Group items tagged

"Science 25 November 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6059 pp. 1052-1053 DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6059.1052 * News Focus Adaptation to Climate Change Adaptation to Climate Change Time to Adapt to a Warming World, But Where's the Science? 1. Richard A. Kerr With dangerous global warming seemingly inevitable, users of climate information-from water utilities to international aid workers-are turning to climate scientists for guidance. But usable knowledge is in short supply. Figure View larger version: * In this page * In a new window Adapt to that. Climate will change, but decision-makers want to know how, where, and when. "CREDIT: KOOS VAN DER LENDE/NEWSCOM" DENVER, COLORADO-The people who brought us the bad news about climate change are making an effort to help us figure out what to do about it. As climate scientists have shown, continuing to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will surely bring sweeping changes to the world-changes that humans will find it difficult or impossible to adapt to. But beyond general warnings, there is another sort of vital climate research to be done, speakers told 1800 attendees at a meeting here last month. And so far, they warned, researchers have delivered precious little of the essential new science. At the meeting, subtitled "Climate Research in Service to Society,"* the new buzzword was "actionable": actionable science, actionable information, actionable knowledge. "There's an urgent need for actionable climate information based on sound science," said Ghassem Asrar, director of the World Climate Research Programme, the meeting's organizer based in Geneva, Switzerland. What's needed is not simply data but processed information that an engineer sizing a storm-water pipe to serve for the next 50 years or a farmer in Uganda considering irrigating his fields can use to make better decisions in a warming world. Researchers preparing for the next international climate assessment, due in 2013, delive

Webcast: 'We Sea Change,' a Climate Change Education Video 0 What is climate change, and how is it affecting coastal Carolina? That is the question that a group of teens from Isaac Bear Early College High School set out to answer for their Third National Student Summit on the Ocean & Coasts project. Representing the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher, four teens spent months researching climate change issues such as salt water intrusion in rivers, changes to barrier islands, disappearing beaches, and habitat loss in longleaf pine forests in the Wilmington, N.C., region. The students presented a video documenting this research during the National Student Summit on February 15, 2011 at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. After the Summit, the team broadened the project's scope to include climate change education through the production of a second video. This film, We Sea Change, aims to give their local community in Wilmington an understanding of climate change, impacts on the coastal Carolina region, and how people can be part of the climate change solution. We Sea Change will be broadcast live to the Ocean Portal from the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 7pm. There will be a panel discussion on climate change immediately following the 7pm screening. Meet the team! The Cape Fear Beach Bears: Sandy Paws for a Cause team members include students Jessica Lama, Keela Sweeney, Evan Lucas, and Dustin Chambers. They have conducted research and produced their videos under the guidance of teachers Bryan Bishop from Isaac Bear Early College High School and Megan Ennes from the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher.

Science 8 July 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6039 pp. 173-175 Galaxy Zoo Volunteers Share Pain and Glory of Research 1. Daniel Clery A project to "crowdsource" galactic classifications has paid off in ways the astronomers who started it never expected. Figure View larger version: * In this page * In a new window Space oddity. Greenish "voorwerp" spotted by a Dutch volunteer still intrigues scientists. "CREDIT: NASA, ESA, W. KEEL (UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA), AND THE GALAXY ZOO TEAM" The automated surveys that are becoming increasingly common in astronomy are producing an embarrassment of riches for researchers. Projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) are generating so much data that, in some cases, astronomers don't know what to do with them all. SDSS has compiled a list of more than 1 million galaxies. To glean information about galaxy evolution, however, astronomers need to know what type of galaxy each one is: spiral, barred spiral, elliptical, or something else. At present, the only reliable way to classify galaxies is to look at each one. But the SDSS list is so long that all the world's astronomers working together couldn't muster enough eyeballs for the task. Enter the "wisdom of crowds." An online effort called Galaxy Zoo, launched in 2007, set a standard for citizen-scientist participation projects. Zealous volunteers astonished the project's organizers by classifying the entire catalog years ahead of schedule. The results have brought real statistical rigor to a field used to samples too small to support firm conclusions. But that's not all. Buoyed by the curiosity and dedication of the volunteers, the Galaxy Zoo team went on to ask more-complicated classification questions that led to studies they hadn't thought possible. And in an online discussion forum on the Galaxy Zoo Web site, volunteers have pointed to anomalies that on closer inspection have turned out to be genuinely new astronomical objects. "I'm incredibly impres

Defining normal Gardeners, meteorologists, businesses, weather junkies and others will get answers to some of these questions in July, when NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) releases the latest version of an official weather product called the U.S. Climate Normals. Updated each decade, the U.S. Climate Normals are 30-year averages of many pieces of weather information collected from thousands of weather stations nationwide. Each time they are updated, an old decade is dropped, and a new one added. Starting in July, when you hear that a day was hotter, or colder, or rainier than normal, that "normal" will be a little different from what it was in the past.

"The Orangeburg Scarp, a band of hard, crusty sediment teeming with tiny plankton fossils that runs from Florida to Virginia, marks an ancient shoreline where waves eroded bedrock 3 million years ago. That period, the middle Pliocene, saw carbon dioxide levels and temperatures that many scientists say could recur by 2100. The question is: Could those conditions also result in Pliocene-epoch sea levels within the next 10 to 20 centuries, sea levels that may have been as much as 35 meters higher than they are today? The answer, say climate scientists, may lie 17,000 kilometers away in East Antarctica. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the world's largest, a formation up to 4 km thick and 11 million km2 in area that covers three-quarters of the southernmost continent. Its glaciers were thought to sit mostly above sea level, protecting them from the type of ocean-induced losses that are affecting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But studies of ancient sea levels that focus on the Orangeburg Scarp and other sites challenge that long-held assumption. Not everybody believes the records from Orangeburg. But combined with several other new lines of evidence, they support the idea that parts of East Antarctica could indeed be more prone to melting than expected. "