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January 28, 2014
AGU’s State of the Union Wishlist
Every January, the president of the United States appears before Congress and the nation to reflect on the previous year and to set forth his agenda for the next 365 days. As President Obama embarks on his fifth State of the Union, the American Geophysical Union has put together a list of critical issues that should be included in tonight’s address.
January 17, 2014
Top 5 Science Policy Stories from 2013
From extreme partisanship in Congress and a historic typhoon to political climate change battles and the search for habitable planets, 2013 was never short of science policy news. In a year full of ups and downs for the Earth and space science research community, AGU Public Affairs has compiled a list of the top five Earth and space science policy stories from 2013.
January 13, 2014
The Polar Vortex Gets Its 15 Minutes of Fame
Every science has its own language and terms, and meteorology has more than most. It’s strange though how every now and then, a scientific term you’d only hear if you were listening to a group of meteorologists discuss weather gets turned into a water cooler topic. In 2012, it was the term DERECHO (dah-ray show), when one came through the mid-Atlantic (and knocked down a million trees and power lines from Ohio all the way to the Eastern Shore of Maryland).
Now, the polar vortex has gotten its 15 minutes of fame. The cold outbreak at the beginning of the year was certainly one of the more severe chills in a couple of decades, but by no means as bad as what we saw during several winters in the1970’s and 1980’s. In the past few days I’ve seen images on TV news of snow, frozen lakes, and high winds that were labeled as the polar vortex, but they were wrong. The polar vortex is high above the surface and what you were seeing in those news reports was, (wait for it), snow, frozen lakes, and high winds!
While my fellow meteorologists have cringed as the public tries to make sense of this new word in the public’s weather dictionary, I think it’s a wonderful teaching moment. Albert Einstein said that science should be made as simple as possible, but no more so, and I cannot accurately explain the polar vortex in one sentence (or even one paragraph), but I can do it in three or four. So, if you will bear with me, I promise it will be quite interesting and you’ll never look at a TV weather report the same again!
January 8, 2014
The Recent Cold Snap
Over the last weekend, the temperature in the vast middle of U.S. suddenly dropped to a record low. This extreme weather is a result of a nonlinearity in the weather system, specifically a wave breaking event in the upper atmosphere. Usually the air motion in the mid-latitude is moving very rapidly within a narrow band, called the Jet Stream, which predominantly flows west to east but also contains waviness. It …
December 20, 2013
Senator Olympia Snowe Encourages Scientists to Make Their Voices Heard
The large auditorium was standing-room only for former Senator Olympia Snowe’s (R-Maine) address at AGU’s 2013 Fall Meeting. An ally with a history of standing up for many of AGU’s key issues on and off Capitol Hill, Senator Snowe resigned in January of 2013 over what she saw as an increasingly inept and hyper-partisan atmosphere in Congress. During her time in the Senate, Snowe positioned herself in the middle of …
December 3, 2013
Climate Science Legal Defense Fund: Protecting the Scientific Endeavor
So you are having a great time at the AGU Fall Meeting. You are meeting science colleagues from around the world, you are seeing cutting edge research presented in the scientific program, and you are enjoying the sights and sounds of beautiful San Francisco. Then you check your email and the blood drains from your face. Your institution’s legal counsel explains that a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request has …
November 12, 2013
New Website Wants to Encourage Public Discussion of Climate Change by Scientists
What are your thoughts on the new Climate Change National Forum and Review (CCNFR)? According to the website’s founders, the forum offers one way for scientists, and eventually policy makers, to join the discussion on climate change. The organization’s founders, Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon, Dr. Barry Lefer, and Prof. Tracy Hester, developed CCNFR to educate the American public on the science of climate change and its policy implications. CCNFR’s main vehicle …
August 29, 2013
Lessons of Volcanic Eruptions
Volcanic eruptions are the most important natural cause of climate change, and they teach us many lessons about the climate system. The cooling Earth experiences for a couple years after a big volcanic eruption, like that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, helps us calibrate the amount of warming we will suffer in the future from continued human emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. By filtering out the …
June 14, 2013
Swimming in Unfavorable Conditions
With over 70% of the world covered by water, understanding the interaction between humans and the ocean is vital to the health of both. The world’s ocean helps to feed communities, regulate climate, support tourism and economies, and generate oxygen that humans breathe, and provides innumerable benefits to the livelihood and health of the humans who interact with it. Changing climate and swelling populations create conditions that increase stress …
June 5, 2013
Global Warming: Public Opinion and Policy
As a research scientist in Carnegie Mellon University’s interdisciplinary department of Engineering and Public Policy, I field a lot of questions. Perhaps the toughest of those is “How can you sleep at night, when you know your research is influencing policy? We’re scientists, not advocates!” Well, shall we pause a moment to consider how our reluctance to talk about policy implications has affected the global warming debate? The scientific …
