Category Archives: Environment

Friday Sprog Blogging: Antarctica: Land of Endless Water.

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Last week, I noted that the Free-Ride offspring are off kicking it with The Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment, and that, to ensure that you would not have to endure a Friday without a Sprog Blog, I gave each of the sprogs a book to read during their visit with their grandparents and asked them to report back on their books via email. At the conclusion of the elder Free-Ride offspring’s book report, emailed to me last Thursday night, I wrote:

Major props to the elder offspring for doing blog-homework without any prodding. This sets the bar pretty high for the younger offspring next week.

Want to guess how the sibling rivalry played out here?
With no prodding whatsoever, I received an email report from the younger Free-Ride offspring this past Sunday night on this book:

Antarctica.png

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Earth Day 2010: change I can believe in.

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First, let me refer you to Sharon Astyk’s excellent post on what has become of Earth Day. If I had the time or energy to pay much attention to Earth Day as a particular day of observance, I think I’d share Sharon’s grumpiness.
After all, paying attention to our impacts on our shared environment just one day out of 365 is not likely to make much of a difference, and buying stuff as a strategy to deal with our over-consumption of resources (and the pollution that follows upon the manufacture and transport of that stuff) seems pretty perverse.
That said, I’m going to take this Earth Day as an opportunity to notice some sustainable changes in the direction of treading more lightly that I’ve made in the past year. This isn’t quite rising to the level of Mike Dunford’s Earth Day resolutions meme, in which the sprogs and I participated last year. Resolutions are good, but sometimes when you set a goal and then fail to live up to it, you throw your hands up and kind of give up.
Giving up, I’d argue, doesn’t do much to help. On the other hand, noticing places where you imagined change would be painful and it turned out not to be might actually help motivate more change.
Here are the changes that have stuck since last Earth Day:

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ClimateGate, the Michael Mann inquiry, and accepted scientific practices.

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In my earlier post about the findings of the Penn State inquiry committee looking into allegations of research misconduct against Michael Mann, I mentioned that the one allegation that was found to merit further investigation may have broad implications for how the public understands what good scientific work looks like, and for how scientists themselves understand what good scientific work looks like.
Some of the commenters on that post seemed interested in discussing those implications. Others, not so much. As commenter Evan Harper notes:

It is clear that there are two discussions in parallel here; one is serious, thoughtful, and focused on the very real and very difficult questions at hand. The other is utterly inane, comprising vague ideological broadsides against nebulous AGW conspirators, many of which evince elementary misunderstandings about the underlying science.
If I wanted to read the second kind of conversation, there are a million blogs out there with which I could torture myself. But I want to read – and perhaps participate in – the first kind of conversation. Here and now, I cannot do that, because the second conversation is drowning out the first.
Were that comment moderators could crack down on these poisonous nonsense-peddlers. Their right to swing their (ham)fists ends where our noses begin

Ask and you shall receive.

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In the wake of ClimateGate: findings of the misconduct inquiry against Michael Mann.

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Remember “ClimateGate”, that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and widely distributed? One of the events set in motion by ClimateGate was a formal inquiry concerning allegations of research conduct against Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor in the Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University.
The report (PDF) from that inquiry has been released, so we’re going to have a look at it here.
This report contains a lot of discussion of how the committee pursuing the inquiry was constituted, and of which university policies govern how the committee is constituted, and of how membership of the committee was updated when members left the university for other positions, etc. I’m going to gloss over those details, but they’re all there in the ten page report if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
My focus here will be on what set the inquiry in motion to begin with, on the specific allegations they considered against Dr. Mann, on how the committee gathered information relevant to the allegations, and on the findings and decisions at which they arrived. Let me state up front that committee decided that one allegation merited further consideration in an “investigation” (which is the stage of the process that follows upon an “inquiry”), and that to my eye, that investigation may end up having broader implications for the practice of science in academia.
But let’s start at the beginning. From the inquiry report:

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#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Talking Trash: Online Outreach from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”.

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Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
Among other things, this panel took up the article panelist Lindsey Hoshaw wrote about the garbage patch for the New York Times and some of the reaction to it (including from panelist Miriam Goldstein).
Lindsey’s article was interesting because of the process. To get a spot on the ship going out to the North Pacific gyre, where the garbage patch is, she had to come up with funding. (We learned during the session that ship time on some of these expeditions can run to $18,000 a day.) Rather than pitching the story idea to the New York Times and hitting them with the bill, or covering the cost of the ship time herself, she “crowd-sourced” her participation — that is, she turned to readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit web project that supports freelance journalists, for donations. The pitch she gave when asking for this money described deliverables:

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#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from “Talking Trash: Online Outreach from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”.

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Session description: Debris in the North Pacific Gyre received unprecedented attention in 2009 with voyages from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Project Kaisei, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Each voyage integrated online outreach into its mission, but emphasized very different aspects of the problem. What are the challenges of creating a major outreach effort from one of the most isolated places on earth? How can scientists, journalists, and educators balance “exciting findings live from the field!” with “highly preliminary unpublished non-peer-reviewed data that our labwork might contradict”? And why is the public so interested in the issue of trash in the ocean, anyway?
The session was led by Miriam Goldstein (@oystersgarter), Lindsey Hoshaw (@thegarbagegirl), and Annie Crawley (@AnnieCrawley).
Here’s the session wiki page.

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Some thoughts on ClimateGate.

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It’s quite likely, if you’re reading anything else on the internets besides this blog for the past few weeks, that you’ve already gotten your fill of ClimateGate. But maybe you’ve been stuck in your Cave of Grading and missed the news that a bunch of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers (or leaked by an insider, depending on who’s telling the story) and widely distributed. Or maybe you’re still sorting out what you think about the email messages in question and what they mean for their authors, the soundness of scientific consensus on climate change, or the responsible conduct of science more broadly.
Honestly, I’m still sorting out what I think, but here’s where I am at the moment:

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Send GrrlScientist to Antarctica!

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GrrlScientist is in a contest to become Quark Expedition’s official blogger from Antarctica. (So is DN Lee from Urban Science Adventures.)
Grrl has been doing pretty well getting votes in this contest, despite the fact that her competition includes a radio personality from Portugal and a member of the Osmond family.
Of the top vote-getters, it is clear to me that Grrl would do the best job with the specified task (blogging from, and about, Antarctica). She has a personal and professional interest in nature, science, the environment, and conservation. She has a history of writing pieces that are accessible communications of both scientific content and aesthetic appreciation, in an astounding balance of clarity and lyricism. She takes lovely nature photographs, which she regularly shares with readers of her blog. And to say she’s an experienced blogger is an understatement on par with noting that Antarctica can get a little chilly.
The voting in the contest ends 30 September, 2009 at 12 noon (Eastern time). That’s less than 48 hours from now.
If you haven’t yet voted, consider giving Grrl your support. Voting does require registering your email address with Quark, but they are doing this to avoid poll-crashing, and I haven’t received any spam from them. And, if you’ve already cast a vote for someone else, you are allowed by the rules to reassign your vote. Some other worthy science bloggers in the competition have been throwing their support to Grrl as the voting winds down, so don’t miss this chance to give her your vote, too.