Living on the Real World

George Leopold contributed this post:

Among the eight members of NASA’s 2013 Astronaut Candidate Class announced this week is Christina M. Hammock, currently station chief at NOAA’s American Samoa Observatory.

This year’s astronaut class (four women, four men) is dominated by aviators and test pilots. But Hammock’s class also includes Jessica Meir, an assistant professor of anesthesia at the Harvard University Medical School.

Hammock, 34, hails from North Carolina and holds undergraduate (electrical engineering and physics) and graduate degrees (electrical engineering) from North Carolina State University. She previously worked as an electrical engineer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The best-known astronaut with ties to NOAA is, of course, current acting administrator Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space. What firsts will Hammock achieve in exploring the solar system?

Christina Hammock 

The next…

Kathy Sullivan

Before becoming NOAA’s station chief in American Samoa last August, Hammock worked for Raytheon Polar Services in Greenland, Alaska and Antarctica. She also spent two years at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.

According to Hammock’s LinkedIn page, the future astronaut’s plan – you’re not an astronaut until you actually fly in space — has been to combine her experience in space science instrument engineering in decidedly remote field research locations “with the goal of applying these skills to contribute to the Human Space Flight Program.”

It looks like she’ll get her chance.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden noted in announcing the 2013 astronaut class that they will undergo training to prepare for missions in low-earth orbit, an asteroid and eventually Mars.

Could a member of the astronaut class of 2013 be one of the first humans to set foot on Mars? They will almost certainly be among the first to fly on commercially developed spacecraft.

Being selected to the American astronaut corps is incredibly difficult. Hammock was one of 6,300 applicants, the second largest pool of applicants ever received, Bolden noted. A recent alumni of the American Meteorological Society’s Summer Policy Colloquium, a PhD systems engineer, told me she has applied to NASA several times and has never gotten past the “Thanks for your interest in the Astronaut Corps” phase.

So, Godspeed to Christina Hammock and the other members of this year’s astronaut class. They enter an American space program at a crossroads, seeking to regain its footing while working with an emerging group of space entrepreneurs to develop the next generation of spacecraft and rockets needed to explore the solar system.

-George Leopold

Russ Schumacher is an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University where he teaches and does research in mesoscale meteorology. His academic focus is on extreme precipitation events and flooding. But his interest in such extremes doesn’t end there. He wants to use that knowledge to make the world a safer place. Towards that goal he’s convened a group of graduate students “undertaking research on some aspect of extreme precipitation, flooding, floodplain management, engineering, societal and behavioral aspects of precipitation or floods, etc., with an interest in multidisciplinary approaches and perspectives” to participate in a “Studies of Precipitation, flooding, and Rainfall Extremes Across Disciplines (SPREAD) workshop.”[1]

The workshop’s interesting features are not limited to the multidisciplinary participants or the acronym. The week includes an in-depth look at case studies, with a special focus on the Big Thompson Canyon flood of  1976. The group will make a field trip to the site and hear perspectives from several speakers, including Eve Gruntfest, a social scientist who made a career of studying that flood and who is currently working with the NSF Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences. Ms. Gruntfest also was a leader in the WAS*IS program which ran for several years and helped tap into Mr. Schumacher’s interest in and heart for interdisciplinary work. [Hundreds of other WAS*IS participants were similarly inspired.] During the week, the group will teleconference with Mr. Schumacher’s former Valparaiso instructor and mentor Professor John Knox, now at the University of Georgia, and with Marshall Shepherd, another professor at UGA and this year’s AMS President.

Perhaps most importantly, the SPREAD group will use their time together to develop and design multidisciplinary research projects. They’re scheduled to reconvene in one year to report findings and to plan continuing work.

Expect to hear much more from this promising researcher and the early-career community he’s building over the coming years, as their understanding or extreme weather and its social impacts deepens, and as they SPREAD (forgive me!) the word.

The workshop runs16-21 June 2013 in Fort Collins, Colorado. You can find more complete information here.

As a line of thunderstorms approaches the DC region, the headlines and graphics on the Washington Post website focus on the oncoming weather, and report that the Office of Personnel Management has allowed federal employees in the area to take unscheduled leave or work from home. Ten or twenty years ago, such attention to the weather, matched by institutional action, was unheard of.

Back in that day, this was true even for winter storms, which have an inherently longer forecast horizon. With each new administration, incoming OPM directors would boast that unlike their predecessors, they would be stingy with leave for federal employees, and in any case wouldn’t take such actions simply based on an uncertain forecast. They’d hold off until storm conditions actually prevailed across the area.

Today, government officials at every level have learned not to fall into that trap. Two trends have dictated the change. The first is that Washington, DC, like other major cities, is zero-margin. Traffic is bad and an aging Metro infrastructure has proven fragile even under fair skies. Both rapidly deteriorate in even the slightest adverse weather. Electrical power is frequently an early casualty in storms. The power outages mark the progress of every event; it doesn’t take much to cut off power to tens of thousands of homes. There’s little margin at the household level either. In most families, both parents work, leaving no one instantly available to take over daytime responsibility for the children from the schools if and when they close.

The second trend is that weather forecasts have improved. We now reliably see storms days in advance, even in the summertime. There’s been talk of this line of thunderstorms and its possible implications for the East coast for at least 48 hours.

The real world is not a controlled experiment. We aren’t yet fully able to estimate how many lives are being saved as a result of today’s forecasts and warnings, the more aggressive response by emergency managers across the Midwest and East, and actions by the general public. We won’t be able to give a figure on any corresponding reduction in property loss or business disruption from this individual storm. But here’s a comparison for you. In the United States, each of us pays about a penny a day for our government weather services. We pay a comparable additional amount for private-sector weather services… to the broadcast meteorologists on radio and television and the providers of weather information on our smartphones, etc. Over a year that amounts to 3-7$ a person. The savings from improved forecasts and response to today’s weather alone may well be comparable to that figure. But that’s just today. In recent weeks we received comparable benefits from the tornado watches and warnings; from the notice of this spring season’s flooding across the nation’s midsection; from the monitoring and forecasts of Tropical Storm Andrea; from weather support to firefighters in Colorado. And more.

What a bargain.

Weather-ready nation? Maybe not yet, but getting there.

This guest post comes from Dr. Harold Brooks, a Senior Scientist in the Forecast Research and Development Division at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, and an AMS Fellow. A thoughtful and useful contribution to the national discussion prompted by the most recent Moore tornado. The views expressed by Dr. Brooks are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of NSSL or NOAA or the US Government.

At the heart of it, this single sentence summarizes most of tornado safety advice. Although there are special situations that require additional information, if someone in the path of a tornado follows this advice, their chances of survival dramatically increase. For the most part, the partnership between the National Weather Service, the media, and emergency management personnel emphasizes this same message. The words may differ (lowest floor, interior room, bathroom or closet), but the core idea remains the same. Obviously, having a purpose-built shelter is ideal, but not everyone has one.

Occasionally, someone strays from this basic messaging, potentially causing problems. Many in the tornado safety community are concerned about an inappropriate message that seems to have become very popular recently, but that differs significantly from the basic safety idea. Some broadcast meteorologists have offered the advice that “if you don’t get underground, you won’t survive.” Sometimes, it’s couched in terms of “this tornado is so severe, the usual advice doesn’t work” or “you can’t survive an EF5 above ground.” The message suggests that even in-residence shelters built to the design specifications of the Texas Tech wind engineering groups and the FEMA standards won’t survive.

This advice is wrong and providing it is irresponsible at best, and dangerous at worst. As a factual statement, claiming that EF5 tornadoes can’t be survived above ground is wrong. After the 3 May 1999 tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, survey work indicated that 1% of people who were in houses that were rated F4 or F5 were killed, as reported by Hammer and Schmidlin. They don’t differentiate between the F4 and F5 in the paper, but it is exceedingly unlikely that all of the people in F5 homes died. In the 20 May 2013 tornado, the Briarwood Elementary School was rated EF5 and there were no fatalities there. 1% may seem like a very small death rate, but it is orders of magnitude larger than the ordinary probability of dying in day to day activity. Violent tornadoes are very dangerous, but they do not bring certain death.

Of greater importance is the safety message and response it brings. Even if one believes that EF5 damage guarantees death, only a small part of the damage associated with tornadoes with peak damage of EF5 actually is EF5. As a result, even the pessimist would recognize that most people need to heed advice appropriate for their situations.

Consider the person who has no underground option readily at hand. What should they do? Flee the path? This potentially puts large numbers of people into vehicles ahead of the tornado. Past experience, such as the 1979 Wichita Falls tornado, teaches us that this is potentially catastrophic. Traffic jams occurred near the path on 20 May 2013 and it is exceptionally fortunate that deaths did not occur in vehicles in that tornado.

What if fleeing isn’t an option? There is a report of a young woman who had recently moved into a rent house and was unaware of whether any neighbors had a shelter. When she heard local television meteorologists say that she wouldn’t survive if she couldn’t get underground, she decided to run out of the path of the tornado. Fortunately, she called her mother who told her that this was a foolish thing to do and go back into the house and get into the closet where she rode out the tornado as it destroyed her house. She survived.

In the aftermath of the May 1999 tornado in Moore, we discovered that no school aged children had been killed in the tornado, and only one parent of a Moore Public School student was killed at home, out of the 36 fatalities. In an effort to understand why, I enlisted the help of an assistant principal and a teacher at two of the junior high schools in the Moore Public Schools that had had approximately half of their housing stock damaged or destroyed. We did some simple surveys of the 8^th graders at their schools and talked to a large numbers of the students to find out what they knew about tornado safety and what they had done that evening.  The overwhelming majority understood the basic rules as stated in the first sentence of this post and had taken appropriate action. They had taken the safety lessons they had learned at school and taken them home to protect their families.

Two stories stood out, however. There were two students who were in their homes, alone. The tornado came through the area in the early evening and their parents were not home at the time of the tornado. Both students were watching coverage of the tornado and heard the local television meteorologist say that if they didn’t get below ground, they would die. They had no underground shelter at the house and both had been told by their parents that they were not to leave the house until the parents got home. In both cases, the students faced a dilemma and both came to the same conclusion. They would obey their parents, stay in the house, and decided they would die in the tornado. They watched the coverage until the power went out. In one case, major damage occurred on the same block of houses.

Because of what they were told, they did absolutely nothing to protect themselves.

The message they were told that evening led to a potentially deadly lack of action.

We should be giving people the message that they should do what they can to protect themselves. Get as low as you can and put as many walls between you and the tornado as possible. In every violent tornado, stories come up along the lines of “how did anyone survive this?” The message from this is that it is possible to survive, but your chances are much better if you follow simple safety advice.

Some people have heard the message I am bringing and have misinterpreted it to mean that people shouldn’t get underground if that option is available to them. This is a grotesque reading of my words. Get low. If people don’t understand that “below ground” is lower than “above ground”, it’s not clear that there is a message we can provide them that they will understand.

We don’t know if the misguided advice that you won’t survive a tornado if you’re not underground has actually led to someone dying, but we do know that it has led to people making horribly bad decisions. Instead, we need to emphasize proper safety information to maximize the chances of survival.

Get as low as you can and put as many walls between you and the tornado as possible.

—Harold Brooks

The news continues from Moore, Oklahoma, as the community begins an all-too-familiar recovery process: remembering the beloved who died, and saying farewell; healing from injury, and caring for those who need to mend;  sifting through the rubble for what can be salvaged; clearing away mountains of debris, and planning the rebuilding; returning to a job or looking for new work. The people of Moore have been through this four times over just two decades. They know better than most that the road ahead is difficult and long.

In the background, emerging in the news stories, are hints of a growing trend that menaces America as much or more than anything we’ve seen so far in the natural disasters of the past few years.

Several candidate possibilities might come to your mind.

For example, some news reports reminded us that the Moore tornado wasn’t necessarily a worst-case scenario. They called to our recollection the Tri-State Tornado of Wednesday, March 18, 1925, which killed almost 700 people over its 200 mile track. They refer to its predecessor, a June 8, 1805 event that went through the same region and left an unbroken swath of downed trees two miles wide extending hundreds of miles from Missouri through southern Illinois to Indiana. Imagine a similar event occurring today, and shift its location a bit north, toward Chicago. That would be occasioning a different level of national discussion. Each and every day, we are one day closer to that future event.

Ominous…but this is not our biggest challenge.

Some have noted that population growth and urban sprawl are increasing our exposure, so that on that basis alone we can expect greater loss of property and life in future years.

Though we should keep this growing vulnerability in mind, it has to be seen in a larger context. Our population growth and urban sprawl are bigger issues, conveying opportunity as well as risk. They deserve attention on their own, broader merits.

Needn’t be our greatest concern.

Some have argued the need for more safe rooms in more homes, and more safe rooms in more public buildings. To fail to move in this direction is to condemn us to growing losses in the future. The Natural Hazard Mitigation Association website provides a good starting point for more information here. The challenge is not just safe rooms in new home construction… it’s the extension of the concept to large spaces such as schools, etc. The engineering challenge and the costs of scaling up wind-resistant structures grow quickly with the size of those structures. And that’s putting aside the problem of retrofits to existing structures, which is far more costly still. Where’s the funding to come from?

Vexing, but this isn’t our biggest challenge.

Others see a climate change footprint, although informal on-line discussion among experts suggests this topic should be explored with the caution befitting its complexity. Even the Union of Concerned Scientists has called for restraint here.

So this wouldn’t seem to be our biggest challenge either.

Here’s my candidate for the most troubling piece of what lies ahead. The polarization of our society has begun to fray our fundamental social fabric… our commitment to pull together and come alongside each other at a national level when disaster strikes. We saw this back in the New Orleans Katrina event. The country recoiled at the size of the $100B recovery bill. We saw this in Hurricane Sandy last fall, when Governor Christie was flayed by his party for thanking a Democratic president for help, and again when Congress initially balked at passage of a $50B supplemental for recovery of the area, and then more recently as the flow of that promised support to the region has proved slow. Most recently we’ve seen it in the response to the Moore tornado, with Senator Coburn arguing against Oklahoma accepting national aid, and with some Democratic legislators seeing this as an opportunity for Sandy payback.

The Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne recently captured some of this, writing that Oklahoma needs help, not ideology, after Moore tornado. Here are a couple of snippets:

“except for one moment in our past, there has never been anything un-conservative or controversial about helping the victims of disasters. In fact, federal disaster relief is as old as our republic, as Brian Balogh, a University of Virginia historian, notes in his seminal book, “A Government Out of Sight.”

The practice goes back to the 1780s, Balogh wrote, and “by the mid-1820s, general relief bills were directed at entire classes of victims.” The sensible justification “was the victims’ inability to foresee or predict these sudden events, and the recipients’ innocence of any responsibility for them.”

It was only between 1840 and 1860 that disaster relief from Washington became contentious as a particularly extreme brand of states’ rights politics reared its head. Southerners, Balogh notes, began fearing that “extending federal power” in this way “might establish a precedent for national intervention in the slavery question.””

 [Dionne made extensive references to Congressman Cole(R-OK), who represents Moore]

“Cole, in a very different way, is also consistent when it comes to disaster relief. He was one of just 49 House Republicans who voted in January for a $50 billion Hurricane Sandy aid package; 179 voted no. “There’s clearly a federal responsibility to act in this case,” Cole said in a speech on the House floor. “We’ve always acted after disasters.”

And then he offered this piece of prophecy:

“It’s pretty unusual in my state to go through a year without a tornado disaster, and it’s pretty unusual to go through a year without a drought disaster. Each time, we’ve come and asked for help from the federal government; each time, we received that help. Undoubtedly, we’ll be doing that again in the near future. It would be hypocritical, in my view, to fail to do for people in the affected region what I and, I know, many others have routinely asked for our own regions.”

Dionne closes with this: “Empathy, honesty and common sense: We could use more of all three. May the people of Oklahoma get the help they need. Rigid ideology is no substitute for generosity of spirit.”

Well said!

Just two comments to add. First, the empathy, honesty, and common sense have to be pre-existing. They can’t be set aside during extended periods of partisanship and bickering, and worse… and then somehow magically summoned at a moment’s notice. It doesn’t work that way. Catastrophe accentuates pre-existing states and mindsets. If we’re in community, respect and value each other, and acknowledge our interdependence when things are going well… if we genuinely love one another… then catastrophe will only strengthen our resolve and commitment. If one the other hand, all we’ve known is wrangling and self-centered argument and action, then any empathy in time of crisis looks inadequate, limp, false.

Second, we’ll do better as a nation over the long haul when we all learn from community-level experience anywhere it occurs. The Moore experience shouldn’t sound a cautionary note in Moore alone, or just across Oklahoma. It should be triggering town meetings and leadership action at the community level in every city across America… an examination of risk, an inventory of community options for coping, and an identification of next steps.

The National Weather Service is struggling to get something like this underway with its Weather-Ready-Nation initiative. Programs such as these should be incubated and encouraged.

An analog to the National Transportation Safety Board for natural hazards could also foster such action.

Speaking of teachable, let’s start with those teachers. Every news vignette reminds us that our K-12 teachers are instructors, but far more. When the situation demands, they’re true first responders. Heroes.

But not just heroes. They didn’t just risk life and limb trying futilely to protect the children. They did that while actually doing the right things to protect those kids. They took action that worked. They were brave and brilliant. In this case, all those folks we have seen picking over the school rubble the past few nights were in actual fact only the second responders.

Then there’s the whole discussion about how to shelter-in-place in the face of such a terrifying threat….options ranging from below-ground shelters to safe rooms. The fresh piece to the discussion this time around is the shift in focus from individual homes to schools (hardly a surprise), hospitals, and other larger public spaces and what can be done in those contexts. Expect this to be a topic for reflection and debate for a long time, and not just in Tornado Alley.

There’s also a budding conversation where these topics intersect with social- and climate change. Andy Revkin has provided an interesting discussion thread over the past two days. You might start your reading here.

And finally, we have to note that the weather enterprise… the National Weather Service and its private sector partners, the private weather services and the broadcast meteorologists… did a splendid job bringing general public across a broad swath of the central United States through progressively heightened states of severe-weather alert over a period of several days. We saw and heard some reference after the fact to “fifteen minutes of warning,” but that was merely the climactic stage of the preparedness process which had built for almost a week. If you’re of a certain age (and you don’t have to go too far back), you can remember when tornado warnings were triggered by volunteer spotters (not today’s technology), started on average 3 minutes after tornado touchdown, and had a false-alarm rate of 70%.

The trend is positive. Today weather-ready. Tomorrow, weather-readier.

What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A stunned town and a distraught nation cry out in anguish this morning. Yet another tornado has hit Moore, a suburban community on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.  This is the third strike in recent years, and easily the most deadly. The May 3, 1999 tornado, an EF5 (wind speeds exceeding 200 mph), destroyed 8000 homes and took 36 lives, inflicting property losses exceeding $1B. On May 7, 2003, an F3 tornado passed through town, causing injuries and damage but no fatalities.

Yesterday’s event looks to dwarf those tragedies. Fifty people, including many children, have already been reported dead. We’re told to expect another forty, if not more. Hundreds if not thousands of homes have been damaged or destroyed. Over coming days, the picture will clarify. We’ll know just how many died. We’ll understand why and how the two schools at the center of the story were damaged, and why casualties at the one school greatly exceeded those at the other. Post-event assessments of the tornado’s wind speeds and the property loss estimates will converge and stabilize. We’ll have thoughts about the quality of the forecasts and the content and wording of the warnings.

Eventually there’ll be plenty of time to ponder all that, maybe even blog about it. First, though, before the analysis of the weather and the engineering, before the second-guessing, before the effort to build resilience in Moore and elsewhere, there ought to be time to grieve and to mourn… and to seek some measure of comfort. But when it comes to comfort, we find that mere words don’t cut it. We’re told touch helps… and it does… but touch falls short. Being present, empathizing, sharing pain… necessary, but in no way sufficient. The pain and loss remain.

So the question Where can comfort be found? has challenged humankind throughout history.

Turns out that in 1563, a young man (in only his late twenties), after considerable prayer and reflection, decided he’d been given the answer. His name? Zacharias Ursinus (nee Baer). He’d been commissioned by Elector Frederick III, sovereign of the Electoral Palatinate from 1559 to 1576, to develop a Protestant confessional document, known today as the Heidelberg Catechism. He was so struck by what he found, he saw it as so foundational to all of life, that he formulated the notion as Question and Answer 1, an encapsulation or summary of the catechism as a whole:

Q1. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A1. That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

Perhaps most days, you and I might be inclined to duly note this and move on. But it could be that today, associating all those Moore school kids with our own children and grandchildren, that you and I might take some time for reflection, or want to dig a bit deeper into the fuller version to the answer of question 1 (only an excerpt is provided here.) And Ursinus’ answer, that is, the full answer, no different from the master’s thesis or Ph.D. of today, is thoroughly footnoted with Biblical references. We might even be curious about the answer to his Heidelberg Catechism Question 2:

Q2. What must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort?

Today… maybe most days… our greatest need is for comfort.

another guest post from George Leopold…

It’s not the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, but the drought gripping the American Great Plains since at least 2011 has reportedly lowered water levels in southern sections of the High Plains Aquifer by many feet.

In parts of Texas and western Kansas, the New York Times reports that the great underwater reservoir, also known as the Ogallala Aquifer, no longer supports farmland irrigation, at least as it is currently practiced. Average aquifer levels in some parts of Kansas have dropped 4.25 feet since 2011, according to state statistics cited by the Times.

An incredulous Kansas agriculture official told the newspaper that some wells that were measured multiple times — out of sheer disbelief — showed a 30-foot decline.

The drought’s impact on the region has been exacerbated by wasteful, outdated agricultural practices spawned by a Cadillac Desert approach to resource management. The consequences have been magnified by the new reality of climate change.

Relearning the hard lessons of the Dust Bowl.

 Aquifers are drained in decades. The time needed to recharge them is measured on a geologic time scale.

All this serves to underscore how we must change the way we use water, farm the land and why we must move away from monoculture. How many times have we seen farmers in the middle of a hot summer day irrigating endless acres of corn – among the thirstiest of crops – with a pivot sprayer? Much of the water being pulled from aquifers for irrigation is lost to evaporation. Once of the simplest alternatives is to irrigate at night.

As any gardener knows, water your plants or your vegetable patch in the evening.

Many vineyards in dry states like California (where, as a Bay Area friend says, “If it weren’t for the fog, this would be Arizona….”) have adopted “drip irrigation” techniques. The relatively inexpensive technique conserves water and irrigates roots, not foliage.

Underground irrigation is slowly catching on among some conservation-minded farmers in the nation’s breadbasket. It’s expensive, but may eventually become an unavoidable cost of doing business as aquifer and well levels continue to decline. Those costs will of course be passed along to consumers in the form of high food prices.

Only then, perhaps, will the rest of us appreciate that what is happening in the “fly-over” states affects us all.

View a slideshow highlighting the consequences of the High Plains drought and poor irrigation practices here.

- George Leopold

Last month, the White House issued an important statement on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. The statement builds on February remarks by the President:

“We’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering, and math – the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”

A grand vision… and the focus on preparing a 21^st century workforce is surely appropriate. If anything, the goal understates the importance of STEM education to the American people and the world.  STEM education is the Nation’s incubator for innovation in future years. STEM education doesn’t just prepare Americans for the jobs of the future. It also transforms the nature of those jobs. Innovation of the past century has changed America from a manufacturing society to an information society, and it’s now changing America once more. Thanks to STEM, we’re moving toward a more-balanced, productive society. Manufacturing, information, and services will not only be more integrated but also contribute more to the Nation’s safety, health, prosperity, and national security. STEM education is one reason America’s 4% of the world population can realistically aspire to remaining the indispensable Nation for the 21^st century, and why American ideals of freedom and democracy can endure.

The White House statement goes on to give some of the particulars:

President Obama strongly believes that the United States must equip many more students to excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). That’s why the President’s 2014 Budget invests $3.1 billion in programs across the Federal government on STEM education, an increase of 6.7 percent over 2012 funding levels (see Table). The 2014 Budget includes critical investments in a number of areas that will benefit aspiring students:

 Recruiting, preparing and supporting excellent STEM teachers, with $80 million to support the President’s goal of preparing 100,000 excellent STEM teachers and $35 million to launch a pilot STEM Master Teacher Corps.

 Supporting more STEM-focused high schools and districts, with an investment of $150 million to create new STEM Innovation Networks to better connect school districts with local, regional, and national resources. In addition, the Department of Education (ED) will invest $300 million to support re-design of high schools to encourage partnerships with colleges, employers, or community partners, focusing on high-demand employment sectors such as STEM fields.

 Improving undergraduate STEM education, with the National Science Foundation (NSF) launching a $123 million new program to improve retention of undergraduates in STEM fields and improve undergraduate teaching and learning in STEM subjects to meet the President’s goal of preparing 1 million more STEM graduates over the next decade.

 Investing in breakthrough research on STEM teaching and learning, with approximately $65 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education (ARPA-ED), which would allow the Department of Education to support high-risk, high-return research on next-generation learning technologies, including for STEM education.

So far so good. The new programs proposed for Department of Education, NSF, and DoD/DARPA will surely contribute to strong improvements in STEM education.

But the next piece of the proposal is more problematic. It turns out that the administration plans to accomplish this in part by cannibalizing 114 of the 226 STEM programs threaded through federal agencies. The administration cites $180M savings which will be used in part to fund the new thrusts. In support of this step, the administration speaks to reduced fragmentation, easier coordination, and more rigorous evaluation.

All laudable goals. But there’s analogy here to reducing the biodiversity of an ecosystem, with the same negative results. Reducing biodiversity diminishes ecosystem function and resiliency and makes the ecosystem more vulnerable to die-off and collapse. In the same way, reducing the diversity of STEM programs targeted to the particular specialties of the agencies… particle physics, medicine, the geosciences, forestry, agriculture, fisheries, energy, and much more… reduces the ability of those agencies to inspire young people’s interest in and capacity for their specialized work. Long-standing staples such as NOAA’s Teacher-at-Sea Program (to name one example of dozens) are jeopardized.

The reality is that these programs aren’t so much fragmented as tailored. Our entire educational system is locally-, not federally-based, precisely to foster such diversity and to put the control in the hands of those most motivated to see it function well… the parents of the children involved.

To sum up… the choice between either integrated or fragmented is a false one. Either approach, carried out in isolation, carries risk…risk that is unacceptable for programs so vital to the Nation’s interests as these. The way to minimize that risk is to carry out both approaches, with full vigor: both integrated and tailored. A side benefit of the both-and approach is that the tailored programs are building on the improved foundation provided by the new, integrated thrusts, and so can contribute even more effectively.

By the way, do the math. If the savings of the cutbacks amount only to $180M, then the added cost of “both-and” to every American comes to one or two pennies a week. A small price to pay to ensure we create the world’s best labor force and at the same time transform America in the 21st century.

That’s my two cents’ worth.

Climate change continues to draw attention and concern from those focused on long-range planning, and big-ticket items, such as the nation’s critical infrastructure.

Those zeroing in on the topic span the gamut from the Government Accountability Office of the U.S. Congress to the American Meteorological Society.

The GAO has just issued a new report: Climate Change: Future Adaptation Efforts Could Better Support Local Infrastructure Decision Makers.

Here’s the thumbnail information GAO has provided, reproduced essentially verbatim:

“What GAO found

According to the National Research Council (NRC) and others, infrastructure such as roads and bridges, wastewater systems, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) centers are vulnerable to changes in the climate. Changes in precipitation and sea levels, as well as increased intensity and frequency of extreme events, are projected by NRC and others to impact infrastructure in a variety of ways. When the climate changes, infrastructure– typically designed to operate within past climate conditions–may not operate as well or for as long as planned, leading to economic, environmental, and social impacts. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that, within 15 years, segments of Louisiana State Highway 1– providing the only road access to a port servicing 18 percent of the nation’s oil supply–will be inundated by tides an average of 30 times annually due to relative sea level rise. Flooding of this road effectively closes the port.

Decision makers have not systematically considered climate change in infrastructure planning for various reasons, according to representatives of professional associations and agency officials who work with these decision makers. For example, more immediate priorities–such as managing aging infrastructure–consume time and resources, limiting decision makers’ ability to consider and implement climate adaptation measures. Difficulties in obtaining and using information needed to understand vulnerabilities and inform adaptation decisions pose additional challenges.

Key factors enabled some local decision makers to integrate climate change into infrastructure planning. As illustrated by GAO’s site visits and relevant studies, these factors included (1) having local circumstances such as weather-related crises that spurred action, (2) learning how to use available information, (3) having access to local expertise, and (4) considering climate impacts within existing planning processes. As one example, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District managed risks associated with more frequent extreme rainfall events by enhancing its natural systems’ ability to absorb runoff by, for instance, preserving wetlands. This effort simultaneously expanded the sewer system’s capacity while providing other community and environmental benefits. District leaders enabled these changes by prioritizing adaptation, using available locallevel climate projections, and utilizing local experts for assistance.

GAO’s report identifies several emerging federal efforts under way to facilitate more informed adaptation decisions, but these efforts could better support the needs of local infrastructure decision makers in the future, according to studies, local decision makers at the sites GAO visited, and other stakeholders. For example, among its key efforts, the federal government plays a critical role in producing the information needed to facilitate more informed local infrastructure adaptation decisions. However, as noted by NRC studies, this information exists in an uncoordinated confederation of networks and institutions, and the end result of it not being easily accessible is that people may make decisions–or choose not to act–without it. Accordingly, a range of studies and local decision makers GAO interviewed cited the need for the federal government to improve local decision makers’ access to the best available information to use in infrastructure planning.

Why GAO Did This Study

The federal government invests billions of dollars annually in infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, facing increasing risks from climate change. Adaptation–defined as adjustments to natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climate change– can help manage these risks by making infrastructure more resilient.

GAO was asked to examine issues related to infrastructure decision making and climate change. This report examines (1) the impacts of climate change on roads and bridges, wastewater systems, and NASA centers; (2) the extent to which climate change is incorporated into infrastructure planning; (3) factors that enabled some decision makers to implement adaptive measures; and (4) federal efforts to address local adaptation needs, as well as potential opportunities for improvement.

GAO reviewed climate change assessments; analyzed relevant reports; interviewed stakeholders from professional associations and federal agencies; and visited infrastructure projects and interviewed local d

What GAO Recommends

GAO recommends, among other things, that a federal entity designated by the Executive Office of the President (EOP) work with agencies to identify for local infrastructure decision makers the best available climate related information for planning, and also to update this information over time. Relevant EOP entities did not provide official comments, but instead provided technical comments, which GAO incorporated, as appropriate.”

As it happens, the AMS Policy Program is putting on a two-day workshop entitled Climate Information Needs for Financial Decision Making, on June 3-4, 2013, here in Washington, DC, at the AAAS Building, 1200 New York Ave NW, Washington, DC 20005, directly relevant to the GAO interests and concerns.

The AMS  announcement (which gives more particulars, including contacts and information on how to register) states:

The primary goals for this event are to make the climate community more aware of the information needs of financial decision-makers, to increase awareness among financial decision-makers of the potential benefits of using climate information, and to create new ways of enabling climate scientists and financial decision-makers to collaborate effectively.

We will look for instances where climate information has been used in financial analysis, and where climate information hasn’t been used because it is inadequate for financial analysis. Ultimately, we will assess what is necessary to make climate information adequate for financial analysis.

This workshop will be organized by the American Meteorological Society (AMS), in partnership with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). The event is being supported, in part, by the Department of Energy’s Climate and Environmental Sciences Division.