opted for political ends.

Funded, I’ll add, by Big Fossil.

I asked Michael Mann how much damage he reckons Soon and Baliunas, and others like them, have done to the process of developing good policies to combat climate change. He told me, “Well, they are the hired hands of the “Merchants of Doubt”, the ones who do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by muddying the waters and confusing the public into thinking that there is still a scientific debate about whether climate change is happening, whether it is due to human activity, and whether it is a problem. There is none. It is hard to know just how much damage these deniers-for-hire have done to our civilization and our planet by needlessly delaying the action necessary to avert dangerous climate change.

As a follow-up, I wondered if he thought the recent exposure of climate science denials tactics would change the nature of future Senate hearings for the better. “I do—in my dreams,” he said. “Sadly, we are not there yet. While there is a worthy debate to be had about how we confront the challenge of averting the climate change threat, there is no legitimate debate to be had about whether or not the problem exists. Currently we have a congress that is committed to keeping that fake debate alive, as we have seen all too recently in the antics of folks like Senator James “climate change is a hoax” Inhofe, who now controls the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. We have to get past that.”

Finally, I asked Mann if he saw evidence that the peer review process has ultimately been improved as a result of clear abuses by denialist authors, or the reaction of publishers to those abuses. He told me, “Well, I certainly think that the scientific community is now far more aware of some of the bad faith efforts that have been made by industry-funded climate change deniers to pollute the peer-reviewed literature with antiscientific, agenda-driven screeds. Cracks still exist in the system, but slowly they are being repaired as scientists and editors increasingly learn more about the forces of antiscience that are still very much at play today.”

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1GIdxQS

If you have not been living in a cave, and had you been, I’d respect that, you know about Willie Soon Gate. Willie soon is a researcher on soft money at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Soon is well known for producing research of questionable quality that anemically attempts to buck the scientific consensus that human caused greenhouse gas pollution is rapidly raising the Earth’s temperature. Soon’s links to the fossil fuel industry have been known for some time, but recently, he has gotten into even more hot water over having published papers without properly disclosing that the work was funded by Big Fossil. The story is complex and I will not recite it here. What I want to do instead is to place the story in a larger context.



Soon did not arrive on the horizon recently. His involvement with anti-climate change science activism goes back over ten years. The rise of Willie Soon and the early effects of his ‘research’ on policy have been well documented in Michael Mann’s book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

Let me give you the short version first, followed by elaboration using a handful of quotes from Mann’s book. Really, though, you should just go read the book. (By the way, if you do read it, consider leaving a review at Amazon; there has been a concerted effort by science denialists to leave bogus one star and otherwise horrid, inaccurate reviews on that site!)

The following graphic shows the march of global surface temperatures over the period we call the “Instrumental record,” which is the period of time best measured by thermometers and, later, satellites. The inset is a version of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph produced by Michael Mann and colleagues, showing recent warming in the context of previous natural variation.

This shows a the very end of period of mainly “natural variation” followed by a dramatic increase in surface temperatures owing to increased greenhouse gas pollution.

Here is a closeup of the same graph showing just the period of time over which the surface temperature variation, which amounts to an average increase, that is unambiguously anomalous compared to the past. This increase is pretty much entirely due to the effects of humans.

I’ve marked off a section of this graph that shows just the data since about 2003. This is the year that these two things happened: 1) Willie Soon co-authored two papers arguing that global warming wasn’t really happening, or was not human caused; and 2) Senator Jim Inhofe held Congressional hearings on climate change at which Soon, Mann, and others, testified.



There is no doubt whatsoever that action to reduce climate change has been slowed or even simply stopped in some cases by Big Fossil funded anti-science activism, which generally has involved an unholy marriage between crappy science and political maneuvering in Congress and elsewhere, a marriage involving a big dowery from fossil fuel interests. Willie Soon’s papers and Inhofe’s use of bad science is only part of the picture, but a key part, and at least, illustrative of the process. The following are brief quotes from Mann’s book describing part of the story. Again, read the book to get the full context and all of the details.

Soon after Mann and his colleagues published the Hockey Stick research, there was a range of reactions among which were attacks from the denialist community. One of these was a non peer reviewed piece put on a web site.

“The Summer of Our Discontent” (August 1998), had been invited from Sally Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. [Suggesting] that we had extended the MBH98 hockey stick no further back in time than A.D. 1400 for fear of encountering the warmer temperatures of the medieval warm period—a charge that … is nonsensical, since the stopping point was entirely determined by objective statistical criteria. Second, they claimed that our reconstruction suffered from an issue known as the “divergence problem”…

(I’ve discussed the divergence problem at length elsewhere on this blog.)

In a section of his book called “The Paper That Launched a Half-Dozen Resignations,” Mann talks about the Soon and Baliunas paper. Both Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon were at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Soon being a protege of Baliunas’. She had previously worked on the role of the sun in the Earth’s climate system.

The two went on to publish a number of articles analyzing the relationships between records of past solar variability and climate. … the Soon and Baliunas article took the form of two nearly identical papers published simultaneously in two different journals in spring 2003. One version of the paper appeared in the journal Climate Research while the other (which, it turns out, was simply a longer, unedited version of the first, but with three more coauthors added) was published in the journal Energy and Environment. Duplicate publication of a paper is highly unusual, and in fact is strictly forbidden by most academic journals. That both the authors and the study had been supported by the American Petroleum Institute—each of the authors had a long history of fossil fuel industry funding—combined with the highly unusual dual publication of the paper raised some eyebrows. Questions had been raised, moreover, about the two journals that jointly published the paper. Climate Research had in the recent past published a spate of contrarian papers of questionable scientific merit. Some members of the editorial board had already expressed concern that one editor at the journal known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry.

[One of the journal’s editors,] Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen … quite remarkably confessed in an interview … “I’m following my political agenda—a bit, anyway. But isn’t that the right of the editor?” The Soon and Baliunas study claimed to contradict previous work—including our own—that suggested that the average warmth of the Northern Hemisphere in recent decades was unprecedented over a time frame of at least the past millennium.

Mann goes on to explain in detail why the papers were scientifically flawed, and notes that …

The authors in many cases had mischaracterized or misrepresented the past studies they claimed to be assessing in their meta-analysis … Paleoclimatologist Peter de Menocal of Columbia University/LDEO, for example, who had developed a proxy record of ocean surface temperature from sediments off the coast of Africa, indicated that “Mr. Soon and his colleagues could not justify their conclusions that the African record showed the 20th century as being unexceptional … My record has no business being used to address that question.”

In response to Soon and Baliunas,

A group of twelve leading climate scientists joined me in authoring a rebuttal to Soon and Baliunas in Eos, the official newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. … The American Geophysical Union considered our rejoinder important enough to issue a press release entitled “Leading Climate Scientists Reaffirm View That Late 20th Century Warming Was Unusual and Resulted from Human Activity” in early July 2003, just prior to the article’s publication. Nevertheless, the Soon and Baliunas study was immediately taken up by the U.S. Senate’s leading climate change denier, Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

This brings us to the use of Soon’s and other denialist work as a tool to develop a contrarian argument in a Senate Hearing. Senator James Inhofe, famous for claiming that climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public, chaired the hearing which was held in July 2003. Again, you should read Mann’s account for all the amazing details; it is a rousing story! In essence, Soon and his work were being used to argue against the importance of Global Warming, and Mann represented the scientific view. The story also involves Hillary Clinton (in case you were wondering about her position on climate change). Here’s the part of Mann’s recounting I want you to see:

Midway through the hearing, [ranking member] Jeffords dropped a bombshell. He announced that his staff had received a note from Hans Von Storch announcing his resignation as chief editor of the journal Climate Research, in protest over the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper. Von Storch was no scientific ally of mine. Indeed … he and I had had disputes in the past regarding the relative merits of statistical climate reconstruction methods. But ally or not, Von Storch was outraged that such a transparently flawed paper had been published in his journal. His note, which Jeffords read aloud, was to the point: “My view … is that the review of the Soon et al. paper failed to detect significant methodological flaws … The paper should not have been published in this forum, not because of the eventual conclusion, but because of the insufficient evidence to draw this conclusion.” Von Storch’s resignation had been precipitated by the refusal of the journal’s publisher, Otto Kinne, to allow him to publish an editorial expressing his view that the peer review process had clearly failed with the Soon and Baliunas paper. Several other editors quit as well (ultimately six editors—half the editorial board—would quit in protest over the incident)….

Perhaps the single most troubling issue to arise from the Soon and Baliunas affair was that of apparent editorial malpractice. At the two journals that published versions of the paper, the peer review process appears to have been compromised to produce a study in the scientific literature that could be seized upon by those with a contrarian policy agenda. … It is particularly pernicious when that process is compromised or co-opted for political ends.

Funded, I’ll add, by Big Fossil.

I asked Michael Mann how much damage he reckons Soon and Baliunas, and others like them, have done to the process of developing good policies to combat climate change. He told me, “Well, they are the hired hands of the “Merchants of Doubt”, the ones who do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by muddying the waters and confusing the public into thinking that there is still a scientific debate about whether climate change is happening, whether it is due to human activity, and whether it is a problem. There is none. It is hard to know just how much damage these deniers-for-hire have done to our civilization and our planet by needlessly delaying the action necessary to avert dangerous climate change.

As a follow-up, I wondered if he thought the recent exposure of climate science denials tactics would change the nature of future Senate hearings for the better. “I do—in my dreams,” he said. “Sadly, we are not there yet. While there is a worthy debate to be had about how we confront the challenge of averting the climate change threat, there is no legitimate debate to be had about whether or not the problem exists. Currently we have a congress that is committed to keeping that fake debate alive, as we have seen all too recently in the antics of folks like Senator James “climate change is a hoax” Inhofe, who now controls the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. We have to get past that.”

Finally, I asked Mann if he saw evidence that the peer review process has ultimately been improved as a result of clear abuses by denialist authors, or the reaction of publishers to those abuses. He told me, “Well, I certainly think that the scientific community is now far more aware of some of the bad faith efforts that have been made by industry-funded climate change deniers to pollute the peer-reviewed literature with antiscientific, agenda-driven screeds. Cracks still exist in the system, but slowly they are being repaired as scientists and editors increasingly learn more about the forces of antiscience that are still very much at play today.”

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1GIdxQS

The Hydraulic Hypothesis and the End of Civilization [Greg Laden's Blog]

OK, I admit the title of this post is possibly a bit extreme but I could not resist the symmetry. Here, I refer to both ends of civilization, the start and the finish.

I’d like to talk about a recent review published in Science, titled “Systems integration for global sustainability” written by my colleague Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute together with Jiangou Liu, Harold Mooney, Vanessa Hull, Steven Davis, Joane Gaskell, Thomas Hertel, Jane Lubchenco, Karent Seto, Claire Kremen and Shuxin Li. But I want to put this paper in a broader perspective, dipping into my training as an archaeologist. But first a relevant digression.

The so called “Hydraulic Hypothesis” is an idea first fully characterized by the historian Karl Wittfogel. His original idea was part of a larger model for the origin of civilization that we see today as having several problematic aspects, but the key idea is still valid. If agriculture is the basis for a society, and it is carried out in a semi-arid region, then the management of water through various forms of irrigation and the centralized control of the agricultural cycle lends itself to centralized despotic leadership. or at least, some kid of cultural and social change allowing for organized effort to predominate over individual self interest. (In fact irrigation based systems have emerged without despotic leadership, and complex society has emerged absent a hydraulic beginning, so this is an oversimplification, just so you know.) But in its simplest form we can correctly say that the emergence of stratified, hierarchic, complexly organized societies was often linked in no small part to the emergence of organizational (and technological) solutions to growing food where there is not enough rain at the right time of year. There is a great advantage to growing food in this manner. The crops become, in essence, invasive species, because human activity provides the crops with a leg up on all the other plants in the region. A plant that in wild form is found primarily in limited microhabitats, out competed everywhere else by more arid-adapted plants, suddenly has a free ride across a vast landscape. Despite the fact that the Hydraulic Hypothesis is an oversimplification, we can appreciate the fact that the beginnings of human “civilization” (as a social and economic system, which we retain today by and large) is linked partially but importantly to managing water to grow food.

At present the news story that never fails to occupy the front page is ISIS, the Islamic State, making a nuisance of itself in Syria and Iraq. It is generally thought that ISIS emerged in large part because of the quasi-failure of Syria. Syria transited from being a run of the mill Middle Eastern Kingdom with some powerful connections to a quasi-failed state for a number of reasons, but one of the big factors turns out to be water. Or, really, lack thereof. In a recently published paper (not the one in Science mentioned above), Peter Gleick made this point:

The Syrian conflict that began in 2012 has many roots, including long-standing political, religious, and social ideological disputes; economic dislocations from both global and regional factors; and worsening environmental conditions. … key environmental factors include both direct and indirect consequences of water shortages, ineffective watershed management, and the impacts of climate variability and change on regional hydrology. Severe multiyear drought beginning in the mid-2000s, combined with inefficient and often unmodernized irrigation systems and water abstractions by other parties in the eastern Mediterranean, including especially Syria, contributed to the displacement of large populations from rural to urban centers, food insecurity for more than a million people, and increased unemployment—with subsequent effects on political stability. There is some evidence that the recent drought is an early indicator of the climatic changes that are expected for the region, including higher temperature, decreased basin rainfall and runoff, and increased water scarcity. Absent any efforts to address population growth rates, these water-related factors are likely to produce even greater risks of local and regional political instability, unless other mechanisms for reducing water insecurity can be identified and implemented.

Two key graphics from Gleick’s paper demonstrate the role of climate change. First, the drop in available water due to decreased rainfall and, probably, increased evaporation:

Second, the decrease in annual average discharge of a key river in the region:

Adaptation to an arid environment allowed the development of agriculture, and required the development of complex states, thousands of years ago, in this region. Subsequent increases and decreases in aridity and other natural climate factors have been recognized as creating local collapses around the Mediterranean during subsequent millennia. But now, climate change (together with the other factors Gleick mentions) has pushed the system over the edge. Thousands of years of technological adaptation and cultural evolution to address the problem of growing grains and orchards in dry country together with modern technology to the extent it has been applied have been insufficient to allow the system to continue in some localities, and everything we know about climate change strongly suggests that this is going to get worse, eventually encompassing the entire region. Expect most of the Middle East to become a client region for global agricultural production over the next decade or two. The term Arab Spring is deeply ironic; the spring is running dry.

So this is how the Hydraulic Hypothesis bookends civilization. Cultural technological management of limited or badly timed natural water were adaptations to semi-arid climate conditions and contributed to the development of what we call civilization. As climate conditions shift to the point where these adaptations become unreliable, the system fails. And, the failure is in part because of prior success. As a highly integrated but organic system it is unable to manage deep and causative change. If Vulcans ran the Earth, the Syrian farmers would have been, logically, put on some sort of dole and eventually retasked, and there would not have been a civil war. But since we rely so much on organic system evolution (which includes in part the much vaunted “free market”) that is not what happened.

The review in Science addresses the large scale system dynamics. From the paper:

Global sustainability challenges, from maintaining biodiversity to providing clean air and water, are closely interconnected yet often separately studied and managed. Systems integration—holistic approaches to integrating various components of coupled human and natural systems—is critical to understand socioeconomic and environmental interconnections and to create sustainability solutions. Recent advances include the development and quantification of integrated frameworks that incorporate ecosystem services, environmental footprints, planetary boundaries, human-nature nexuses, and telecoupling. Although systems integration has led to fundamental discoveries and practical applications, further efforts are needed to incorporate more human and natural components simultaneously, quantify spillover systems and feedbacks, integrate multiple spatial and temporal scales, develop new tools, and translate findings into policy and practice. Such efforts can help address important knowledge gaps, link seemingly unconnected challenges, and inform policy and management decisions.

The study focuses on biofuels and “virtual water” to illustrate the broader concepts. Since we’re talking about Hydraulic adaptation at the beginning and end (maybe) of human civilization, let’s look more closely at the virtual water.

What is virtual water, you ask? Let’s say you and I are the farmers (there are no other farmers) and together we produce all of the food. We live in different places and the food gets traded back and forth. You may be surprised to hear that for every liter of water the people who live in our hypothetical two-farm world drink as refreshment, we farmers require something like 100 liters of water to match that in food (that is a very rough estimate). But the water requirement varies tremendously by the kind of food. Let’s say I grow wheat and you grow eggs. That means that every person-year of food (in terms of calories) that I grow requires a very small fraction of the water that you need to grow one person-year of calories. Plants generally require a fraction of the water that animal products require. Even among plants the differences are rather large.

So, if we trade wheat and eggs (I give you wheat and you give me eggs) evenly by calorie, than we are simultaneously trading water, but very unevenly. When I give you 1000 calories of wheat, I’m giving you something like 1000 liters of water, virtually. When you give me 1000 calories of eggs, you are giving me perhaps a million calories of water, virtually. If you are farming in a water rich region and I’m farming in a water poor region, that makes sense and it may even be the reason I grow wheat and you grow egg chickens. Or, if we started out with plentiful water relative to production in both regions, but your farms experience increasing aridity, there is now a pressure for us to change our virtual water trading practices. You should be growing some wheat and I should be growing some chickens.

Alternatively we could eat less animal product. Or, if you like you can experience a regional civil war in your part of the world and create a religious state that everybody hates. Whatever.

In real life, virtual water is quite complex. From the review:

The main virtual water exporters (sending systems) are water-rich regions in North and South America and Australia, whereas Mexico, Japan, China, and water-poor regions in Europe are the main importers (receiving systems)… Asia recently switched its virtual water imports from North America to South America. On the other hand, North America has engaged in an increased diversification of intraregional water trade while trading with distant countries in Asia. China has undergone a dramatic increase in virtual water imports since 2000, via products such as soybeans from Brazil (nearly doubling from 2001 to 2007 and amounting to 13% of the total global world water trade). The spatial shift in the use of soybean products in Brazil from domestic to international has led to water savings in other countries, but at the cost of deforestation in Brazilian Amazon. Within-country virtual water transfer is also common. For example, virtual water flow through grain trade from North China to South China goes in the opposite direction of real water transfer through large projects, such as the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, that aim to alleviate water shortages in North China.

Or, in the form of a picture, from the review:

To me one of the key issues raised when taking a system level look, and this refers back directly to the Hydraulic Hypothesis, is the role of regulatory process and government. After all, we created these governments (as part of civilization) for the exact reason of managing the emerging complex system of agriculture (oversimplified again … and there were other reasons of course). So I asked Peter Gleick what he thought about the relationship between free market economics, regulation, and government (or higher level) involvement. He told me, “Free markets are both a solution and a problem. There is growing evidence that for a number of critical global challenges, government oversight and regulatory institutions are critically important to correct the failure of free markets. We encourage trade in goods and services worldwide, which has led to a remarkable trade in “virtual water” — the water required to make those goods and services. This is a good thing, in my opinion, because it permits countries that could never possibly be self sufficient in food because of insufficient water (most of the Middle East and North Africa) to use their limited water for higher valued economic activities and then buy food on the market. But the market failure here is that natural ecosystems do not compete or play a role in such “markets” — permitting the complete extinction of endemic fish from the Aral Sea to grow cotton in the Central Asian republics for export. I could give other examples of gross free market failures with global consequences (ozone hole, climate change). So, yes, balance markets with strong government regulatory oversight to protect public goods.”

This makes sense because of one of the things people almost always forget when it comes to market forces. The free market model assumes that the system is made up of “ideal free actors.” Ideal free does not mean free of ideals! (Maybe there should be a comma there.) The actors in the market are “ideal” in that they are identical in their access to information and ability to act on it, and they are free in the sense that there are no external constraints on those actions. So, ideal actors regulated (not free) do not make up a free market (that is the point usually made by Libertarians) but more often than not, the actors are not “ideal.” It is a major failure of integration of economics theory and social theory to place the non-ideal parts in the category of “external costs” and ignore them. One actor’s external costs is another actor’s non-idealness.

I also asked Gleick to elaborate on the relationship between regional collapse and the global system, as a means of integrating the two studies I cover above. He responded, “… can regional collapses influence or perturb global systems, rather than the other way around? I would argue for example that perturbed global systems are influencing regional collapses (for example, climate, drought, and Syria). A functioning global systems approach would have to be able to handle regional perturbations. Could you argue that the political collapse in the US Congress is a major barrier to a global systems approach to cut greenhouse gas emissions? Yes. But that US government failure can be bypassed by other mechanisms, as we’re seeing now with California’s cap/trade system; collaborative state efforts; federal efforts that bypass congressional constraints using other mechanisms.”

Peter Gleick has written up his own comments on the Science review, on his blog, here.

______________________________________________________

Citation: Liu, J. H. Mooney, V. Hull, S.J. Davis, J. Gaskell, T.Hertel, J. Lubchenco, K.C. Seto, P.H. Gleick, C. Kremen, S. Li. 2015. Systems Integration for Global Sustainability. Science, Vol. 347, No. 6225. 27 February 2015. DOI: 10.1126/science.1258832

______________________________________________________

Other posts of interest:

• New Research Suggests Global Warming Is About To Heat Up


• New Research Demonstrates Link Between Greenhouse Gas Pollution and Global Warming


• Has Global Warming stopped?

Also of interest: In Search of Sungudogo: A novel of adventure and mystery, set in the Congo.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1DvVSse

OK, I admit the title of this post is possibly a bit extreme but I could not resist the symmetry. Here, I refer to both ends of civilization, the start and the finish.

I’d like to talk about a recent review published in Science, titled “Systems integration for global sustainability” written by my colleague Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute together with Jiangou Liu, Harold Mooney, Vanessa Hull, Steven Davis, Joane Gaskell, Thomas Hertel, Jane Lubchenco, Karent Seto, Claire Kremen and Shuxin Li. But I want to put this paper in a broader perspective, dipping into my training as an archaeologist. But first a relevant digression.

The so called “Hydraulic Hypothesis” is an idea first fully characterized by the historian Karl Wittfogel. His original idea was part of a larger model for the origin of civilization that we see today as having several problematic aspects, but the key idea is still valid. If agriculture is the basis for a society, and it is carried out in a semi-arid region, then the management of water through various forms of irrigation and the centralized control of the agricultural cycle lends itself to centralized despotic leadership. or at least, some kid of cultural and social change allowing for organized effort to predominate over individual self interest. (In fact irrigation based systems have emerged without despotic leadership, and complex society has emerged absent a hydraulic beginning, so this is an oversimplification, just so you know.) But in its simplest form we can correctly say that the emergence of stratified, hierarchic, complexly organized societies was often linked in no small part to the emergence of organizational (and technological) solutions to growing food where there is not enough rain at the right time of year. There is a great advantage to growing food in this manner. The crops become, in essence, invasive species, because human activity provides the crops with a leg up on all the other plants in the region. A plant that in wild form is found primarily in limited microhabitats, out competed everywhere else by more arid-adapted plants, suddenly has a free ride across a vast landscape. Despite the fact that the Hydraulic Hypothesis is an oversimplification, we can appreciate the fact that the beginnings of human “civilization” (as a social and economic system, which we retain today by and large) is linked partially but importantly to managing water to grow food.

At present the news story that never fails to occupy the front page is ISIS, the Islamic State, making a nuisance of itself in Syria and Iraq. It is generally thought that ISIS emerged in large part because of the quasi-failure of Syria. Syria transited from being a run of the mill Middle Eastern Kingdom with some powerful connections to a quasi-failed state for a number of reasons, but one of the big factors turns out to be water. Or, really, lack thereof. In a recently published paper (not the one in Science mentioned above), Peter Gleick made this point:

The Syrian conflict that began in 2012 has many roots, including long-standing political, religious, and social ideological disputes; economic dislocations from both global and regional factors; and worsening environmental conditions. … key environmental factors include both direct and indirect consequences of water shortages, ineffective watershed management, and the impacts of climate variability and change on regional hydrology. Severe multiyear drought beginning in the mid-2000s, combined with inefficient and often unmodernized irrigation systems and water abstractions by other parties in the eastern Mediterranean, including especially Syria, contributed to the displacement of large populations from rural to urban centers, food insecurity for more than a million people, and increased unemployment—with subsequent effects on political stability. There is some evidence that the recent drought is an early indicator of the climatic changes that are expected for the region, including higher temperature, decreased basin rainfall and runoff, and increased water scarcity. Absent any efforts to address population growth rates, these water-related factors are likely to produce even greater risks of local and regional political instability, unless other mechanisms for reducing water insecurity can be identified and implemented.

Two key graphics from Gleick’s paper demonstrate the role of climate change. First, the drop in available water due to decreased rainfall and, probably, increased evaporation:

Second, the decrease in annual average discharge of a key river in the region:

Adaptation to an arid environment allowed the development of agriculture, and required the development of complex states, thousands of years ago, in this region. Subsequent increases and decreases in aridity and other natural climate factors have been recognized as creating local collapses around the Mediterranean during subsequent millennia. But now, climate change (together with the other factors Gleick mentions) has pushed the system over the edge. Thousands of years of technological adaptation and cultural evolution to address the problem of growing grains and orchards in dry country together with modern technology to the extent it has been applied have been insufficient to allow the system to continue in some localities, and everything we know about climate change strongly suggests that this is going to get worse, eventually encompassing the entire region. Expect most of the Middle East to become a client region for global agricultural production over the next decade or two. The term Arab Spring is deeply ironic; the spring is running dry.

So this is how the Hydraulic Hypothesis bookends civilization. Cultural technological management of limited or badly timed natural water were adaptations to semi-arid climate conditions and contributed to the development of what we call civilization. As climate conditions shift to the point where these adaptations become unreliable, the system fails. And, the failure is in part because of prior success. As a highly integrated but organic system it is unable to manage deep and causative change. If Vulcans ran the Earth, the Syrian farmers would have been, logically, put on some sort of dole and eventually retasked, and there would not have been a civil war. But since we rely so much on organic system evolution (which includes in part the much vaunted “free market”) that is not what happened.

The review in Science addresses the large scale system dynamics. From the paper:

Global sustainability challenges, from maintaining biodiversity to providing clean air and water, are closely interconnected yet often separately studied and managed. Systems integration—holistic approaches to integrating various components of coupled human and natural systems—is critical to understand socioeconomic and environmental interconnections and to create sustainability solutions. Recent advances include the development and quantification of integrated frameworks that incorporate ecosystem services, environmental footprints, planetary boundaries, human-nature nexuses, and telecoupling. Although systems integration has led to fundamental discoveries and practical applications, further efforts are needed to incorporate more human and natural components simultaneously, quantify spillover systems and feedbacks, integrate multiple spatial and temporal scales, develop new tools, and translate findings into policy and practice. Such efforts can help address important knowledge gaps, link seemingly unconnected challenges, and inform policy and management decisions.

The study focuses on biofuels and “virtual water” to illustrate the broader concepts. Since we’re talking about Hydraulic adaptation at the beginning and end (maybe) of human civilization, let’s look more closely at the virtual water.

What is virtual water, you ask? Let’s say you and I are the farmers (there are no other farmers) and together we produce all of the food. We live in different places and the food gets traded back and forth. You may be surprised to hear that for every liter of water the people who live in our hypothetical two-farm world drink as refreshment, we farmers require something like 100 liters of water to match that in food (that is a very rough estimate). But the water requirement varies tremendously by the kind of food. Let’s say I grow wheat and you grow eggs. That means that every person-year of food (in terms of calories) that I grow requires a very small fraction of the water that you need to grow one person-year of calories. Plants generally require a fraction of the water that animal products require. Even among plants the differences are rather large.

So, if we trade wheat and eggs (I give you wheat and you give me eggs) evenly by calorie, than we are simultaneously trading water, but very unevenly. When I give you 1000 calories of wheat, I’m giving you something like 1000 liters of water, virtually. When you give me 1000 calories of eggs, you are giving me perhaps a million calories of water, virtually. If you are farming in a water rich region and I’m farming in a water poor region, that makes sense and it may even be the reason I grow wheat and you grow egg chickens. Or, if we started out with plentiful water relative to production in both regions, but your farms experience increasing aridity, there is now a pressure for us to change our virtual water trading practices. You should be growing some wheat and I should be growing some chickens.

Alternatively we could eat less animal product. Or, if you like you can experience a regional civil war in your part of the world and create a religious state that everybody hates. Whatever.

In real life, virtual water is quite complex. From the review:

The main virtual water exporters (sending systems) are water-rich regions in North and South America and Australia, whereas Mexico, Japan, China, and water-poor regions in Europe are the main importers (receiving systems)… Asia recently switched its virtual water imports from North America to South America. On the other hand, North America has engaged in an increased diversification of intraregional water trade while trading with distant countries in Asia. China has undergone a dramatic increase in virtual water imports since 2000, via products such as soybeans from Brazil (nearly doubling from 2001 to 2007 and amounting to 13% of the total global world water trade). The spatial shift in the use of soybean products in Brazil from domestic to international has led to water savings in other countries, but at the cost of deforestation in Brazilian Amazon. Within-country virtual water transfer is also common. For example, virtual water flow through grain trade from North China to South China goes in the opposite direction of real water transfer through large projects, such as the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, that aim to alleviate water shortages in North China.

Or, in the form of a picture, from the review:

To me one of the key issues raised when taking a system level look, and this refers back directly to the Hydraulic Hypothesis, is the role of regulatory process and government. After all, we created these governments (as part of civilization) for the exact reason of managing the emerging complex system of agriculture (oversimplified again … and there were other reasons of course). So I asked Peter Gleick what he thought about the relationship between free market economics, regulation, and government (or higher level) involvement. He told me, “Free markets are both a solution and a problem. There is growing evidence that for a number of critical global challenges, government oversight and regulatory institutions are critically important to correct the failure of free markets. We encourage trade in goods and services worldwide, which has led to a remarkable trade in “virtual water” — the water required to make those goods and services. This is a good thing, in my opinion, because it permits countries that could never possibly be self sufficient in food because of insufficient water (most of the Middle East and North Africa) to use their limited water for higher valued economic activities and then buy food on the market. But the market failure here is that natural ecosystems do not compete or play a role in such “markets” — permitting the complete extinction of endemic fish from the Aral Sea to grow cotton in the Central Asian republics for export. I could give other examples of gross free market failures with global consequences (ozone hole, climate change). So, yes, balance markets with strong government regulatory oversight to protect public goods.”

This makes sense because of one of the things people almost always forget when it comes to market forces. The free market model assumes that the system is made up of “ideal free actors.” Ideal free does not mean free of ideals! (Maybe there should be a comma there.) The actors in the market are “ideal” in that they are identical in their access to information and ability to act on it, and they are free in the sense that there are no external constraints on those actions. So, ideal actors regulated (not free) do not make up a free market (that is the point usually made by Libertarians) but more often than not, the actors are not “ideal.” It is a major failure of integration of economics theory and social theory to place the non-ideal parts in the category of “external costs” and ignore them. One actor’s external costs is another actor’s non-idealness.

I also asked Gleick to elaborate on the relationship between regional collapse and the global system, as a means of integrating the two studies I cover above. He responded, “… can regional collapses influence or perturb global systems, rather than the other way around? I would argue for example that perturbed global systems are influencing regional collapses (for example, climate, drought, and Syria). A functioning global systems approach would have to be able to handle regional perturbations. Could you argue that the political collapse in the US Congress is a major barrier to a global systems approach to cut greenhouse gas emissions? Yes. But that US government failure can be bypassed by other mechanisms, as we’re seeing now with California’s cap/trade system; collaborative state efforts; federal efforts that bypass congressional constraints using other mechanisms.”

Peter Gleick has written up his own comments on the Science review, on his blog, here.

______________________________________________________

Citation: Liu, J. H. Mooney, V. Hull, S.J. Davis, J. Gaskell, T.Hertel, J. Lubchenco, K.C. Seto, P.H. Gleick, C. Kremen, S. Li. 2015. Systems Integration for Global Sustainability. Science, Vol. 347, No. 6225. 27 February 2015. DOI: 10.1126/science.1258832

______________________________________________________

Other posts of interest:

• New Research Suggests Global Warming Is About To Heat Up


• New Research Demonstrates Link Between Greenhouse Gas Pollution and Global Warming


• Has Global Warming stopped?

Also of interest: In Search of Sungudogo: A novel of adventure and mystery, set in the Congo.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1DvVSse

Celebrities and Attention Police [Uncertain Principles]

While I’m running unrelated articles head-on into each other, two other things that caught my eye recently were Sabine Hossenfelder’s thoughts on scientific celebrities (taking off from Lawrence Krauss’s defense of same) and Megan Garber’s piece on “attention policing”, spinning off that silliness about a badly exposed photo of a dress that took the Internet by storm.

Like Sabine, I’m generally in favor of the idea of science celebrities, though as someone whose books are found on shelves between Lawrence Krauss’s and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s, there’s no small amount of self-interest in that. But I think it’s generally good to direct more public attention to science-y things, by whatever means necessary. Which is why I spent an afternoon a month or so back with a cameraman filming me putting footballs in a freezer.

I do share the concern, though, about the attention-steering effects of celebrity. Sabine describes this within the context of science as a hypothetical involving Neil deGrasse Tyson publicly mentioning one of her papers. I think that hypothetical is already a reality outside of science, though, with the vagaries of celebrity meaning that the public image of science is largely drawn from a handful of photogenic fields with charismatic proponents at the expense of a much larger range of science with more direct impact on daily life.

The APS March Meeting takes place this week, and will be the largest physics meeting of the year. It probably won’t generate publicity in proportion to its attendance, though, because it’s largely focused on condensed matter physics, and that’s just not as sexy as astrophysics or particle physics. And that can be pretty frustrating for people in March Meeting research fields.

(This is not entirely the fault of the celebrities themselves– Cosmos did make an effort to include some stuff from other fields of science, and Brian Cox has expanded his tv-presenter empire to include biological topics. the problem, though, is that celebrity isn’t transferrable, and so doing this necessarily means having people who attained fame via work in one field out in the media talking about fields that can be pretty far removed from their areas of expertise. Which can be even more frustrating, particularly when the new topics aren’t handled well.)

At the same time, though, “you’re insufficiently interested in the stuff I consider important” is the battle cry of the humorless scold, as described in Garber’s piece at the Atlantic (same link as above, to save you scrolling back up). Which is why I spend a lot of time on Twitter scrolling past stuff that I think is pointless, biting back snide replies. There’s no accounting for taste, and all that, and you’re not going to get people to stop caring about whatever weird shit they’ve decided to care about by telling them that it’s unimportant trash. All you’re going to do is piss them off.

So, as irritating as it can be to see celebrity-driven attention going disproportionately to a handful of fields, it’s also important not to get too worked up about that and start yelling at people, because that doesn’t really do any good. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony of saying this in a post where I just finished complaining that people are insufficiently interested in things I consider important. You’re very clever, now shut up.)

All you can really do is work with the system as much as you can to promote what you like, and when something catches on, run with it as far as you can. Which is why, while I have no interest in reading any of the umpteen pieces on the science of color perception that were rushed out in the wake of the silly dress business, I applaud the scientists who produced them. Ride that horse until it collapses under you, because you might not get another chance.

So, you know, as with so many other things, there’s a needle to thread here. Celebrity is probably a net positive, but you need to be cautious about its attention-directing effects. At the same time, though, getting too caught up in the misdirection of attention by celebrity communicators is a short fast road to frustration and the writing of crankily contrarian books.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1wJX4pw

While I’m running unrelated articles head-on into each other, two other things that caught my eye recently were Sabine Hossenfelder’s thoughts on scientific celebrities (taking off from Lawrence Krauss’s defense of same) and Megan Garber’s piece on “attention policing”, spinning off that silliness about a badly exposed photo of a dress that took the Internet by storm.

Like Sabine, I’m generally in favor of the idea of science celebrities, though as someone whose books are found on shelves between Lawrence Krauss’s and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s, there’s no small amount of self-interest in that. But I think it’s generally good to direct more public attention to science-y things, by whatever means necessary. Which is why I spent an afternoon a month or so back with a cameraman filming me putting footballs in a freezer.

I do share the concern, though, about the attention-steering effects of celebrity. Sabine describes this within the context of science as a hypothetical involving Neil deGrasse Tyson publicly mentioning one of her papers. I think that hypothetical is already a reality outside of science, though, with the vagaries of celebrity meaning that the public image of science is largely drawn from a handful of photogenic fields with charismatic proponents at the expense of a much larger range of science with more direct impact on daily life.

The APS March Meeting takes place this week, and will be the largest physics meeting of the year. It probably won’t generate publicity in proportion to its attendance, though, because it’s largely focused on condensed matter physics, and that’s just not as sexy as astrophysics or particle physics. And that can be pretty frustrating for people in March Meeting research fields.

(This is not entirely the fault of the celebrities themselves– Cosmos did make an effort to include some stuff from other fields of science, and Brian Cox has expanded his tv-presenter empire to include biological topics. the problem, though, is that celebrity isn’t transferrable, and so doing this necessarily means having people who attained fame via work in one field out in the media talking about fields that can be pretty far removed from their areas of expertise. Which can be even more frustrating, particularly when the new topics aren’t handled well.)

At the same time, though, “you’re insufficiently interested in the stuff I consider important” is the battle cry of the humorless scold, as described in Garber’s piece at the Atlantic (same link as above, to save you scrolling back up). Which is why I spend a lot of time on Twitter scrolling past stuff that I think is pointless, biting back snide replies. There’s no accounting for taste, and all that, and you’re not going to get people to stop caring about whatever weird shit they’ve decided to care about by telling them that it’s unimportant trash. All you’re going to do is piss them off.

So, as irritating as it can be to see celebrity-driven attention going disproportionately to a handful of fields, it’s also important not to get too worked up about that and start yelling at people, because that doesn’t really do any good. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony of saying this in a post where I just finished complaining that people are insufficiently interested in things I consider important. You’re very clever, now shut up.)

All you can really do is work with the system as much as you can to promote what you like, and when something catches on, run with it as far as you can. Which is why, while I have no interest in reading any of the umpteen pieces on the science of color perception that were rushed out in the wake of the silly dress business, I applaud the scientists who produced them. Ride that horse until it collapses under you, because you might not get another chance.

So, you know, as with so many other things, there’s a needle to thread here. Celebrity is probably a net positive, but you need to be cautious about its attention-directing effects. At the same time, though, getting too caught up in the misdirection of attention by celebrity communicators is a short fast road to frustration and the writing of crankily contrarian books.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1wJX4pw

See Earth in the Mars night sky

View larger. |Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMU

On January 31, 2014 about 80 minutes after sundown, the Mars Curiosity rover turned its camera toward the horizon and snapped this photo of Earth shining in the Martian night sky.

‘Shining’ might be rather strong word. In the image, Earth is a faint white speck, top-center-left, just above the dim glow of twilight near the Martian landscape. Can you see it? We couldn’t. Luckily, NASA supplied an image with a pointer, see below.

View larger. | Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMU

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The image was captured on the rover’s 529th day, or sol, on the red planet. When Curiosity took this photo, Mars was about 160 million kilometers (99 million miles) from Earth.

Read more from NASA JPL

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1N8rewZ

View larger. |Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMU

On January 31, 2014 about 80 minutes after sundown, the Mars Curiosity rover turned its camera toward the horizon and snapped this photo of Earth shining in the Martian night sky.

‘Shining’ might be rather strong word. In the image, Earth is a faint white speck, top-center-left, just above the dim glow of twilight near the Martian landscape. Can you see it? We couldn’t. Luckily, NASA supplied an image with a pointer, see below.

View larger. | Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMU

Enjoying EarthSky? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!

The image was captured on the rover’s 529th day, or sol, on the red planet. When Curiosity took this photo, Mars was about 160 million kilometers (99 million miles) from Earth.

Read more from NASA JPL

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1N8rewZ

Touching NASA tributes to Leonard Nimoy’s passing

What better tribute? Terry Virts in the International Space Station gives the vulcan salute.

American astronaut Terry Virts (@AstroTerry) – orbiting 250 miles (400 km) above Earth on the International Space Station – paid this fitting tribute via Twitter to actor Leonard Nimoy, who died on Friday, February 27, 2015 at the age of 83. Nimoy will forever be known as Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series and many of the subsequent movies. The late actor’s home state of Massachusetts can be seen just to the right of Virts’ Vulcan salute.

Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha), also orbiting in ISS, tweeted, too:

"Of all the souls I have encountered.. his was the most human." Thx @TheRealNimoy for bringing Spock to life for us. http://ift.tt/1AoSYTT

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) February 28, 2015

In the video below, NASA Astronaut Mike Fincke and ESA European Space Agency Astronaut Luca Parmitano reflect on how Nimoy’s character Mr. Spock inspired generations of actual astronauts, space scientists and engineers, and space fans around the globe.

NASA itself on Twitter (@nasa) also acknowledged the influence of Nimoy and Star Trek for space goers, workers and fans:

RIP Leonard Nimoy. So many of us at NASA were inspired by Star Trek. Boldly go… http://t.co/qpeH5BTzQc http://ift.tt/17DM32L

— NASA (@NASA) February 27, 2015

R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy

Bottom line: Tributes from NASA astronauts to Leonard Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock on Star Trek.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1EFkV0b

What better tribute? Terry Virts in the International Space Station gives the vulcan salute.

American astronaut Terry Virts (@AstroTerry) – orbiting 250 miles (400 km) above Earth on the International Space Station – paid this fitting tribute via Twitter to actor Leonard Nimoy, who died on Friday, February 27, 2015 at the age of 83. Nimoy will forever be known as Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series and many of the subsequent movies. The late actor’s home state of Massachusetts can be seen just to the right of Virts’ Vulcan salute.

Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha), also orbiting in ISS, tweeted, too:

"Of all the souls I have encountered.. his was the most human." Thx @TheRealNimoy for bringing Spock to life for us. http://ift.tt/1AoSYTT

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) February 28, 2015

In the video below, NASA Astronaut Mike Fincke and ESA European Space Agency Astronaut Luca Parmitano reflect on how Nimoy’s character Mr. Spock inspired generations of actual astronauts, space scientists and engineers, and space fans around the globe.

NASA itself on Twitter (@nasa) also acknowledged the influence of Nimoy and Star Trek for space goers, workers and fans:

RIP Leonard Nimoy. So many of us at NASA were inspired by Star Trek. Boldly go… http://t.co/qpeH5BTzQc http://ift.tt/17DM32L

— NASA (@NASA) February 27, 2015

R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy

Bottom line: Tributes from NASA astronauts to Leonard Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock on Star Trek.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1EFkV0b