Tag: scitell

Categories
Africa science

Crap as a vehicle for discovery

Marcus Byrne

Marcus Byrne talks dung on Sustainable Lens [ 52:12 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

We use crap as a vehicle for discovery

On making science accessible: We owe it to the public. We live in a society that allows us to do these crazy things, and it’s my job to give back, one: the knowledge and two: the process.

Marcus Byrne is an Associate Professor at Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa, where he teaches zoology and entomology. His research interests revolve around the use of insects for biological control; which includes dung beetles. Dung beetles have a single-minded approach to life and its challenges. Dung beetle orientation is underpinned by an effective visual navigation system which can operate in the dimmest starlight, using limited computational power. This research won Marcus an Ignoble Prize in 2013 – an award he wears with pride as it gives opportunities to talk Science.

Talking points

I knew I wanted to be a biologist but…I was terrified of insects.

Dung Beetles are such enigmatic animals, hugely entertaining and really interesting.

The is the planet of the insects.

Having a big dung ball is a bit like having a Porsche

You hang around the bar – the pile of poo – with your big dung ball and hopefully pick up a chick – and roll it away with her.

That’s how you spend the day, finding poo, rolling dung balls and fighting off other males.

Observation triggers questions. Like most fields of science, as your dig into it you turn up more questions than answers, and that’s the joy of science.

A society that allows people to be curious and ask crazy blue-sky questions is a wonderful society. It’s part of the human condition – why is the sky blue? These are important questions, if we didn’t ask them we wouldn’t have poetry, or music or literature. I don’t think things have to have a purpose in themselves. I really believe that science should not have to be commercial as its basis.

We can learn things from these little guys.  Their brains…are solving complex problems with very little computing power.

Learning from the Ignoble: Science is not a creed – it can be bent, folded, stapled, beat-up in any way you like and it still works. It’s this self-correcting system that doesn’t need respect

We use crap as a vehicle for discovery

On making science accessible: We owe it to the public. We live in a society that allows us to do these crazy things, and it’s my job to give back, one: the knowledge and two: the process.

Marcus was in Dunedin for the Science Teller Festival organised by the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. We are grateful for the organisers of the Festival in their help in arranging this episode of Sustainable Lens.

Image: Chris Collingridge

Categories
communication conservation biology

Rekindling the inner frog

Robin Moore

Robin Moore talks frogs [ 58:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

There’s an inner frog within all of us, we just need to rekindle that

The Amphibian Survival Alliance’s Dr Robin Moore aims to get people concerned with conserving less charismatic creatures. Robin explores how we can scale up conservation efforts for the most threatened vertebrate group, the amphibians. In particular he questions how we might engage a public that is disempowered by prophecies of inevitable doom. We talk about several unconventional projects in amphibian conservation, including: the Search for Lost Frogs campaign; the Metamorphosis project; and the Frame of Mind campaign. What is clear is that storytelling takes engagement to a whole different level as humankind explores our connection with amphibians and the wider environment.

Talking points

Kermit makes it easier – he is an amiable character, he helps people relate to frogs

You do need the poster frogs – we’re picking the sexiest of the relatively unsexy.  To just focus on the ecologically valuable – the small brown frogs – wouldn’t engage the public.

The future of frogs is in our hands, we’re bound by the same fate of environment

Scientists are trained to be so objective, to remove human bias or emotional attachment toward study subject. But truth is, there is always a human bias, the fact that there are 500 times more studies on mammals than amphibians is a human bias towards mammals. Scientists always approach something with unique experience and perspectives

My eyes were opened to the power of story-telling and using art first of all through the Search for Lost Frogs.  I realised that that resonated with people not because we were trying to tell them that a third of amphibians were threatened, but because we were telling stories and I think people respond in a different way when you’re telling stories and not just delivering the dry facts.

You can fit facts around your existing attitudes. Climate Change is a perfect example, the more facts you tell them they can dig in their heels.

Walking a fine line with maintaining scientific integrity, when you engage with the media you lose to a certain extent the control of the message. The story that gets picked up may not be the story that you want to tell.

When you are trying to save the frogs, you are really trying to save the environment – you are not trying to save the frogs in isolation. And when you’re trying to save the environment, you’re essentially trying to change people’s behaviour and attitudes. So conservation, more often than not, boils down to working with people.

One of the challenges is the perception of the environment as something separate from us, something to be exploited and abused

Improving the state of the environment and the lives of the people is the same deal. You can’t improve the lives of the humans if you are destroying the environment. (In Haiti) a lot of the problems are linked to the state if the environment.

It is a false dichotomy to look at human welfare and think it is conservation versus development.

(Am I an activist?). I guess so, yeah, I don’t often use that word. (You used it to describe the model you worked with . She does consider herself to be activist?) I think so. I can from a background of reporting conservation and working with local groups, I didn’t feel that was activism so much. Whereas Gabby really does focus on the messaging and getting the message out there, whereas my work with amphibian survival alliance, is also supporting habitat protection projects – which I don’t think of as activism. Perhaps an element of what I do is activism, but not the whole suite.

You can’t not answer a 12 year old who is asking a question about her future.

Dr Moore was in Dunedin for the Science Teller Festival organised by the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. We are grateful for the organisers of the Festival in their help in arranging this episode of Sustainable Lens.

Categories
climate change science

Historian of climate science

Naomi Oreskes

Naomi Oreskes [ 56:12 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ever wondered why science and politics don’t play nice? Naomi Oreskes tells us why in this history of climate science.

The naive vision of ‘we do the facts then hand it over to the policy makers and they act on it’. That would be great in a perfect world, and it worked for ozone so scientists could be forgiven for thinking that was realistic, but it hasn’t worked this time around.

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard. Professor Oreskes’s research focuses on the earth and environmental sciences, with a particular interest in understanding scientific consensus and dissent. Her 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global warming , co-authored with Erik M. Conway, was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Time Book Prize, and received the 2011 Watson-David Prize from the History of Science Society.

In this conversation, Naomi tells us of the bad luck of the coincidental rises of neo-liberal economics and the emergence of the global environmental issues

Talking points

We see a tendency to err on side of least drama

What we call science has changed dramatically over time

Narrowing of focus of science…the rise of specialisations, a powerful tool but comes at cost of broader perspectives.

After 1940s, increasing recognition of role of science and technology in modern warfare…not entirely new but…becomes much stronger.

Disassociation begins to take place where scientists don’t talk about the larger geo-political context of their work

We might like to believe that there is a litmus test for the truth…the reality is that it doesn’t really work that way.

The insight of Kuhn…consensus.

Continental drift…as a model for how scientists judge evidence independent of political interference (was originally uncontroversial before people realised had age of earth implications).

Climate change not a paradigm shift because didn’t replace an alternative

Climate change is applied physics and chemistry.

By 1965 signals that carbon in the atmosphere was increasing…(but)… most scientists thought we wouldn’t be able to detect climate change from increased greenhouse gases until the 21st Century.

The surprise in the story was when it occurred sooner. when already the the late 1980s and early 1990s the effects were beginning to be seen.

When was it first described as problem:

In 1957 he (Roger Revelle) gave an interview with Time Magazine where said one reason why we should care about this is that a warmer world will lead to sea-level rise

There is no question that Revelle thought it could be a problem, he wasn’t 100% sure that it would be a problem and how soon it would be a problem.

The idea that it (anthropogenic climate change) could be a problem was on the table going back to the late 1950s.

Gordon MacDonald was one of the first in the US to say that climate change could be a problem. He wrote about it in the 1960s and called it inadvertent weather modification.

At that time he’s a relatively quiet voice, its not a big issue in the environmental movement as a political issue but it turns out to be really really important politically…today in the US the Environmental Protection Agency has the legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, this has been affirmed by the Supreme Court and we are waiting for the EPA to do this.

The Clean Air Act 1973 includes weather and climate in the issues the Act has authority over… that is because people already understood at that time that pollution had the potential to cause changes in weather and climate. And that work was largely done by Gordon MacDonald.

By the 1980s climate modellers are building climate models that they now think are good enough to be able to predict what the climate signals should look like if there were no additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere versus what it actually does look like. In 1988 James Hansen and his colleagues published a paper in which they said that they believed climate change had become detectable. (That was controversial but it reached public awareness).

In the next few years there’s this tremendous political momentum begins to build and its that momentum that also triggers the backlash…a right-wing turn against science.

This is the bad luck story – what historians call a history contingency…the growth of neo-liberal economics happened just around the same time as scientists begin to find evidence of some really major global environmental problems. So as environmental concerns moved from local to global issues…gigantic issues with huge economic consequence…just at the same time as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan are promoting deregulation in the economic environment, scientists are pointing out these very major potentially grave environmental threats, and how do you prevent acid rain…climate change…protect the ozone…? Well the answer is regulation, and sometimes really big scale regulation like international conventions with significant political implications. So we were beginning to see the advocates of free market policies turning against science.

People who up until then had generally supported science as supporting industry…the business community valued science because it helped create technology, now you see large sectors of the business community beginning turn against science. And that is the historic Greek tragedy part of the story, things go downhill from there very seriously and very quickly.

Critical analysis is one thing, dishonest attack is another.

Scientists have been conservative in their estimates of the rate and degree of climate change over the last 30 years.

The whole issue of climate change is now so political and so difficult that I think a lot of people in the scientific community are kind of spooked. And they’re nervous and they don’t really know how to respond. And I think a lot of scientists think that if they’re just very cautious and very careful and very conservative that that will preserve and protect their credibility.

Absolutely scientists should be conservative and should not make claims they can not support with evidence and high quality data…the question is once you have that data, what do you say about it? And if you don’t think the world is responding, if you don’t think the world gets it, then that tells me that you aren’t communicating it clearly enough.

How do we communicate clearly in ways that are effective and truthful and correct? It’s not an argument in favour of exaggerating the science or saying things that aren’t true. It’s about taking what we believe to be true and communicating it clearly.

But now you’re up against the largest, most successful, most profitable business in the history of mankind, you’re up against an economic system that depends on burning fossil fuels, you’re up against a lifestyle – every rich person in the world because we live off the energy stored in fossil fuels, and I don’t mean rich-rich, I mean all of us, every person who lives in the West.

Can science compete against the business system with vested interests in us over-consuming? That’s the $64,000 question…that is the question that will determine the what happens in the next 100 years. If we can’t figure out a way to act upon what we know then we’re going to see a lot of pain and suffering.

The naive vision of ‘we do the facts then hand it over to the policy makers and they act on it’. That would be great in a perfect world, and it worked for ozone so scientists could be forgiven for thinking that was realistic, but it hasn’t worked this time around.

(Am I an activist?). Not really, I teach classes and do my research. Students often ask me…”what should they do?” and I always say you have to figure that out for yourself – based on who you are, what your temperament is, what your personality is, what your talents are, what resources you have at your disposal…so I’m a scholar, and I love doing the work I do. …. I feel like I’ve ended up in a place that has worked out being meaningful, and valuable, and I think the best thing I can do is keep on doing what I’m doing.

We went from ‘most of the observed warming is likely to be…’, to ‘most of the observed warming is very likely to be…’ and now ‘it’s extremely likely…’…likely, very likely, extremely likely I think these are shades of difference that the scientific community thinks are terribly important but that most people outside the scientific community don’t really see that that’s so significant…

Naomi was in Dunedin for the Science Teller Festival organised by the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. We are grateful for the organisers of the Festival in their help in arranging this episode of Sustainable Lens.

Categories
science

Positively sceptical thinker

Guy P Harrison

Everybody needs to understand that science is not this thing that some other people do.

Guy P. Harrison is author of several books on sceptism including 50 Popular Beliefs that People Think Are True and the soon to be released Think: Why You Should Question Everything. With a positive and engaging brand of sceptical thinking Guy argues that weak scepticsm is the biggest threat facing the world.

Talking points

We need an open mind, but not doing to draw a conclusion until you’ve done the work

We need to humanise science, it’s not something that other people do.

It has to be OK to say “I don’t know”

Science is not a job, a profession, it is an outlook, it’s about embracing the real universe, the real world and the real humanity for what it is, and trying to learn as much as you can about it – and what is boring about that? That is exciting.

If you are a scientific thinker – a good sceptic – and you chose reality over fantasy and you open your mind up to whole world, all human kind, all the universe, you’ll never be bored a moment in your life.

There’s never a dull moment when you are a scientific thinker

If you are a scientific thinker, you are probably prone to being one of the crazier thinkers out there, because reality is so bizarre and there still are so many mysteries that we’re working on

My mind is open to anything, but I’m not going to ever accept claims without good evidence – it has to go through the meat grinder of scientific process, we have to see what comes out the other end. But thinking about these things…think away…dream.

You have to be comfortable not knowing

People love to point out when science is wrong and they go “Aha!?” and I go “what are you talking about? you’re pointing to the greatness of science”. Science is wrong and we go – “Aha we’ve found the blunder!” and they change the textbooks. That’s how it is supposed to work. That’s what’s great about science, we fix the mistakes.

I completely separate the irrational belief from the believer. I have complete respect for anyone regardless of what they may believe.

Believing crazy stuff is part of the human condition – we’re all a little goofy…the ways we process information (vision, memory) set us all up to fall for things that are not real or true, and if you remember that it humanise the believers and just keeps you in check – it allows the sceptic keep grounded. We’re all in this together, we are all fighting the same battle trying to be not nuts.

Creation stories are beautiful and there’s much wisdom to be found in them, but it breaks my heart that creation stories stand in the way of the real human story – the real story of humanity evolution – because that is the most beautiful, most unlikely, story of all. But 9/10 people couldn’t give you a good summary. Religions around the world are suppressing the real human story.

Teaching a child that the earth is 6000 years old is as nuts as teaching a child that the distance from the earth to the moon is about half a mile – that’s how nutty that is, that’s educational malpractice.

To teach biology without mentioning evolution is like teaching astronomy without mentioning planets or stars – it doesn’t make sense

You need to have that sceptical force-field around you…asking questions.

We need humanise science. Everybody needs to understand that science is not this thing that some other people do. Science is not this thing I learned in high school and then I can put away. Science is this core part of humanity. Science is who we are, we all have a stake in the scientific process, we all have a stake in scientific progress. If we turn off to science, if we leave it to others to worry about stuff, we are burying our heads in the sand and setting ourselves up for disaster.

We’re going to have this bizarre situation where we’ve got a planet where 99% of the people are scientifically illiterate but yet everything depends on science – that’s a recipe for disaster.

We have to stay connected to the science…this doesn’t mean memorising the periodic table…but should at least tap into the wonder of the world of science.

Part of being a good sceptic is being comfortable with “I don’t know”. Ignorance is fine. Admitting ignorance is honest. Don’t shy away from it. Let that ignorance drive you, motivate you to keep searching for answers. But don’t lie. We have this strange compulsion throughout humanity to fill in the blanks with made-up answers when we don’t know something. That’s a big mistake. It’s OK to leave it blank for now if we don’t have the answer.

Everything is tentative in science.

You’ve got to be a grown up – you can’t always have answers to everything. Never pretend to know what you don’t know.

(on Economic growth) Quality rather than size.

I’m realistic but optimistic.

We are in reach of a overcoming racism, poverty, and disease. We can overcome these things and really do better. It is possible. Doesn’t mean we will, but it is possible and just that possibility should fuel one with hope. It is something to work for and reach for – it’s there, we’ve never been closer. And to get there we need scientific thinking, we need a world filled with good sceptics so we that don’t waste time on pseudo-science and superstition. We can focus more on real social progress, real economic progress, real technological progress for all and devote more time for each other.

Tap into human creativity and passion for learning and discovery – we call it science but it’s really just being human . If you’re a teacher, don’t put sit your students them down in chairs rows and make them listen for an hour while you talk for an hour in front of a chalkboard, take them out and walk them along a coastline. Explore and discover.

Children learning are not robots, they’re not automobiles in for a tune up, these are human thinking machines that need to be stimulated – they need to wander off in different directions. We have to keep that component of excitement and discovery.

For me sceptism is a moral issue. I care about people, I care about the world, so I feel I have to speak up about this. I have to encourage people to think more clearly – there’s so much nonsense out there that’s harming people.

Guy was in Dunedin for the Science Teller Festival organised by the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. We are grateful for the organisers of the Festival in their help in arranging this episode of Sustainable Lens.