• Evolution defenders to fight climate skeptics

    Laura Rauch / AP file

    This file photo shows the reduction in water levels due to drought on Lake Mead in Nevada. Scientists say climate changes and a growing population could conspire to dry up Lake Mead and Lake Powell within 13 years

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    A national organization best known for its defense of teaching evolution has added climate change to its agenda in a move that highlights a brewing controversy inside the classroom.

    Across the country, teachers and schools boards are being pressured to teach that the science of climate change is controversial when, in fact, it is not, according to the National Center for Science Education.

    For example, the school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., made headlines in 2011 for requiring teachers of an environmental science class to ensure their curriculum presented all sides of the climate change issue.

    "That is so common with evolution," Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, told me.

    Anti-evolution groups often push school boards to include teaching of controversial ideas such as intelligent design inside the science classroom, even though it has been ruled as "creationism in disguise."

    Climate controversy
    On climate change, NCSE notes that mountains of scientific evidence show that the planet is warming and human activities are part of the reason why. That's not controversial, it says.

    Nevertheless, anti-global warming messages spread by groups such as the Heartland Institute, Scott said, are used by grassroots activists to pressure school boards and educators to teach that global warming is controversial.

    James Taylor, an environmental policy fellow at the institute, told the Los Angeles Times that this pushback is needed to prevent "an important and ongoing scientific debate" about human-caused climate change from turning into "a propaganda assault on impressionable students."

    Scott said NCSE will weigh in on the side of science, giving parents, teachers, and school boards advice and legal support to help maintain the integrity of climate science inside the classroom.

    "That's our ecological niche," Scott said. "Nobody else is doing this."

    Growing movement?
    "The climate change education situation today is about where the teaching of evolution was 20 to 25 years ago," noted Scott. "We are trying to get ahead of the situation before positions get hardened."

    Unlike the teaching of evolution, which is often a standard section in biology class, climate change science is scattered throughout the curriculum. 

    It is sometimes found in junior high Earth science class, for example, and is starting to be featured in biology and geology courses. More often, it is found as part of senior year environmental science courses.

    NCSE's goal is to help science teachers cover climate change inside their classroom with information on the factors that influence it, such as increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

    Teachers ought to be able to discuss this without controversy and explain that there are several policy proposals out there on what to do, said Scott.

    But that's where the science teaching should stop.

    "We are not a policy institute. We are not going to argue about cap and trade or a carbon tax," Scott noted in reference to two policy proposals.

    More on science education:

     

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website.

     

     

  • Float Venice to save it from rising seas, study says

    Manuel Silvestri / Reuters

    In this file photo, tourists take photos of each other in the flooded Saint Mark's square in Venice.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    To protect Venice from periodic floods that are increasingly heightened by the double whammy of rising seas levels and sinking land, a team of Italian researchers suggests lifting up the canal-laced city by pumping seawater into the aquifers below it.

    Doing so could result in a uniform uplift of about 30 centimeters over a 10-year period of steady, coordinated pumping via a series of 12 wells that circle the city, according to a study reported in the journal Water Resources Research.

    The idea isn't entirely new, but until now its applicability was clouded by a limited understanding of Venice's underlying soils.

    The researchers overcame this obstacle by combing through seismic data — obtained in the 1980s by an Italian oil and gas company — to create a 3-D reconstruction of the soils.

    "This allowed them to confirm the presence of a continuous layer of impermeable clay below which injected water could increase pore pressure," Scott K. Johnson reports for Ars Technica.

    Pore pressure corresponds to water between grains of sediment that can bear some of the load. Subsidence occurs when water is pumped out — as occurred in Venice in the mid-1900s — and the grains pack together, causing the land to sink.

    In theory, pumping water back into the soils could reverse this trend, but in reality a full recovery isn't possible, notes Ars Technica.

    However, the achievable uplift is sufficient to curb some of Venice's periodic flooding.

    Importantly, the coordinated injection of the seawater can prevent one side of the city rising up faster than another, which could crumble the infrastructure — buildings, roads, etc. — that the project aims to protect.

    While the cost of the undertaking has been estimated at more than $100 million, the raised up land would reduce operating costs for the MOSE flood gate project meant to stop the rising waters from entering the city at all.

    And given that tourism generates at least $2 billion a year in Venice, according to National Geographic, that seems like a small price to pay even for a country at the forefront of the European debt crisis.

    What's more, if this approach works in Venice, it might also find use in other parts of the world threatened by rising seas, including Shanghai, New York, New Orleans, Miami, Cairo, Amsterdam and Tokyo.

    More on Venice and rising seas:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

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  • Support for climate hacking up

    John Mcconnico / AP

    An iceberg melts in Kulusuk Bay, eastern Greenland, in this July 17, 2007, file photo. A new survey finds growing support for schemes to hack the climate to reduce global warming.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    The public is surprisingly aware of the fact that humans could deliberately hack the planet's climate to reduce or offset changes due to greenhouse gas emissions, according to a first-of-its kind survey.

    What's more, 72 percent of the 3,105 respondents think scientists should be allowed to study ways to do this that involve managing the amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface, such as injecting tiny particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's energy back into space.

    This field of science is technically known as geoengineering, though the survey found that more people have a better idea of what it's all about when the tem "climate engineering" is used, according to the results, which were presented Monday in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

    Growing recognition
    Scientists have batted around the concept since the 1960s, though it remained on the periphery of the climate debate until the last few years largely due to fears that public discussion would lessen incentives for political action to curb emissions, note the researchers.

    But in recent years the concept has gained traction due in part to the fact that the prominent scientist Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel for his work on the ozone hole, has urged systematic study of solar radiation management. 

    As well, news media coverage of geoengineering has spiked and bookshelves have begun to creak under the weight of tomes dedicated to the idea, such as Eli Kintisch's "Hack the Planet" and Jeff Goodell's "How to Cool the Planet".

    Given the growing recognition, the researchers felt the time is ripe to collect data on public opinions and awareness on the subject. 

    Survey results
    According to the results, 8 percent of the respondents correctly described geoengineering and 45 percent correctly described the interchangeable term "climate engineering," adding weight to the argument that the term geoengineering is misleading and difficult to understand. 

    While 72 percent of the respondents support studying solar radiation management, uncertainty about using the technique to stop a climate emergency now or deploying it immediately was considerable.

    "Overall the support for [solar radiation management] is surprisingly high," the team writes. "Our own view, and our impression of the dominant opinion within the research and policy community, is that near term use of SRM would be reckless."

    The research team, which includes David Keith, an expert on scientific study of geoengineering at Harvard University and the University of Calgary, was pleased to also find broad public trust in university researchers to dispense honest information about the field.

    In fact, 75 percent or respondents ranked university researchers as trustworthy. 

    "As future policy and governance debates concerning SRM continue, scientists are likely in a unique and trusted position of influence … ensuring that the science remains disentangled from the politics will help to preserve the public's trust in scientists on the topic of SRM," they conclude.

    Less than trustworthy
    Less than a third, however, trust information about geoengineering from the government. The media is an even less trustworthy source of information (26 percent).

    There's also a subset of people out there who believe governments or scientists are already distributing chemicals in the atmosphere for purposes ranging from culling the population to mind control.

    "We found that 2.6 percent of the subjects believe that it is completely true that the government has a secret program that uses airplanes to put harmful chemicals into the air and 14 percent of the sample believe that this is partly true," the team notes.

    More on geoengineering:

     

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more information of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

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