Obama Begins To Move Towards Renewable Future
I am really glad that Obama is starting to talk about policy change because of the oil spill. His speech today at Carnegie Mellon University laid out exactly why it is so important to do so. (bold added)
We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. So without a major change in our energy policy, our dependence on oil means that we will continue to send billions of dollars of our hard-earned wealth to other countries every month — including countries in dangerous and unstable regions…
And the time has come to aggressively accelerate that transition. The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future. (Applause.) Now, that means continuing our unprecedented effort to make everything from our homes and businesses to our cars and trucks more energy-efficient. It means tapping into our natural gas reserves, and moving ahead with our plan to expand our nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants. It means rolling back billions of dollars of tax breaks to oil companies so we can prioritize investments in clean energy research and development.
But the only way the transition to clean energy will ultimately succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future — if capital comes off the sidelines and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs is unleashed. And the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.
No, many businesses have already embraced this idea because it provides a level of certainty about the future. And for those that face transition costs, we can help them adjust. But if we refuse to take into account the full costs of our fossil fuel addiction — if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and the national security costs and the true economic costs — we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.
The House of Representatives has already passed a comprehensive energy and climate bill, and there is currently a plan in the Senate — a plan that was developed with ideas from Democrats and Republicans — that would achieve the same goal. And, Pittsburgh, I want you to know, the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months. (Applause.) I will continue to make the case for a clean energy future wherever and whenever I can. (Applause.) I will work with anyone to get this done — and we will get it done.
Full speech below
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Movie Review: Extraordinary Measures
I just got done watching Extraordinary Measures, a movie that frankly flew way under my radar, but one I think everyone should see.
I am not what you would consider a person prone to emotional outbursts. Some have even claimed that I have a bit too much logic and reason, but frankly I was crying through half this movie. It tells the tale of a family who has two children with Pompe. A debilitating illness that affects the muscles. The most heartbreaking symptom is that almost all of the patients die before they turn 10 years old.
This is the tale of a couple of motivated parents and some dedicated scientists who discover a treatment that will control the symptoms of the illness. It is a heart warming movie with an ending which, if it doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, you might want to get your brain looked at.
What I liked so very much about this movie however is that it perfectly demonstrates the beauty, wonder and usefulness of science. These parents have children struck down with the most horrible of symptoms, and instead of getting down on their knees and praying to an invisible sky daddy to grant them health, they work themselves to the bone using advanced science to develop and a treatment that saves their lives.
This movie points out a lot of things that religious people often overlook. It is scientists who work hard to bring cures to sick children. You could pray till you are blue in the face and it wouldn’t be as useful as the treatment that the hard working and heroic scientists develop for these little kids.
People often wonder if you can’t have morality, or hope, or art, or wonder without a god this movie illustrates the beauty and awe and joy and wonder that scientific discovery can create. All of these things are possible without involving some iron age sky creature that tells you when you can eat certain foods, or what kind of people can get married.
Not only is it a heart warming and thrilling tale of science as the hero, it also demonstrates in a more subtle way the dangers of moving away from science. Every child you teach creationism to a kid instead of evolution through natural selection, every time you tell a kid that something is simply “gods will” or “only god knows” you may be stealing the next Albert Einstein or Mary Curie from us.
It is ok to tell kids that you don’t know something, but you can do so in a way that stokes their natural curiosity for the world. You can fill them with a sense of wonder and awe about the natural world. If you do these things there is a much better chance they will grow into adults that have a hunger for science, and a drive to protect this amazing planet.
Or you can tell them that the world is 6000 years old, that god created it in 6 days, that if they like someone of the same gender they will burn in hell fire for all eternity, and that an invisible sky daddy grants wishes if you pray to him, but only if you do so in the right way and read the right holy book.
One seems like a great way to raise a kid, the other seems like child abuse.
Watch this movie with someone you love, and then talk about science afterward. I bet you will talk about it in a way you might not have before. Science can often be confused with “what I do in 7th period” or “what nerds in lab coats do” but it has real benefits to our lives. It is real people using their amazing intelligence to discover things about the world. Things that make us better as a society, things that show us how much we still need to figure out, and in some very lucky cases things that cure sick children of a horrible illness.
6 Steps To Save Humanity
Neuroscientist and fiction writer David Eagleman presents “Six Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization.”
Civilizations always think they’re immortal, Eagleman says, but they nearly always perish, leaving “nothing but ruins and scattered genetics.” It takes luck and new technology to survive. We may be particularly lucky to have Internet technology to help manage the six requirements of a durable civilization:
1. “Try not to cough on one another.” More humans have died from epidemics than from all famines and wars. Disease precipitated the fall of Greece, Rome, and the civilizations of the Americas. People used to bunch up around the infected, which pushed local disease into universal plague. Now we can head that off with Net telepresence, telemedicine, and medical alert networks. All businesses should develop a work-from-home capability for their workforce.
2. “Don’t lose things.” As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, “knowledge is hard won but easily lost.” Plumbing disappeared for a thousand years when Rome fell. Inoculation was invented in China and India 700 years before Europeans rediscovered it. These days Michelangelo’s David has been safely digitized in detail. Eagleman has direct access to all the literature he needs via PubMed, JSTOR, and Google Books. “Distribute, don’t reinvent.”
3. “Tell each other faster.” Don’t let natural disasters cascade. The Minoans perished for lack of the kind of tsunami alert system we now have. Countless Haitians in the recent earthquake were saved by Ushahidi.com, which aggregated cellphone field reports in real time.
4. “Mitigate tyranny.” The USSR’s collapse was made inevitable by state-controlled media and state-mandated mistakes such as Lysenkoism, which forced a wrong theory of wheat farming on 13 time zones, and starved millions. Now crowd-sourced cellphone users can sleuth out vote tampering. We should reward companies that stand up against censorship, as Google has done in China.
5. “Get more brains involved in solving problems.” Undertapping human capital endangers the future. Open courseware from colleges is making higher education universally accessible. Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced by sites such as PatientsLikeMe, Foldit (protein folding), and Cstart (moon exploration). Perhaps the next step is “society sourcing.”
6. “Try not to run out of energy.” When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. Email saves trees and trucking. Online shopping is a net energy gain, with UPS optimizing delivery routes and never turning left. We need to expand the ability to hold meetings and conferences online.
But if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.
New High Resolution Tools Improve Predictions Of Climate Change And Its Impacts
On March 22, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture held a webcast announcing the launch of a joint research program to produce high-resolution models for predicting climate change and its resulting impacts.
Called Decadal and Regional Climate Prediction Using Earth System Models (EaSM), the program is designed to generate models that–significantly more powerful than existing models–can help decision-makers develop adaptation strategies addressing climate change. These models will be developed through a joint, interagency solicitation for proposals.
The promise of an historic program
EaSM is distinguished by its promise for generating: 1) predictions of climate change and associated impacts at more localized scales and over shorter time periods than previously possible; and 2) innovative interdisciplinary approaches to address the sources and impacts of climate change. These interdisciplinary approaches will draw on biologists, chemists, computer scientists, geoscientists, materials scientists, mathematicians, physicists, computer specialists and social scientists.
Axel Heilberg Island in Canada's Arctic, is shown in an April 8, 2008 image. Note the blocks of ice that have calved off the foot of the glacier (middle-bottom), as well as the melt feature and stream (bottom-right). This photograph was obtained from on board the NASA P-3B aircraft during ARCTAS, a NASA-funded contribution to POLARCAT, a core activity of the 2007/2008 International Polar Year.
“This extraordinary and exciting multi-agency research program will enable a major step forward in our ability to understand and predict both climate change and its impacts on people–at the spatial and temporal scales relevant to human life and societal decision making,” says Timothy Killeen, NSF’s assistant director for the Geosciences Directorate.
By producing reliable, accurate information about climate change and resulting impacts at improved geographic and temporal resolutions, models developed under the EaSM solicitation will provide decision-makers with sound scientific bases for developing adaptation and management responses to climate change at regional levels.
“This project integrates expertise from multiple communities–including the fundamental sciences–which is needed to understand climate change processes, and advanced modeling, which is needed to quantitatively assess climate change impacts,” says Edward Seidel, NSF’s acting assistant director for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate.
The need for improved climate change models
The development of high-resolution, interdisciplinary predictive models through EaSM is important because the consequences of climate change are becoming more immediate and profound than anticipated. These consequences include prolonged droughts, increased ecosystem stress, reduced agriculture and forest productivity, altered biological feedbacks, degraded ocean and permafrost habitats and the rapid retreat of glaciers and sea ice–all of which are expected to have major impacts on ecological, economic and social systems as well as on human health.
To mitigate these consequences, EaSM models will be designed to support planning for the management of food and water supplies, infrastructure construction, ecosystem maintenance, and other pressing societal issues at more localized levels and more immediate time periods than can existing models.
Program funding
The joint solicitation for EaSM proposals enables the three partner agencies to combine resources and fund the highest-impact projects without duplicating efforts. The FY 2010 EaSM solicitation will be supported by the following funding levels: 1) about $30 million from NSF; 2) about $10 million from DOE; and 3) about $9 million from USDA. This project represents an historic augmentation of support for interdisciplinary climate change research by NSF and its partner agencies.
This solicitation is the first solicitation for the five-year EaSM program, which will run from FY 2010 to FY 2014. Submitted proposals will be reviewed through NSF’s peer review process, and awards will be funded by all three partner agencies. About 20 NSF grants under EaSM are expected to be awarded.
Research goals for EaSM
- NSF is particularly interested in developing models that will produce reliable predictions of 1) climate change at regional and decadal scales; 2) resulting impacts; and 3) potential adaptations of living systems to these impacts. Related research may, for example, include studies of natural decadal climate change, regional aspects of water and nutrient cycling, and methods to test predictions of climate change.
- The USDA is particularly interested in developing climate models that can be linked to crop, forestry and livestock models. Such models will be used to help assess possible risk management strategies and projections of yields at various spatial and temporal scales.
- DOE is particularly interested in developing models that better define interactions between climate change and decadal modes of natural climate variability, simulate climate extremes under a changing climate, and help resolve the uncertainties of the indirect effects of aerosols on climate.
Types of proposals
Two types of interdisciplinary proposals will be considered for EaSM funding: Type 1 proposals should be capacity/community building activities, address one or more goals, and last up to three years; these proposals may receive up to $300,000 in annual funding. Type 2 proposals should describe large, ambitious, collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts that advance Earth system modeling on regional and decadal scales, and last three to five years; these proposals may receive from $300,000 to $1 million in annual funding.
Lets Say It Again, Global Warming Doesn’t Mean It Won’t Snow
Even the president seems to feel the need to remind people, that global warming doesn’t mean that winter doesn’t happen.
You can read the full transcript below, I have highlighted the global warming part in bold. Or you can watch the whole thing here.
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