COSEE-West

How important are museums, TV shows and after school clubs to teaching kids science? Ira Flatow and guests look at "informal science education" and what researchers are learning about learning science. Plus, what's the best way to keep undergraduate science majors in science?

"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

"Science 25 November 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6059 p. 1040 DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6059.1040 * News & Analysis Climate Change Humans Are Driving Extreme Weather; Time to Prepare 1. Richard A. Kerr Figure View larger version: * In this page * In a new window Thai floods 2011 Hurricane Katrina 2005 Texas drought 2011 "CREDITS (LEFT TO RIGHT): PAULA BRONSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES; JEFF SCHMALTZ, MODIS RAPID RESPONSE TEAM, NASA/GSFC; NOAA" An international scientific assessment finds for the first time that human activity has indeed driven not just global warming but also increases in some extreme weather and climate events around the world in recent decades. And those and likely other weather extremes will worsen in coming decades as greenhouse gases mount, the report finds. But uncertainties are rife in the still-emerging field of extreme events. Scientists cannot attribute a particular drought or flood to global warming, and they can say little about past or future trends in the risk of high-profile hazards such as tropical cyclones. Damage from weather disasters has been climbing, but the report can attribute that trend only to the increasing exposure of life and property to weather risks. Climate change may be involved, but a case cannot yet be made. Despite the uncertainties, the special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released 18 November stresses that there is still reason for taking action now. The panel recommends "low-regrets measures," such as improvements in everything from drainage systems to early warning systems. Such measures would benefit society in dealing with the current climate as well as with almost any range of possible future climates. The report takes a cautious, consensus-based approach that draws on the published literature. Headlines and even some scientists may point to the current Texas drought or the 2003 European heat wave as the result of the strengthening greenhouse. But the report fin

Science 25 November 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6059 p. 1039 DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6059.1039-b * News of the Week Random Sample Mongolia's 'Ice Shield' Figure View larger version: * In this page * In a new window Hot zone. Flanked by desert, Ulan Bator will be cooled in summer by an "ice shield." "CREDIT: BRÜCKE-OSTEUROPA/WIKIPEDIA" As the coldest capital on Earth, you might think the last thing Ulan Bator needs is more ice. But that is just what it's about to get under a geoengineering trial aimed at "storing" freezing winter temperatures to cool and water the city during the summer. At the end of this month, engineers will drill a series of bores through the ice on the Tuul River, pump up water from below, and spray it on the surface where it will freeze. This process will be repeated throughout the winter, adding layer after layer to create a chunk of ice that will be 7 or 8 meters thick by the spring. It's an attempt to artificially create the ultra-thick slabs-known as naleds in Russian-that occur naturally in far northern climes when rivers or springs push through surface cracks. Nomads have long made their summer camps near such phenomena, which melt much later than normal ice. Flanked by desert and plagued by summer temperatures that can rise close to 40°C, Ulan Bator's municipal government hopes the $724,000 experiment will create a cool microclimate and provide fresh water as the naled melts. ECOS & EMI, the Anglo-Mongolian company behind the plan, has still greater ambitions. "Everyone is panicking about melting glaciers and icecaps, but nobody has yet found a cheap, environmentally friendly alternative," says Robin Grayson, a geologist in Ulan Bator for ECOS & EMI. "If you know how to manipulate them, naled ice shields can repair permafrost and build cool parks in cities." The process, Grayson says, can be replicated anywhere where winter temperatures fall below −5°C for at least a couple of months.

perspective "The distribution of species on Earth and the interactions among them are tightly linked to historical and contemporary climate, so that global climate change will transform the world in which we live. Biological models can now credibly link recent decadal trends in field data to climate change, but predicting future impacts on biological communities is a major challenge. Attempts to move beyond general macroecological predictions of climate change impact on one hand, and observations from specific, local-scale cases, small-scale experiments, or studies of a few species on the other, raise a plethora of unanswered questions. On page 1124 of this issue, Harley (1) reports results that cast new light on how biodiversity, across different trophic levels, responds to climate change. "

"Abstract Climate change can affect organisms both directly via physiological stress and indirectly via changing relationships among species. However, we do not fully understand how changing interspecific relationships contribute to community- and ecosystem-level responses to environmental forcing. I used experiments and spatial and temporal comparisons to demonstrate that warming substantially reduces predator-free space on rocky shores. The vertical extent of mussel beds decreased by 51% in 52 years, and reproductive populations of mussels disappeared at several sites. Prey species were able to occupy a hot, extralimital site if predation pressure was experimentally reduced, and local species richness more than doubled as a result. These results suggest that anthropogenic climate change can alter interspecific interactions and produce unexpected changes in species distributions, community structure, and diversity. "

"Abstract The Phanerozoic fossil record of marine animal diversity covaries with the amount of marine sedimentary rock. The extent to which this covariation reflects a geologically controlled sampling bias remains unknown. We show that Phanerozoic records of seawater chemistry and continental flooding contain information on the diversity of marine animals that is independent of sedimentary rock quantity and sampling. Interrelationships among variables suggest long-term interactions among continental flooding, sulfur and carbon cycling, and macroevolution. Thus, mutual responses to interacting Earth systems, not sampling biases, explain much of the observed covariation between Phanerozoic patterns of sedimentation and fossil biodiversity. Linkages between biodiversity and environmental records likely reflect complex biotic responses to changing ocean redox conditions and long-term sea-level fluctuations driven by plate tectonics. "