Randy Olson, the marine biologist turned filmmaker and author who’s about as far from the label “nerd” as can be, had his Howard Beale “mad as hell” moment over climate miscommunication last week on his blog, The Benshi.

The piece, “The Nerd Loop: Why I’m Losing Interest in Communicating Climate Change,” is a long disquisition on why there’s too much thumb sucking and circular analysis and not enough experimentation among institutions concerned about public indifference to risks posed by human-driven global warming. He particularly criticizes scientific groups, universities, environmental groups and foundations and other sources of funding. Randy summarized his points in a short “index card” presentation (in lieu of a Powerpoint) and followup interview on Skype (above).

In our chat I admitted freely that I’ve stepped aboard the “nerd loop” on occasion on this blog, exploring humanity’s “blah, blah, blah, bang” habit when it comes to confronting certain kinds of risks. This goes for financial bubbles and tsunamis as well as long-term, long-lasting changes in the climate.

I agree with Olson, utterly, that there’s not enough experimentation, too much fear of failure and also far too much fear and misunderstanding at scientific institutions, from America’s universities to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about the obligation and responsibility to engage the public in a sustained way. As I’ve put it here and elsewhere many times, it’s particularly important as traditional science journalism becomes a shrinking wedge of a growing pie of communication portals.

I encourage you to watch the video and/or read Olson’s provocative essay. You won’t agree with all of what he says. I don’t, and in fact I think that research revealing the human habit of embracing or ignoring information based on predispositions and emotion, not the information, is vitally important to convey (and needs to be conveyed more creatively, too!).

But I hope you’ll recognize the merits in Olson’s argument. Here’s the summary of the “Nerd Loop” essay: Read more…

I mused with my wife early yesterday morning about how, more and more these days, humans speak with their fingers, silently tapping keys and hitting “send.” (We were side by side in bed with our MacBooks, checking weather and schedules and the like.)

So it felt refreshing to spend a couple of hours in the afternoon as the docent for the “Creative Splash” exhibit of kids’ poetry and drawings about nature in the physical offices of the local online community-run newspaper, Philipstown.info (made famous in the New Yorker not long ago).

It was very quiet, there, too, so I returned to writing for a bit, but reverted to speech with the arrival of Simon Draper, a champion of living small through his Habitat for Artists project (six-by-six-foot freestanding studios).

Simon Draper and Andy Revkin.

I’d touched on his work once before on Dot Earth in “Small (Car, House) is Beautiful.” Here’s a video of Simon at work (music by Dar Williams, who’s a Draper fan and neighbor): Read more…

The Bipartisan Policy Center, as its name implies, tries to define a path on issues like energy that can work in a period of polarized politics and shrinking budgets. It’s a tough challenge. That’s why the new center’s latest effort, “An Open Letter to the American People and America’s Leaders: A New Era for U.S. Energy Security,” focuses arguments for action on oil mainly on the basis of economic and geopolitical conflict, with the environment and climate in the background.

The authors appear to be from the Walter Lippman school of pragmatic politics. The letter was written by former senators from both parties and former top national security and environmental officials from past administrations. (You can read an interview with one of the authors, Gen. James L. Jones, retired, on the Green Blog.)

Here’s the background paper with more detail on the proposal, which is primarily aimed at developing more accountability within the government, and particularly the White House, on overseeing a sequence of achievable steps to progressively ratchet down the amount of oil per unit of gross domestic product — “oil intensity” is the shorthand. Read more…

A long list of engine designs have been pushed as replacements for the 19th-century pistons-and-sparks systems still under the hood of almost every motor vehicle on roadways today. It’s a sure bet that despite the advent of pricey all-electric vehicles, internal combustion engines will still dominate for decades given the power density in liquid fuels. Mazdas still hum here and there but no new design has truly gone mainstream — yet.

One alternative that’s been under development at Michigan State University for years is picking up momentum, in large part because of $2.5 million in seed money as part of the stimulus spending from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Energy, in 2009. Last month the team at the university, led by associate professor of mechanical engineering Norbert Mueller, presented a bench-scale prototype to the Energy Department. Mueller’s group plans to build a prototype within a year with sufficient power (25 kilowatts, or 33 horsepower) to charge the batteries in a hybrid. It’s hard to find a downside, for the moment, in coverage in technical publications and blogs. Here’s Mueller explaining the design in a video from the university: Read more…

After reading about Japan’s aging, and largely forgotten, stone tablets warning of tsunami risk, a Dot Earth reader, “Mesa” from Telluride, Colo., posed an important question about the human capacity to act sensibly when facing future risks (some abbreviation expanded):

So, if people don’t adjust behaviors for events that actually happened 100 years ago and may repeat, what’s the argument for them adjusting behaviors for things that might happen 100 years in the future? That is, it seems that this feature of human psychology dooms things like global CO2 emissions protocols. If so, better to focus on the medium term technological solutions as opposed to long range political structures.

A good question, indeed. This relates to the recent piece I did examining whether there are critical gaps in humans’ cognitive toolkit, or is it O.K. for us to keep getting some kinds of risks wrong even as the human growth spurt crests in coming decades. (The question extends well beyond climate policy; as I did the other day, I encourage you to listen to a great recent discussion of financial bubbles and busts on Leonard Lopate’s radio show.)

Several other comments deserve extra attention (I’ve added the links within them for context) and are excerpted here:

Chris Goldfinger, the Oregon State University scientist whose research has helped reveal the frequency and power of earthquakes along the Cascadia fault off the Pacific Northwest: Read more…

It’s not American Idol, by any means, but I was invited to sit on a panel helping a Washington, D.C., audience weigh the attributes and faults of seven finalists in a nationwide search for talented innovators pursuing energy breakthroughs. The result is “Planet Forward: Energy Innovation,” a one-hour special being shown on many PBS stations around the country tonight at 9:30. Here’s a snippet:

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Planet Forward, which is also a monthly segment on the Nightly Business Report, is a co-production of the Center for Innovative Media at The George Washington University and Maryland Public Television in association with Nebraska Educational Telecommunications. The host is my friend and fellow straddler of journalism and academia, Frank Sesno, who directs the university’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

These were the finalists, chosen through online voting: Read more…

Vincent Yu/Associated Press A centuries-old tablet warned of tsunamis in the town of Aneyoshi, Iwate Prefecture, in northern Japan. (Click for larger view.)

I encourage you to read “Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors,” a haunting and fascinating Associated Press story by Jay Alabaster describing centuries-old stone tablets warning of coastal tsunami risk that dot the Japanese coast ravaged by the great earthquake and resulting waves on March 11th.

This is an example of how “disaster memory,” conveyed from generation to generation, can — at least for a time — limit losses from inevitable, but rare, calamities. The inscription inscribed on one stone (pictured at right) was quoted in the article:

High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants…. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.

In some parts of the world, tsunami warnings have been passed down through oral traditions. That is the case on Simeulue Island in Indonesia, which was struck by the extraordinary Indian Ocean tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004. Earthquake analysts concluded that longstanding warnings about the importance of running to high ground at the first shudder of an earthquake, dating from the 19th century, played a substantial role in limiting losses to 7 deaths out of 80,000 residents.

In Japan, there was evidence of great tsunamis on portions of the coast, but the most recent was in 1933. One Japanese expert in the wire story, interestingly enough, noted how such messages lose their influence over time:

Earlier generations also left warnings in place names, calling one town “Octopus Grounds” for the sea life washed up by tsunamis and naming temples after the powerful waves, said Fumihiko Imamura, a professor in disaster planning at Tohoku University in Sendai, a tsunami-hit city.

“It takes about three generations for people to forget. Those that experience the disaster themselves pass it to their children and their grandchildren, but then the memory fades,” he said.

Given the number of other crowded spots around the world, from the Pacific Northwest to the Caribbean to other parts of Indonesia, sit atop long-slumbering faults known to generate big tsunamis, hopefully the message from northeastern Japan will not fade.

Addendum: California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, has published On Shaky Ground, a detailed and sweeping report pointing to longstanding lapses by the state agency responsible for keeping schools safe in earthquakes.

Could this be Professor Imamura’s “three generations” rule in action?

The Field Act, the law that the investigative series asserts is being laxly enforced, was written after the Long Beach earthquake of 1933 wrecked 70 schools around Los Angeles (after school hours), prompting a mob to try to lynch the city’s school building inspector.

That’s just about three generations ago.

The really bad news here is that California is the best case, because the state experiences just enough moderate earthquake activity to keep people attuned to the risk. Further up the coast, and in places like Salt Lake City, Utah, there is substantial risk, but little recent history of calamity — and thus no disaster memory.

Here’s a quick swing north. The National Snow and Ice Data Center has inaugurated a useful new Web feature, Icelights, that offers the public a two-way portal for addressing questions about the behavior of sea ice and ice sheets and their relationship to the world far from the poles. The latest feature, “What is the connection between Arctic sea ice and U.S. weather?,” explores the hypothesis that open Arctic waters in fall or winter could influence storm patterns and snowfall outside of the region.

The answer? Unknown, so far. Here’s the most relevant line:

[W]hile sea ice affects the atmosphere, the atmosphere also affects sea ice. Warmer air temperatures help prevent ocean water from freezing over in the first place, and winds can push the ice together, keeping ice extent lower. “It’s a highly coupled system,” said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze, “Cause and effect are difficult to unravel.”

There’s also new analysis by a team from the Naval Postgraduate school, led by Wieslaw Maslowski, pointing to a complete late-summer retreat of Arctic Ocean sea ice by the end of this decade and possibly 2016. This is an initial finding reported by Maslowski at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting and reported by Richard Black of the BBC, and there are plenty of ice analysts who doubt this conclusion and see more evidence of an open-water Arctic Ocean toward mid-century. The new analysis hinged on refined simulations and better incorporation of data on the thickness of ice. But the challenge, as noted in Black’s piece, is that thin ice — which both melts and reforms quickly — makes the behavior of the system harder to predict. The science of predicting sea ice behavior in a warming world is still in early stages of understanding, and a good place to keep track of the learning curve is through the Sea Ice Outlook project, which I’ve covered periodically.

I was lucky enough to observe the complicated nature of Arctic Ocean sea ice by camping on it for three days with a research team eight years ago this month:

Another question is whether high latitude snowfall shapes winter weather farther south. I received an e-mail yesterday from Judah Cohen, a commercial weather and climate analyst who made a prediction in late December for a particularly cold pattern of North American temperatures through the remainder of the winter — based on his hypothesized link between autumn snow cover in Siberia and winter conditions on this continent. Below are maps of his prediction, which was published by the National Science Foundation in December, and the actual conditions, followed by Cohen’s description of the results. Click here to see the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast for the same period.

Where Siberian snow cover and therefore the model has its best skill, the Eastern U.S., it correctly predicted cold, with the coldest temperatures extending from the Northern Plains through the Northeast. The model did incorrectly predict warm for the Southwestern U.S. The relatively warmest temperatures in the country were observed in the Southwest, though they were not warm compared with climatology. And certainly the AER forecast was better than any other forecast that I am aware of; no other forecast predicted a cold winter in the Eastern U.S., including that from the [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration].

The Energy Information Administration has released “World Shale Gas Resources,” an important commissioned report providing an assessment of how much natural gas is locked in shale deposits in 14 regions around the world. (Here’s its overview of shale gas in the United States.) Here’s a map of the surveyed regions:

The report includes some pretty remarkable numbers from countries that currently have limited domestic gas options, including China and quite a few western European nations that have been held somewhat hostage by Russia. Its publication comes in sync with a disturbing article in The Times noting how much crop production, including tropical staples such as cassava, is being diverted to making biofuels.

I sent the following query to a batch of people immersed in assessing and/or developing the world’s energy menu but it’s a query for you, as well, of course (I’ve tweaked it to remove some e-mail shorthand): Read more…

Despite the public focus on radiation risks, cost has long been the main obstacle to a substantial expansion of nuclear power generation, and will be even more as a result of Japan’s still-unfolding effort to secure the wave-ravaged Fukushima Daiichi complex.

Still, it’s worth exploring more fundamental questions about such complicated, consequential systems in an interconnected world where a valued trait, going forward, appears to be resilience. It may be fine to argue, as George Monbiot and others have done with reams of data, that nuclear reactors, even after Fukushima, are vastly safer than coal in terms of lives lost. But is nuclear power simply too brittle?

It doesn’t look that way in this neat, clean — almost cheery — animated diagram on a Nuclear Regulatory Commission educational Web page: Read more…