The Climate and Clean Air Coalition for Reducing Short-Lived Climate Pollutants, which was formed in mid-February, is now made up of 18 members in the developing and developed world. The coalition's goal is to cut emissions of climate warming pollution that acts on shorter timescales than carbon dioxide (CO₂), which is the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.

President Barack Obama and the G-8 leaders worked on global and economic issues in the dining room of Laurel Cabin at Camp David, Md.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Pollutants like black carbon, methane, and hydroflurocarbons (HFCs) help trap heat in Earth's atmosphere, warming the planet. Unlike CO₂, though, they only remain in the atmosphere for a short time period, from days to weeks, in the case of black carbon, to about a decade for methane. By contrast, CO₂ can remain in the atmosphere for a century or more.

In a fact sheet released on May 19, G-8 members said the reduction of short-lived global warming pollutants would "enhance our collective ambition in addressing climate change by complementing efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions."

Recent studies have identified the potential benefits of tackling short-lived global warming agents in addition to the long-lived pollutants. In a study published in January in the journal Science, researchers found that cutting black carbon emissions would reduce warming in the Himalayas and the Arctic during the next 30 years by as much as two-thirds, and would even help maintain the current South Asian monsoon. Black carbon, also known as soot, warms the air by absorbing radiation from the sun, and when it lands on snow and ice it darkens the surface, causing more melting. Another assessment from the U.N. Environment Programme also found major benefits to reducing emissions of short-lived greenhouse gases. 

Black carbon also harms public health, especially in developing countries, where wood, dung and other fuels that emit soot when burned are used for cooking. Implementing soot-reduction policies would avoid 373,000 premature deaths each year in India and China alone.

"The President's announcement puts the short-lived climate pollutant strategy where it belongs — firmly in the hands of the leaders of the world's largest economies," said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development in Washington.

The G8 leaders also reaffirmed their commitment to limit global warming to less than 2°C, or 3.6°F, above pre-industrial levels. This goal, though, is looking less and less achievable, according to recent studies. Climate negotiators meeting in Bonn, Germany, this week are working to hammer out details of a process that is intended to result in a new global climate treaty by 2015, which would go into effect by 2020. However, emissions reduction pledges are still running well short of what would be needed to achieve the 2°C target. 

BERLIN, Md. – Fifth grader Aman Shahzad looked closely at the level attached to the plumb line. "Lower, lower," she called out. "OK! The bubble is in the middle." Her classmate, holding the wooden surveyor's pole, read the measurement: 14 centimeters.

The two students were from Pemberton Elementary School in nearby Salisbury, Md., the first to participate in a new, three-month interdisciplinary unit called "Investigating Climate Science" that spans science, math, economics and government. On this day in early spring on Maryland's eastern shore, they were on a field trip to Assateague Island, measuring the slope of the beach as the first step in a lesson on sea-level rise.

The unit represents the vanguard of a nationwide effort, pushed by education and science groups, to broaden climate change education into a variety of physical and social science classes in public school curricula. 

Yet even here, in one the most sophisticated climate change education units in the nation, teachers still feel the need to balance what the world's scientific bodies know about climate change with what is represented in the public dialogue, avoiding terms like "global warming" and including a lesson questioning humanity's impact on the problem. 

Honing critical thinking

The three-month unit is designed for middle school and high-achieving elementary students. It was developed by four teachers in the Wicomico County Public Schools' gifted and talented program, with help from environmental educator Carrie Samis of the Maryland Coastal Bays Program. Lessons focus on climate science and hone critical thinking skills.

• In one lesson, students examined and analyzed editorial cartoons related to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of building a pipeline to ferry crude oil from Alberta's tarsands to the United States.

• Another lesson examined the possible causes of changing climates, differentiating between anthropogenic and natural ones. Students studied greenhouse gases, climate indicators, and carbon foot prints, then predicted positive and negative effects climate change may have on agriculture, the economy, infrastructure and wildlife.

• The full-day field trip to Assateague Island showed students how vulnerable the barrier island is to sea-level rise. They conducted a mock debate, acting as local stakeholders, on the impacts of salt marsh migration.

• One lesson, called "the controversy," probes "both sides of the story." It examines uncertainties in historic data, fossil records, ice core samples and tree rings, posing the questions, "How do we know?" and "Where is the proof?" 

The diversified approach reaches and engages students via a number of different avenues. Gabe Dunn, a fifth grader at Westside Intermediate School, in Hebron, Md., liked the unit's hands-on science and civics activities, especially debating the viability of land development amid marsh migration and sea-level rise. Cade Stone, a fifth grader at Pemberton Elementary, found the editorial cartoons appealing.

A need for 'balance'

The unit has generated controversy.

Months before the lessons began, parents voiced concern over the contents and stressed a need for "balance." Virtually every scientist studying atmospheric and earth sciences says climate change is real and that humans are the cause. But some parents sought inclusion of opposing theories, such as other causes and doubts that climate change is occurring. 

In response, Nancy Rowe, one of four teachers developing the unit, devised lessons to show that climate change is not all caused by humans. "We want to be balanced," Rowe said. 

That desire of balance lead the program's creators to avoid terms like "climate change" or "global warming" in lesson plans, Rowe said, "which would have sent a biased point of view."

Scientists and educators who conduct workshops for teachers on climate change say this "false-balance" is not the correct approach.

"Human activities are the drivers of recent climate change," said Susan Buhr, a climate scientist and director of the education and outreach program of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado. "Teachers need to discern what is credible and not credible, and part of the job of teachers is to provide signposts to that end."

'Science has to lead'

Debate over the tradeoffs and values of how to respond to climate change is appropriate for environmental education, Buhr and other educators say. However, the strong evidence that supports the climate science and human causation of climate change doesn't warrant equal weight with minority claims, often disputed by other research, that are not credible, they add. "Science has to lead," Buhr said.

Teachers drafting the program said criticism – or the desire to avoid it – influenced their decision to include alternate views. Parental opposition may have been small, said Samis, who helped write the climate curriculum for the Wicomico students. But it "has been at the forefront of my mind the whole time." 

After a local newspaper reported a front-page news story of the Wicomico County schools' field trip to Assateague, readers accused the teachers of "brainwashing the kids with biased information" that climate change is occurring. "That hurt," Rowe said. "We are really trying to expose them to both sides so that they can make their own decision about what to think."

Lively lessons

Buhr disagrees with efforts that allow kids to make their own decisions about established scientific conclusions. "We don't ask students in science class to make up their own minds over whether they believe in photosynthesis or if the earth is round," she said. "Why would we be doing that here?"

Still, the teachers note that teaching the controversy has made for lively lessons in civics, politics and skeptical thinking – part of the goal of the whole unit. And the science is getting through. 

The field trip was proof of that.

On this unseasonably warm March day, 160 students on a field trip from the Wicomico County gifted and talented program learned how climate change, sea level rise, and salt marsh migration will affect Maryland's coastal areas. They also learned about economic, cultural, and social policies and decisions that local land owners, farmers, watermen, developers, and elected officials may have to make as the climate changes.

Science is really a process of discovery, of skepticism, of challenging long-held constructs, and controversy. By addressing parental concerns, discussing the different newspaper stories and linking student experiments to real-world situations, Rowe and her colleagues are, in effect, teaching the kids how to do science.

"We aren't hiding anything," Rowe said. "The kids love seeing both sides of a story."

See Part One: Climate Science Education Graduates to the Next Level

The Daily Climate is a nonprofit news service covering climate change, and a Climate Central content partner. 

Tornado damage in Joplin, Mo. Credit: National Weather Service.

It also ranks as the seventh deadliest in U.S. history, and the deadliest since 1947. Additionlly, the Joplin tornado was also one of the most expensive tornadoes on record, having caused direct insured losses of $1.9 billion, according to Missouri officials. Others have estimated losses at closer to $3 billion.

Joplin is being rebuilt using state and federal funds, and the morale of the community received a boost when President Obama delivered the commencement address at Joplin High School on Monday evening. The High School itself was destroyed during the tornado, and students spent the past year taking classes in a temporary facility.

The Joplin tornado's death toll was especially shocking to weather forecasters, since during the past two decades billions of dollars have been spent upgrading the nation’s weather warning systems to provide timely tornado watches and warnings. A national network of Doppler radars scans the skies for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, and scientists’ understanding of the factors that lead to tornadoes has improved dramatically during the past two decades. A tornado warning was in effect for Joplin at the time the storm struck, yet it was not enough to prevent so many deaths.

Given all the advances that have been made, the high death toll in Joplin has prompted many in the meteorological and emergency management communities to rethink how they issue tornado warnings.

One of the major lessons stemming from Joplin is that more attention needs to be paid to ensuring that tornado warnings encourage people to take protective action. A post-tornado survey report by a National Weather Service team found that most Joplin residents did not take shelter when they heard the tornado sirens. Instead, they waited until they received additional information confirming the threat. In part, this was because of the prevalence of false alarms.

In the wake of Joplin, and other deadly tornadoes that struck during the 2011 season, the National Weather Service is experimenting with issuing tornado warnings that contain enhanced wording in order to help encourage people to act.

While the tornado that devastated Joplin was the seventh deadliest in U.S. history, there have been far deadlier tornadoes. Here’s a look at the Top Six all-time twisters:

No. 6
The Woodward, Okla., Tornado, April 9, 1947

The scene in Woodward, Okla., after a deadly tornado struck in 1947. Credit: National Weather Service.

The deadliest tornado on record in the tornado-prone state of Oklahoma had a path length of 100 miles. According to the National Weather Service, the tornado had a maximum width of 1.8 miles, and a forward speed of about 50 mph. The tornado was ranked as an F-5 on the Fujita Scale, and it slammed into Woodward without warning at 8:42 pm on April 9, 1947. More than 1,000 homes and businesses were destroyed and 1,000 people injured. The Weather Service said the bodies of three children were never identified, and one child who survived the tornado was never reunited with her family.

The death toll from this event stands at 181, with at least 116 lives lost in Oklahoma. 

No. 5
The Gainesville, Ga., Tornado, April 6, 1936

Downtown Gainesville, Ga., following the devastating tornado that struck without warning in 1936. Credit: Digital Library of Georgia.

The tornado that hit Gainesville, which occurred a day after the Tupelo event (see No. 4 below), was actually a pair of tornadoes that converged on the center of the town at the height of the business day. According to the Digital Library of Georgia, 60 people died in just one building when the Cooper Pants Factory, a two-story garment factory, collapsed and burned after being struck. Many of the victims were young women and girls. In all, 203 were reported killed.

Tornado damage "immobilized the Gainesville Fire Department and forced rescuers to dynamite buildings on the Public Square as a means of controlling the rapid spread of fire," the website said.

Letters from Gainesville reportedly fell from the sky across state lines in South Carolina.

No. 4
Tupelo, Miss., April 5, 1936

This tornado was part of a group of twisters that struck Mississippi that day, and although it missed downtown Tupelo, it flattened residential areas around the town. In some cases the tornado wiped out entire families.

The official death toll stands at 216, although other estimates put it higher. This is due in part to differences between counting white vs. black victims at that time in the segregated South.

No. 3
The St. Louis/East St. Louis Tornado, May 27, 1896

The scene in St. Louis following the F-4 tornado there in 1896. Credit: NOAA Image Library.

The St. Louis tornado, which was later estimated to be of F-4 intensity on the Fujita Scale, caused 255 fatalities, and about $2.9 billion in damage when adjusted for inflation, according to one estimate.

The tornado struck the core of downtown St. Louis, damaging or destroying factories, hospitals, homes, railroad yards, churches and other facilities. About 35 people were killed at the Vandalia railroad freight yards in East St. Louis.

Considering how many more people live in St. Louis and East St. Louis today, and how much more developed it is than 100 years ago, if the same tornado struck today, the numbers of fatalities and damage would, in all likelihood, skyrocket.

No. 2
The Natchez, Miss., Tornado, May 6, 1840

According to the Tornado Project, which maintains an extensive database of U.S. tornadoes, the Natchez tornado touched down about 20 miles southwest of Natchez, Miss., on May 6, 1840. The funnel grew to a mile wide, and it moved along the Mississippi River, rather than crossing it quickly. This allowed it to sink numerous river-going vessels. In fact, the death toll was higher on the river than on land. A piece of a steamboat window was reportedly carried for 30 miles.

While the official death toll stands at 317, it’s possible that more were killed, particularly on plantations where deaths were not always accurately reported.

No. 1
The Tri-State Tornado, March 18, 1925

Damage in Murphysboro, Ill., following the Tri-State Tornado in 1925. The tornado killed 234 in this town as it traversed across three states. Credit: NOAA Image Library.

The deadliest tornado on record in the U.S. is the infamous Tri-State Tornado that carved out a 219-mile path across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana on March 18, 1925. The tornado killed 695, and was estimated to be about three-quarters of a mile wide at times. The tornado traveled at an extraordinary speed — making it more difficult for people to seek shelter. At times its forward speed was clocked at more than 70 mph.

The Tri-State Tornado caused the largest death toll on record in a single U.S. city when it blasted through Murphysboro, Ill., killing 234, including many children who were in school at the time. At just one school — the De Soto school — 33 children were killed.

The tornado remained on the ground for a remarkable three and a half hours, during which time it destroyed 15,000 homes and injured more than 2,000, according to a National Weather Service website about this historic event. 

A brown booby hitching a ride on an Olive Ridley sea turtle near Los Cobanos beach in El Salvador. According to the journal Biological Conservation, birds are an excellent indicator for learning the effects of climate change, especially in tropical ecosystems. Some birds are particularly susceptible to extreme weather events such as increased rainfall, heat waves, cold spells and cyclones.  

Credit: Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images

The first Heartland Institute conference on climate change in 2008 had all the trappings of a major scientific conclave — minus large numbers of real scientists. Hundreds of climate change contrarians, with a few academics among them, descended into the banquet rooms of a lavish Times Square hotel for what was purported to be a reasoned debate about climate change.

But as the latest Heartland climate conference opens in a Chicago hotel on Monday, the thinktank's claims to reasoned debate lie in shreds and its financial future remains uncertain.

Heartland's claims to "stay above the fray" of the climate wars was exploded by a billboard campaign earlier this month comparing climate change believers to the Unabomer Ted Kaczynski, and a document sting last February that revealed a plan to spread doubt among kindergarteners on the existence of climate change.

Along with the damage to its reputation, Heartland's financial future is also threatened by an exodus of corporate donors as well as key members of staff.

In a fiery blogpost on the Heartland website, the organisation's president Joseph Bast admitted Heartland's defectors were "abandoning us in this moment of need".

Over the last few weeks, Heartland has lost at least $825,000 in expected funds for 2012, or more than 35% of the funds its planned to raise from corporate donors, according to the campaign group Forecast the Facts, which is pushing companies to boycott the organization.

The organization has been forced to make up those funds by taking its first publicly acknowledged donations from the coal industry. The main Illinois coal lobby is a last-minute sponsor of this week's conference, undermining Heartland's claims to operate independently of fossil fuel interests.

Its entire Washington D.C. office, barring one staffer, decamped, taking Heartland's biggest project, involving the insurance industry, with them.

Board directors quit, conference speakers cancelled at short-notice, and associates of long standing demanded Heartland remove their names from its website. The list of conference sponsors shrank by nearly half from 2010, and many of those listed sponsors are just websites operating on the rightwing fringe.

"It's hemorrhaging," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, who has spent years tracking climate contrarian outfits. "Heartland's true colors finally came through, and now people are jumping ship in quick order."

It does not look like Heartland is about to adopt a corrective course of action.

In his post, Bast defended the ads, writing: "Our billboard was factual: the Unabomber was motivated by concern over man-made global warming to do the terrible crimes he committed." He went on to describe climate scientist Michael Mann and activist Bill McKibben as "madmen".

The public unravelling of Heartland began last February when the scientist Peter Gleick lied to obtain highly sensitive materials, including a list of donors.

The publicity around the donors' list made it difficult for companies with public commitment to sustainability, such as the General Motors Foundation, to continue funding Heartland. The GM Foundation soon announced it was ending its support of $15,000 a year.

But what had been a gradual collapse gathered pace when Heartland advertised its climate conference with a billboard on a Chicago expressway comparing believers in climate science to the Unabomber.

The slow trickle of departing corporate donors turned into a gusher.

Even Heartland insiders, such as Eli Lehrer, who headed the organization's Washington group, found the billboard too extreme. Lehrer, who headed the biggest project within Heartland, on insurance, immediately announced his departure along with six other staff.

"The ad was ill advised," he said. "I'm a free-market conservative with a long rightwing resumé and most, if not all, of my team fits the same description and of us found it very problematic. Staying with Heartland was simply not workable in the wake of this billboard."

Heartland took down the billboard within 24 hours, but by then the ad had gone viral.

Lehrer, who maintains the split was amicable, said the billboard had undermined Heartland's claims to be a serious conservative thinktank.

"It didn't reflect the seriousness which I want to bring to public policy," Lehrer said in the telephone interview. "As somebody who deals mostly with insurance I believe all risk have to be taken seriously and there certainly are some important climate and global warming related risks that must be taken account of in the insurance market. Trivialising them is not consistent with free-market thought. Suggesting they are only thought about by people who are crazy is not good for the free market."

Other Heartland allies came to a similar conclusion. In a letter to Heartland announcing he was backing out from the conference, Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economist wrote: "You can not simultaneously say that you want to promote a debate while equating the other side to terrorists and mass murderers."

A number of other experts meanwhile began cutting their ties with Heartland, according to a tally kept by a Canadian blogger BigCityLiberal.

Meanwhile, there was growing anger that Bast failed to consult with colleagues before ordering up the Kaczynski attack ads.

Four board members told the Guardian they had not been consulted in advance about the ad. "I did not have prior approval of the billboard and was in favor of discontinuing the billboard when I was made aware of it," Jeff Judson, a Texas lobbyist and board member wrote in an email.

Could the turmoil and discontent at Heartland eventually prove its undoing? Campaigners would certainly hope so. "We are watching the consequences of organization that acts quite randomly and that is actually an extremist organization in the end," said Davies. "They are not built to be at the hump of the climate denial movement."

But while more mainstream corporate entities are deserting Heartland, others are stepping into the breach, including the coal lobby and conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation.

Both the Illinois Coal Association and Heritage stepped in to fund this week's conference, after other corporate donors began backing out in protest at the offensive Kaczynski ad.

Meanwhile, a Greenpeace analysis of the other smaller conference sponsors suggests they have collectively received $5 million in funds from Exxon and other oil companies.

The Coal Association and Heritage were not listed on the original conference sponsor list, but appeared to come in about a week or so after the appearance of the offending Kaczynski ad.

Phil Gonet, the chief lobbyist for the 20 coal companies in the association, said he had no qualms about stepping in to fund the Heartland conference.

"We support the work they are doing and so we thought we would finally make a contribution to the organization," he said, calling criticism of the ad "moot", "pointless" and "absurd".

Gonet went on: "I made a contribution mainly in support of a conference that is designed to make balanced information available to the public on the issue of global warming … In general, the message of the Heartland Institute is something the Illinois Coal Association supports."

Reprinted with permission from The Guardian. 

The moon is endlessly creative in finding ways to amuse us. Just two weeks ago, the Earth’s only natural satellite was unusually close to us, and looked bigger and brighter than normal. The result was a Supermoon, which dazzled skywatchers across the U.S.

Now its orbit has taken the moon farther away than average, just in time it to pass directly in front of the sun this past Sunday, fittingly enough. Ordinarily, that would have caused a total solar eclipse, with the moon blotting out the sun entirely for a few minutes. But the moon appeared smaller than normal — small enough, in fact, that it couldn't block the entire sun, even when they were lined up perfectly.

So instead, the lucky folks who lived in a swath of the country from Northern California into Nevada got to see what’s known as an annular eclipse, late Sunday afternoon, the first visible in the U.S. in 18 years. What it means is that when the moon was dead-center in front of the sun, a fiery ring of sunlight surrounded the moon’s silhouette (“annulus” is Latin for “ring”).

BALTIMORE – Ninth grade science at the Academy for Career and College Education began the usual way last fall. Victoria Matthew's students learned the difference between biotic and abiotic characteristics, then progressed to the basics of scientific method. By Thanksgiving, they were ready for climate change. That's when Matthew braced herself.

"Initially, I thought I was going to get a lot of pushback from the kids, said Matthew, a teacher at the inner-city charter school for grades six through 12. "But I didn't encounter any. I was surprised."

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick watches on as students perform an experiment in a 5th grade classroom in New Bedford, Mass in 2011. Credit: Matt Bennett/Gov. Patrick's office, via flickr.

 

Like teaching evolution, efforts to improve climate science lessons have opened rifts in classrooms and school districts across the United States. Parents have pressured teachers not to teach the subject. Teachers have watered down the science. Special interests – from the Heartland Institute on the right to Facing the Future on the left – have vied to influence curriculum. Some states and districts have ignored the topic altogether. Others insist on a "balanced" debate that pits a small minority of scientists who deny human-driven climate change against the findings of nearly all earth and atmospheric scientists.

But the landscape is changing rapidly and profoundly in public schools.

A key role

Earlier this month, the education-based nonprofit Achieve, Inc. released draft "next generation science standards" for elementary, middle- and high-school classrooms. Developed from recommendations by the National Research Council, the standards represent the first comprehensive revision of U.S. science curricula in 15 years. They highlight "cross-cutting" concepts that touch various disciplines, giving students a  "cumulative, coherent and usable understanding" of science and engineering. Climate change plays a key role.

Groups are stepping forward to buttress climate science in schools, pushing to ensure the topic is well-represented in new national science standards. Science and education leaders are seeking ways to broaden climate science from a narrow unit of earth science curriculum into an interdisciplinary subject taught across a variety of physical and social science classes. 

The hope is that, if educators can effectively teach the nuance and complexity of climate change, the gains would bolster larger efforts to improve science education overall, aiding literacy and critical thinking.

"The reality of climate change is that it’s utterly interdisciplinary," said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Effective climate change education ... has to have strong earth science, biology and physics components, and it has to connect to social science, history, psychology and economics."

"It has to answer 'How did we get into this pickle?'"

Loath to teach

Two problems with climate change make it a subject teachers are loath to teach: Climate change is complex – touching on economic, social, political and scientific issues to a far greater degree than most other science topics. And climate change politics put teachers square in the middle of an ideological battle.

Climate science is now taught in many districts in the earth science curriculum, mostly in middle school grades. Left there, it's doomed for failure, Niepold said. As students advance to high school, core science becomes specialized, displacing interdisciplinary, predominantly earth science-based concepts like climate change. 

Statistics show that 83 percent of U.S. high school students take biology, 50 percent take chemistry, 20 percent take physics, and just 20 percent take earth science courses, said Niepold. "Even if the earth science classes were amazingly effective, we're only reaching 20 percent of all high school students." 

More troubling, earth science is frequently reserved for kids not destined for college, said Niepold. Many college-bound high school students are fast-tracked through biology, chemistry, physics, and advanced placement science classes, skipping the topic. As a result, college-bound seniors can emerge from high school without much exposure to climate science.

"Climate change should be everywhere in the curriculum, but as a result of its complexity it is nowhere," said Jill Karsten, program director for education and diversity at the geosciences directorate of the National Science Foundation. 

Politicizing the classroom

The push to broaden climate science curricula brings up the second problem: By embedding climate change into an economics or ecology lesson, schools and teachers expose themselves to charges that they're politicizing the classroom. 

Roberta Johnson, executive director of Boulder, Colo.-based National Earth Science Teachers Association, recalls an incident reported by an Indiana teacher on a recent survey: The teacher had started a climate change unit. A parent, angry at the lesson plan, threatened to commandeer the classroom and dispute the legitimacy of the science. The teacher, thinking the dispute could lead to a useful discussion on science and truth, welcomed a debate. But before any such thing could happen, school administrators killed the entire unit. 

That teacher's struggle is not unique, Johnson noted. Last fall the association surveyed 555 kindergarten through 12th grade teachers across the United States who teach climate change. Forty percent said they were pressured not to teach climate change at all. A separate poll conducted by the National Science Teachers Association in Arlington, Va., found that 82 percent of high school and middle school science educators have faced skepticism about climate change from their students.

"It is disheartening to see the struggle teachers are having in the classroom," Johnson said.

State standards

As of 2008, the latest year available, 29 states taught climate change directly, via a course that specifically covered it, according to an analysis by NOAA and the Technical Education Research Center for earth and space science education. Twelve others taught it indirectly – mentioning it, for example, in a chemistry lesson on greenhouse gases. Eight states failed to adequately address atmosphere, weather or climate concepts: Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Iowa had no state standards.

State laws in Texas, South Dakota, and Louisiana require that any lesson on climate science be balanced equally with instruction that other scientists dispute the consensus findings that society's greenhouse gas emissions are altering planetary systems such as the atmosphere and oceans. 

The newest is in Tennessee, where state law, enacted in April, allows teachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction. Gov. Bill Haslam, noting the bill passed the Legislature by a three-to-one margin, allowed the measure to become law despite misgivings, saying he did not believe the legislation "changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools."  

Tennessee, Texas and South Dakota aren't alone.

In state legislatures and before local school boards across the country – Oklahoma, Mississippi, Washington State, Wyoming, Colorado, California, among others – political battles over the teaching of climate change in public schools have flared. 

In many ways the political debate over climate science mirrors the fight to teach evolution theory, a battle that has been waged in the nation's classrooms and courts since the Scopes' Trial in 1925. But there is a key difference. The teaching of evolution today enjoys constitutional protections separating church from state. Unless all elements of the causes and impacts of climate change are clearly laid out in state standards, no legal mechanisms require that climate science be taught accurately. 

Teaching 'both sides'

Across the country, scientific accuracy is being compromised in schools, say science educators. Even when teachers and school districts include lessons on climate change, earnest teachers think teaching "both sides" of the climate debate is scientifically valid. The Earth Science Teachers Association survey found 36 percent of the teachers polled nationally had been urged to teach "both sides." In southern states, 12 percent of those teachers said they were required to do so, whereas just 1 percent of teachers in the Northeast reported such a mandate.

"They tell us they need resources to teach 'both sides' of climate change well," said Susan Buhr, who runs teacher workshops as director of the education and outreach program of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado. 

"From our perspective, there aren't 'both sides,'" she added. "There is the scientifically credible side, and then there is the misrepresentation side in the public dialogue." 

But other regions and states, including some with conservative-leaning politics such as West Virginia, have strong standards for earth science, said Mark McCaffrey, program director of the National Center for Science Education, which has long defended the teaching of evolution in public schools and earlier this year announced it would start doing the same for climate science. California and Massachusetts are among states viewed as progressive in climate science because they integrate climate literacy principles into the state standards. 

In a California ninth grade ecology unit within biology class, for example, students might examine a 100-year survey of the state’s wildlife population to illustrate the impact climate change is having on animals today. 

Hands-on activity

In Victoria Matthew’s biology class in Baltimore, students examined global ocean water temperatures and coral bleaching, and how that relates to climate change. A hands-on activity included an oyster dissection, and Matthew discussed how climate change is expected to impact oyster populations in Chesapeake Bay.

Efforts are underway to expand curriculum in classrooms. Among the most promising is an initiative underway in Maryland and Delaware, one of 15 test cases funded by the National Science Foundation to research ways to improve climate education.

The test program encourages scientists and educators to work together to address local impacts – sea-level rise in the Chesapeake Bay, or rising temperatures in urban areas – and develop lessons that could apply elsewhere in the curriculum, said the study's principal investigator Donald Boesch, of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Most information for educators focuses on global climate change, but Boesch said greater learning takes place when climate impacts are examined at the local level.

Similar climate education research programs focused on local impacts are being developed for Great Lakes and southeastern states.

Cross-cutting themes

But there is a larger goal here, educators say.

On May 11, the National Research Council, in coordination with the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Achieve released the draft Next Generation Science Standards, laying out key scientific ideas and practices all students should learn by the end of high school. Replacing standards issued more than a decade ago, the framework aims to connect knowledge from various disciplines into a "coherent and scientifically based" world view. 

Climate change factors highly in the effort, which emphasizes earth and space content as well as cross-cutting themes such as modeling, systems behavior, and uncertainty. 

Educators say the push to improve the quality of climate change education would directly affect the 26 states that have partnered to develop the standards and could ripple through the entire educational system. Climate change, in effect, has become the poster child for what the National Academy of Sciences hopes to accomplish with science education. 

"If we can get the standards ... climate-rich, then that's going to have a domino effect in getting into state standards, and getting into textbooks and curricula," said Karsten at the National Science Foundation.

"That could be pretty catalytic."

The Daily Climate is a nonprofit news service covering climate change, and a Climate Central content partner. 

But as Fred Guterl says in a sobering, important and highly readable new book, those were really the good old days. The nuclear threat has receded, he acknowledges in The Fate of the Species: Why the human race may cause its own extinction and how we can stop it (Bloomsbury: $25), but warns that “the success of Homo sapiens has created new and terrifying risks that didn’t exist a few decades ago.”

Those risks are coming at us from all directions, says Guterl, the executive editor of Scientific American magazine. In the natural world, for example, we’ve inadvertently sped up the evolution of viruses. Potentially deadly SARS, bird flu and swine flu have all emerged from the genetic reshuffling of viral strains between humans, waterfowl and pigs on huge farms in China and other developing countries. Air travel can then spread those strains around the world at high speed, where they might once have flared through a small area and burned themselves out.

Humans are also pushing into wilderness areas to exploit natural resources and to find new places to live — and running into diseases we’ve never had to deal with before. AIDS, which jumped from chimps to humans in Africa, probably in the 1950’s, is a prime example. In the developed world, meanwhile, the use of antibiotics in cattle feed is creating new, drug-resistant bacterial strains that have public health officials mildly terrified.

The list goes on: Guterl regales the reader with one nightmare scenario after another, from mass extinctions that could unravel the world’s ecosystems to synthetic biology that could create killer organisms beyond anything nature could come up with to computer viruses engineered to take down a rival nation’s power grid.

And of course, no litany of doom would be complete without a meaty chapter on climate change. His focus here is not on vague pronouncements about the world as a whole, but on specific regional tipping points that could flip the climate into a new, stable configuration that could be very bad for humans. In India, he writes, “a sudden stopping of monsoon rain” — a possibility some scientists have raised — “which accounts for 80 percent of rainfall . . . could throw a billion people into danger of starvation.”

Another tipping point, the complete loss of sea ice in the Arctic, which at least one of his sources considers plausible, “would be like heating Greenland on a skillet.” That, in turn, could send sea level up by a catastrophic 20 feet in a couple of centuries. In all, Guterl cites no fewer than seven separate climate tipping points, each of which could be a disaster, and many of which would interact with each other to make the others more likely to happen.

That sort of interaction could easily happen across categories, too: drastic changes in climate will certainly hasten the collapse of species, and may well trigger the spread of deadly diseases. And attempts to deal with climate change in the form of geoengineering could cause a whole new set of planet-wide disasters nobody can even imagine yet.

By the time you get the book’s final chapter, you may find yourself cowering under a table, and with good reason. But the title does include the phrase “and how we can stop it.” That’s what the last chapter, titled “Ingenuity,” is about.

Unfortunately, pretty much all of the solutions Guterl talks about are blue-sky dreaming about magic technologies — geoengineering to save the climate, bioengineering to create biofuel-spewing microbes and meat that grows in test tubes — and other solutions that sound great but have so far gone nowhere. “We need to cut carbon emissions,” he writes, focusing on climate change, “and we need disruptive technologies that somehow change the energy equation.”

The operative word is “somehow.” Nobody really has a good answer to any of the existential threats Guterl so accurately and chillingly describes. But that’s what makes The Fate of the Species so important. If we can’t fully appreciate the danger humans face on so many fronts, it’s going to be awfully hard to come up with solutions. 

That’s 4 degrees Celsius, which is a 7.2 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase to us on the other side of the pond. Greater Manchester, in the U.K.,  is on the forefront of developing a blueprint for EcoCities in light of manmade climate change, which could mean hotter and drier summers and colder and wetter winters. EcoCities is a dual initiative with the University of Manchester and the property company Bruntwood. The project will look at the impacts of climate change and how cities can adapt to the challenges and opportunities that go along with a changing climate.

Credit: hassellstudio

The last 60 years have been the hottest in Australasia for a millennium and cannot be explained by natural causes, according to a new report by scientists that supports the case for a reduction in manmade carbon emissions.

In the first major study of its kind in the region, scientists at the University of Melbourne used natural data from 27 climate indicators, including tree rings, corals and ice cores to map temperature trends over the past 1,000 years.

Red dust blown in from Australia's parched interior blankets Sydney in 2009. Australia and its region are experiencing the hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists have determined. Credit: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty

"Our study revealed that recent warming in a 1,000-year context is highly unusual and cannot be explained by natural factors alone, suggesting a strong influence of human-caused climate change in the Australasian region," said the study's lead researcher, Dr. Joelle Gergis.

The climate reconstruction was done in 3,000 different ways and concluded with 95 percent accuracy that no other period in the past 1,000 years match or exceeded post-1950 warming in Australia.

The study, published in the Journal of Climate, will be part of Australia's contribution to the fifth Intergovernmetal Panel on Climate Change report, due in 2014.

As part of the study, climate modellers used the natural data to analyze the impact of both natural events, like volcanic eruptions in the pre-industrial era, and the impact of human-induced climate change such as greenhouse gasses emissions on temperatures in the last millennium.

Dr. Steven Phipps, from the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, who carried out the modeling, said the study demonstrated strong human influence on the climate in the region.

Credit: flickr/incite

"The models showed that prior to 1850 there were not any long-term trends and temperature variations were likely to be caused by natural climate variability which is a random process," he said.

"But [the modeling showed] 20th-century warming significantly exceeds the amplitude of natural climate variability and demonstrates that the recent warming experience in Australia is unprecedented within the context of the last millennium."

Annual average daily maximum temperatures in Australia have increased by 33.35 F since 1910. Since the 1950s each decade has been warmer than the one before it.

Australia's peak scientific body, the CSIRO, has said temperatures will rise by between 33F and 41F by 2070 when compared with recent decades. It predicts the number of droughts in southern Australia will increase in the future and that there will be an increase in intense rainfall in many areas.

Reprinted from The Guardian with permission.

A sunset over the Saudi city of Hail. Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, now wants to become a leader in renewable energy. According to Bloomberg, the country aims to have 41,000 megawatts of solar capacity within two decades, a shift that could potentially save 523,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, in an attempt to pare back on oil used for desalinization and power plants. 

Credit: Hassan Ammar/AFP/Getty Images

An Australian university has embarked upon an ambitious project — hailed as the first of its kind in the world — to simulate how the environment would cope with runaway climate change.

The decade-long study, at the University of Western Sydney's Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, will subject Australian bushland to heightened CO2 levels and altered rainfall patterns consistent with a "business as usual" global increase in greenhouse gases.

The centerpiece of the study is the Eucalyptus Free Air CO2 Enrichment experiment, which has involved the construction of six fiber glass and steel ring structures 92 feet high and 82 feet in diameter in native woodland in Richmond, New South Wales. The structures contain an array of sensors that will deliver a concentration of CO2 to the trees within the rings.

This, scientists say, will recreate an atmosphere where CO2 is at 550 ppm — about 40% higher than current levels — to see how the environment would change for living things, including humans.

This level of CO2 has been chosen to mimic how the environment would react in a world where no significant action is taken to reduce carbon emissions over the next 35 years.

It has been predicted that a 40% increase in CO2 would result in an average global temperature increase of about three degrees centigrade.

An automated computer-controlled system will modulate the amount of CO2 pumped from the rings, to account for environmental variability.

Scientists will use a giant 141 foot high crane to study the impact on all parts of the towering eucalypt trees, such as soil bacteria and fungi, the growth patterns of the tree canopy and the insects that dwell in the foliage.

Credit: Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment. 

The sprawling facilities at the institute have been funded via a $40 million grant from the federal government, bolstering a $15 million investment by the University of Western Sydney.

Prof David Ellsworth, who is leading the "free air" experiment, was involved in a similar study at Duke University in the U.S.

"That study was with plantation trees and we found there was less [growth] enhancement than we expected with the higher CO2 levels," he said.

"But there's been nothing like this before, on this scale. We're dealing with native woodland and poorer soils. It's an area with impoverished phosphorus and nutrition in the soil, which is the same as the environment in many areas of the world in the tropics and sub tropics.

"It will give us a window into how biodiversity will behave in futuristic conditions."

The first results from the study, which is due to launch in September, will be published next year.

However, the institute has already conducted preliminary research — the findings can be read here and here — on a small collection of trees over the past 18 months, to test their responses to heightened CO2 and warmer temperatures.

"The outcome was that the trees had a limited ability to adjust," said Ellsworth. "They didn't cope well with a warm Sydney summer. Photosynthesis decreased. They stopped growing, basically.

"Heightened CO2 levels have been shown to initially aid plant growth, but previous studies have shown this can last as little as a few months.

"To put it crudely, plants want a balanced diet. CO2 is part of that diet, but they also need nutrients that aren't depleted."

Trees in New South Wales, Australia. Credit: kevincure/flickr

The institute insists its work isn't only of interest to Australia, where modelling has predicted a temperature rise of as much as 5°C, coupled with more frequent droughts, by 2070 if no action on emissions is taken.

Prof Ian Anderson, director of research at the institute, said scientists from the UK, Brazil and South Africa had already contacted the institute about the research.

"The soils are very different here to the northern hemisphere, but plants there rely on the same equation of CO2, nitrogen and phosphorus as they do here," he said.

"We are also looking at the impact of drought and because we will potentially see big water reductions in the future, the results here will be very important for the rest of the world."

Ellsworth said: "I really hope the big players, like China and the U.S., are paying attention to research like this.

"If we don't want to be saturated by carbon in 2040 or 2050, the international community really needs to be in its final run of cutting of emissions right now."

Reprinted with permission from The Guardian.

Researchers say climate change could dramatically change fruit and nut industries around the world as trees like cherries, almonds, apples, and pistachios struggle to adapt to rising temperatures. Above, a pint of fresh cherries in Northborough, Mass.

Credit: sushiesque/flickr

Rick Knabb. Credit: NOAA.

Knabb, 43, was formerly a NOAA researcher and manager prior to joining The Weather Channel as the on-air hurricane expert in 2010. He was deputy director of NOAA’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu, and before that, he was a senior hurricane specialist and the science and operations officer at the Hurricane Center.

The position of hurricane center director is a high-profile assignment, requiring a mix of communications skills and scientific expertise that is unique in meteorology.

“When hurricanes threaten our coastal communities, those in harm’s way look to NOAA’s National Hurricane Center for life-saving information,” said NOAA Director Jane Lubchenco during a conference call with reporters. “Rick personifies that calm, clear and trusted voice that the nation has come to rely on. Rick will also lead our hurricane center team and work closely with federal, state and local emergency management authorities to ensure the public is prepared to weather the storm.”

Hurricane Irene as it approached the Southeast Coast in 2011. Credit: NASA.

Knabb earned a bachelor’s degree in Atmospheric Science from Purdue University and holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in Meteorology from Florida State University.

"I know what the job entails and I know what is in store and what we have to accomplish,” Knabb said. He noted that researchers and forecasters need to make improvements in hurricane intensity forecasts, as well as refining track forecasts, which have shown greater accuracy in recent years.

NOAA is scheduled to release its 2012 Atlantic hurricane outlook on May 24. Outlooks from research groups and private companies have called for an average to below-average season.

Now its orbit has taken the moon farther away than average, just in time it to pass directly in front of the sun on Sunday, fittingly enough. Ordinarily, that would cause a total solar eclipse, with the moon blotting out the sun entirely for a few minutes. But the moon appears smaller than normal — small enough, in fact, that it can’t block the entire sun, even when they’re lined up perfectly.

During the annular eclipse, the moon passes directly in front of the sun, leaving a spectacular ring of fire. Credit: ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images.

So instead, the lucky folks who live in a swath of the country from Northern California into Nevada will see what’s known as an annular eclipse on Sunday, late in the afternoon, the first visible in the U.S. in 18 years — weather permitting, of course. What it means is that when the moon is dead-center in front of the sun, a fiery ring of sunlight will surround the moon’s silhouette (“annulus” is Latin for “ring”).

“I like to compare different types of eclipses on a scale of 1 to 10 as visual spectacles," said NASA's Fred Espenak of the Goddard Space Flight Center on the agency’s eclipse website. “If a partial eclipse [where the moon crosses the sun off-center] is a 5 then an annular eclipse is a 9." (His ranking for a total solar eclipse on that same 1-10 scale: “A million! It’s completely off the charts.”

One note of caution: even though the moon will cover 94 percent of the sun on Sunday, there’s still enough light to blind you. Use an approved solar filter if you want to take a look, or, suggests Espenak, “A #14 welder's glass is a good choice.” If you’ve got one lying around, that is.

But a Princeton University senior named Amanda Rees may have come up with the most promising solution so far. Rees, 22, is convinced that an important part to the world’s energy future may lie in a fast-growing, nearly indestructible weed that makes homeowners tremble and pandas salivate: bamboo. “It comes in over 1,200 species,” she said with unabashed enthusiasm during a conversation in her lab, deep within Princeton’s Engineering Quadrangle. “It has a high growth rate, and it thrives in thrives in a wide range of climates.”

Best of all, she explained, bamboo is so hardy — it’s downright, aggressive, in fact — that you can grow it in places that wouldn’t be suitable for food crops. It was that concern that first got her into the bamboo game. “I’ve been really passionate about the environment ever since high school,” she said. The school was Marlborough, in Los Angeles, a private girls’ school that has a program focused on getting students internships in science labs. Rees interned at UCLA for two years, focusing on materials science projects, including finding ways to store hydrogen as a future energy source.

When she arrived at Princeton, Rees knew she wanted be an engineer, but yet another summer internship, this one at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, left her with a real concern about food security. In the U.S., she said, “we’re now using more corn to make ethanol than we are for food” — a trend that drives up the price of both. “Does that really make sense?” It even makes less sense when you realize that corn ethanol may be little better for the climate than gasoline, and maybe even somewhat worse.

In trying to figure out what she’d do for her senior thesis project, Rees and her advisor, engineering professor Winston Soboyejo, went back and forth on a few ideas and finally realized that her interest in energy and food security dovetailed with one of his. “He really loves bamboo,” she said. Sobojeyo has designed pack frames for camels made of the light, strong, inexpensive stuff, and guided students in building a bamboo bicycle.

People had tried converting bamboo into ethanol before, but Soboyejo urged Rees to explore the idea of making it into butanol instead. Like ethanol, butanol is a form of alcohol, but, where ethanol is corrosive to pipes and engines in too high a concentration, butanol isn’t: you can therefore mix more of it with gasoline. “It also has a higher energy density,” Rees said, “and when you burn it, it creates less nitrous oxide and sulfur in the exhaust.”

The tricky part is that where ethanol can be fermented in open vats, the microbes that naturally produce butanol can survive only in oxygen-free environments. “A few companies are producing it,” she said, “including Butamax and gevo,” but as far as Rees knows, nobody’s making it from bamboo. “Our argument is that we’re using a better feedstock to create a better fuel; we’re capitalizing on the advantages of both.”

Since the engineering school isn’t equipped with the fermenters that you need to cook butanol, Rees also had to collaborate with faculty in Princeton’s molecular biology department. “We know about chemistry,” said Rees, a chemical and biological engineering major, “but they’re the experts on bacteria.” Rees liberated the bamboo's internal sugars by treating bamboo sawdust  acid and enzymes, but bacteria she used to try and convert the sugers into butanol only produced a small amount of fuel. The process clearly needs to be improved on to be commercially useful — possibly by trying a different bacterial species.

Will Rees be the one to do the improving? She’s not sure. “I’ve thought about staying on after graduation to do another year of research. I’ll probably go to grad school eventually.”

But for a young woman with such wide-ranging interests, it may be too early to focus narrowly on the most obvious career path. Last year, Rees was named a Dalai Lama Fellow, a distinction that allowed her to pursue a project designed to further compassion and understanding.

“My project,” she said, “was going to an all girls’ school in Tanzania, “where I taught a class on energy, the environment and entrepreneurship. The girls were brilliant, just amazing. It was life-changing.”

It’s a pretty safe bet that those Tanzanian girls felt exactly the same way about her.

A new study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that hundreds of Western Hemisphere mammals may not be able to keep up with the projected speed of climate change, including the Emperor Tamarin pictured above.

"Due to the unprecedented rapidity of projected climatic changes, some species may not be able to move their ranges fast enough to track shifts in suitable climates and associated habitats" says the authors of the study. According to USAToday, out of the of 493 mammals studied, in some places as many as 39 percent may not be able to keep pace with climate change.

That new treaty is supposed to apply to industrialized and developing nations alike, whereas Kyoto only mandated emissions cuts by industrialized countries.

In Bonn, negotiators are trying to hammer out a roadmap for writing the new treaty, and are working to finalize provisions under which industrialized countries would finance climate adaptation and mitigation work in the developing world. In Durban, countries agreed to a Green Climate Fund that would commit up to $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries hard hit by climate change.

Yet to date, no financing has been provided under this fund. 

In addition, diplomats need to hammer out the terms under which Kyoto will be extended. The Bonn talks are scheduled to continue through May 25, with one more round of talks expected prior to the Doha meeting in December.

These talks are taking place in a climate of growing pessimism that global warming can be limited to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, a goal that world leaders, including U.S. President Obama, committed to in 2009.

Here's a roundup of news coverage of the Bonn talks:

REUTERS: Door to 2 degree temperature limit is closing - IEA

GUARDIAN / BUSINESS GREEN: Bonn climate talks: EU plays down Kyoto Protocol rift

TIMES OF INDIA: Rich nations stall talks on their record of cutting emissions

REUTERS: Climate deal milestones should be set this year: U.N.

BLOOMBERG: Qatar Climate-Change Negotiations May Spur Gulf Effort, NGO Says

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Climate negotiators back at table after some progress in Durban

AFP: Duration of ‘Kyoto 2′ threatens rift at U.N. climate talks

AFP: Climate talks open in Bonn to tackle emissions targets

BBC: Europe Struggles for Climate Lead

A satellite view of Death Valley, Calif., a land of extremes that happens to be the lowest point in North America. The region, according to National Geographic, receives less than 2 inches of annual rain and experiences summer temperatures up into the triple digits. Despite these conditions and its morbid name, plants and animals are, in fact, able to thrive. 

Credit: NASA

In Grand Isle, La., last week, a large waterspout headed directly at this hapless videographer, who realized too late that the twister was coming right at him. His failure to take shelter is not something to be emulated, even though the video is impressive. This tornado was officially rated an EF-1 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with maximum winds of 110 miles per hour. And a small warning on the mildly offensive language in the video.

The 45-day field campaign, known as the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry Project, or DC3, could help climate scientists fine tune their computer models and improve simulations of global warming.

The project, which involves experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA, along with researchers from Germany and numerous universities, employs a wide array of assets, including ground-based research radars, sophisticated lightning mapping arrays, as well as three heavily-modified research aircraft that will help measure changes in atmospheric chemistry before, during, and after thunderstorms move through a particular region. 

Diagram of the field campaign's research platforms gathering data on a thunderstorm. Click on image for a larger version.

Credit: NCAR.

All this scientific firepower is aimed at gaining a better understanding of how thunderstorms affect the formation and transport of two key atmospheric compounds that affect the climate — nitrogen oxides (NOx) and ozone. 

According to NOAA researcher Tom Ryerson, large thunderstorms act like “hoover vacuums,” sucking in surrounding air — pollutants and all — and lofting it to great heights. 

Thunderstorms eventually vent these chemicals into the upper atmosphere, where they can have a significant influence on atmospheric chemistry.

“When thunderstorms form, air near the ground has nowhere to go but up,” said Mary Barth, a principal investigator on the project from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in a press release. “Suddenly you have an air mass at high altitude that’s full of chemicals that can produce ozone.”

Getting a better handle on the sources and movement of NOx is a priority for climate scientists, since NOx itself is a greenhouse gas that helps warm the planet, and it’s also a precursor to ozone formation. 

Ozone is created through a series of chemical reactions between nitrogen oxides, water vapor, and other gases in the presence of sunlight. Ozone in the troposphere — which is the lowest layer of the atmosphere where most weather occurs — acts as a potent greenhouse gas.

Lightning is thought to be the largest natural source of nitrogen oxides emissions. Human activities, such as burning fossil fuels for energy, also emit nitrogen oxides. 

What scientists do not fully understand, and are hoping to ascertain through this field project, is exactly how much nitrogen each bolt of lightning produces.

“We don’t think that lightning is as big [a source of nitrogen oxides] as manmade sources, but we still need to know what the baseline is,” said Don Macgorman of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., and another one of DC3’s project coordinators.

Braving Turbulent Flights

NOAA’s Ryerson is one of many DC3 researchers that have descended upon the small town of Salina, Kan., where the research aircraft are based. Ryerson is a crew member aboard NASA's DC-8 research jet. 

NASA's DC-8 research laboratory, which is being used in the thunderstorm research project that is currently underway.

Credit: NASA.

This assignment involves spending hours flying at low altitudes through turbulent air, as instruments attached to the jet capture data about air flowing into and out of the storm.

The DC-8 crew, along with a German-operated Dassault Falcon jet and an NSF/NCAR Gulfstream V, are based in Salina in order to be prepared if storms erupt in any of the study’s three target areas. These areas, in northeastern Colorado and central Oklahoma, as well as northern Alabama, were chosen because of an extensive ground-based network of weather instruments, such as cutting edge mobile radar systems and lightning mapping arrays that can complement the data gathered from the air. 

These regions also have different types of manmade and natural sources of pollutants and gases that affect atmospheric chemistry. 

“It’s going to be really fun to contrast what’s being processed by the storms from these three different regions,” said NCAR’s Barth in an interview.

The field campaign is a formidable logistical challenge, given the many teams and fast-moving research platforms involved.

It’s no easy task to arrange flight patterns while complying with changing air traffic control needs, Ryerson said. “It’s a dance we have to perform each time. It’s kind of like jazz, we have to improvise.”

The research flights themselves aren’t all that pleasant for those aboard the aircraft, either. Thunderstorms, after all, are usually something that pilots avoid, not fly close to or into.

Ryerson noted that many have already suffered from some degree of airsickness, even during the training flights. 

But that’s a price they’re willing to pay in order to gather valuable data.

That’s the simple version of the story, but things look even worse when you dig into the details. For one thing, all that open water does re-freeze each winter, but it freezes into a relatively thin layer known as seasonal, or first-year ice. Because it’s so thin, first-year ice tends to melt back quickly the following season, giving the ocean a chance to warm things up even more in what National Snow and Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze has called a “death spiral” that could lead to ice-free Arctic summers by 2030. 

The sun reflects over thin sea ice and a few floating icebergs. Credit: Jefferson Beck/NASA

But it’s worse than that, says a new analysis by scientists at the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research Laboratory in Hanover, N.H. “First-year ice is not just thinner, “ said Donald Perovich, lead author of a report in Geophysical Research Letters, in an interview. “We’re also beginning to realize it has other properties.” The most important: new ice is less reflective than old ice, for most of the year, anyway. It absorbs more heat from the Sun, which means it doesn’t just melt faster: it actually speeds up its own melting.

Here’s how it happens, according to Perovich. “Most of the precipitation in the Arctic,” he said, “happens at the end of summer and in the early fall.” When the snow first begins to fall, it builds on the multi-year ice, but disappears onto the patches of open ocean. Those patches eventually freeze, and the snow sticks there as well; it just forms a thinner layer. So for most of the winter, all of the ice, thick and thin, is covered with a brightly reflective blanket. That would be good as far as warming is concerned, except that for most of the winter, the Sun doesn’t rise.

When the Sun finally does rise in spring, it melts the thinner snow first, forming heat-absorbing pools on the surface of the first-year ice. The older ice eventually catches up, forming pools of its own, but since the surface is crumpled, the ponds don’t spread as widely, and they absorb less heat.

In short, the death spiral — where more melting leads to more melting — appears to be even steeper than anyone thought.

That doesn’t mean that there’s less ice literally every year. The lowest levels ever recorded happened in September of 2007; since then, coverage has been bouncing around near, but not quite at, those historic lows, and first-year ice in the winter has been near its historic highs.

“What it means,” Perovich said, “is that with more seasonal ice, the Arctic is more susceptible to an outlier kind of year.” If there’s significantly more heat in a particular year due to natural variations, in other words, there could be a huge loss of ice. It’s kind of like a staircase, Petrovic said. “It bounces around for a while, then there’s a drop to a new normal, then it bounces around.” The point, he said, is that “we now have a type of ice cover that’s even easier to knock over than it was before.”

What that means is that at some point in the not too distant future, an unusually warm summer (even for a globally warming world) could knock the ice in the Arctic ocean down another major step, and take the world closer to the time when all of it vanishes — creating a new heat-trapping region where none existed before, and pushing climate change into an even higher gear.

A minute later, it all made a lot more sense. The storage area is a refrigerator the size of a walk-in closet, chilled to minus 30°F, and with a powerful fan blowing just to ensure the frigid air circulates evenly to every corner of the cramped space. Plastic foam coolers and cardboard boxes lined with insulation cover most of the floor, with more piled on top. Bender reached into one of the coolers, pulled out a plastic bag with a lump of ice inside and held it to the light. On close inspection, you could see that the ice was permeated with tiny bubbles, as though it was a chunk of frozen Sprite — and if you chipped off a piece and dropped it into a glass of water, the ice would sizzle and hiss, as the bubbles escaped.

A researcher insepcts a freshly drilled ice core. Credit: Kendrick Taylor/WAIS Divide Ice Core Project Research Professor.

These bubbles didn’t come out of a soft-drink factory, however. They’re bits of ancient atmosphere, trapped in the spaces between fallen snowflakes that eventually became welded into a mass of solid ice in the world’s truly cold places. “This one is from Antarctica,” Bender said over the whirr of the fan. “And this,” he said, retrieving another sample, “comes from Greenland.”

The bubbles, preserved like flies in amber, are tiny time capsules that hold a record of what the air was like — its temperature, the gases it was made of, the tiny particles of dust and pollen and volcanic ash it carried — when the snow first fell. And because each year’s snowfall buries the snow from the previous year, which buries the snow from the year before, and so on into the past, the bubbles that come from deeper layers contain air that’s tens or even hundreds of thousands of years old.

By gently melting slices of ice from different depths to release and study this preserved air, scientists like Bender have teased out the story of a climate that has changed drastically, plunging into the frigid depths of ice ages and emerging into warm interglacial periods over at least the past 800,000 years.

In large part, their goal is to understand how the climate responds to changing concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which for the first time in the planet’s history are generated from human activity more than natural sources. They’re reading the past in order to understand what the future might hold.

What the past has told them already is that there’s been an intimate relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature as far back as they can see. When CO₂ is high, so is the thermometer, and when it drops, the temperature goes with it. But the ice can tell them much more than that. It also carries information about what kinds of vegetation thrived in different eras, and whether the planet was moist or dry, and even how bright the Sun was.

A researcher examines layers in a snow pit deposited by different storms. Credit: Kendrick Taylo/WAIS Divide Ice Core Project.

All of that information and more is locked up deep ice; it’s Bender’s job, and that of his colleagues across the world, to unlock it.

The concept is simple enough, but the execution and analysis can be extremely complicated. The first step, Bender explained back outside the refrigerator, is to retrieve samples from sheets of ice that can be thousands of feet thick. U.S. scientists rely mostly on crews from Ice Core Drilling Services, based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who use custom-designed equipment to extract cylinders, or cores of ice, a little less than 5 inches across. Back in the lab, where the cylinders are shipped packed in dry ice, you can easily see the layers representing individual years, much as you can see each year of a tree’s growth in its annual rings.

You don’t just show up in Antarctica and drill anywhere, though. “The preferred place to work,” Bender said, “is at a dome.” These are the ice plateaus that mark the very highest points on the world’s highest continent. They’re ideal for two reasons. First, the ice sheet is thickest here, so you can drill most deeply into the past. Second, Bender said, “Once you get off the highest point, the ice is flowing laterally, trying to discharge into the ocean as bergs. The flow leads to the deepest layers being folded and mixed up.”

Even when the layers are nice and orderly, however, the information scientists can extract from the air bubbles, and also from the ice that surrounds them, isn’t much good if they don’t know how old a given layer is. They do it by comparing ice cores with other ancient records — sediments from the bottom of the sea, for example, where dust and organic matter, including shells of tiny plankton known as foraminifera, form their own layers.

Ice core storage facility at the National Ice Core Laboratory. 

The organic material’s age can be teased out with radioactive dating, and if you go far enough back, you can see a change in the orientation of tiny iron particles from a time when Earth’s north and south magnetic poles changed places about 780,000 years ago. (Contrary to what some poorly informed folks believe, these reversals, which happen every so often, have nothing to do with climate change). Scientists can also synchronize the sea floor and ice core records by looking for thin layers of ash that mark massive volcanic eruptions.

Once they’ve figured the age of a layer in an ice core, paleoclimatologists melt the ice and capture the trapped air. The meltwater tells them what the air temperature was at the time the original snow actually fell, based on the form of oxygen the water contains. The liberated air, meanwhile, tells the scientists how much CO₂ was in the atmosphere at the time.

As climate skeptics love to point out, these measurements lead to an apparent paradox: if you look closely enough, you see that over and over, as ice ages gave way to warm interglacial periods, the temperature began to rise before the CO₂. In fact, this makes perfect sense. Enormous amounts of CO₂ are stored in the deep ocean, so when changes in Earth’s orbit bring more sunlight to the poles, the jolt of warmth liberates the stored gas, leading to more warming, and ultimately to the end of the ice age. A recent paper showed exactly how it might have played out.  

Bubbles containing ancient gases are visible in a piece of an Antarctic ice core sample. Credit: Oregon State University.

Scientists like Bender aren’t content just to leave it at that, however. They’re constantly trying to determine new ways to slice and dice ancient air see what other stories they might tell of the ancient past. They look for traces of methane, for example, which naturally rise and fall as methane-burping wetlands spread during wetter times and shrink when it’s dry — a clue to average rainfall at different times in Earth’s history. They look for nitrous oxide, produced by bacteria in drier soils. They even look for changes in the mixture of gases that tell them how quickly the original snow grains welded themselves together, which tells them how bright the sun was at any given era.

All of that comes from the continuous ice-core record, which goes no more than 800,000 years into the past. But Bender is determined to break that barrier. His lab is now working with ice he believes to be more than a million years old. You can’t use conventional dating techniques to confirm its antiquity, but he and his colleagues think they’ve figured out a way (it has to do with radioactive argon).

It’s not just curiosity that drives him. For the past million years or so, ice ages have lasted about 100,000 years each (the information comes not just from ice cores, but also from geological records). But before that, Bender said, “the cycles lasted 40,000 years, and the ice volume was only half of what we’ve gotten more recently.” Nobody really knows why — but there was clearly something different going on, quite possibly having to do with a mix of greenhouse gases different from what came later.

Understanding what changed at a million years B.C. could help climate scientists better understand the climate system overall. That in turn will help climatologists to gauge the coming impacts of human-generated greenhouse gases more accurately. The better the information they have to feed into their models, the more we can trust the projections that come out — and plan for what’s on the way.

OK, lecture’s out. Now you get to watch a new video from NASA that shows one important effect of the waxing and waning of the seasons. It shows satellite views of Earth over both the North and South Poles, side-by-side, demonstrating how sea ice expands in summer and melts back in winter, see-sawing from one pole to the other as summer and winter alternate.

It looks as though the changes balance out pretty evenly — but from a climate perspective, they don’t. In the south, the ice sheet covering the Antarctic continent — nearly 2 miles thick in places — remains intact even through the summer. The bright, white surface reflects sunlight back into space, so summer temperatures never rise all that high.

In the Arctic, by contrast, the ice right at the pole is all sitting in the ocean. It melts back a lot more. The relatively dark water underneath absorbs the Sun’s heat, driving Arctic temperatures higher than they’d normally be, in a process known as Arctic Amplification. It’s just one of many climate feedbacks that help speed global warming.

Also worth noting, with some concern: the amount of Arctic sea ice in September, the annual low point, has been much smaller in recent years.

One of the biggest open questions about climate change is whether clouds will slow or speed global warming. Everyone agrees that as the globe warms, more water vapor will enter the atmosphere. If that leads to more low-level cumulus clouds — the kind that bring rainstorms — they'll provide more shade, and block out some of the Sun's warming effect. If it leads to more cirrus clouds, however — the thin, high-altitude clouds shown in this image — they'll trap extra heat, and make the warming more intense.

Credit: Kevin Povenz/flickr

An infrared view of Tropical Storm Aletta, the first named storm of the 2012 East Pacific Hurricane Season, on Tuesday as captured by the nation's newest weather satellite, the Suomi-NPP. TS Aletta currently has maximum sustained winds of 40 mph and is moving due west, according to NOAA. Aletta is the first tropical storm anywhere in the world in 41 days, an incredibly long drought for tropical storms. That span was the longest the Earth has been void of a such a storm in at least 70 years.

Credit: NOAA

NOAA’s analysis of global temperatures showed that the planet’s thermometer stood at 57.87°F for the month, averaged over night and day, land and sea, from the poles to the equator. That’s 1.17°F  higher than the 20^th-century average — the biggest such departure from average of any month since November, 2010. The last time April was below that average was in 1976, when Gerald Ford was president.

Global surface temperature departures from average during April 2012. Credit: NOAA.

Some places that drove April numbers up, said NOAA, included Alaska, the lower 48 states of the U.S., Mexico and most of Russia. The places that kept the global average from being even higher — which is to say, places that were cooler than average — included Scandinavia (particularly Norway and Sweden), the United Kingdom, and northern Australia.

NOAA also reported that La Nina, the Pacific ocean current that’s been around since for about a year and a half, has dissipated. Normally, La Nina is associated with cooler than average global temperatures; it tends to hold back the longer-term warming associated with human greenhouse gases. With the brakes now off, it’s not at all implausible that warming will increase over the next year or so.

Gills Onions is a food processing company in California that already sets an energy example by using its own waste to generate electricity. But recently, after repeatedly needing to purchase additional electricty at the most expensive time of day, the company became even greener by adding a gigantic battery. 

According to The New York Times, the battery is the same in principle as many others except it has external tanks to store huge volumes of electrolyte and takes up a space the size of a tennis court, making it the largest of its kind in the world. In addition to enabling the company to pay off-peak electricity prices, it provides energy security by stepping in during the event of a power emergency.

Credit: Gills Onions

The Micronesian proposal, which has garnered the support of more than 100 parties to the ozone treaty, including the U.S. and the European Union, seeks to cut emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are compounds that contain carbon, hydrogen, and fluorine. These substances are used as solvents, refrigerants, firefighting agents, and propellants. They were introduced as a substitute for the chloroflourocarbons, or CFCs, that scientists discovered were destroying the Earth's protective ozone layer — thereby allowing greater amounts of the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays to reach the Earth's surface.

The Antarctic ozone hole as depicted by NASA satellite sensors in 2004. Credit: NASA.

 

Unlike CFCs, HFCs don't destroy ozone in the upper atmosphere, but they do have a downside: they are extremely powerful global warming gases. In fact, HFC-134a, which is the most popular HFC substitute and is used in air conditioning systems in vehicles, has a global warming potential that is more than 1,400 times that of carbon dioxide, the main manmade global warming gas.

HFCs don't remain in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide does, though, which means that the benefits of reducing their use could be seen rather quickly. This makes reducing HFCs an attractive option for low-lying island nations like Micronesia, which are worried about sea level rise during the next several decades.

"In Durban the world agreed to develop a new climate plan by 2015 to go into effect in 2020, but we need action now, and an agreement to phase down HFCs under the Montreal Protocol is the best strategy this year," said Micronesian ambassador Asterio Takesy in a press release.

In the U.S., HFC emissions have skyrocketed in recent years, growing by 216 percent between 1990 and 2009, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. The Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD), an environmental think tank in Washington, claims that phasing down HFC production and use under the Micronesian plan would be the equivalent of preventing 100 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

"Phasing down HFCs is the biggest, fastest, cheapest piece of climate mitigation available to the world in the next few years," IGSD president Durwood Zaelke said.

With U.N. climate talks deadlocked, environmental advocates have increasingly turned to the Montreal Protocol to address greenhouse gases that fall under that treaty's purview. The Protocol is widely considered to be one of international environmental law's greatest success stories, responsible for slashing emissions of ozone-depleting substances and helping address climate change at the same time.

Zaelke said the proposal may draw opposition from India and Brazil, among others, due to concerns that an HFC phaseout would harm industry, and because of their opposition to mandatory emissions reductions.

This isn't the first time that Micronesia has spearheaded an effort to address global warming within the framework of the Montreal Protocol, either. In 2007, parties to the treaty agreed to a Micronesian plant to accelerate the phase-out of HCFCs, another CFC substitute that is also a potent global warming agent. The U.S., along with Canada and Mexico, have  submitted a similar proposal for an HFC phase-down.

A final decision on the latest amendment won't be reached until November, when treaty talks take place in Geneva, Switzerland.

In addition to the West, drought conditions are also prevalent in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and parts of the Northeast as well, along with a small pocket in the Upper Midwest. In all, 56 percent of the Lower 48 states were experiencing drought conditions as of May 8, almost twice the area compared to last year at this time, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.  

U.S. Drought Monitor issued May 8, 2012. Click on image for a larger version.

Fortunately, much of the West had such bountiful winter precipitation last year that the risk of water supply disruptions are rather low in most areas, but that could change if the current weather pattern lasts much longer. Water officials in Colorado, for example, have begun urging residents to start conserving water in case the dry spell continues.

Take a look at the streamflow forecast for the West this summer compared to last year at this time. The orange and red hues this year indicate well below average streamflow conditions are likely, as unusually thin and dry snow cover yields less water than usual. Last year at this time, the same map showed above average streamflow conditions for most of the West.

Western streamflow outlook for spring/summer 2012. Credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service. Click on image for a larger version.

In addition to heightened water supply concerns, the dry conditions may provide favorable conditions for a busier wildfire season, including in California, as Climate Central reported on May 11. 

Heavy rains and severe weather have dominated weather headlines in Texas recently — a stark contrast from last spring — and the rainfall has eroded what was a widespread area of severe-to-exceptional drought conditions. As can be seen in this Drought Monitor map, the severe drought conditions are now confined to northern and western Texas, with dramatic improvement in southern and southeastern areas.

Drought monitor image and statistics showing improved conditions in Texas. Credit: NOAA/USDA. Click on image for a larger version.

Parts of Texas picked up nearly a foot of rainfall during in a seven-day period ending on May 14, eating away at the large precipitation deficit the state had been facing.

In the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, though, meaningful drought relief has been wanting. In Georgia and South Carolina, for example, pop-up thunderstorms have provided some rainfall recently, but nowhere near the widespread rains needed to put a solid dent in the drought conditions that intensified during the winter. 

The Southeast drought is very likely related to the La Niña conditions that existed in the Pacific Ocean last winter. La Niña events, which feature cooler-than-average waters in the equatorial Tropical Pacific, tend to influence weather patterns in such a way that it leads to drier-than-average winter conditions in the southern tier of the U.S. Fortunately, La Niña has diminished, with neither La Niña or El Niño conditions likely for the next few months, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center and forecasters affiliated with Columbia University (some researchers refer to the absence of La Niña and El Niño as “La Nada”).

Texas rainfall during the seven-day period ending May 14, 2012. Credit: NOAA. Click on image for a larger version.

The latest drought outlook issued by the Climate Prediction Center shows the likelihood of some improvement in drought conditions for Florida and North Carolina, but Georgia and South Carolina aren’t looking quite as good for some reason.

In the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, forecasts favor improving drought conditions. Maryland and Delaware had their driest January to April period on record.

Drought conditions are also expected to improve in parts of the Upper Midwest.

U.S. Drought Monitor issued May 8, 2012. Click on image for a larger version.

Of course, these forecasts aren't set in stone. If a tropical storm or hurricane were to make landfall in northern Florida or coastal Georgia, for example, it could end the southeastern drought. But as Texas learned last year, when Tropical Storm Don essentially evaporated as it made landfall, it's probably best not to hold your breath for such relief.