Science and the media: 18 - 23 December
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0758
Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:
- Three Nature articles about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s leader, Jane Lubchenco—and about US science politics.
- A long front-page, above-the-fold New York Times story reviewing the climate debate—and conveying pessimism.
- A Science magazine report about the views of Bill Foster, a physicist who just completed a term in Congress.
- A long New York Times Sunday magazine piece about an effort to use physics research methods to gain deep understanding of cities.
Nature lionizes Lubchenco, sounds political alarm
Nature this week lionizes as “Newsmaker of the Year” Jane Lubchenco, the scientist who leads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And in an editorial , Nature‘s editors are making the most of it.
Two articles set the context for the editorial. In a long news feature , “Newsmaker of the Year: In the Eye of the Storm,” Nature reports in detail on Lubchenco’s science-minded leadership of NOAA and of the federal response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, traces out the story of her childhood and career, and emphasizes her many years of effort, initiative, and innovation in science communication and outreach.
In an invited commentary , “Stand Up for Science,” Nancy Baron argues that Lubchenco models “the intrinsic link between communication and leadership.” Baron is science outreach director for the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea, or COMPASS, and lead communications trainer for the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program. She says Lubchenco “helped launch” both organizations.
But the editorial carries the freight, and carries this headline: “Calm in a crisis: Jane Lubchenco, Nature‘s Newsmaker of the Year, shows how scientists can help society.” The editors mean to capitalize on their lionization of Lubchenco by challenging in advance what they see as the threat of anti-science actions coming soon from Republicans, and by advocating stronger, more effective communication by scientists in public.
They begin by making the overall case for Lubchenco as leader and science-outreach communicator:
For almost three months this year, a mini-volcano of oil and gas erupted into the Gulf of Mexico and disgorged nearly 5 million barrels of petroleum. Throughout the crisis, a poised scientist gave countless media interviews to explain to a scared and angry public how the US government was striving to contain the damage. Behind the scenes, with decisive leadership, she ran the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—the agency that closed fisheries, tracked oil, protected habitats and assessed the damage to communities and the environment. For her role in the response to the crisis, Jane Lubchenco is Nature‘s Newsmaker of the Year.
Nature‘s editors continue by summarizing Lubchenco’s career successes “as both a leading researcher and an environmental advocate.” Then they turn abruptly to the Republicans:
The United States could do with more scientists like Lubchenco, with the skills and the dedication to speak out on issues that matter. The need will be particularly acute next year, when the Republican Party takes over the US House of Representatives. Although Republicans have generally supported basic science, incoming House leaders have made it clear that they are hostile to certain areas of research. Some have pledged to hold hearings on climate science, which they argue is seriously flawed and has overstated the evidence for global warming. Adrian Smith (R-NE) introduced the YouCut Citizen Review , which calls on the US public to search the National Science Foundation website list of peer-reviewed grants for those they consider wasteful. And Darrell Issa (R-CA), the incoming head of the powerful Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, last year led an effort to revoke funding from the National Institutes of Health for studies of substance abuse and HIV risk in other countries.
Scientific leaders in the United States must stand up against such attacks. As a first step, they should try to meet with incoming House members from both parties to voice their concerns and explain the rationale behind research in controversial areas. Recognizing that all politics is local, scientists will need to make clear why climate change or HIV research matters for the communities represented by members of Congress. They should take along science-savvy business leaders and locally elected officials to help make their case.
Next the editors assert that
- beyond “the scientific leadership, there is a broader need for more individual scientists to communicate with the public,” and that
- such activity, unfortunately, “is not particularly valued -- and is even disdained -- in some fields of research,” and that
- “spending time meeting with elected leaders or local journalists does not help a young scientist to get tenure,” and that
- most scientists “receive no training in public communication, and will need to hone their skills.”
The editors recommend that scientists consult with communication professionals, and they endorse scientific societies’ congressional science-fellowship programs.
The editorial ends this way:
As with any endeavour, it takes time to develop the communication skills that Lubchenco and other senior scientists have acquired. Even Lubchenco foundered at times during the oil spill. She made some mistakes and was criticized for the way that her agency initially downplayed the evidence for oil spreading below the surface. Despite such slips, Lubchenco has steered her agency through the crisis with a steady hand. She is an outstanding example of how much one scientist can do to improve both society and natural ecosystems. Others would do well to follow her lead.
Climate gloom in New York Times front-page feature
The 22 December New York Times front page offers an energetic statement of climate-change alarm—and ultimately, gloom—in the lengthy feature article “Temperature Rising: A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning.”
The Times blurbs the piece as a continuation of the series “Temperature Rising: Tracking the Numbers,” in which articles “are focusing on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences.” In this latest article, Justin Gillis reviews much of the history of both the science and the debate. He ties it all together around the story of the late Charles David Keeling and Keeling’s graph showing the planet’s rising carbon dioxide levels: the Keeling Curve.
“Many Americans have never heard of” the Keeling Curve, Gillis says, “but to climatologists, it is the most recognizable emblem of their science . . . carved into a wall at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.” Gillis adds that by “the late 1960s, a decade after Dr. Keeling began his measurements, the trend of rising carbon dioxide was undeniable, and scientists began to warn of the potential for a big increase in the temperature of the earth.”
Gillis also notes that Keeling’s widow, Louise Keeling, has “said that if her husband had lived to see the hardening of the political battle lines over climate change, he would have been dismayed.” Gillis quotes her: “He was a registered Republican. He just didn’t think of it as a political issue at all.”
Nevertheless, writes Gillis, Keeling’s “discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming.” He continues:
When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.
By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.
The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?
Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide traps heat at the surface of the planet. They cite growing evidence that the inexorable rise of the gas is altering the climate in ways that threaten human welfare.
The article recites the risks and predicts their intensification: “melting ice sheets, rising seas, more droughts and heat waves, more flash floods, worse storms, extinction of many plants and animals, depletion of sea life and—perhaps most important—difficulty in producing an adequate supply of food.” Then it recounts the story of Republican President George Bush’s actions committing “the United States in 1992 to limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide” and the story of the “limited effect” of the Kyoto Protocol.
Gillis observes that some “of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny,” quoting in particular Dana Rohrabacher of California, who recently in a congressional hearing on global warming called the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere “undramatic.” Then he quotes scientists and others who disagree.
And then Gillis goes back decades to tell Keeling’s story in some detail, declaring that “the essence of his scientific legacy was his passion for doing things in a meticulous way,” which “explains why, even as challengers try to pick apart every other aspect of climate science, his half-century record of carbon dioxide measurements stands unchallenged.” Here’s a key excerpt, telling about the origins of the Keeling Curve:
He quickly made profound discoveries. One was that carbon dioxide oscillated slightly according to the seasons. Dr. Keeling realized the reason: most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere, and plants there were taking up carbon dioxide as they sprouted leaves and grew over the summer, then shedding it as the leaves died and decayed in the winter.
He had discovered that the earth itself was breathing.
A more ominous finding was that each year, the peak level was a little higher than the year before. Carbon dioxide was indeed rising, and quickly. That finding electrified the small community of scientists who understood its implications. Later chemical tests, by Dr. Keeling and others, proved that the increase was due to the combustion of fossil fuels.
Gillis also reports about Keeling’s mentor, Roger Revelle, who later taught at Harvard. There among the students “in the 1960s who first saw the Keeling Curve displayed in [Revelle’s] classroom was a senator’s son from Tennessee named Albert Arnold Gore Jr, who marveled at what it could mean for the future of the planet.” Gore’s famous 2006 movie and book both featured the Keeling Curve.
To interpret the Keeling numbers, Gillis gives his audience an elementary review of the climatological argument:
The basic physics of the atmosphere, worked out more than a century ago, show that carbon dioxide plays a powerful role in maintaining the earth’s climate. Even though the amount in the air is tiny, the gas is so potent at trapping the sun’s heat that it effectively works as a one-way blanket, letting visible light in but stopping much of the resulting heat from escaping back to space.
Without any of the gas, the earth would most likely be a frozen wasteland—according to a recent study, its average temperature would be colder by roughly 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But scientists say humanity is now polluting the atmosphere with too much of a good thing.
In recent years, researchers have been able to put the Keeling measurements into a broader context. Bubbles of ancient air trapped by glaciers and ice sheets have been tested, and they show that over the past 800,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air oscillated between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Just before the Industrial Revolution, the level was about 280 parts per million and had been there for several thousand years.
That amount of the gas, in other words, produced the equable climate in which human civilization flourished.
Other studies, covering many millions of years, show a close association between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the earth. The gas seemingly played a major role in amplifying the effects of the ice ages, which were caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit.
The geologic record suggests that as the earth began cooling, the amount of carbon dioxide fell, probably because much of it got locked up in the ocean, and that fall amplified the initial cooling. Conversely, when the orbital wobble caused the earth to begin warming, a great deal of carbon dioxide escaped from the ocean, amplifying the warming.
Gillis also discusses “climate-change contrarians” who don’t accept the claimed implications of the Keeling numbers:
The Internet has given rise to a vocal cadre of challengers who question every aspect of the science—even the physics, worked out in the 19th century, that shows that carbon dioxide traps heat. That is a point so elementary and well-established that demonstrations of it are routinely carried out by high school students.
However, the contrarians who have most influenced Congress are a handful of men trained in atmospheric physics. They generally accept the rising carbon dioxide numbers, they recognize that the increase is caused by human activity, and they acknowledge that the earth is warming in response.
But they doubt that it will warm nearly as much as mainstream scientists say, arguing that the increase is likely to be less than two degrees Fahrenheit, a change they characterize as manageable.
Among the most prominent of these contrarians is Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who contends that as the earth initially warms, cloud patterns will shift in a way that should help to limit the heat buildup. Most climate scientists contend that little evidence supports this view, but Dr. Lindzen is regularly consulted on Capitol Hill.
Gillis predicts that barring “some big breakthrough in clean-energy technology . . . rapid growth in developing countries threatens to make the emissions problem unsolvable.” He quotes Ralph Keeling, the son who has continued his father’s scientific work:
“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”
Physicist’s outlook after two years in Congress
A news article in the 17 December issue of Science reports on the thoughts of physicist, businessman, and ex-congressman Bill Foster of Illinois, who co-founded Electronic Theatre Controls and did 22 years at Fermilab before winning a special congressional election in March 2008. Foster, a Democrat, lost the seat last month. He wants to see more scientists in politics.
Both the reporter, Eli Kintisch, and his subject assume that scientists bring special qualities to public office. Kintisch quotes Foster’s former chief of staff, who found himself frequently chasing down numbers for Foster’s detailed study. He quotes Foster asserting that an “engineer or scientist can cut through the sound-bite level of debate” and that “it takes a physicist to unwind what physicists did to structured finance” on Wall Street. He cites Foster’s idea for “a rule that complex derivatives . . . be expressed as algorithms so that their possible impacts could be modeled.”
Kintisch also reports that Foster, aware of the high proportion of engineers in China’s government, has begun thinking about creating a political action group to identify and train scientists and engineers to run for office. Foster is reportedly considering whether or not to insist that recruits “have a science-based attitude about climate change, or, more controversially, about evolution.”
At the end, Kintisch observes that Foster could possibly return some day to “a Congress with more members who are scientists—and one that is more capable of dealing with an increasingly complex world.”
New York Times Sunday magazine: “A Physicist Solves the City”
Physicists’ tools and approaches appear in the financial world. What about applying them to the study of cities?
The 19 December New York Times Sunday magazine offers a lengthy article by Jonah Lehrer called “A Physicist Solves the City,” which the Times blurbs this way: “What makes a city grow and thrive? What causes it to stagnate and fall? Geoffrey West thinks the tools of physics can give us the answers.”
But first, some biology. Lehrer’s article reports that after the Superconducting Super Collider project crashed in 1993, West, with several decades of physics experience, began to look for completely new scientific opportunities—challenges outside high-energy physics. In 1997, as the magazine puts it,
he published one of the most contentious and influential papers in modern biology. (The research, which appeared in Science, has been cited more than 1,500 times.) The last line of the paper summarizes the sweep of its ambition, as West and his co-authors assert that they have just solved “the single most pervasive theme underlying all biological diversity,” showing how the most vital facts about animals—heart rate, size, caloric needs—are interrelated in unexpected ways.
The mathematical equations that West and his colleague devised were inspired by the earlier findings of Max Kleiber. In the early 1930s, when Kleiber was a biologist working in the animal-husbandry department at the University of California, Davis, he noticed that the sprawlingly diverse animal kingdom could be characterized by a simple mathematical relationship, in which the metabolic rate of a creature is equal to its mass taken to the three-fourths power. This ubiquitous principle had some significant implications, because it showed that larger species need less energy per pound of flesh than smaller ones. For instance, while an elephant is 10,000 times the size of a guinea pig, it needs only 1,000 times as much energy. Other scientists soon found more than 70 such related laws, defined by what are known as “sublinear” equations. It doesn’t matter what the animal looks like or where it lives or how it evolved—the math almost always works.
West’s insight was that these strange patterns are caused by our internal infrastructure—the plumbing that makes life possible. By translating these biological designs into mathematics, West and his co-authors were able to explain the existence of Kleiber’s scaling laws.
Despite objections about exceptions, when West moved on, it was to the study of cities. Lehrer reports that the “correspondence” with biology ‘was obvious to West: he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do.”
Lehrer reports as well that West, as “a theoretical physicist in search of fundamental laws . . . likes to compare his work to that of Kepler, Galileo and Newton.” In fact, Lehrer says that concerning the scientific study of cities,
[West] didn’t want to be constrained by the old methods of social science, and he had little patience for the unconstrained speculations of architects. (West considers urban theory to be a field without principles, comparing it to physics before Kepler pioneered the laws of planetary motion in the 17th century.) Instead, West wanted to begin with a blank page, to study cities as if they had never been studied before. He was tired of urban theory—he wanted to invent urban science.
Lehrer says that within two years, West and his colleague Luis Bettencourt discovered that “urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations” that enable understanding of the city’s “deep structure, its defining patterns, which will show . . . whether a metropolis will flourish or fall apart."One finding, according to Lehrer, is that “creating a more sustainable society will require our big cities to get even bigger"—will require “more megalopolises.”
Lehrer describes the nonquantitative study of cities by Jane Jacobs, a believer in small-scale neighborhoods, and then quotes West:
One of my favorite compliments is when people come up to me and say, “You have done what Jane Jacobs would have done, if only she could do mathematics.” . . . What the data clearly shows, and what she was clever enough to anticipate, is that when people come together, they become much more productive.
Lehrer analyzes various criticisms of the work of West and his colleague, but says that the
theoretical physicists aren’t discouraged by these critiques. While they admit their equations are imperfect, they insist the work remains a necessary first draft. “When Kepler found the laws that govern planetary motion, he didn’t get the laws exactly right,” West says. “But the laws were still good enough to inspire Newton.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the Media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.