This may be of interest to those thinking about social decision
making under conditions of complexity.
Cheers,
-
Ashwani
Vasishth [EMAIL PROTECTED] (818) 677-6137
http://www.csun.edu/~vasishth/
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Department of Urban Studies and Planning
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff Street, SH 208, Northridge, CA 91330-8259
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>Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:29:15 +0100
>From: david duthie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: [bioplan] Wedging Sustainability Into Public Consciousness
>- the art of the soluble
>
Dear BIOPLANNERS,
The climate change "problem" is so big it is easy to get overwhelmed
and end up paralyzed and doing next to nothing. This problem works
at all scales, from personal to global.
On the margins of the AAAS meeting that I posted on last week,
participants were given the chance to play the "Wedge Game", a
practical hands-on way to get to grips with "the problem.
Based on a Princeton University initiative, the game demonstrates how
a big problem can become tractable by being broken down into smaller
discrete "bites" - analogous to Sir Peter Medawar`s "art of the
soluble " metaphor for successful scientific research.
Now, thanks to BIOPLAN, you and your children can play the Wedge Game too.
Information about the game, plus links to download the two key
peer-reviewed papers by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala describing
the stabilization wedges are available at:
http://www.princeton.edu/~cmi/resources/stabwedge.htm
Many influential institutions have already picked up on this idea,
for example http://www.wri.org/climate/topic_content.cfm?cid=4229
Check it out and get it into schools via your kids.
Best wishes
--
David Duthie
UNEP-GEF Biosafety Unit
Geneva
Email: david.duthie @ unep.ch
*************************************************************
Science 23 February 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5815, pp. 1068-1069
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5815.1068
News of the Week: AAAS ANNUAL MEETING:
Wedging Sustainability Into Public Consciousness
Robert Coontz*
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA--In a darkened ballroom in the Hilton San
Francisco, 413 people tap numbers onto slate-gray keypads, each the
size of a thick paperback book. Around them, almost 600 others watch
as two screens at the front of the room reveal the results of their
manipulations: a selection of strategies for taking wedge-shaped
bites out of a graph of projected levels of atmospheric carbon over
the next 50 years. Their mission: to whittle future CO2 levels down
to a plateau in time to avert intolerable greenhouse warming.
The "Wedge Game," based on "stabilization wedges"--a concept
developed by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala of Princeton
University (Science, 13 August 2004, p. 968)--was part of a town
hall-like session for teachers and students at the AAAS Annual
Meeting, held here from 15 to 19 February. The game, designed to
convey the scale of the effort needed to stabilize carbon emissions
and the pros and cons of possible options, was just one of some 200
sessions, ranging from "Addiction and the Brain" to "Education,
Learning, and Public Diplomacy in Virtual Worlds." (For coverage of
selected sessions, visit www.sciencenow.org.) But one theme dominated
the meeting: "Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being."
AAAS President John Holdren of Harvard University and the Woods Hole
Research Center in Massachusetts set the stage with an opening
address in which he warned of the dangers of complacently expecting
technological fixes such as nuclear fusion to solve our problems.
"I'm a great believer in science and technology, but the notion that
science and technology will ride to the rescue is a pernicious one,"
Holdren told reporters at a morning briefing before the talk.
"Believing in technological miracles is usually a mistake." Instead,
he said, a huge effort on many fronts will be needed. Holdren urged
scientists to "tithe" 10% of their time to working on four key
challenges: global poverty, the competition for resources, the
"energy-economy-environment dilemma," and the threat from nuclear
weapons.
For its 4000 participants and 3000 visitors, including some 1000
reporters, the meeting offered a crash course in those challenges and
how scientists are tackling them, from "big picture" strategies to
technical nuts and bolts.
Researchers monitoring the state of the planet reported warning signs
from several quarters. Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State
University in Columbus said ice cores from the Quelccaya Ice Cap in
Peru--the largest body of ice in the world's tropics, 5670 meters
above sea level--show that the ice is now melting faster than
precipitation can replenish it. "All things being equal, those
glaciers should be growing," he said. Thompson, who has been studying
such glaciers for decades, estimates that the 5000-year-old glacier
could be gone within 5 years. Because temperatures at high altitudes
are more stable than those below, he says, melting tropical mountain
glaciers could be a "canary in the coal mine" for global climate
change. Their loss could devastate the millions of people who depend
on them for water.
Meanwhile, in the Pacific Ocean, a research cruise from Tahiti to
Alaska has shown that the upper 700 meters of the northeastern
Pacific have increased their acid content by about 5% within the past
15 years. The change matches what computer models predicted would
happen as more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves in
seawater, said Richard Feely, an oceanographer with the U. S.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle,
Washington. Largely as a result, Feely calculates that the zone
within which marine creatures can grow calcium carbonate shells is
growing shallower by 1 to 5 meters per year.
Even some of the supposed good news about climate change is looking
less rosy. "You tell farmers in high latitudes they're going to get
warming temperatures and longer growing seasons--end of story,
they're happy," plant ecologist David Wolfe of Cornell University
said at one session. But recent outdoor field studies with carbon
dioxide suggest that "yield benefits are about half what we thought
they were," he said. Also, hotter weather could damage milk
production and crop yields. New work suggests that high levels of
atmospheric CO2 emboldens weeds more than crops and could require
farmers to double the amount of herbicide they use.
Problems dominated news reports from the meeting, but more than three
times as many sessions focused on the quest for solutions:
economically competitive biofuels, better-managed water resources,
and more efficient fish farms, fisheries, and livestock grazing. The
tone ranged from matter-of-fact to unabashedly techno-optimistic. In
a fast-paced pep talk in the run-up to the Wedge Game, for example,
long-time alternative-energy advocate Amory Lovins of the Rocky
Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, hymned the virtues of
greener living through engineering. Ultralight low-drag cars,
better-insulated houses, and decentralized low-carbon "micropower"
energy sources, he predicted, would stabilize Earth's climate while
reaping huge profits for businesses that seize the opportunities they
present. "The low-hanging fruit is mushing up around our ankles,"
Lovins said.
Perhaps influenced by Lovins, the Wedge Gamers voted for a deep-green
mix of two parts increased efficiency and one part each solar
electricity, wind power, driving less, switching from petroleum to
natural gas, and "biostorage" (planting forests to absorb CO2). It's
far from current U.S. energy policy, but it reflects much of the
thinking on display at many other sessions at this meeting.
With reporting by David Grimm, Eli Kintisch, Greg Miller, and Erik Stokstad.
*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is distributed, without profit, for research and educational
purposes only. ***
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