Participating in the Homeschool Blog Awards--with Some Trepidation

I have decided to nominate some of my favorite blogs in the 2007 Homeschool Blog Awards, with some trepidation.

Why do I have some trepidation?

It is not because of the rules, although some of those might be cause to disqualify my blog, in the unlikely event that I am nominated. I do not know if my blog will be considered "nice to other bloggers," especially since I do discuss controversial topics and I state my opinions forthrightly. And although I consider my blog 'family friendly' I do not know what that really means, so it may not be 'G-rated' according to someone else because I do not toe the line on matters of conservative politics. But the people who have spent many hours putting this together have their standards and 'those that do the work get to make the rules,' as my grandmother (z"l) would say. So I have decided to participate anyway.

For more on the controversy over rude language please go over to Dana's post at Principled Discovery. I think she has very good insight into this concern. Personally, I do not like to put nasty words (according to my standards) on my own blog, as I am responsible for the content. I have edited comments a few times myself for this reason.

My concern is a new policy this year that a blog must have three nominations in a category in order to be short-listed as a nominee for an award. I can understand the justification given for this policy change. This policy is an attempt to get people to think about the blogs they nominate and then to read those in the categories that they vote on. In other words, it is an attempt to make this something other than a popularity contest. And that goal is admirable.

But I don't think the policy is going to make the goal attainable. For a blog to be nominated three times in a single category, it must already be a popular blog among those readers who will be doing the nominations. And the readers must all like it for the same reason. That makes it unlikely that new and interesting blogs will make it to final voting because good blogs may fit into several categories. So we are likely to get 'the same old, same old' when it comes right down to the winners.

Last year I found some really good blogs that I have since added to my list of "must reads" from the final cut. Such blogs were often new and different, and few of them were nominated more than once. But I had the chance to view them and vote on them. Now, the representation in the final voting will be limited and the voters will be precluded from choosing them as best, even if we think they are, in fact, better than the ones chosen by the committee. Personally, I'd prefer a more democratic approach and I think it would be more encouraging to diverse bloggers in the homeschool world.

But I still like the idea of the awards in general, and I think the committee has done much to reassure those of us who are not in the mainstream for our political views or religious practice to participate. So, despite my trepidation, I'll play.

If you want to know the truth, I really want the opportunity to honor some really interesting blogs.

If you want to play, go to the link above by Saturday and make your nominations. You can nominate yourself--I am just to too much of a Midwesterner to consider that Kosher.

Carnival of Homeschooling #98: Thanksgiving Edition

It's late fall and the harvest is in here in the northern hemisphere.

Our Canadian friends have already celebrated Thanksgiving. And we did, too, over a month ago at Sukkot. Now it is nearing time for those of us in the United States to remember our blessings.





Nerdmom over at the Nerd Family blog is counting all of the blessings that she is thankful for that are related to homeschooling.

There are so many fruits of what we are doing for our children to consider and so there are many, many articles up over at the Thanksgiving Edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling.





As I go about the chores of late fall--chores like raking pine needles up around the outside, trimming the bushes and cutting back the deadfall, writing a paper on adult neurogenesis and depression, writing an anotated bibliography about alternative intelligence testing for second-language speakers, studying for final exams, and (my favorite) baking pumpkin pies--as I go about these chores, it is very helpful to be reminded that they, too, are something to be thankful for! Really!


So many of us are so blessed with abundance in this country with many different kinds of blessings. At COH this week, there are homeschoolers standing ready to share their experience and wisdom on a variety of topics.

Take a few moments during this busy time of visiting, family, remembering and giving, to nourish your mind with the wit, wisdom and understanding of your fellow homeschoolers.

When I have some downtime in my preparations for the holiday, I plan to make a nice cup of hot cider and head on over to the Nerd family!

The Red Herring Question: Social Skills and Schools Today

I am home again after a whirlwind tour of the mid-west.
I will have lots to say later about everything and pictures to post, too!
But I want to get an article written for the Carnival of Homeschooling and the deadline is fast approaching.

I am, as you know, working on a Ph.D. in Special Education with an emphasis in the Neurospychology of Twice-Exceptional People with ASD. And whenever I tell colleagues from around the country in gifted ed that I am homeschooling my gifted-AS kid, I get the usual question. You all know what it is. You have probably heard it many times. Shall we repeat it together?
WHAT ABOUT SOCIAL SKILLS?

I have taken to answering the question with a question: Are schools today a place where students actually are taught or learn appropriate social skills? The question usually causes a long silence, since it requires the original asker to actually think about her assumptions. And then I begin to hear answers with references to rudeness, bullying, lockstep age-grading, reduced recess and lunch time, silent lunches, and so forth. All of these things are barriers to social interaction in schools and social interaction is how social skills are learned. It is an amazing experience each time this happens to me. Here are educators who have questioned many assumptions about the needs of gifted learners, but still need a prompt to think about their assumptions that school is where children learn social skills.

Yesterday, I was vindicated! I went to hear Dr. Sanford Cohn, an educational psychologist specializing in the psychology of gifted children from Arizona State University discuss the issue. His talk had a provocative title. In fact, it was so provocative that I almost did not go. I was wondering if it was going to be one of those presentations that is inflammatory but not scholarly.

For the curious among you, the title was: Good Intentions, Unanticipated Consequences: Creating a Generation of Brilliant Psychopaths.

See what I mean?

Dr. Cohn sat at a table and held the mike in his hand. He did not have slides. He did not pace, bluster or entertain. His voice was even and measured, and displayed just an edge of passion. And the audience listened intently and silently. We were on the edges of our seats, leaning forward to catch every word. Because we knew that what he had to say was true and important.

He started out by discussing the requirements for learning for every child--those who are intellectually gifted and those with average and above average intelligence. And those are novelty and complexity i.e. we have to get their interest and sustain it. He then went on to discuss the disaster of the concept of inclusion--something I will discuss at length at another time--which is the idea that one teacher can differentiate curriculum for a full range of students in one classroom. At this point he condemned the PC ideas that underpin these philosophies and discussed the social consequences for, but not limited to, gifted kids.

His take-home message is that when the system refuses to use effective placement and pacing to meet the intellectual needs of any child (and remember, school is supposed to be about meeting educational needs, not social engineering), you are telling that child, "You don't matter" at the level of action, even though your words may be otherwise. And the kids see the hypocrisy. And the more educators protest otherwise, the more we look like "self-deluded fools" in the eyes of our kids. In fact, the current institutions, politcal, social and educational, that society holds up as exemplars, are overwhelming our children with hypocrisy. We have a media that devalues the individual and uses sexual overtones and imagery to sell anything. We have politicians that lie to the people with impunity. And an educational establishment that is, in effect, "educating for contempt and disdain."
In fact, said Dr. Cohn, we could not do a better job or this if we had actually set out to do this on purpose.

In this mileau, it is very difficult to teach ordinary social manners and mores. Studies of the brain--particularly the recent discovery of mirror neurons and their effect on imitation suggest that human beings do not, in general, learn to "do as I say, not as I do."

As Dr. Cohn finished his presentation, I was thinking: This is the overarching reason why I took my son out of school. There are a lot of small reasons--they could not meet his needs, give him the individual attention he needed for his AS or giftedness, etc. But over all, in the eyes of the educational establishment, my son, as an individual, is unimportant. Their social engineering goals--however poorly founded--are more important than his education. And in that environment, learning appropriate social skills--compassion and caring for others as individuals and the manners and graciousness to show it--is impossible.

The question of social skills in schools--an environment in which children are often told one thing and see another--is one that educators ought to ponder themselves before they impose it on the one million or more homeschoolers in the nation. As parents, we are taking the responsibility to place our children in environments where they will hear and see how respect, graciousness, caring and compassion are implemented in every day life.

Carnival of Homeschooling #97: Homeschool U is Open for Classes

It's November, and every graduate student I know is up their ears and eyeballs in tests and projects. So this is a good time to get some on-line education in a different major.

The Carnival of Homeschooling--Homeschool U edition--is up over a Principled Discovery. Dean of Students Dana has made sure to develop a well-rounded schedule of classes that can fit any student's area of interest. And the tuition is very economical, too!

So head on over to Homeschool U! I'll bet the student union has comfy chairs and nice warm drinks for you fall studying pleasure.

The Loss of Awe and Ecophobia

Yes, another post about environmental science, but from a different perspective. This time, I am going to talk about environmental education. I started thinking about this because of something that Judy Aron said over at Consent of the Governed. She mentioned that some of the science education about global climate change was "scaring little children."

I am also preparing a talk for the National Association for Gifted Children annual conference about the uses of wilderness awareness curricula for meeting a variety of goals in the education of gifted children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. So ideas about environmental education are fresh in my mind.

First, a few definitions. The first two are from dictionary.com:

Awe: n.
A mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, and wonder inspired by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might: We felt awe when contemplating the works of Bach. The observers were in awe of the destructive power of the new weapon.

Natural history: n
1. The study and description of organisms and natural objects, especially their origins, evolution, and interrelationships.
a. A collection of facts about the development of a natural process or entity: the natural history of early hominids as revealed in the fossil record.
b. A work or treatise containing such facts.

This last one is defined by David Sobel in his book Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the heart in Nature Education.

Ecophobia n.: a morbid fear of one's home or morbid or excessive fear of ecological disaster or deterioration.

So what is the problem? School-based science curricula have been developed to teach children about the prospects of global warming, the destruction of the rainforest, and the movement of pollutants through the food web while at the same time they do not teach children about the natural wonders in their own backyards. Children as young as first grade are taught about rainforest ecology and the loss of habitat in which they learn that in the time between recess and lunch "tens of thousands of acres of rainforest will be cut down in order to make way for fast-food 'hamburgerable' cattle," as Sobel puts it.

There are several problems with this approach to teaching about the environment. To begin with, small children need hands-on instruction in science. When a person has been on the planet only six or seven years, he has had little chance to experience the vacant lot next door or the woods outside of town, let alone be required to worry about the end of nature. Most of them, in North America at least, have never seen a rainforest and they have little idea of where one is or what it might look like.

Secondly, the science of ecology requires the student to understand a large number of complex biological interactions that happen at the organismal, community and ecosytem levels. These interactions between species, and between species and the environment require a basic understanding of non-biological concepts such as energy, and laws of conservation. And you can't see or touch these interactions. Although there are probably a few, highly gifted first and second graders who could imagine these large ideas, most little children would be better off without them for a while longer.

Does this mean little children cannot learn about ecology and the environment? Not at all. But why not go local? For one thing, it is right in front of us. Take the kids out and show them how the bees and butterflies pollinate flowers, which develop into fruits that we can eat. In this way, a small child will learn about the vital role that pollinators play in the environment. And the schools will not need to buy expensive curricula with all the bells and whistles. All a teacher would need is some library books, some inexpensive hand-lenses, and access to the outdoors over a period of time. A guest speaker from the university biology department who will talk to the kids for free would be an added bonus.

Really, the first thing we want to teach our small children about the environment is as close as the door garden, the trees at the back of the schoolyard, the garden, or the desert across at the edge of town. Because what we want to teach them is wonder and awe. We want them to have time to satisfy their curiosity about how a tadpole becomes a frog and what makes a plant grow 'big and strong.'

There will be plenty of time for them to learn about species interactions in rainforests far away, once they have experienced the joy of watching ants follow their little trails of formic acid to get food and bring it safely back to the anthill. They will be better equipped to take responsibility for whole ecosystems after they have taken responsibility for the family aquarium or birdfeeder. The study of rainforest ecology is much more appropriate for mid-schoolers and high schoolers, who have developed at least some ability for abstract thought.

Richard Louv in The Last Child in the Woods notes that most scientists started out their careers as small chasers of snakes, catchers of spiders and collectors of leaves. The great natural historians of the past began like E.O. Wilson, who spent the days of his childhood roaming the shores of Mobile Bay, bringing home shells and starfish, and exulting in the power of the waves and the awesome winds of storms. Or like the 'grand old man of Rocky Mountain Geology, David Love, who grew up roaming the mountains of Wyoming, testing his mettle against the blizzards and the droughts.

When I was a child roaming the woods and fields of Central Illinois, I did not imagine that I would be an ecologist who would do statistics at the computer. In fact, the only computer I knew of took up a whole floor of the IAA building downtown, and was kept behind glass windows in a clean room. No, I imagined being a geologist, roaming the hills and mountains, collecting rocks. Or a paleontologist, spending my days running the soft shales of the Morrison formation in my hands, finding the spectactular fossil of my dreams. Or as a Naturalist, studying how the plants and animals of the tall-grass prairie made a living.

It is not necessary to induce ecophobia into our kids in order to get them to care about nature. In fact, it may even be counter-productive. Inducing unnamable worries into the hearts of our children may even cause them to avoid thinking about nature. It may make them feel like aliens who don't belong to the earth. As the naturalist Robert Pyle wisely observed: "What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?"

As homeschoolers, we have taken the power of our children's education into our own hands. We don't need to let them be taught to fear nature. We are there with them, day after day. Take the little ones outside. Let them experience the power of the sun's heat, the smell of rain on a dusty road, the softness of freshly turned soil in their hands on a spring day in the garden. Take them outside every day and teach them awe and wonder.

Fall into Winter: The Last Cross-Quarter of the Year

Some call it Halloween. And some call it El Dia de Los Muertos. It is called All Saints, All Souls, Samhain and Martinmas. It gets celebrated anytime between October 31 and November 7.



It is the fourth cross-quater day of the year and the actual astronomical event this year takes place on November 7.



This is the time when, as the earth completes her yearly cycle around the sun, it is exactly half-way between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. The days are getting rapidly shorter now, and the sun appears to rise and set further and further toward the south every day.

This picture is of the sunrise this morning--a few days before the actual date, but close enough to see how far to the southeast it is actually rising. Our house faces the south-east, and today the sun rose just over the neighbor's house which is directly across from our front door.



Today was also the beginning of Standard Time, and it was too late coming in my humble opinion. Yesterday (Saturday) morning, the sun rose at nearly 8 AM and it did not actually get above the mountain until nearly 8:15 AM. That is really late. I was grateful that my N. was not shivering in the gloaming at a bus stop at 7:15!

It was also very strange how light it was on Halloween. I do wish the state would reconsider this lunacy of starting Mountain Standard Time later and later into the year. Since we need the lights in the mornings, I don't think it is buying us much.

But, I digress!




This is the sunset tonight (just before 5 PM MST) taken from the patio near our bedroom. The Sandia Mountain Front is well to the north (picture right) and that is where the sun set on the Summer Solstice.


In the Old Religion of Europe, this Cross-Quarter day is known as Samhain and is celebrated as the last harvest of the year. Coming as it does, at the very end of autumn, it is the Celtic new year and the beginning of winter according to the old calendar. In the Old Religion, this day marked a Royal Assembly and a time to honor the dead. The wheel of the year is moving us all toward the time of darkness and death, and accordingly Samhain represents a time when the boundaries are thin between this world and the world of spirits.


When Christianity came to Europe, it borrowed this old festival and made it into a holy day to honor All Hallows or All Saints. This is where we get the American Folk Holiday of Halloween which is derived from 'All Hallows Eve.' For the celebration of Halloween, people dress up as ghosts and witches, vampires and reapers, all a reminder of the origins of the day in honor of the dead. In the sacramental Christian churches, the next day after All Hallows is All Souls Day, a day to honor all the departed, which is an echo of Samhain. Here in the southwest, many people celebrate El Dia de Los Muertos--The Day of the Dead. They make altars decorated with mementos of their dear departed and eat candy skeletons and bread made in the shape of skulls and crossbones. Earlier today, in Albuquerque's South Valley neighborhoods, people made the annual Marigold Parade for Dia de Los Muertos.


There is no Jewish cognate for the fourth cross-quarter. We honor the dead with a special yizkor service at each of the three pilgrimage festivals and on Yom Kippur, as well as on the anniversaries of the deaths of our loved ones. We celebrated the last harvest last month during Sukkot. But this coming Friday is Rosh Chodesh, the new moon celebration that begins the month of Kislev which brings Hannukah and winter.

Winter is definitely on its way up here in Sedillo.
Bruce got the pellet stove running last weekend. It is connected to a thermostat and fires up every morning, now that we have programmed the set-back for warmth in the early morning and mid-evening times. We've had one frosty night after another, and after our last walk, Lily has taken up her old post by the warm stove.


The sunsets are moving every further south along the hills to our west. The sky is taking on the clouds and colors of winter.

And now that we have ended Daylight Time, the evenings are dark and the nights are long.

Happy cross-quarter day--whatever you call it--a little early!



On the actual day, I will be traveling up north where the nights are even longer and the weather is colder.

Global Climate Change: Science, Politics, and Ideologies

I was reading a post at Consent of the Governed yesterday about Al Gore, the IPCC, and the issue of global climate change. You can read what was written here. I started to write a reply to the post, but it began to get so long that I copied it to Word in order to post about on my own blog. So I will discuss the issue here today.


Before I go on, I think it would be helpful to state up front my claim to expertise in this matter. I have advanced degrees in geology and biology. In geology, I studied paleoclimatology and worked on the microfossil identifications for the Glacial Lake Estancia project with Dr. Roger Andersen. As a biologist, my focus was on ecology and evolution, and my specific interest was in the desert soil ecology of cryptogamic crusts. I also taught Genetics to undergraduates as an instructor (sometimes called a lecturer). In my first area of interest, paleoclimate, I learned quite a bit about the influences on climate on the earth and about the earth's history of climate change. In my second area of interest, desert ecology, I was involved in ongoing studies of desertification in the southwestern US, through work on the lands of the Servilleta Long Term Ecological Research Center and also at the Jornada del Muerte.


As I have been moving through my days, reading blogs, reading the newspaper, and having discussions, I have noticed that with respect to global climate change, science and politics are getting twisted together in a very confusing way. On the one hand, the science as it is reported in the popular press gets simplified and stated in absolute terms. Then political types get a hold of the simplification of results and use it to push very specific agendas. For those who oppose the political agendas that have been tied to scientific information, it has become almost de rigeur to deny the scientific evidence lock, stock and barrel and call it "junk" science. The fascination of scientific discussion is lost to both of these positions and the argument descends to insult and name calling that spirals to the point where lines are drawn in the concrete, and neither "side" can even bear to listen to the other. In other words, the science is lost in the political ideologies of left and right.


Those who embrace the ideologies as described above are generally not scientists, although politically astute scientists do use prevailing ideologies to get funding. We are human, after all. When scientists enter the popular discussion they are often at a disadvantage because many forget that the popular discussion is not conducted to get at a better understanding of physical reality and how it works, but rather to demonstrate the absolute rightness of one ideology over another.


Science does not work by proclaiming an absolute position and then going out to find evidence to support it. Rather, it works by hypothesis testing. A question is posed and then an experiment is developed to test the hypothesis. Information is extracted regardless of whether the hypothesis or the null is confirmed by the experiment. Of course, funding proposals being what they are, most scientists would rather be able to confirm the hypothesis rather than the null, and so we generally do a lot of ground work in order to make sure the hypothesis is a good one before commiting time, money, and professional reputation to it. This requires the willingness to spend much time learning the field. The purpose of all of this is advance our knowledge of physical reality bit by bit.



Most working scientists spend their years of research developing ideas that support the dominant paradigm of their field. In Geology, for example, that paradigm is plate tectonics, in Chemistry, it is the quantum structure of the atom, and in Biology it is evolution by natural selection. It is a rare and interesting time when the current paradigm no longer supports everything that is being discovered, and a new paradigm is developed. I was fortunate to begin my studies in Geology during exciting times when the paradigm shift to plate tectonics was taking place. A fascinating popular account of this shift is The Road to Jaramillo: Critical Years of the Revolution in Earth Science, by William Glen.



There is a popular misconception about what happens to previously developed knowledge in the event of a paradigm shift. It does not go away or cease to be a description of reality. It is, rather, subsumed under the new paradigm. For example, Newton's laws did not cease to operate when the revolution in Physics precipitated Quantum Mechanics in the early years of the 20th centuries.






Now that we've got that background explicated, let's talk about what we know about the science of global climate change. That the earth's climate has changed over time and continues to do so is not in question among scientists. The position of the continents now--particularly the fact that the north pole is positioned in ocean almost surrounded by continental landmasses, does indicate that the earth can be expected to undergo bouts of glaciation and inter-glacial periods, as has been occuring since the beginning of the Pleistocene. Cyclical warming and cooling can be expected as long as the continents remain the their present configuration.


Interglacial periods like the one we are in now, which are characterized by sea-level rises and warming of the earth's average temperature. Toward the end of these periods, the average temperature rises sharply and is followed by renewed glacial advances. This creates sea-level drops and cooling of the earth's average temperature.


These major changes also cause changes in precipitation patterns expected in different regions across the earth's surface. For example, here in New Mexico, glacial advances trigger "pluvials" or periods of higher rainfall, whereas glacial retreats are marked by dryer, desert conditions. This is turn changes the latitude and altitude of the major life zones. Again, in New Mexico, geomorphological studies and paleo-pollen studies indicate that what is now low desert grassland was often covered by water (such as Glacia Lake Estancia in the present Estancia Basin, and Glacial Lake San Agustin on what is now the plains of San Agustin). The other life zones were shifted down in altitude accordingly, with the pinon-juniper woodlands being below 5,000 feet, the Ponderosa Pine zones being below 6,000 feet, and so forth, all the way to a lower treeline in montaine topography.


The point here is that the earth's climate has changed in the past and can be expected to change in the future. Human beings tend to see things through the lens of a very short lifespan in comparison to the age of the earth, and so we tend to think that the way things are is the way things always were and always will be. To think about climate change as a dynamic process on the earth, requires us to take a longer view, one in which our history is an almost miniscule segment in the extremely long timeline of earth history.



There is also ample evidence that human activity has created a faster warming of the earth than has been seen at the end of other interglacial periods. Oxygen isotope data from the poles indicates that temperatures have risen before the beginning of each of the past four glacial advances, however the rate of change for the current average temperature rise appears to be much steeper than for the ends of any other interglacial period since the beginning of the Pleistocene. However, there are different ideas about how much steeper because there is error in these reconstructions.


This is not the first time in earth's history that life has altered conditions. Think about the Oxygen revolution at the beginning of the Phanerozoic. The evolution of photosynthetic bacteria changed the atmosphere of the earth to one that is oxygen-rich. The beautiful Banded Iron Formations in the Mesabi Range are only one piece of evidence of this major change. This was a major change that allowed oxygen-using life forms to evolve and pushed the anaerobic archaebacteria into very limited oxygen poor environments, such as the deep sea vents. I could go on and on about the alterations that the various phyla of life have made to the earth's environment. Think about the invasion of the land by plants and then animals. Think about the evolution of flowering plants in the early Cenezoic.



None of the above is controversial among scientists. There is ample evidence from a multitude of scientific disciplines, including Physics, Astronomy, Paleontology, Biology, Geology, Chemistry, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. If so, why the controvery?


I think much can be explained by the ideological uses to which this information has been put. In the world of politics, some people have used this evidence to make specific predictions, and based on these predictions, they have demanded certain political solutions that affect our current ways of doing business. Others, opposed to these solutions have then rejected the evidence rather than attack the proposed solutions.


In effect, one ideological camp is proclaiming: The climate is changing (scientifically supported) and therefore we must change our economic system (science cannot determine this) in order to stop the climate change (dubious endeavor). One might wonder if the real ideological goal here is to use the idea of climate change in order to further an anti-industrial, anti-capitalist political agenda. Another camp seems to be proclaiming: The climate is changing (scientifically supported) and human beings have caused it (not scientifically supported--we can only say that human action has contributed to the speed and magnitude of the ongoing change) and therefore human beings are bad (science cannot determine moral judgement).



The response on the other side seems to be something like this: We don't like the idea that we might be forced to change our economic system or way of life (science cannot evalute this) so therefore we reject the idea that the climate is changing (science does not support the conclusion).



My point here is that the debate is not actually a scientific debate. It is one in which scientific conclusions are either being used or rejected based on an a priori ideological stand. Is the debate over? That depends on how one defines what the debate is. There has never been any debate among earth scientists that climatic change is ongoing in earth history. There is no doubt among us that the earth has been warming over the past 10,000 years, since the end of the Wurm/Wisconsinin glaciation. There is a great deal of evidence that interglacial periods end with increasing global temperature means that create weather patterns that then cause renewed glacial advances. The preponderance of the evidence indicates that this time, the warming is happened faster and is greater than prior ends of interglacial periods. These results can be tied to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And we can measure the effect of human activities that put a great deal of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In particular, we are burning fossil fuels at ever increasing rates which is releasing carbon dioxide that was previously sequestered in the regolith for the past 250 million years mas o menos. All of these things are within the realm of science to test and demonstrate.




What we cannot say for certain is what the consequences of this will be for human civilizations. Predictions can be made based on evidence from past interglacial periods and whole vast epochs when carbon dioxide was more abundant in the earth's atmosphere. But conditions are not exactly the same. As the remaining glacial ice from the Wurm/Wisconsinin melts, we can expect sea levels to rise. We can measure the volume of the ice and make some prediction of how much water would be added to our oceans. But we cannot say how fast this would happen and exactly what the human consequences would be. We can predict that weather will become more extreme, because the earth's oceans are essentially great heat engines that distribute that energy around the planet via weather. But we cannot say whether or not a specific weather event was caused by climate change. There is not one cause of weather--it is a stochastic system. Anyway, any event has a chain of causes, some immediate and some more ultimate. Finally, we have no idea how much impact small changes we can make in the earth's carbon budget would have on climate change.



This is where the debate actually begins. Science can tell us what has happened, what is happening and how, and it can make predictions about consequences within a range of error. (In this case there are many variables and that range of error is rather large). Science cannot determine what, if anything, human beings should do about it. Science cannot properly make moral judgements about what the right actions would be. That is up to us as whole human beings who must balance knowledge across all human realms of knowledge: the physical, the moral and the spiritual.




As a scientist, I can say what the evidence tells us. And as a scientist, every conclusion I make must be stated within a range of error. But it is as a human being that I want to hold out some hope about climate change. One hundred and ten thousand years ago, the earth entered the last glacial advance (called the Wurm in Europe and the Wisconsinin in North America). The species Homo sapiens sapiens was around then. And during that glacial period, the human species underwent great adaptations that, by about 40,000 years ago, made us fully modern. The way our brains work, and many of the traits that arise from that, including modern cultural behavior (such as group organization and art) have been stable in the human population these last 40,000 years. We have much evidence of certain genetic polymorphisms (differences among individuals) that have been stable since this time. Change is continuous over time on this earth, and as a species, we certainly have the range of genetic variation to be able to adapt to change. And something more. In the past 40,000 years we have developed something unique for life on earth. Culture. And during the past 10,000 years we have developed something even more adaptable: Civilization. We are able to record and use information from our ancestors in order to expand our knowledge beyond that of a lifetime and now can adapt even more rapidly. Some of us call this way of passing on knowledge memes.



Even if the seas are rising my bet is that Homo sap sap has the memes to deal with it. And I wonder what people are doing about it now, while the ideologues argue? I don't have to be a betting woman for that. Individuals are moving forward even while governments wrangle and Al Gore refuses to reduce his carbon footprint. But neither 'gods nor governments' are getting it done. It is good old human ingenuity.





And it is this that gives me hope. Lots of it.