London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:
The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.
We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.
American Journal of Physics: String theorist Moataz H. Emam briefly discusses the accomplishments of string theory that would survive a complete falsification of the theory as a model of nature; and argues that such an event suggests that string theory should become its own discipline, independent of both physics and mathematics.
New York Times: American innovators — with their world-class strengths in product design, marketing and finance — may have a historic opportunity to convert the scientific know-how from abroad into market gains and profits. Mr. Hill views the transition to “the postscientific society” as an unrecognized bonus for American creators of new products and services. Mr. Hill’s insight, which he first described in a National Academy of Sciences journal article last fall, runs counter to the notion that the United States fails to educate enough of its own scientists and that “shortages” of them hamper American competitiveness. The opposite may actually be true. By tapping relatively low-cost scientists around the world, American innovators may actually strengthen their market positions.
New York Times: Whom can we trust to do hard-headed calculations to prove that a scientific experiment will not lead to the end of the world?
Science: The U.S. military has more to gain than lose by working with Chinese scientists on fundamental research. So says the Pentagon's former director of basic research, William Berry, in arguing for the removal of obstacles to scientific cooperation between the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and China despite the military rivalry between the two countries.
Berry, now a researcher at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., writes with colleague Cheryl Loeb in a working paper published by his center last week that collaborating with Chinese researchers at a time of rapid growth in China's science and technology investment will help DOD stay on the cutting edge of materials, biotechnology, energy sciences, and other disciplines relevant to long-term U.S. security interests.* It would also help the U.S. military learn more about China's scientific capabilities, says Berry, who was wowed by a visit to Shanghai's Fudan University last fall. As first steps toward fostering these links, the authors want DOD to encourage its program managers and scientists to travel to Chinese universities, establish a liaison office in China, and sponsor visits by Chinese academics to U.S. institutions.
Salon.com: Deniers continue to insist there's no consensus on global warming. Well, there's not. There's well-tested science and real-world observations.
San Francisco Chronicle: Two years ago, the National Academies published the seminal study on U.S. competitiveness entitled "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." The study identified major shortcomings in U.S. investments in basic scientific research as well as in math and science education for our youngsters. The suggestions contained in this study were immediately picked up by the Democratic House Leadership as their competitiveness strategy and later by President Bush in his State of the Union message under his American Competitiveness Initiative. Legislation in the form of the America Competes Act was passed in the House and Senate in 2007, and it appeared the United States was finally going to move forward after years of neglect to increase investment in math, science and basic research. All parties agreed that our competitiveness in the 21st century was at stake and we needed to act.
International Herald Tribune: A new era in U.S.-India cooperation was unveiled at the White House in July 2005 when President George W. Bush told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that he would work to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India, despite over a quarter century of disagreements between the two countries over nuclear issues.
Nature: 50 years after the appointment of the first presidential science adviser, the White House is flooded with scientific information. Roger Pielke Jr suggests how the next administration might develop ways to use it best.
Washington Post: "It's the oldest and most cliched of metaphors, but when it comes to global warming, it's the only one that really works: We're in a desperate race. Politics is chasing reality, and the gap between them isn't closing nearly fast enough," says Bill McKibben in the Washington Post.
Wired: How nonconformity, not rote learning, unlocked his genius.
The New York Times: Americans who read the papers or watch Jay Leno have been aware for some time now that there is a slim but real possibility — about 1 in 45,000 — that an 850-foot-long asteroid called Apophis could strike Earth with catastrophic consequences on April 13, 2036. What few probably realize is that there are thousands of other space objects that could hit us in the next century that could cause severe damage, if not total destruction.
The New York Times: After years of spending our nation’s space budget building an orbiting space station of questionable utility, serviced by an operationally expensive space shuttle of unsafe design, NASA has set a new direction for the future of human spaceflight. Once again, we have our sights on the Moon ... and beyond. We are finally, bodily, going to make our way into space, this time to stay.
The Boston Globe: There is now a broad consensus in this country, and indeed in the world, that global warming is happening, that it is a serious problem, and that humans are causing it. The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded there is a greater than 90 percent chance that greenhouse gases released by human activities like burning oil in cars and coal in power plants are causing most of the observed global warming. This report puts the final nail in denial's coffin about the problem of global warming.
Salon.com: Burned by 2004, I've been doing my best this time around to avoid the echo chamber of lefty blogs telling me what I want to hear about the possibility of Democrats taking control of Congress. But when the Wall Street Journal starts predicting a blowout, the siren song gets hard to resist.
The New York Times: A report last month by the National Academy of Sciences documents widespread bias against women in science and engineering and recommends a sweeping overhaul of our institutions says Margaret Wertheim. The reason is not academia bureaucracy, but more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed physics, astronomy and mathematics as inherently male.
However, Cathy Young in the Boston Globe writes that maybe the findings of the National Academy of Science report could be explained by the make up of the panel's members.
Says Young:
Ultimately, the report is a missed opportunity. It could have addressed the personal and family choices women could make to maximize their career potential, or looked at the factors in the high achievement of Asian-American women in science. (Asian-Americans are virtually ignored in all the talk of minority women in science.) Instead, it upholds an orthodoxy of female victimization. Women, and science, deserve better
Continue reading "Women still face discrimination in science" »
The Independent: James Lovelock, the inventor of the microwave oven and the Electron Capture Detector, a useful instrument for measuring atmospheric trace compounds in the field, answers questions from the public on nuclear waste, the environment, and the links between science, lobbying, and politics.
James Lovelock wikipedia entry
Personal web site
The Washington Post: In regard to nuclear proliferation and arms control, the fundamental problem is clear: Either we begin finding creative, outside-the-box solutions or the international nuclear safeguards regime will become obsolete.
Salon.com: As Al Gore, the former Vice President's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," is receiving critical attacks from the Competitive Enterprise Institute over the quality of the science in the movie. salon.com asks some leading climatologists to review the movie for scientific accuracy.
Their biggest surprise: that Gore could present the science in an accurate way without putting everyone in the audience to sleep. The scientists only dispute one technical point on Gore's use of ice core samples but on the whole, "Given the fact that this was a film intended to bring the message to the lay public, I think it was excellent," says John Wallace, a climate scientist at the University of Washington.
Related story
A review of the movie at realclimate.org
The Guardian: Do scientists have responsibility towards deciding what happens to the applications of their research? asks Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society. Rees provides examples of how scientists involved with the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs try to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and lower tensions during the cold war. He also points out that scientists themselves sometimes restrict specific areas of research because of concerns over the potential for developing weapons either through a "Hippocratic oath", or through moratoriums (such as the 1975 "Asilomar declaration" by molecular biologists).
Rees says:
Such a "voluntary moratorium will be harder to achieve today: the academic community is larger, and competition (enhanced by commercial pressures) is more intenseTo be effective, the consensus must be worldwide. If one country alone imposed regulations, the most dynamic researchers and companies would migrate to another that was more sympathetic or permissive. This is happening already in stem cell research...
...Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical. More than that, they should foster benign spin-offs, but resist dangerous or threatening applications.
Continue reading "Martin Rees: Encouraging scientific responsibility" »
Nature: Chris Patten, chancellor of the Universities of Oxford and of Newcastle in the UK, recently gave a speech to the Academy of Technologies in Paris, France in which he calls for caution in the establishment of a European Institute of Technology, modeled on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Will the EIT be a real institution or a "virtual body, promoting yet more networking?" he asks. Patten claims that Europe doesn't need a new institution, just better funding of some of the existing universities and research institutions.
The New York Times: Paul Krugman writes that scientists and anyone considering of running for office on a platform of dealing with climate change, need to be more pro-active in dealing with the manipulation of data by opponens of global warming. If their opponents misrepresent their data, they should call it scientific fraud "pure and simple" says Krugman.
The Courier News: Mention the words "particle physics" and most people begin to go cross-eyed. But the study of this arcane subject has led scientists around the world to a greater understanding of how the universe is formed, what is inside an atom and what new particles are out there in space. For years, brilliant American scientists have dominated the field of particle physics and the investigations into the nature of matter, space, energy and time — the very origins of the universe itself.
The New York Times: Other industrial democracies are reshaping their immigration policies to invite the skilled immigrants that the US turns away.
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