How to spend one's first evening of winter break

• Arrive home to the welcoming smell of t-butyl mercaptan in some, but not all areas of the house
  
  
• Call natural gas company to report gas leak
  
  
• Open windows
  
  
• Hear CO detector go off
  
  
• Put cats in pet carrier, kids in coats and head to neighbors
  
  
• Call gas company again
  
  
• Call neighbors to tell them we've let ourselves into their house
  
  
• Gas company reports fire department will be coming too
  
  
• Wait
  
  
• Neighbors come home, our kids play with their kid
  
  
• Their cat hisses at our cats
  
  
• Gas company and fire department arrive. Vent house. Close up again.
  
  
• Fire company determines CO is coming from water heater and/or furnace and the water heater has a hole in it and needs to be replaced.
  
  
• Listen to fire department tell us not to turn on furnace until someone comes to check it or fix it.
  
  
• Find "turn on the water and hope for the best" to be insufficient precautionary steps against freezing pipes.
  
  
• Call extremely odd but competent heating and cooling guy.
  
  
• Agree that our pipes would probably not freeze by 8am if our house was at 70 degrees now.
  
  
• Explain that our house is at approximately 20 degrees now.
  
  
• Wait.
  
  
• Observe that kids are all tired and hungry and getting on each other's nerves.
  
  
• Observe that our cats are hungry and getting on each other's nerves.
  
  
• Return to house to get Mac-n-cheese and another cat carrier.
  
  
• Heating and cooling guy arrives, assesses safety of furnace, fires furnace up and sets at 50 degrees for the evening once assured humans and pets will be retreating to a hotel.
  
  
• Agrees to show up at 8:30 to replace WH, recommends replacing furnace, tells Dr. H all about the problems he has with his colon and his ex-wife.
  
  
• Go through house quickly to collect necessities for the evening.
  
  
• Retreat to hotel over protests of neighbors, having already taken up four hours of their evening.
  
  
• Get kids/cats settled in hotel. Look over furnace brochures. Check consumer reports and manufacturer's website. Note that a 20+ year furnace in our poorly constructed house is likely to have very low efficiency.
  
  
• Call heating and cooling guy in the morning to find out if they sell the 93% efficient furnaces in the manufacturer's product line in addition to the 80% efficient one he gave us the brochure for.
  
  
• Pack up cats and kids, meet heating and cooling guys at house, install 93% efficient, two-stage furnace and new water heater.
  
  
• Buy new CO detectors.
  
  

Yet more consistency with expectations

• Overheard: "I am so screwed."
  
  A student in my non-majors class who hasn't been to class in a week and a half, after receiving today's test.
  
  
• Observed: Another faculty member pulling out of the local sandwich shop in his large SUV, as I pull in driving my Prius hybrid.
  
  He is our resident climate change denier/skeptic.
  
  
  

 

The cooling scare of the 70's

Today, a student in one of my classes said she had heard that in the 70's everyone thought the world was cooling. She wondered if it was true. Of course, there were a few headlines about this idea in the 70's, and this is a commonly cited among doubters of climate change. Fortuitously, Real Climate had a post about this recently, which I was able to send around after class:

Here's a quote:

Remote sensing, integrated global data collection and modeling were all in their infancy. But our analysis nevertheless showed clear trends in the focus and conclusions the researchers were making. Between 1965 and 1979 we found (see table 1 for details):

* 7 articles predicting cooling
* 44 predicting warming
* 20 that were neutral

In other words, during the 1970s, when some would have you believe scientists were predicting a coming ice age, they were doing no such thing.

A new challenge in storytelling

I'm about to begin my spring term of teaching, and I find myself wondering:

Which stories do I tell?

How should I tell them?

My science class for non-majors is an "issues" course. That is, we look at current issues in science of interest to the general community. Energy, climate change, that sort of thing. Back in the day, I used to present both sides of the global warming debate. I thought I had to, you know, to be fair. I don't know why - maybe to overcompensate for my liberal nature. As I became increasingly uncomfortable with this, I began to minimize the debate itself, and just present mechanism, facts and numbers. I addressed the debate, but only briefly.

In 2005, after a break of a few years, I taught the course again. Just beforehand, I went to a seminar where I had the opportunity to discuss the issue of what to present in class with real climate scientists. The other instructors (non-climate scientists like me) and I wanted to know what to do about the other side of the debate. We all felt some discomfort not presenting both sides. The climate scientists felt no such discomfort. "Present IPCC," they said, "this is the consensus of the scientific community." A fine point, I thought.

I presented the IPCC conclusions. I talked about how climate modeling was done. I showed Hanson's famous graph and explained how it was routinely misrepresented. This all went well. Half way though the term (and after the climate change section), the students in my class asked where I fell politically. I told them I try not to discuss my own politics. They said, "But we want to know!"

There are two schools of thought on this question: full disclosure and don't ask, don't tell. Having opted for the second, I now found myself facing a room full of students asking for full disclosure instead. Astonishingly, to me at least, they went on to say, "We really don't know!" How could they not know? Anyway, there was really no conflict here. The students asked me a fair question. They knew me well enough to believe me when I said the following: "Me? OK. I'm a raving liberal. Does that mean you have to agree with me? No. Does that mean your grade on issues papers depends on agreeing with me? No. I care that it is well written. I care that you have reasons for your opinions and that you can articulate them."

So, what have I learned? A reasoned approach to the evidence does not necessarily get you branded as a raving liberal.

I'm teaching this class again this term. I was planning on taking the same approach. This is all well and good. However, I find myself wondering if my story needs to change. Why? Well, there is a faculty member on my campus who is a global warming skeptic. He teaches this topic. A lot. His contention that climate change is not caused by humans is appealing to the students. And why wouldn't it be? It means they don't need to think about changing their lifestyles. It is hard to counter this.

I'm hoping the way I tell the story of climate change is up to the challenge.

scientiae-carnival

Real Climate

I love the site RealClimate. RealClimate is a group blog by a group of climate scientists for journalists and the general public. It offers much more than sound bites, and covers a range of topics. Recently, they put up a new post/site feature entitled Start Here with a lot of links to basic information about climate change. It looks to be a very good resource, with suggestions for complete novices to those wanted really technical information. I teach about climate change in some science classes for non-science majors. As I am not a climate scientist, I am often in need of technical information to answer student questions. I often have trouble finding this information in simpler sources intended for a general audience, and I also have trouble digging it out from more technical sources. More often than not, I find the information at RealClimate.

Today, they also have an interesting post about temperature changes over the last 1000 years.

Step It Up

So, today was a National Day of Climate Action promoting cutting carbon emissions 80% by 2050. So, in celebration, here are a few climate-related items.

• This radio address by Bill McKibbon founder of Step it Up 2007 was quite interesting. (Sorry, the radio address download is not free, but here is a link to a recent Talk of the Nation with McKibbon as a guest.)
  
  
• I recently attended a talk given by the CEO of a major oil company (rhymes with swell). As public talks go, it was a very good one. By, by gosh, does that man love carbon-based fuels! He is either (a) very good at his job as a public representative or (b) a true believer or (c) both. His message: there are two problems keeping us from energy security. First, public policy doesn't allow the development of some energy resources. Second, public policy doesn't encourage and support the development of other resources. Oh, yeah, and we have plenty of fuel, if only we could develop it. Now, I do not disagree with a number of things he said. For example, I also believe it will take time to move away from carbon. Yes, I think ethanol from corn is problematic. My main issue with the talk was that he spoke nothing of conservation, and nothing about changing the way we do things. He talked of energy savings through improving efficiency and increasing energy supply to "maintain our lifestyle".
  
  
• Here's a little light reading - the IPCC 2007 Summary for Policy Makers. Too scary for bedtime.
  
  
• Check out the site RealClimate for ongoing and technical information about climate change.