Living on the Real World

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.

The other day a colleague was in my office and as part of the conversation she and I did a quick walkthrough of a powerpoint presentation I’d given about a decade ago on natural hazards. As part of that presentation back then, I had forecast the outlook for progress with respect to the various elements that added together reduce losses from natural hazards. The forecast doesn’t look so bad ten years later…and in fact much of it might be just as relevant to the next ten years. So in the hope of stimulating a bit of thought, here’s a summary:

Progress is LIKELY over the next decade with respect to advances in

Warning and emergency response. If anything, the progress here has far exceeded what I’d expected only ten years ago. The front-end part… the observations and the modeling… have made great strides, as evidenced by the Hurricane Sandy forecast. Emergency responders have grown more savvy in their use of forecasts and in pre-positioning assets prior to any emergency. And social scientists are improving the content of warning messages.

Insurance, other mechanisms for spreading risk. Hurricane Andrew, 9/11, and the financial-sector meltdown of 2008 have each triggered the development of new financial mechanisms for spreading risk over ever-larger pools of assets. [However, the sector’s tools are limited. Despite attainments in spreading risk, it has yet to succeed in markedly reducing risk.]

Information access. Time was that disaster-zones were also information-starved. Now, thanks to IT and social media, the disaster-zone is information rich, even when and where cellphone infrastructure is temporarily saturated. Search and rescue and many other elements of emergency response are being transformed in consequence.

Progress is POSSIBLE, BUT MORE PROBLEMATIC with respect to advances in

Public awareness and education. The media have discovered that public interest in catastrophe is essentially unlimited. A whole lot of learning is going on every evening in front of the television and the computer screen. School kids are utterly fascinated by weather extremes, and this continues to be a gateway for American children into science more broadly. But knowledge in the abstract doesn’t always translate to more effective behavior in the actual hazard event.

Pre-event mitigation. There’s growing appetite for this, especially at the local level. Local officials and individual homeowners are increasingly aware that Washington bailouts after a disaster are likely to be slow in coming, less than needed, and in any event will not make them whole. Community leaders are realizing that community survival is a holistic thing. Small businesses won’t survive and big business won’t avoid disruption unless the workers, their families, their schools, their hospitals, and more aren’t equally resilient. As for the flip side, a community isn’t resilient unless the jobs are still there after the hazard has come and gone. Appetite and enthusiasm for the NOAA/NWS Weather-Ready Nation initiative reflect this.

Sustained international cooperation. Emergency response and disaster relief continue to bring countries together, if only momentarily. But progress with respect to pre-event mitigation measures continue to challenge multi-national approaches.

SUCCESS MAY PROVE MORE ELUSIVE with respect to

Reducing vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure. There are several challenges here. Dependence on critical infrastructure (communications, power, transportation, sewage, water, healthcare, schools, financial…) is still relatively new, historically speaking. We haven’t accumulated a lot of experience in seeing how critical infrastructures can fail and how disaster impacts cascade through such infrastructures to immobilize communities and even entire nations… look at the great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and its effect on Japanese (mainly nuclear) electrical utilities. And the costs of retrofitting critical infrastructure to build in resilience and continuity are staggering.

Challenges posed by megacities. The world’s megacities are essentially massive job shops competing for global business. The competition is often based on price and to keep costs down, megacities build in floodplains and on fault zones, and compound risk by jerry-rigging cheap but fragile infrastructure. Poverty is often endemic.

Newly emerging hazards. It is sadly true of all of us individually and collectively that we learn best through practice. By definition, we’ve had no experience with newly emerging hazards. Threats waiting in the wings include pandemics, major asteroid strikes, WMD, cyber-attacks, climate change and more. These threats are not only novel but global. They portend bitter future lessons.

Equity issues. This challenge is old but stubbornly resistant to cure. Every evidence shows that disasters aggravate pre-existing social inequities, whether based on gender, religion, ethnicity, or economic fault lines. Jesus said the poor are always with us… and He could have added that they would also always be more disadvantaged by hazards.

These last four issues are particularly challenging because they’re interwoven.

______________________

What do you think? Has this been the story of the last ten years? If so, would you double down for the next ten? Do you believe persistence is the best forecast here?  And here are two more telling questions:

1. Which of these trajectories could you change for the better? and
2. What are you waiting for?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” – Charles Dickens

Yesterday the National Academy of Public Administration released its long-anticipated report on the National Weather Service. Building off the work of an earlier NAS/NRC Report: Weather Services for the Nation: Becoming Second to None, and entitled Forecast for the Future: Assuring the Capacity of the National Weather Service, the NAPA study provided fifteen recommendations. You can find those and a brief commentary in the previous post.

Others have reacted to the NAPA findings over the past 24 hours. Several colleagues, people who are leaders, and well-respected in the meteorological community, have used the word underwhelming. You get the sense they had expected more… a critique that might have been more expansive, visionary. The earlier NAS/NRC report had articulated a future for national weather services in which the NWS was an important player, but no longer the single dominant actor. Instead, the NAS/NRC saw that the NWS would or should be an agent of change, partnering with a vibrant private-sector weather-services industry. Together both would tap new technologies, the natural and the social sciences, and the power of today’s IT and social networking to serve emerging national needs for weather observations and forecasts. There’d been a hope that the substance and the language of the NAPA report would capture the community’s imagination in the same way.

That may have been asking more of the NAPA report than it could deliver. NAPA was tasked to provide a “change management framework for the future.” The report’s recommendations are subject to interpretation, and interpreted broadly and in the most positive light, would seem to be responsive. That’s particularly true when we note that the end-goal of a “weather-ready nation” is threaded throughout the report and the recommendations. See this goal in its broadest, most challenging and comprehensive sense, and things fall into place. Take the words at face value, and nothing more, and the report might seem a bit dry. [In that way, the report, like all such reports, is something of a Rorschach test.]

So much for the NAPA Valley of despond… the winter of despair. NWS leadership and employees can be forgiven for feeling put-upon and worn. The partnering community can be disappointed because it fails to find the hoped-for note of inspiration.

What about the other Napa Valley… the spring of hope? Please indulge a mere vignette, one that illustrates the larger story unfolding… one that for me at least hints at the excitement and the vitality of our community and conveys a sense of the opportunities ahead. It’s about a former Navy officer by the name of Jim Etro. After retiring, Jim founded Itri Corporation, back in 1998. Here’s a snippet from their website: Itri Corporation provides technical management and advice, the services associated with the application of the environmental sciences and the technologies that may be employed to assess and characterize the environment. We also develop and implement information fusion and decision support tools that integrate information and sensors and modeling technologies. Itri Corporation also has a system integration and manufacturing business in which we develop, deploy, and operate unique remote sensing equipment for our clients.

Back when Jim’s company was much younger and smaller, and I was just starting at the AMS, we would talk. One year he told me he was purchasing and instrumenting a drone aircraft with remote sensors which he was going to use to help California winegrowers (think Napa Valley) monitor the condition of their vines.

Very cool.

[But just a sample of the kind of innovation evident every day from dozens of startups, like Joel Gratz and OpenSnow, Bill Gail and Global Weather Corporation, and myriad more, as well as the continuing iimprovement and advance that’s the hallmark of more mature companies like AccuWeather and The Weather Corporation and everything and everyone in between.]

In 2006, Jim Etro did something else that was very cool, and says a lot about the man. Running his small company, scrabbling to make ends meet, he nevertheless found it easy to do something that has left leaders of much bigger enterprises, with annual revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars, scratching their heads. He invested in the professional development of one of his Itri employees, a young professional by the name of Andrea Bleistein, and paid to send her to the AMS Summer Policy Colloquium that year. Today she’s a valued part of NOAA National Weather Service leadership.

Spring of hope? Winter of despair? Like Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, we each get to choose, every day.

When the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (NAS/NRC) released its report Weather Services for the Nation: Becoming Second to None back in the summer of 2012, it was widely understood that the NRC study, which focused on needed investments, would be followed by a similar review from the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) that would look at the organizational implications and “provide a change management framework for the future.” That long-awaited sequel, Forecast for the Future: Assuring the Capacity of the National Weather Service, has finally been released. Below you’ll find the CONSOLIDATED LIST OF RECOMMENDATIONS, taken verbatim from the report  (a big dose to absorb in this form, but worth seeing in their entirety).

1. While most agree that the Modernization and Associated Restructuring transformed the structure and operations of the NWS for the better, the Panel recommends additional and ongoing change to improve the operations and services of the organization.

2. The Panel recommends that the NWS improve its engagement with the weather enterprise and core partners to enhance the primary and secondary value-chains.

3. To realize the vision of building a Weather-Ready Nation, the Panel recommends that the NWS engage both internal and external stakeholders to secure support for the concept and their commitment to collaborate to achieve mutual goals in the national interest.

4. To ensure the NWS receives advice from the range of external stakeholders, the Panel recommends the NWS establish a formal advisory committee under the procedures established by the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

5. The Panel recommends that the NWS better align its resources and operations to effectively and efficiently meet the emerging needs of the Weather-Ready Nation paradigm.

6. To guide and support the important changes needed to more effectively and efficiently deliver weather, water, and climate products and services, the Panel recommends that the NWS conduct additional zero-based analyses of staff alignment and functions.

7. The Panel recommends that the NWS expand its recruitment to include competencies needed for Weather-Ready Nation such as internal and external communication skills, problem-solving, collaboration, conflict management, and leadership.

8. The Panel recommends that the NWS examine its training and development strategies and technology to build an improved training and development framework that marries the science, leadership, and decision support skills needed to ensure the success of Weather-Ready Nation.

9. The Panel recommends that the NWS and NWSEO collaborate to re-frame the labor/management relationship in keeping with the true partnership spirit of Executive Order 13522, which will necessitate the pre-decisional involvement sought by the union and the increased organizational results sought by management within a climate of mutual trust.

10. To ensure that NWS Research to Operations (R2O) and Operations to Research (O2R) receive appropriate priority and support, the Panel recommends that it consolidate the current distributed management of this function.

11. The Panel recommends that the NWS establish Configuration Management and Security Risk Management over its information technology systems.

12. The Panel recommends that the NWS conduct an NWS-wide analysis of its enterprise architecture, dissemination systems, and telecommunications infrastructure and identify opportunities for consolidating, integrating, or eliminating hardware or systems given current or anticipated future operational scenarios.

13. The Panel recommends that the NWS conduct an NWS-wide requirements analysis of its facilities.

14. The Panel recommends that in keeping with its vision of a Weather-Ready Nation, the NWS prioritize and accelerate its efforts to develop mobile computing applications and the use of Virtual Private Networks and rapidly transition these technologies for use in mobile, forward-deployed, and remote applications.

15. To facilitate additional and ongoing change the Panel recommends that the NWS, in conjunction with its partners, develop a process and structure to guide significant organizational and operational changes.

Let’s look at this report from four perspectives:

NWS leadership and employees. From this viewpoint, it’s easy to be overwhelmed, maybe even a bit depressed. Between the NAS/NRC and NAPA studies, the National Weather Service is being told to step up nearly every aspect of its game, at precisely the same time the agency and its people are facing constrained budgets, flat salaries, unfilled positions, the prospect of furloughs, travel restrictions, and more. Talk about being asked to do more with less! Where will it all end? Is there any light at the end of this tunnel?

But there’s merit in every detail of both the NAS/NRC and NAPA critiques. From the NWS director on down to the entry-level interns and the bench forecasters, everyone has to shoulder responsibility, identify a target for improvement, take some initial steps.

That said, the rest of us don’t get a free pass:

NWS stakeholders. Whether weather enterprise or core partners, whether internal or external… all players or would-be players in this collaboration, even though not targeted or singled out in this report, nevertheless share responsibility. We are equal partners when it comes to engagement, transitioning technologies, facilitating change, reframing the labor/management relationship, communicating (listening as well as talking), training and education, responding to NWS recruitments, realigning operations and resources… and more. None of these actions can be executed by NWS alone; all require coordination… not just for a short period, but sustained for a period of years.

Congress and the Administration. In today’s focus on the NAPA report and changes within the agency, national leaders in both the executive and legislative branches have to uphold their end of the bargain and make the investments needed to sustain the agency and the weather enterprise for decades to come.

J.R. Spradley, a NOAA political official from the Reagan days, once said in a similar situation he was reminded of a mule they had down on the farm. They were training the mule to do more and more work around the farm on less food…but just when they’d succeeded… when they’d gotten the mule to work all day for no food at all, it went and died on ‘em.

Every single local community across the United States. The NAPA recommendations are all framed in terms of The Weather-Ready Nation…a society that is prepared for and responds to weather-dependent events. No way does this happen unilaterally. We reach this goal only when every individual, every parent, every small business owner, every school teacher, every hospital administrator, every banker, every county and local official takes this goal seriously, integrates it with other community objectives, works with the National Weather Service instead of sitting in solemn judgment on it.

NWS has to act, but this is not a spectator sport. All of us are participants. Together, we can do this. And it’ll be worth our joint effort.

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. – Edward Lorenz

The May 2013 issue of Physics Today contains an interesting article on this subject, taking us back to that time when the MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz first appreciated that differences in fine details of initial weather conditions could lead over time to radically different numerical weather predictions over time. The article merits reading (savoring might be a better word; the authors Adilson E. Motter and David K. Campbell have done a splendid job in the telling) in its entirety.  But there’s a special immediacy to Lorenz’ recounting of his own discovery.

Here’s the excerpt:

“At one point I decided to repeat some of the computations in order to examine what was happening in greater detail. I stopped the computer, typed in a line of numbers that it had printed out a while earlier, and set it running again. I went down the hall for a cup of coffee and returned after about an hour, during which time the computer had simulated about two months of weather. The numbers being printed were nothing like the old ones. I immediately suspected a weak vacuum tube or some other computer trouble, which was not uncommon, but before calling for service I decided to see just where the mistake had occurred, knowing that this could speed up the servicing process. Instead of a sudden break, I found that the new values at first repeated the old ones, but soon afterward differed by one

and then several units in the last decimal place, and then began to differ in the next to the last place and then in the place before that. In fact, the differences more or less steadily doubled in size every four days or so, until all resemblance with the original output disappeared somewhere in the second month. This was enough to tell me what had happened: the numbers that I had typed in were not the exact original numbers, but were the rounded-off values that had appeared in the original printout. The initial round-off errors were the culprits; they were steadily amplifying until they dominated the solution.”

The rest… so goes the cliché… is history. Lorenz’ work is quite possibly the biggest scientific breakthrough in 20^th-century physics not to have been recognized by a Nobel Prize. If not, it’s at least a contender for that distinction. It has served as a portal into one of the most consequential and intriguing branches of physics, addressing phenomena ranging from Poincare’s three-body problem, to Saturn’s rings, the behavior of some electrical circuits, and a range of biological wonders, as well as stock market behavior, to name a few areas of application.

And speaking of clichés, the authors remind us that Lorenz gave us another one:

“Lorenz realized that if the atmosphere were to behave like his model, forecasting the weather far in the future would be impossible. At a 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in a talk titled “Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Lorenz used a butterfly as a metaphor for a tiny, seemingly inconsequential perturbation that could change the course of weather. The metaphor caught on, and sensitive dependence famously came to be dubbed the butterfly effect.”

The butterfly serves to remind us that in a similar way, our individual actions, though seemingly inconsequential, can be hugely far-reaching. Two groups of people come to mind on this particular weekend.

Mothers. The world has a billion or so. Individually, it might seem that each is lost in the mass. But, in fact, each has an extraordinary impact on one or more sons or daughters, who then by virtue of both their mother’s nature and her nurture, grow up to shape our future and all its possibilities. I’m thankful every day for all the mothers in my life. My own mother… this is my first Mother’s Day without her. I love and miss you, Mom! Her chain of mothers going back to that 20-year-old mom who came to the United States from Londonderry, Ireland in 1643 with her 21-year-old husband… and beyond. My dad’s mother, who gave birth to him (birthweight 13 lbs, 27” tall) in 1918 when mothers and their children didn’t often survive such an experience. And all the others. Without them I wouldn’t be here…without them I wouldn’t be who I am. Then there’s my daughter. My daughter-in-law. My wife… and all her mothers. All the mothers who’ve been my work colleagues. And their mothers. Without them, I wouldn’t be who I am either. And then there are all those mothers-to-be. Parenthetically, if anybody understands chaos theory, that would be mothers of young children. They knew about chaos long before Ed Lorenz.

Happy Mother’s Day, y’all.

Meteorologists. This second group numbers only in the (many) thousands. Especially on my mind are the 4000 or so who work for the National Weather Service, doing shifts at more than a hundred NWS forecast offices across the country. Individually, you too might be forgiven for feeling lost in the mass. You’ve had a rough ride the past decade or so, and especially in recent years and months… with all manner of budget woes, aging infrastructure, the looming shadow of furloughs, unfilled positions, outside criticism and more. But draw encouragement from that butterfly.

Like that butterfly, every day you influence those around you, who in turn influence those around them, and so on… and that influence ripples around the world. You can wait for the NWS culture to change from the top down… and that’s like to happen over time given the new team at the top. But in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, you can be the change you want to see in the world…and in the National Weather Service… without waiting another day. And unlike the butterfly, which doesn’t know whether its flapping wings are creating a storm or snuffing one, you can be intentional. You get to choose the change you create. The NWS has one of the best missions in government. Protect lives and property? It doesn’t get any better than that. You have much to be proud of…including your role in it.

So… all around… a tip of the hat this weekend to the butterfly. To chaos. And those mothers who manage it and those meteorologists who predict it.

As promised, the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication today released the second set of their latest survey findings, in a report entitled Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in April 2013.[1]

Here’s their executive summary, reproduced in its entirety:

Nearly two in three Americans (63%) believe global warming is happening. Relatively few – only 16 percent – believe it is not. However, since Fall 2012, the percentage of Americans who believe global warming is real has dropped 7 points to 63%, likely influenced by the relatively cold winter of 2012-13 (compared to the prior year) and an unusually cold March just before the survey was conducted. In March of 2012, after an unusually warm winter, 66 percent of Americans believed global warming was happening; thus, seasonal effects may account for at least some of the change we observe.

• Those who believe global warming is happening are more certain of their convictions than those who do not. Of the 63% of Americans who believe global warming is happening, most say they are “very” (33%) or “extremely sure” (27%). By contrast, of the unconvinced, fewer are very (28%) or extremely sure of their view (18%).

• About half of Americans (49%) believe global warming – if it is happening – is caused mostly by human activities, a decrease of 5 points since Fall 2012, but similar to levels stretching back several years.

• More Americans believe that “most scientists think global warming is happening” than believe there is widespread disagreement among scientists(42% versus 33%, respectively). One in five Americans (20%) continue to feel they “don’t know enough to say” and fewer than one in 20 (4%) believe that “most scientists think global warming is not happening.”

• About half of Americans (51%) say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” about global warming, a 7 percentage-point decline in worry since Fall 2012.

• At least four out of ten Americans say global warming will harm people in their community (45%), their family (44%), or themselves (42%). Though Americans today, compared to Fall 2012, are slightly less likely to perceive these threats of harm, they are much more likely to do so today than they were a year ago.

• Global warming is also perceived as a threat to people in developing countries (55%, down 9 points since September 2012, but similar to March 2012), in other modern industrialized countries (53%, down 4 points since September, but up 4 points since March 2012), and in the United States (52%, down 5 points since September, but up 6 points since March 2012).

• Today, four in ten Americans say people around the world are being harmed right now by climate change (38%), while 34 percent say global warming is currently harming people in the United States.

In an earlier post on the first set of the GMU-Yale survey results (which focused on extreme events), I suggested that the American mindset on this issue created a great opportunity for the National Weather Service and its Weather-Ready Nation program. The reasons were two-fold. (1) Weather-Ready Nation plays into a powerful, pre-existing American concern; and (2), framed properly, it provides ways and means for virtually every American to plug-in, get active, be involved. No one is sidelined.

This latter aspect is particularly important. As the survey results released today suggest, many Americans are somewhat or very worried about global warming, and they think global warming will harm their communities, and their families. Psychologists tell us that when we experience responsibility to act, but lack any authority, we experience stress. This stress is exacerbated when we feel alone, isolated. Americans wake up every morning feeling this toxic combination of accountability- impotence-isolation with respect to a large number of issues: the economy, terrorism, healthcare, and many more. We see signs of the resulting stress everywhere.

But building community resilience to hazards provides outlets for action. Individuals can take measures at home; in the workplace… regardless of their employer or their role at their work; at their children’s schools, and so on. And in each of these cases, they can act in concert. They’ll be working with others. There is no enemy; there’s only a common good.

Thus the survey results released today reinforce last week’s message. This is a challenge that can bring us together, especially if we focus on building resilience to extremes… those we face today, and any changed extremes we may have to contend with tomorrow.

Still more on robotics and climate research, this on “autonomous research vessels,” from George Leopold:

If you are an oceanographer or climate researcher, the sheer vastness of the Earth’s oceans is one of the biggest challenges. Aside from gathering a few samples aboard a research vessel – the snapshot approach – it’s inherently difficult to cover so much space in order to gather meaningful data over time.

One technological solution might be ARVs, or “autonomous research vessels” that don’t move very fast but can cover a lot of ground – I mean, water. As Smithsonian magazine reported in May, an unmanned vessel called Wave Gliders recently completed a one-year, 10,000-mile voyage from San Francisco to Australia with no skipper aboard.

Liquid Robotics’ Wave Glider: Scuba diver not included.

Wave Gliders, designed by a company called Liquid Robotics, use a float covered with solar panels to power an onboard computer and navigation aids. Attached below on a 20-foot cable are a series of paddles used to harness wave motion. Liquid Robotics said the unmanned glider can ride out hurricanes.

The company recently christened Version 3 in its series of hybrid wave and solar-propelled ARVs. It touts Wave Gliders as ideal for collecting ocean data uninterrupted for as much as a year. The unmanned boats cost about $200,000 each, relatively cheap as research tools go.

Liquid Robotics clearly sees climate change research as a key market: “Customers will now have the ability to conduct missions, 24×7, through all weather conditions, across most of the planet to help solve some of the world’s critical problems such as global climate change, ocean acidification, fisheries management, hurricane prediction, tsunami warning and exploration for valuable natural resources.”

Unfortunately, the manufacturer also resorts to standard marketing fluff about providing an “end-to-end solution” for gathering ocean data.

A better form of marketing is the PacX Challenge competition sponsored by Liquid Robotics and others (including energy giant BP!). Ocean researchers have submitted proposals for a $50,000 grant to use the unmanned ship for six months. One of the finalists was quoted by Smithsonian magazine as saying she wants to use the glider to track the growth patterns of photo plankton.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute is among the judges who will select the competition winner from among five finalists.

I ‘ve written a lot lately about the use of cheaper technologies like drones as potential gap fillers for Earth observation. By themselves, sensor-carrying robots won’t provide all the Earth observation data we need. But as autonomous systems like airplanes and boats become more sophisticated and reliable, they are emerging as affordable platforms for a range of weather and ocean sensors.

The investment market seems to agree: In March, Liquid Robotics announced the close of a $45 million late-stage funding round.

So, Anchors Away! Let’s see what if anything these new tools are good for and whether they can help advance climate science.

-George Leopold

Returning to the current Congressional interest in criteria for funding research at NSF as well as other federal science agencies…

Recall that the suggestion from the House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith is that

…the NSF director… post on NSF’s website, prior to any award, a declaration that certifies the research is:

1) “…in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science;

2) “… the finest quality, is groundbreaking, and answers questions or solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large; and

3) “…not duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

These ruminations from the Congress have produced a bit of a dustup… probably something of an overreaction. Some have suggested that this language is different from current NSF guidelines for “intellectual merit” and “broader impacts.” But the fact is that the proposed Congressional language is the same as that used back in 1950 to establish NSF: “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…”  Presumably, then, there’s no argument there. Similarly, scientists and political leaders alike want U.S. research to be groundbreaking and non-duplicative. Any discussion might best be limited to whether it’s helpful to have the NSF director certify, prior to each and every award, however big or small, that the award meets those criteria. It’s hard to see that this does more than add bureaucratic overhead and delay to funding for science… overhead and delay the United States can ill afford given the international race to bring S&T to the global marketplace.

But even here, we’re not on new ground. In the 1980’s, the politics were reversed… the Republicans controlled the White House and Democrats controlled the Congress. During that time, as the National Weather Service consolidated and relocated its local offices as part of the NWS Restructuring and Modernization, Congress required that the Secretary of Commerce certify, for each individual move, that it would result in no degradation of service for any and all communities in the affected areas. Was there delay? Sure. But the sun still rose in the east.

So the fact is, this discussion ought not to pit scientists against politicians, or Republicans against Democrats. If we stand back, we realize that we’re all in it together…

…and we all face a common challenge.

That challenge is this. In the aftermath of World War II, the country realized it needed to get more purposeful and strategic about its approach to R&D. The National Science Foundation and other science agencies were the result. The R&D has paid for itself many times over. The entire IT revolution, nanotechnology, breakthroughs in human health, and much more have been the result.

However, despite the progress, all parties realize that there is a widening gap between what scientists and engineers know and society’s ability to reap the full benefit. We all seek some means to accelerate societal uptake of science and technology… in order to address virtually every aspect of the national agenda.  This has proven so difficult that some have taken to referring to efforts to bridge the gap between science and application as crossing the valley of death. The Department of Defense has contended with this problem for years and along the way has developed a  6.1-6.7 nomenclature to articulate a series of steps between basic research (6.1), applied research (6.2)… all the way to operational system development (6.7).

But the sought-for answer likely lies in a different, less-linear approach: co-production of knowledge (the link is to a brief Wikipedia article; Googling the phrase will take those interested to further material). The phrase might seem abstract but basically it suggests technical experts working together with other groups in society to generate new knowledge and technologies in direct collaboration and partnership. In the Earth sciences, NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program, for example, climatologists and other Earth scientists work side by side with farmers, ranchers, foresters, fisheries managers, emergency managers, and practitioners from many other fields to tease out those aspects of climate science that might be useful to these professions, and those aspects of these professions that might be in need of a little more scientific attention. [Note that as the RISA and DoD experiences imply, such research activities best come additional to basic research rather than at the expense of basic research.] The National Weather Service’s Weather-Ready Nation thrust lends itself to the same co-production of knowledge.

Researchers and political leaders of every political persuasion ought to favor more attention to co-production of knowledge: (1) accelerating its use, while at the same time (2) arriving at a better understanding of its strengths and limitations, and the best ways to implement and foster it. [It turns out that much of this latter understanding can come primarily if not only from the social sciences.]

There’s much more to this, but it turns out it’s virtually impossible for people to work together in this way without rapidly learning from each other and accelerating the rate at which society adopts the best-available knowledge and understanding, and the rate at which such science becomes more relevant.

Who’d have thunk it?

Today the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication released their latest survey findings, in a report entitled Extreme Weather and Climate Change in the American Mind… April 2013.[1]

How might leaders make best use of this survey? To address this question, perhaps we could start with the (succinct) executive summary, reproduced here in its entirety:

• About six in ten Americans (58%) say “global warming is affecting weather in the United States.”

• Many Americans believe global warming made recent extreme weather and climatic events “more severe,” specifically: 2012 as the warmest year on record in the United States (50%); the ongoing drought in the Midwest and the Great Plains (49%); Superstorm Sandy (46%); and Superstorm Nemo (42%).

• About two out of three Americans say weather in the U.S. has been worse over the past several years, up 12 percentage points since Spring 2012. By contrast, fewer Americans say weather has been getting better over the past several years – only one in ten (11%), down 16 points compared to a year ago.

• Many Americans (51%) also say weather in their local area has been worse over the past several years.

• Overall, 85 percent of Americans report that they experienced one or more types of extreme weather in the past year, most often citing extreme high winds (60%) and extreme heat (51%).

• Of those Americans who experienced extreme weather events in the past year, many (37%) say they were significantly harmed. Moreover, the number who have been harmed appears to be growing (up 5 percentage points since Fall 2012 and 4 points since Spring 2012). For example, about one in five Americans today say they suffered a moderate or great deal of harm from extreme high winds (18%, up 9 points since Fall 2012) or an extreme snowstorm (18%, up 3 points). More also say they were harmed by drought (15%, up 6 points) or a hurricane (6%, up 4 points).

• Most Americans (80%) have close friends or family members (not livingwith them) who experienced extreme weather events in the past year, including extreme high winds (47%), an extreme heat wave (46%), an extreme snowstorm (39%), extreme cold temperatures (39%), an extreme rainstorm (37%), or a drought (35%).

• Over half of Americans (54%) believe it is “very” or “somewhat likely” that extreme weather will cause a natural disaster in their community in the coming year.

• Americans who experienced an extreme weather event are most likely to have communicated about it person-to-person – either in person (89%) or on the phone (84%) – although some used social media, such as writing about the experience on Facebook (23%) or sharing a photo of the event or its aftermath using Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram (19%).

Once again, Mr. Leiserowitz, Mr. Maibach and their coauthors have done a stellar job of framing a structured array of incisive questions and letting statistics of the responses speak for themselves (a signature trait of their work). Such an approach is useful to all parties… the concerned general public, scientists, and political leaders.

But, back to the question, how might the latter group…  leaders… make fullest use of such survey results?

Leaders have found the greatest success not when they’ve tried to make their public do a 180⁰ turn but rather when they’ve taken a pre-existing, deep but vague public concern and given it focus. Leaders are at their best when they make knowledge work effective, and when they focus everyone’s energies more on doing the right things than on merely doing things right.

Leaders could therefore come at this two-edged challenge/opportunity in any of several ways. For example, they could take climate-change concerns as the starting point and encourage the public to seek ways and means to reduce national and global carbon emissions. Alternatively, they could take weather extremes as the starting point and encourage the public to build national resilience to weather extremes at the community and household level.

Leaders have real-world experience on these approaches as well. They know that in the past climate-change has sometimes tended to polarize discussion and that uncertainties have paralyzed action. Moreover, they know that to focus on emissions reductions leaves most members of the public uninvolved… at a personal level able to do little more than weigh in on specific policy proposals. By contrast they know from Project Impact (now labeled more generically as FEMA’s Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program)and other initiatives that efforts to build community resilience at the local level tend to get everyone energized and engaged…from K-12 school children, to small business owners and other local business leaders, to hospital administrators to insurers, and emergency responders of every stripe. Virtually no household is left untouched or uninvolved. For that reason, FEMA programs and place-based initiatives such as the National Weather Service’s Weather-Ready Nation should merit special interest from those who would lead.

Of course, as the survey itself suggests, the most favorable path is likely not either/or, but both/and… a balanced approach to the various dimensions of the challenge we face… living (successfully) on the real world.