CommUnity of Minds — Al Gore writes: It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. …

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.

Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.

I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon sources of energy.

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them. (03/02/10)

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BBC Animal Science — Desert ants in Tunisia smell in stereo, sensing odours from two different directions at the same time. By sniffing the air with each antenna, the ants form a mental ‘odour map’ of their surroundings. They then use this map to find their way home, say scientists who report the discovery in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Pigeons, rats and even people may also smell in stereo, but ants are the first animal known to use it for navigation.

Dr Markus Knaden and colleagues Dr Kathrin Steck and Professor Bill Hansson of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany investigated how the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis navigates around its surroundings.

Each day, individual ants will leave the nest entrance and travel up to 100m in search of food. When they find some, they return straight home, somehow finding their tiny nest entrance again within a bleak, relatively featureless desert landscape.

Scientists knew the ant uses a sophisticated array of visual cues to find much of its way home. But Knaden’s team has now found that the insect does much more than that.

First, they placed four odours marked A, B, C and D around a barely visible nest entrance. They then tested the ants by removing and placing them in a remote location, without a nest entrance but with the same four odours.

The ants immediately headed to exactly where their nest should have been, confirming that they use the odours as olfactory landmarks. When the odours were mixed up, the ants became confused and unable to navigate their way home. “They had learned the olfactory scenery,” Dr Knaden told the BBC.

Ants with one antenna were also unable to navigate using more than one smell, confirming that the insects required two antennae, and an ability to smell in stereo, to find their way around. (03/02/10)

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BBC Anthropological Science — Inscribed ostrich shell fragments found in South Africa are among the earliest examples of the use of symbolism by modern humans, scientists say. The etched shells from Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape have been dated to about 60,000 years ago. Details are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers, who have investigated the material since 1999, argue that the markings are almost certainly a form of messaging - of graphic communication.

“The motif is two parallel lines, which we suppose were circular, but we do not have a complete refit of the eggs,” explained Dr Pierre-Jean Texier from the University of Bordeaux, Talence, France. “The lines are crossed at right angles or oblique angles by hatching. By the repetition of this motif, early humans were trying to communicate something. Perhaps they were trying to express the identity of the individual or the group,” he told BBC News.

Symbolic thought - the ability to let one thing represent another - was a giant leap in human evolution, and sets our species apart from the rest of the animal world. Understanding when and where this behaviour first emerged is a key quest for scientists studying human origins.

Arguably the earliest examples of conceptual thought are the pieces of shell jewellery discovered at Skhul Cave in Israel and from Oued Djebbana in Algeria. These artefacts are 90,000-100,000 years old. (03/02/10)

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BBC Environmental Science — Consumers around the globe are not aware that they are “eating” rainforests, says Andrew Mitchell. In this week’s Green Room, he explains how many every-day purchases are driving the destruction of the vital tropical ecosystems.

When was the last time you had a “rainforest picnic”? Or even, perhaps, an “all-day Amazon breakfast”? Next time you are in a supermarket picking up a chicken sandwich for lunch, or fancy tucking in to a hearty breakfast of eggs, sausage and bacon before setting off for work, spare a thought for the Amazon.

A new report by Forest Footprint Disclosure reveals for the first time how global business is driving rainforests to destruction in order to provide things for you and me to eat. … Consumers “eat” rainforests each day - in the form of beef-burgers, bacon and beauty products - but without knowing it. The delivery mechanism is a global supply chain with its feet in the forests and its hands in the till. Because of growing demand for beef, soy and palm oil, which are in much of what we consume, as well as timber and biofuels, rainforests are worth more cut down than standing up.

Governments, which claim to own 70% of them, create prosperity for their nations through this process, but poor forest communities need their forests for energy and food.

The report shows that the EU is the largest importer of soy in the world, much of it coming from Brazil. It also shows that after China, the EU is the biggest importer of palm oil in the world. Soy provides cheap food to fatten our pigs and chickens, while palm oil is in everything from cakes and cookies, to that fine moisturiser you gently rubbed into your cheeks this morning. I have become a bit of a bore in supermarkets, challenging my kids to hunt for soy lecithin or palm oil (often disguised as vegetable oil) on product labels. You should try it! The stuff is everywhere.

The gargantuan farms of Brazil’s Mato Grosso State can boast 50 combines abreast at harvest time, marching across monoculture prairies where once the most diverse ecosystem on Earth stood, albeit in some cases many years ago. (03/02/10)

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Tom Dispatch — Bill McGibben writes: Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal.  “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.”  And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet.  Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome” on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin.  If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet.  At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt. …

The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.

In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data. (02/26/10)

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The Oil Drum / Europe — Ugo Bardi writes: The Roma (or Rroma) of Italy are probably the poorest fraction of the residents in the country. They normally live in segregated camps, in trailers or in self built sheds. Only about half of the 150,000 Roma in Italy are Italian citizens; in most cases, they have no stable job and live a very precarious existence as the target of hatred and of open racism. The image to the right,  from Excite Magazine, shows the Roma camp in the suburb of Ponticelli, in Naples, as it was before being burned to the ground by an angry mob in 2008.

Here I am, in front of the whole class. Romani men and women; about 20 people; all coming from the same camp, nearby. They are in their late 20s and early 30s, and they have dressed up for the occasion. Not that they can afford expensive clothes, of course, but the men look smart in their informal attire. The women like to dress in bright colors. They wear the almost obligatory long skirt, as well as earrings and necklaces. They seem to be very happy to have found a way to leave the routine of the camp where they spend their time cooking and looking after young children.

Over the past months, a group of teachers have been lecturing to this group as part of an initiative of the county government. The idea is to help them gain skills that could be useful for them to find a job and integrate better in society. So, we told them how to manage a cooperative, how to manage their personal finances, safety in the workplace, garbage collection and recycling, permaculture, how to surf the web and much more. They have absorbed most what we told them with ease. After having seen them listen attentively to two hours of lessons on the biological carbon cycle and ask intelligent questions afterwards, I was impressed. So, I told myself; why not peak oil? And here I am.

Telling people about peak oil takes different approaches depending to whom you are talking. I understood long ago that most people can’t read even a simple Cartesian graph. Graphs are a language and they never learned it. If you show them the bell shaped curve, they’ll see it as a hill or a mountain of some kind. They’ll feel that it is hard to climb up and easy to descend. Not the way peak oil should be understood.

The Roma I’ll be talking to are at one of the extremes of the spectrum in terms of culture. None of the men went beyond 3rd or 4th grade of schooling; most of the women never went to school at all. The men can usually read, but rarely can write; the women can neither read nor write. They don’t read newspapers and don’t watch the news in TV. They love movies and spend lots of time chatting. It is from these sources that they gather most of what they know. What would be a good way to explain peak oil to them?

Communication is never one way. If I want them to understand me, I must understand them as well. So, for this talk, I have developed an extreme version of the presentation that I give when I know that the people listening are not at the top level in terms of scientific literacy. It is all based on vivid images shown on screen; pictures of oil wells, for instance. No graphs, no text, and no numbers. I have to rely on my voice, on my ability to catch their attention.

So, I tell them of peak oil based on the example of a person. When we are born, I say, we are very small, but with time we grow and we can do more things. But we also become old. In time, we can do less and less and, eventually, we must die. In a way, I continue, it is the same with oil. When oil is young, there is a lot of it. As it gets older, we use it up and there is less and less of it. We must work harder to get as much of it as we used to. It is the same with many things you are doing - haven’t you noticed that you must work harder? They look at me and nod. They understand the concept. …

When you present peak oil to someone who is middle class, the reaction may be denial or mobilization. But rarely you see people who have understood peak oil who are indifferent to it. There are good reasons for that. If you are middle class, you can see right away how peak oil can hurt you. You depend on a salary and, if your job vanishes because of peak oil, you’ll be in deep trouble. You have to pay your mortgage, your health insurance plan, instruction for your children, and all the rest. Peak oil can destroy you. …

But think of your situation as a Romani person. You have no stable job; so you can’t lose it. You don’t own a house, so you can’t be evicted. Nobody will give you credit, so you’ll never be in debt. You have no retirement plan, so you rely on your children for support when you’ll be old. You depend on welfare, sure, but you also know that you can live with very little. Finally, you live in a close-knit community formed of family clans. You quarrel with your neighbors and relatives all the time but you know that in a difficult situation, they’ll help you if they can.

Peak oil will be hard on the Roma, just as it will be on us, but they have a fighting chance of surviving it. In several ways, they are already post peak. (02/25/10)

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Science Daily — More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. …

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values.  The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.”

“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess.  In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are “evolutionarily familiar.” …

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals.  Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk.  Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel.  So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals. …

In addition, humans have always been mildly polygynous in evolutionary history.  Men in polygynous marriages were not expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate, whereas men in monogamous marriages were.  In sharp contrast, whether they are in a monogamous or polygynous marriage, women were always expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate.  So being sexually exclusive is evolutionarily novel for men, but not for women.  And the theory predicts that more intelligent men are more likely to value sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men, but general intelligence makes no difference for women’s value on sexual exclusivity. (02/25/10)

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BBC Human Science — Do bald people’s shiny heads contribute to global warming? … Can I disrupt the internal sat-nav of snails eating my petunias?… Will a slinky going downwards on an upwards moving escalator ever reach the bottom?

From curious to genius, these are just some of the ideas we’ve received for So You Want to Be a Scientist? - BBC Radio 4’s search for amateur experimenters. Since we launched the project in our weekly science show Material World in January, over 800 people have sent us their brainwaves.

If they’re selected then we’ll help them turn their suggestions into experiments to carry out themselves - from their kitchen, shed or local park. They’ll also be helped by a professional scientist, to advise on everything from experimental design to statistical analysis. Entries close in three days. So if you have an idea and you haven’t submitted it, you may still apply online here before midnight on February 28th.

A panel of judges chaired by Lord May, ex-UK government science adviser and current president of the British Science Association, will whittle the entries down to just four finalists. They’ll have until September to complete their research and present their findings at the British Science Association festival in Birmingham.  (02/25/10)

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Huffington Post — Ellen Brown writes: While bank bailouts fatten Wall Street, states continue to battle the credit crisis. In the search for innovative solutions, some political candidates are proposing that states generate their own credit by setting up their own banks.

State budgets for 2010 face the largest shortfalls on record, totaling $194 billion or 28 percent of state budgets; and 2011 is expected to be worse. Unemployment has already officially hit 10 percent, and many economists expect it to rise higher. Continued high unemployment will keep state income tax receipts at low levels and increase demand for Medicaid and other essential services states provide. The existing alternatives are spending cuts or tax increases, but both will just serve to make the downturn deeper. When states cut spending, they lay off employees, cancel contracts with vendors, eliminate or lower payments to businesses and nonprofit organizations that provide direct services, and cut benefit payments to individuals. The result is a reduction in overall demand. Tax increases also remove demand, by reducing the amount of money people have to spend.

Amanda Paulson, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, quotes Arturo Perez, fiscal analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures, which released its survey of state budget situations in December: “Unless you’re North Dakota, you’re probably a state that has had some degree of difficulty or crisis involving finances. It’s the worst situation states have faced in decades, perhaps going as far back as the Great Depression in some states.”

Unless you’re North Dakota — a state with a sizable budget surplus, and the only state that is adding jobs when other states are losing them. A poll reported on February 13 ranked that weather-challenged state first in the country for citizen satisfaction with their standard of living. North Dakota’s affluence has been attributed to oil, but other states with oil are in deep financial trouble. The big drop in oil and natural gas prices propelled Oklahoma into a budget gap that is 18.5% of its general-fund budget. California is also resource-rich, with a $2 trillion economy; yet it has a worse credit rating than Greece. So what is so special about North Dakota? The answer seems to be that it is the only state in the union that owns its own bank. It doesn’t have to rely on a recalcitrant Wall Street for credit. It makes its own. (02/24/10)

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The Washington Post — Bill McKibben writes: The cross-country ski race I’ve been training for, set for today high in the Green Mountains: cancelled, lack of snow.

Meanwhile, across the continent, backhoes and helicopters are moving snow down British Columbia’s Cypress Mountain in an attempt to cover the Olympic ski courses, and technicians are burying cooling pipes beneath the moguls to keep them from melting. Some climate-conscious jokers put out a video pushing the sport of “bobwheeling” for future snow-challenged Olympiads.

And apparently there was some snowfall in the greater Washington area last week.

When you’re trying to launch snowboarding tricks on dry ground and simultaneously shutting down the U.S. government because the snowbanks are casting shadows on the Washington Monument, something odd is going on. This isn’t a good old-fashioned winter for the District of Columbia, not unless you’re remembering the last ice age. And it doesn’t disprove global warming, despite Sen. Jim De Mint’s cheerful tweet: “It’s going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries ‘uncle.’ ”

Instead, the weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you’d expect as the planet warms. Here’s how it works:

In most places, winter is clearly growing shorter and less intense. We can tell, because Arctic sea ice is melting, because the glaciers on Greenland are shrinking and because a thousand other signals send the same message. Here in the mountains of the Northeast, for instance, lakes freeze later than they used to, and sometimes not at all: Lake Champlain remained open in winter only three times during the 19th century, but it did so 18 times between 1970 and 2007.

But rising temperature is only one effect of climate change. Probably more crucially, warmer air holds more water vapor than cold air does. The increased evaporation from land and sea leads to more drought but also to more precipitation, since what goes up eventually comes down. The numbers aren’t trivial — global warming has added 4 percent more moisture to the atmosphere since 1970. That means that the number of “extreme events” such as downpours and floods has grown steadily; the most intense storms have increased by 20 percent across the United States in the past century.

So here’s the thing: Despite global warming, it still gets cold enough to snow in the middle of winter. It even gets cold enough to snow in Texas and Georgia, as it did late last week. And the chances of what are technically called “big honking dumps” have increased. As Jeff Masters, the widely read weather blogger, pointed out last week, a record snowstorm requires a record amount of moisture in the air. “It is quite possible that the dice have been loaded in favor of more intense Nor’easters for the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, thanks to the higher levels of moisture present in the air due to warmer global temperatures,” he wrote. (02/24/10)

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