Climate change education in zoos
I'm in San Francisco this week for the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the world's largest gathering of Earth Scientists. Over ten thousand scientists from all over the world, including most of the world's top climate scientists, are in town this week to exchange ideas to advance the cause of Earth Science. This year, there is much attention being given to communication of science to the public, and the first talk I attended today on the subject was given by Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University. Dr. Mann has been at the center of much recent controversy over climate science, and has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal titled, "Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence". His "hockey stick" graphs showing the unprecedented increase in global temperatures over the past 1,000 years has been the subject of heated attack, much of it orchestrated by the public relations wings of powerful industries whose profits are threatened by by possibility of regulatory action to reduce global warming. He has a book coming out in January titled, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Dr. Mann reaffirmed his stance on human-caused climate change in his talk this morning, calling attention to a paper that appeared in Nature Geoscience last week, finding that most of the observed warming of Earth's climate in recent decades—at least 74 percent—is almost certainly due to human activity. Dr. Mann said that this study did not go far enough, and that more than 100% of the warming in the past 30 years was due to humans. Without humans, the climate would have cooled over the past 30 years.
Figure 1. An example of educational material on polar bears that has been developed by CliZEN for use at nine U.S. zoos.
Dr. Mann also introduced a new pilot program he is involved with to advance climate change education through U.S. zoos. The National Science Foundation-funded project is called CliZEN, The Climate Literacy Zoo Education Network. Zoos represent a unique way for people to connect to the natural world, and over 50 million people in the U.S. go to the zoo each year--double that, if one includes aquariums. Thus, zoos thus offer a unique opportunity to communicate how climate change threatens the natural world. People who go to zoos are approximately 50% more likely to be alarmed or concerned about climate change than the general population, Dr. Mann showed. The initial eduction effort has a polar theme, and is being brought to nine zoos: the Chicago Zoological Society of Brookfield, IL; Columbus Zoo & Aquarium, OH; Como Zoo & Conservatory, St. Paul, MN; Indianapolis Zoo, IN; Louisville Zoological Garden, KY; Oregon Zoo, Portland, OR; Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, PA; Roger Williams Park Zoo, Providence, RI; and the Toledo Zoological Gardens, OH. The organization Polar Bears International is helping develop the educational material.
Jeff Masters
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300 or so miles east of Nashville, we have a temp of 59 and overcast, with rain on the way. Thanks to wxgeekva, my denial of the arrival of winter is in serious jeopardy, and here you go helping out :) A high of 27 is predicted for Saturday, evidently with some snow preceeding it.
so is this low going to bring some moisture to SE Texas...... maybe in the form of Freezing Rain/SNOW! lol
Added to this there is a big scientific pow wow in Durban I am led to believe as I am led to believe many things! This is about climate and changes among other things.
Here's an idea,that you can shoot to bits but we all know what is the state of things at the moment, which we are led to believe, so if we "bookmark," today, more or less and see what will have changed in a year from now, which will have a positive affect on atmospheric pollution?
My guess is very little, the CO2 graphs will be a bit higher and the cries for change a bit louder. A billion+ vehicles will still be on the roads.
So sad really that we are going to have to burn fuel to cool tanks for arctic creatures to be preserved alive in!
That is a painful irony- burn coal to provide power to air condition the display and cool the tank to warm the climate even more...
Because like life of the universe, life or the objects of space are meant to go extinct and die. Nothing lasts forever, and nothing will show that we existed, like star dust...this is the true irony
...then explain Fruitcakes to me?
Fruit grows and dies as well. But a species will come by and consume the fruit or in this case create a fruitcake....once it is consumed and digested it is part of the species that has consumed it, and the species will still die eventually and never knowing the fruitcake existed in the first place
And thank you for the compliment, hydrus. I will, as much as I can.
Patrick! stay on topic
"The all-time Great Fruitcake Toss record is 1,420 feet, set in January 2007 by a group of eight Boeing engineers who built the "Omega 380," a mock artillery piece fueled by compressed air pumped by an exercise bike.[5]"
There are a few non retrievable pieces of space probes that will be heading away from us for a long time to come and we have sent out an ever increasing number of radio signals from millions of transmissions that will maybe tell a story to some listener, the signals will increase in number, then decrease with no doubt their own story as to why they are in decline.
The radio messages began about a 100 years ago and will continue to be broadcast for some time yet. Any life that can decipher them will then know how long we had the technology to transmit and probably why we stopped.
How many self aware, rational thinking beings have helped to bring about their own demise? ... I mean besides us?
fruitcake should be soaked in bourbon for at least a week prior to consumption...
Same way stars die, new ones are born
The ones here are probably all volunteers, most of them anyway. The paid ones tend to sound a bit less deranged, but even then you get folks like atmoaggie (a former frequent commenter here), who went into A+M convinced AGW was a fraud and came out with the same view, no doubt having spent quite a bit of time sitting in the back of the classroom sniggering about those pointy-headed profs and their crazy science.
Anyway, the direct paid component is largely composed of the think-tank network (e.g. CEI and Heartland), NGOs like the Koch front Americans for Prosperity and a few scientist shills like Willie Soon (most not even qualified to comment on climate science). They feed talking points to the Murdoch empire, Limbaugh, wingnut bloggers, etc., and in turn there's no shortage of willing saps eager to repeat that garbage anywhere they can.
I'm quite sure there are a few paid blog commenters in the mix, but it wouldn't take many of those to keep things jollied along.
The thing to remember about most wingnut blog commenters here and around the blogosphere is that deep down they're scared poopless about this stuff. They really try to not think about the details, but the vehemence of their denial is evidence that they've gotten the message.
But people have a great capacity for fantasy, and they imagine that if they wish hard enough the whole thing will just have been a bad dream.
(Speaking of scared poopless, look out for my following request to Jeff.)
Still 2 feet below normal, resorvoirs still drying up
link?
The sun is going to bulge out and consume earth at some point, it will be gone, no trace left
no link, can see it playing out before my eyes from satellite, and few years of watching weather, classic setup
Two related things to bear in mind as you shiver in one:
If it's cold down here from an Arctic outbreak, it's warm up there, which noting e.g. the recent behavior of the permafrost is Double Plus Ungood.
Average temperatures are unaffected, which is to say the planet will keep right on warming however much it may not feel like it at the moment.
All else equal, the planet should remain habitable for the likes of us for another half-billion years or so, which is to say you can safely put off worrying about this until sometime next week. :)
Will this bring any rain onshore? I am kind of curious as to if this will turn into something a little more wintery. That is if the upper atmosphere is indeed cold enough.
closer to coast, nothing wintry
That makes sense since this year may not be the worst of it in the short-term, although there will be rainy years again. That said, the long-term drying of the whole region (including a huge chunk of northern Mexico, which we often tend to forget about) is inevitable within this century, and more after that.
GHGs go up, the tropics continue to warm, hotter tropical air expands upward (tropopause rises) and out (the tropics expand poleward, compressing the entire atmospheric circulation toward both poles, and, particularly relevant to the TX-area drought, the dry descending branch of the northern Hadley cell, which moves north, as does the storm track). And so it dries.
But it'll be wetter somewhere else, if that's a consolation.
Although, come to think of it, just now the East Africans probably don't feel consoled in the slightest that the shift in the Walker Circulation driven by the warming West Pacific has moved their major rainy season into the Indian Ocean. Most inconvenient, that, as their minor rainy season (they have two, or at least they used to) tends to fail in La Nina years.
Obama thought it through (OK, people long before him thought it through). You, on the other hand, have not. Go figure.
That low moveing into NM I just had the thrill of experianceing, this morning a few flakes of snow fell down upon the city floor (Tucson) which never happens, the mountains are very white with snow and temps havnt got above 50 in a couple days (Very Rare) High temp yesterday and today of 45-47 and tommorow 52 with a low of 27. This thing is a beast of a storm I have a feeling bad things are gonna come from it in the NE and relief from it in SE. JMO
Hopefully you'll be able to give us other posts on the new science reported at the conference.
I have a specific question that's come up in the last couple of days after I saw the permafrost expert elicitation paper in Nature and a second-hand report (the comments clarify) on Mark Pagani's unpublished research (referring to a talk he gave last month), and there are people at the conference (probably including Pagani, but if he's not there plenty of others) who could answer it.
There is (as you know) much concern about the East Siberian area carbon deposits, not just the clathrates but the yedoma, undersea permafrost and river sediments -- all in all a huge complex that could only exist as a result of some possibly unique geological circumstances. (As you will know, based on preliminary assessments of the amount of carbon present and its potential for release, the NSF and science agencies from several other countries are funding a large multi-year research expedition to the East Siberian shelf area, and perhaps some results from this will be reported at the conference.)
But now the picture painted by all of this makes me wonder if the East Siberian deposits really are quite unique.
Pagani finds that the best fit for the carbon trigger for the PETM and the Eocene hyperthermals is Antarctic permafrost (likely forced by Milankovitch cycles). That makes a lot of sense, not so much because of the isotope record match but because it's the only hypothesis I've heard of that can explain the declining intensity of the hyperthermals. Presumably clathrates were needed to provide much of the heavy lifting, so my question is:
How likely is it that that there have been extensive shallow clathrate and other carbon deposits on the Antarctic continental shelves a) similar to what we see off Siberia today, and b) playing a major rule in the hyperthermals?
If it's at all likely, the past may have just become a much better guide to the future than I had thought.
I would appreciate it greatly if you could get an answer to this, although I realize it may be a fuzzy answer due to much of the potential evidence having been erased by the ice sheet.
Thanks again for all your efforts here and elsewhere.
More here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/
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