The Wrack

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 2/22/2015.

I learned a new word this year. Subnivean, from the Latin for under (sub) and snow (nives). Its the zone within and underneath the snowpack. Its where weve all been living lately.

WELLS, Maine, December 8, 2014  Scientists from around New England met at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve on December 5 for a workshop focused on blue carbon science and policy. For the first time, scientists from throughout the region gathered to share research results, identify gaps in knowledge, and plan future collaborations involving carbon in coastal habitats.

The term blue carbon refers to the ability of salt marshes, seagrass meadows, and mangrove forests to take up and store carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Coastal wetlands capture carbon and store it at rates even greater than rainforests.

Carbon held naturally in coastal wetlands is not entering the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, so these habitats have real potential to mitigate climate change, said Dr. Kristin Wilson, Wells Reserve research director, who co-coordinated the workshop.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 11/2/2014.

From reports, it sounds like this years midterm election is a doozy, money-wise: across the country, campaigns are spending record sums marketing their candidates and causes.? So I read, anyway: I do not watch broadcast TV, I have an ad blocker on my computer, and I only listen to satellite radio and MPBN. Voluntarily [and gratefully] deaf to the din from most of the marketing wars, I rarely hear about the latest advances in breakfast cereal, let alone the biannual election season onslaught.

About the only political advertising I do see are ads in newspapers (bless you, candidates, for feeding our starving print publishers), and outdoor campaign signs.

Three hundred and fifty million years ago, the supercontinent Pangaea floated where you sit today. It was a warm, wet world, bathed in oxygen and soupy seas. The Carboniferous period was a time from which we get a lot of the fossil fuels we now use to power our society.

Figure 1: A chart of the scientific consensus on climate change (97% of scientists agree that humans are driving global warming), and how much attention the minority opinion seems to receive in the media. Or is it a graph of the amount of America's wealth controlled by the top 3% (54.5%), vs. the bottom 97%?

?

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 10/5/2014.

Two weeks ago, my family and I were perched on the steps of the grand fountain in Columbus Circle, Manhattan, watching 300,000 people march past. They sang, they shouted, and they carried thousands of messages, all communicating one thing: world leaders, its time to do something about climate change. A week of action followed. Further protests spread around the world, corporations declared carbon reduction goals, and even presidents and prime ministers frankly spoke of addressing the need to revise a framework for negotiation.

Thats some progress, anyway.

"What an impact! Verifiable scientific information--not political lies! Excellent! A must see and hear program for ALL! Really relevant! Outstanding! Data rich and easily understood!" These are comments written on evaluation forms at the end of Dr. Paul Mayewski's Climate Stewards evening lecture in Mather Auditorium last week. Mayewski, the Director and Distinguished Professor of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, took us on a "journey into climate," sharing results from research he and others have conducted over the past forty years in Antarctica and the Arctic. Did you miss the lecture? Don't fret! Kate filmed it and you can watch it in its entirety here.

Short on time? Below is a sampling of the many nuggets of information Mayewski shared:

Climate Reality Project's Allen Armstrong delivered an info-packed update to An Inconvenient Truth 8 years after its release.

Dr. Gordon Hamilton of the University of Maine's?Climate Change Institute presented his "Why the Arctic Matters" lecture on Wednesday evening, providing attendees with a first-hand account of his research findings on Greenland's ice sheets. He first explained that the Arctic is a system, connected to the rest of the world through its oceans. What happens in the Arctic affects life in the Gulf of Maine. His research findings are alarming.

About the Project

The Sandy Dialogues facilitated an exchange of expertise and experience between New Jersey and Maine that culminated in two Maine-based coastal hazard preparedness training workshops. Through this project, the Wells Reserve and its partners learned from New Jersey's Jacques Cousteau Reserve and its stakeholders about the use of decision-support systems, combined with the experience of responding to and recovering from a major storm event.

The Sandy Dialogues stemmed from the earlier Climate Games project in Wells and a sea-level-rise vulnerability assessment done for the New Jersey coast.

Project Period

March to November 2014

I get to meet many scientists. While its hard to understand them sometimes, they are all very decent (and underpaid) people. And they are all as astounded as I am that more than half the country does not believe them when they say climate change is real, that it is happening, and that it is man-made.