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Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children

by WinnieBachman Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s self-evident that embryos, fetuses, and babies are vulnerable. We have strict laws protecting children because they cannot fend for themselves. And yet, too often, we ignore the impact that environmental disasters have on the very earliest stages of life. In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein examines the effect that our reliance on fossil fuels has on the most helpless members of the animal kingdom—as well as on our own children.

“In species after species, climate change is creating pressures that are depriving life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines,” Klein writes. “Instead, the spark of life is being extinguished, snuffed out in its earliest, most fragile days: in the egg, in the embryo, in the nest, in the den.”

Take the case of the leatherback sea turtles. These ancient creatures have been around for 150 million years, making them the longest-surviving marine animals on earth. As Klein points out, they’ve survived the “asteroid attacks” that likely wiped out the dinosaurs. But now they are threatened by a combination of poaching, fishing and climate change. One recent study found that as temperatures rise over the next century, “egg and hatchling survival will rapidly decline” for sea turtle populations in the Eastern Pacific.

The leatherback turtles have “survived so much,” says Klein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “But it’s not clear that they’re going to be able to survive even incremental climate change, because what’s happening already is that when the eggs are buried in the sand, even if the sand is just marginally hotter than it used to be, that the eggs are not hatching; they’re cooking in the sand.” What’s more, turtles don’t have sex chromosomes—they turn into males or females based on the ambient temperature of the sand in which they are born. Hotter sand means more female turtles hatch. And the danger is that warming could eventually result in a significant imbalance between males and females, ultimately decimating the species.

While writing the book, Klein was going through her own fertility crisis, so she says she was particularly attuned to the fragility of new life and the impacts that stressors can have on reproduction. And she began to notice a common theme in the after-effects of environmental catastrophes. In the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill, for example, she toured the Louisiana marshes. With Jonathan Henderson, an organizer with the Gulf Restoration Network, guiding the way, Klein and a few others set out to investigate whether the oil from the Deepwater Horizon had permeated the bayous. It was the fish jumping in dirty water and the coating of reddish brown oil that impressed Klein and her companions.

But what most concerned Henderson, recalls Klein, was the nearly invisible cost of the disaster: the tiny zooplankton and juveniles that grow into the shrimp, oysters, crabs, and fish that are the bedrock of the Gulf fisheries. “What he was preoccupied with was the fact that this was spawning seasoning,” says Klein. “And that even though we couldn’t see it, there was just a huge amount of proto-life surrounding us, and this was spring in the Gulf and everything was spawning.”

Drifting in the marshlands, Klein writes that she “had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage.”

These effects, she argues, may be felt years later, when those juveniles should be reaching maturity. “Looking into it in the context of the Gulf, we’ve heard a lot of really concerning stories directly from fishermen saying that they’re not seeing baby fish out there,” says Klein. “Or they’re seeing female crabs without eggs.” In her book, she recounts a 2012 interview with a Florida fisherman named Donny Waters who had noticed the absence of small fish in his catches. This hadn’t yet cut into his income, since small fish are thrown back. But Waters was worried that the impact would be felt in the years to come—specifically, in 2016 or 2017 when those fish that were in the larval stage during the spill would have grown up.

This wouldn’t be the first time that an oil spill had a delayed effect on the fishing industry. “The greatest and most lasting impacts on the fish in Alaska had to do with this delayed disaster,” says Klein, referring to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. “It wasn’t until three or four years after the spill that the herring fishery collapsed.” Twenty-five years later, it still hasn’t recovered.

What’s more, scientists say the spill might also help explain the deaths of an unusual number of young bottlenose dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico. In a paper published in PlosONE in 2012, Ruth Carmichael and her colleagues examined whether the spill contributed to a “perfect storm” of events that killed 186 dolphins—46 percent of whom were perinatal calves (that is, babies)—in the first four months of 2011.

An unusually high number of young bottlenose dolphins died in the Gulf of Mexico between January and April 2011. Graham Worthy/University of Central Florida

“When we put the pieces together,” explained Carmichael in a 2012 press release, “it appears that the dolphins were likely weakened by depleted food resources, bacteria, or other factors as a result of the 2010 cold winter or oil spill, which made them susceptible to assault by the high volumes of cold freshwater from heavy snowmelt coming from land in 2011 and resulted in distinct patterns in when and where they washed ashore.”

By April 2014, 235 stranded baby bottlenose dolphins had been found, “a staggering figure, since scientists estimate that the number of cetacean corpses found on or near shore represents only 2 percent of the ‘true death toll,'” Klein writes.

Of course, this research isn’t conclusive. A BP spokesperson notes that dolphins in the Gulf began dying off before the oil spill and that unusual mortality events “occur with some regularity.” For its part, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that the “direct or indirect effects” of the spill are being “investigated as potential causes or contributing factors for some of the strandings” but that “no definitive cause has yet been identified.”

Dolphin strandings by age group for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and western Florida. Reprinted with permission from Carmichael et al., PlosONE, 2012.

Further up the food chain, Klein is also concerned about the potential impact of environmental pollution on human fertility. During the same trip that took her through the marshlands of Louisiana, she also visited Mossville, the historic African-American town notorious as a case study in environmental racism.

“This was a town formed by freed slaves, and after being established, it was surrounded by 14 massive petrochemical factories, and the land and water was just poisoned, and most of the people have already left,” says Klein.

While worries about cancers and other illnesses in Mossville have been covered fairly extensively in the media, the issue of fertility problems is less well known. “When I spoke to women who had lived in Mossville, what I heard about was just an epidemic of infertility and that just so many women had hysterectomies,” Klein says. These stories are anecdotal, but Klein hopes more research will be done. “This is often just an understudied part of science,” she says.

Klein also points to emerging research that links the fracking boom with various reproductive problems. In a Bloomberg View column earlier this year, Mark Whitehouse reported on data presented at the annual American Economic Association meeting from a yet-to-be published study of Pennsylvania birth records that apparently found a correlation between proximity to shale gas sites and low birth weight in babies. Babies born within a 2.5-kilometer radius of gas drilling sites were almost twice as likely to have a low birth weight (increasing from 5.6 percent to 9 percent of births) or a low APGAR score, the first evaluation of a baby’s health after birth. And a study published this year examining birth outcomes and proximity to natural gas development reported that mothers who lived within 10 miles of the highest number of fracking sites (125 wells within a 10-mile radius) were 30 percent more likely to have babies with congenital heart defects and twice as likely to have babies with neurological problems compared to mothers whose homes were at least 10 miles away from any fracking site.

Then there’s the threat that climate change itself poses to children. Last year, UNICEF warned that “more severe and more frequent natural disasters, food crises and changing rainfall patterns are all threatening children’s lives” and that by 2050, climate change could result in an additional 25 million children suffering from malnourishment.

“For all the talk about the right to life and the rights of the unborn,” writes Klein, “our culture pays precious little attention to the particular vulnerabilities of children, let alone developing life.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children

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This Man Wrote Hundreds of Letters Warning Politicians Not to Lie. It Worked.

by SantoRoberzkzmv Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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With less than two months until the 2014 elections, the political falsehoods are rolling in. Consider the Colorado Senate Race, between incumbent Democrat Mark Udall and his Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner. Trying to brand himself as just as green as Udall (a longtime clean energy champion), Gardner recently ran an ad claiming that as a state senator in 2007, he “co-wrote the law to launch our state’s green energy industry.”

But when 9 News, Denver’s NBC affiliate, fact-checked the ad, it found the law Gardner was touting didn’t accomplish much at all to promote green initiatives. Asked for a statement, Gardner’s campaign responded, “Cory says that he co-wrote a law ‘to launch our state’s green energy industry,’ not that launched it.'” (The emphasis is Gardner’s.) In other words, the impression given by the ad is just wrong, as the Gardner campaign winkingly admits! “Folks, we honestly do not know if we have ever seen such a frank acknowledgement of purposeful deception from an American politician,” commented the local politics blog ColoradoPols. You can watch the 9 News segment here.

Gardner comes off, in this instance, as reminiscent of GOP pollster Neil Newhouse. While working for Mitt Romney in 2012, Newhouse infamously declared, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Gardner’s cavalier response, like Newhouse’s brazen statement, raises the fear that despite a voluminous growth of fact-checking in the past half-decade, there’s really nothing the media can do to keep politicians honest. But is that really true?

Not according to Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who has focused much of his research on employing the tools of social science to figure out why fact-checking so often fails, and what can be done to make it work better. The cynical view on fact-checking is “too negative,” argues Nyhan on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “I think you have to think about what politics might look like without those fact-checkers, and I think it would look worse.”

Nyhan hasn’t just been studying the fact-check movement; he was there at its origins. In the early 2000s, he co-authored a site called Spinsanity.com, a nonpartisan fact-checking outlet. It was the beginning of a wave: In 2003, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania launched Factcheck.org. But the real fact-checking movement kicked into gear in the late 2000s, with the launch of PolitiFact, by far the most widely known of these outlets, as well as the 2007 launch of the Washington Post fact-checker column, now written by Glenn Kessler.

Brendan Nyhan

As a result, in the last few years, a huge volume of claims have been given one-to-four Pinocchios by the Post, or declared “True,” “Pants on Fire,” or somewhere in between by PolitiFact. That includes the repeated debunking of the last half-decades’ mega lies: Birtherism, for instance, and claims about the Affordable Care Act creating “death panels.” So what does the evidence show about this endeavor?

First the good news: Overall, the fact-checkers have reinforced the idea that reality exists, and journalists are capable of discerning what it is. That may seem obvious, but it’s actually worth underscoring that we don’t live in a postmodern nightmare of subjectivity. “The fact-checkers, when they rate the same content, come to the same conclusion a very high percentage of the time,” says Nyhan. “So that’s a good indication that they are seeing the evidence and interpreting it in a consistent way.” For instance, Factcheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Post‘s Kessler all refuted Sarah Palin’s “death panel” claim; PolitiFact dubbed it the “lie of the year” in 2009.

That’s not to say that fact-checkers are themselves entirely unbiased. PolitiFact in particular has been repeatedly criticized for false equivalence in how it treats the left and the right. It’s just to say that they largely agree with one another, suggesting that facts are, for the most part, discernible.

The Backfire Effect

A far tougher issue, though, is whether minds change when fact-checkers make their pronouncements. On the level of individual psychology, repeated studies by Nyhan and others have shown that it is very hard to correct a misperception once it is out there in the media ether. We’ve previously reported on the so-called “backfire effect,” discovered by Nyhan and his colleague Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter. Again and again, they’ve found in experiments that trying to correct certain false claims that are highly politically charged—the claim that tax cuts increase government revenue, for instance—often just doesn’t work. Partisans can actually become stronger in their wrong beliefs upon encountering a refutation.

Consider the data, for instance, when Nyhan and Reifler attempted, in a classic study, to get partisans to change their minds about the tax cut claim (which they attributed to George W. Bush). In the experiment, participants were shown a fake newspaper article containing an actual George W. Bush quotation: “The tax relief stimulated economic vitality and growth and it has helped increase revenues to the Treasury.” In one version of the experiment, the article then contained a correction, refuting this claim; in another version it did not. It turned out that conservatives who read the correction believed Bush’s falsehood more strongly than did conservatives who never read the correction:

Backfire Effect: Conservatives became more likely to believe President Bush’s claim that tax cuts increase revenue after reading a correction explaining that it isn’t true. Brendan Nyhan.

And that’s just the beginning of the difficulties related to correcting errors and making the corrections stick in people’s heads. Nyhan also notes that much research suggests that negating a claim (“the Affordable Care Act doesn’t create death panels”) actually has the effect of reinforcing it in our minds (“there are death panels”). “We should be pretty cautious about how high our hopes are for changing people’s minds,” says Nyhan. “Once those myths are out there, it’s very hard to change people’s minds.”

Fact Checking as Deterrence

Such are some of the reasons to question the power of fact checking. So then why does Nyhan think a world with fact checking in it is way better than one without it? The answer is that it’s not so much about changing the minds of the partisans as it is about deterring the politicians. “They’re so often the vehicle for these myths,” says Nyhan. “If they know they’ll be called out publicly, they may not reinforce or disseminate these myths in the first place.”

So what about fact-checking as deterrence? Does it work? After all, no politician wants the campaign narrative to revolve around allegations that he or she is a liar, or detached from reality.

Mother Jones’ David Corn has made the case that in the 2012 election, politicians like Mitt Romney just weren’t deterred. And it may well be that on the national level, and especially on the presidential level, politicians get fact-checked so often, and fact-checkers try so hard to spread around the opprobrium, that ultimately it’s a wash.

However, on the local level, this stuff seems to really matter. Nyhan and Reifler provided data to support this idea in a 2013 New America Foundation study. During the 2012 election cycle, they sent letters to 392 state legislators who had PolitiFact affiliates in their states. The letters simply noted that the politicians’ statements might be fact-checked, and that there were reputational risks associated with getting a poor rating. “We sent them a lot of letters,” explains Nyhan. “Some of them became very sick of hearing from us in the mail, as we sent them letter after letter, reminding them just what a significant threat fact-checking could be to them.” Two other groups of legislators, of similar size, received either no letters or a “placebo” letter saying the authors were studying how accurate politicians are, but didn’t bring up reputational risks or fact checking.

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The study found that the warning letters had a statistically significant effect: Legislators who received them were less likely to have their accuracy questioned by PolitiFact, or by other news sources found in a Lexis-Nexis search. Of course, it was also extremely unlikely for any legislator to be fact-checked at all. Thus, the risk declined from just under 3 percent down to 1 percent:

From Nyhan and Reifler, “The Effects of Fact-Checking Threat: Results from a field experiment in the states,” New American Foundation Research Paper, 2013.

To Nyhan, this suggests that fact-checking can serve as a deterrent, and can be a particularly big deal in local as opposed to national races—which means it matters in 2014. Indeed, in one case, fact-checking already appears to have significantly damaged a campaign. In Alaska, incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Begich ran an ad suggesting his opponent, former state attorney general Dan Sullivan, had not been tough enough on sex offenders, going on to state that one of them got out of prison early and went on to commit a horrific crime—a sexual assault and double murder. But PolitiFact rated the ad’s claims “pants on fire,” finding that Sullivan was not responsible for the suspect’s release. Begich’s campaign soon pulled it off the air.

In other words, the ad itself became an issue, and Begich has had to contend with a major backlash, as well as the black eye of having to pull an ad.

To Nyhan, that’s the whole point. Backfires and biases notwithstanding, there remains the potential for a prominent factual correction to cause a media furor, and, in some case, to damage a politician’s reputation. Partisans may stick with their candidate, but they’ll be sticking with a candidate who has been forced to play defense.

So facts work—kind of. Sometimes. Even if politicians try to avoid them.

“I think fact-checking has caused big important changes in how we cover the news now,” says Nyhan, “and it’s gotten especially the younger generation of reporters much more interested in going beyond that ‘he-said, she-said’ reporting.”

To listen to the full podcast episode with Brendan Nyhan, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of a new study suggesting that religious and non-religious individuals are equally moral, and new research on gender discrimination in job performance evaluations, particularly by men with traditional views of gender roles.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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This Man Wrote Hundreds of Letters Warning Politicians Not to Lie. It Worked.

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26 Percent of Women Scientists Say They’ve Been Sexually Assaulted Doing Fieldwork

by BethPhclkj Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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One of the most difficult parts of getting a Ph.D. is finishing your dissertation. Those last three months were certainly the hardest of my life. Beyond the mountain of work a dissertation requires, graduate students also have to face feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, and anxiety about the looming job search. Sometimes, they need a gentle, supportive push to quit stressing about every last comma and—after years of blood, sweat, and tears—finally turn it in.

So when Kate Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chided an old friend who was still a graduate student about taking that last step to finish her thesis, she thought she was doing her a favor. But she was floored by her friend’s response.

Clancy remembers her friend saying, “Well, I was sexually assaulted in the field, and every time I open the dissertation files I have flashbacks.” On this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Clancy goes on to say that conversation “was the first time that it really hit me how much these kinds of experiences can not only emotionally traumatize women, but also explicitly hold them back in their research.”

So she joined up with three fellow female scientists to study the extent to which sexual harassment and sexual assault occur in the field. On this week’s podcast, the four coauthors—Clancy, anthropologists Robin Nelson and Julienne Rutherford, and evolutionary biologist Katie Hinde—discuss their recently published survey of scientists who have worked in the field.

Their results were eye-opening and immediately generated headlines. “Around 70 percent of women from our sample reported experiencing harassment and about 40 percent of men,” Clancy says. Additionally, 26 percent of women and 6 percent of men reported being sexually assaulted (defined as “unwanted physical contact”) while doing field research. Nearly all of the women who reported assault or harassment were students, post-docs, or employees—rather than faculty members.

Field work is a highly-sought-after experience during scientific training in biology, anthropology, and other disciplines. As the study authors note, many universities require at least one field work module to earn a degree, and scientists who engage in field research publish more and secure more grants than those who do not. What’s more, despite the fact that more women enter and complete Ph.D. programs in biology and anthropology, women are less likely than men to maintain fieldwork throughout their careers.

There’s been a lot of debate concerning why, with an increasing number of Ph.D.s going to women, women remain underrepresented in the top tiers of science. This is a complicated and thorny issue, but Clancy and colleagues have added yet another data point: Women might be leaving some disciplines in order to avoid unwanted sexual comments and contact, especially in the field.

Visual representation of “respondents to the survey, their experiences, and who were aware of, made use of, and were satisfied by mechanisms to report unwanted physical contact.” PlosOne

So how did the researchers arrive at these results?

Relying on social media and other outlets to recruit survey-takers, Clancy and her colleagues managed to collect 666 responses, 77.5 percent of them from women.

As the authors note, their sample might overrepresent people who have had negative experiences, as these individuals might be more likely to respond to the survey request. But it might also be an underestimate: “We received information from some folks who said, ‘I would love to do your survey, but I can’t do your survey because it would trigger me in having to think about this traumatic experience that I had in the field,'” says Nelson, who is an assistant professor at Skidmore College.

Importantly, the study’s findings go beyond simply documenting that women are far more likely than men to be sexually harassed or assaulted in the field. Women were also more likely to report that they were harassed or assaulted by superiors. Men, by contrast, were more likely to be harassed by their peers. “There is a whole literature on sort of the directionality of sexual harassment, and there’s much greater psychological harm when it’s a vertical abuse, meaning coming from someone higher up in the hierarchy,” Clancy explains. “And so not only are women experiencing harassment and assault in greater numbers than men, but the actual nature of the assault potentially can cause greater psychological harm.”

What’s so special about field work that might explain these findings? “Our data can’t speak to specific environments within the lab or the office,” says Rutherford, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “But there are some aspects of field work that I think contribute to these kinds of behaviors, and that is there is often a certain amount of confusion about who is in charge…some field sites are run by investigators from multiple universities, and research institutions; there might be a field school where you’ll have students from many different universities—so the overseeing institution may not be clear to any individual participant in any stage in their training or in the hierarchy. So that confusion contributes to, I think, a loosening of boundaries.” And then, of course, there are the practical considerations: Scientists are far away from home, their families, other responsibilities, and social networks that both serve to keep bad behaviors in check and provide support to victims of abuse.

Indeed, the study found that only about 1 in 5 respondents who had been harassed or assaulted were “aware of a mechanism to easily report” the incidents at the time. And of those who did file reports, less than 20 percent said they were satisfied with the outcome.

So what are the next steps? “We put this paper out there as a start of a conversation,” says Hinde, an assistant professor at Harvard. “Solutions are going to be effected by our community coming together agreeing that this is a problem, that these aren’t just occasional isolated incidences or the rare bad apple, but something that we need to systematically address with culture-change.”

You can listen to the full interview with Kate Clancy, Robin Nelson, Julienne Rutherford, and Katie Hinde below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short interview with University of Chicago geoscientist Ray Pierrehumbert, who argues that we’ve been worrying too much about methane emissions from natural gas, and a discussion of a study finding that kids’ drawings at age four are an “indicator” of their intelligence 10 years later.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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26 Percent of Women Scientists Say They’ve Been Sexually Assaulted Doing Fieldwork

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How Western Civilization Ended, Circa 2014

by Ronda9250oe Posted on July 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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You don’t know it yet. There’s no way that you could. But 400 years from now, a historian will write that the time in which you’re now living is the “Penumbral Age” of human history—meaning, the period when a dark shadow began to fall over us all. You’re living at the start of a new dark age, a new counter-Enlightenment. Why? Because too many of us living today, in the years just after the turn of the millennium, deny the science of climate change.

Such is the premise of a thought-provoking new work of “science-based fiction” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, two historians of science (Oreskes at Harvard, Conway at Caltech) best known for their classic 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. In a surprising move, they have now followed up that expose of the roots of modern science denialism with a work of “cli-fi,” or climate science fiction, entitled The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. SPOILER ALERT: Much of the plot of this book will be revealed below! In it, Oreskes and Conway write from the perspective of a historian, living in China (the country that fared the best in facing the ravages of climate change) in the year 2393. The historian seeks to analyze the biggest paradox imaginable: Why humans who saw the climate disaster coming, who were thoroughly and repeatedly warned, did nothing about it.

So why did two historians turn to sci-fi? On the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Oreskes explained that after the extensive research that went into Merchants of Doubt, she and Conway “felt like we really understood the science, but we also felt that the scientific community had really not explained why any of this mattered. And we just kept coming back to this idea of, how do we really talk about why this matters, and not just for polar bears, and not just for people living in far flung places or far into the future, but what’s really at stake.”

The resulting book, The Collapse of Western Civilization, diverges in many respects from other cli-fi works, such as the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson (who clearly influenced Oreskes and Conway, and who blurbed their new book). Collapse is quite short, and hardly a study in character or plot. It has one narrator, and that narrator is a “scholar,” approaching the topic analytically. The force of the story, then, comes not so much from dramatic elements, but rather, from its simple conceit: How would a fair-minded thinker, living 400 years from now, evaluate us?

The answer couldn’t be more depressing: We got it all wrong. We sacrificed our birthright. We unleashed ravaging heat waves, destabilized ice sheets, shot chemicals into the skies in a failed attempt to fix our mess, then halted that intervention and made everything still worse. (All of these things unfold in the story.)

Columbia University Press.

The consequences were toppled governments, mass migrations, and unimaginable human tragedy from starvation, dehydration, and disease. Finally came the “collapse” itself, not of Western Civilization at first, but of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which in the late 21st century rapidly disintegrated, driving up sea levels some 5 meters. Much of Greenland soon followed.

“We were trying to sort of play on this two different senses of ‘collapse,'” explained Oreskes on Inquiring Minds. Summarizing the plot of the book, she elaborated as follows: “The West Antarctic Ice Sheet does collapse, causing massive rapid sea level rise, which then puts into effect a kind of chain of events, which ultimately leads to the collapse of political and cultural institutions as well.”

This is a worst-case scenario, but it is far from crazy in light of our current trajectory. And we are on this trajectory because we’re ignoring the evidence all around us. “A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment,” writes Oreskes’ and Conway’s historian, explaining why our present era will later be called the “Period of the Penumbra.”

So why are we currently on course to be remembered for causing humanity’s greatest failure? The historian singles out two causes in particular, the first of which may be surprising.

First off, the historian argues that our scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the “95 percent confidence limit” (the requirement to statistically establish that there is less than a 1-in-20 chance that a given scientific result is due to chance—or, a 19 in 20 chance that it is real—before it can be accepted) is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, led scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening.

“We have come to understand the 95 percent confidence limit as a social convention rooted in scientists’ desire to demonstrate their disciplinary severity,” writes the historian. “Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did.” The historian even cites the currently live issue of the relationship between hurricanes and global warming: It is very likely that global warming is changing these storms in some way, but showing that in a way that satisfies all of the relevant experts has proven very difficult.

Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would too, says Oreskes. “If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it’s always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed,” she says. “So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.”

Naomi Oreskes. Andy Tankersley.

And then, there are the ideologues. They are, of course, vastly more culpable than the scientists. Here, The Collapse of Western Civilization picks up a theme from Merchants of Doubt: Free market ideologues, trained on the idea that the Soviet Union was the root of all evil, converted to an economic religion of their own dubbed “neoliberalism,” defined as “the idea that free market systems were the only economic systems that did not threaten individual liberty.” Unfortunately for this worldview, market failures do exist, and climate change is the granddaddy of them all. But too many neoliberal ideologues couldn’t accept that, so they doubled down on fantasy. (These are the climate change denying libertarians that we all know so well.)

In The Collapse of Western Civilization, neoliberals receive a comeuppance for this that is appropriate in its dramatic irony. The book ends by noting that China, a country not exactly wedded to freedom of thought or free markets, nevertheless survived climate calamity the best, thanks to its ability to exercise the centralized power of the state to force rapid climate adaptation. Eighty percent of Chinese thus survived the climate cataclysm. Other nations soon followed suit, also growing more autocratic.

Oreskes is not applauding this, of course; rather, she’s suggesting that it could be a very, very painful irony resulting from the behavior of neoliberals. “It could well be the case that the authoritarian nations are actually better situated to deal with climate disruption than the liberal democracies,” says Oreskes. “And we want to suggest that that’s a very worrisome thought.”

So can we still prevent ourselves from writing the story of The Collapse of Western Civilization—a story in which the historian narrator repeatedly points out missed opportunities, when something could have been done to prevent the disaster that followed? Oreskes thinks the answer is yes.

“It’s not too late. We do still have opportunities,” she says. “But if we continue the way we’ve been going, and we continue to miss these opportunities, there is going to become a point of no return.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of questionable claims about “drinkable” sunscreen, and a new study finding that less than 1 percent of scientists are responsible for a huge bulk of the most influential research.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds viaiTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How Western Civilization Ended, Circa 2014

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Designer Butterflies, See-Through Frogs, Giant Neural Networks…and Other Works of Modern Art

by aleidasharrington Posted on July 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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American artist Deborah Aschheim makes the “invisible visible”: In one series of works, she created room-size installations that allowed art lovers to walk through a nervous system, with each subsequent installation becoming “smarter” than the previous one. The sixth and final piece in the series was the most like a real brain—using motion sensors, closed circuit TVs and baby monitors, the network responded to the movement of its audience, capturing their actions and encoding “experiences” into “memories.” (For images of the fourth installation in the series, see below.)

Ascheim’s work calls into question an idea that was once widely accepted: That no two disciplines differ more greatly than science and art. The scientifically trained British novelist C.P. Snow crystallized this notion in his famed 1959 lecture about the “two cultures.” Scientists and those in the humanities, Snow said, just couldn’t communicate.

But to hear Arthur I. Miller tell it, that’s an antiquated point of view. Miller is a physics Ph.D., a science historian, and a philosopher—and an art aficionado to boot. And in his new book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art, he makes the case for the existence of a “third culture” that, today, is mashing together art, science, and technology into one big domain. “There are still people who think science is science, and art is art,” says Miller on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “But that is very far from the situation because it is very, very common and meaningful today for artists to indulge in science and technology in doing their work.”

Miller’s argument is supported not only by the myriad examples of artists who, like Aschheim, are highly reliant on science, but also by the surprising symmetries between how artists and scientists go about their work. One of his most important points: Scientists not only appreciate, but are in some cases driven by, aesthetic considerations. And artists don’t just pull ideas out of their imaginations: They engage in detailed work that often resembles scientific research.

“There’s aesthetics in biology: form is beautiful in biology, but it’s form as adapted to nature,” says Miller. “And when one gets into the physical sciences, one can even quantify aesthetics even more, in that, for example, we’ve heard the phrase, ‘This is a beautiful equation.'” Einstein, famously, put it like this: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

At the frontier of this new culture, there is a blossoming of workshops and events in which artists and scientists are thrown together into a room and forced to interact. The thinking is that cross-pollination will occur and new creative ideas will emerge. The CERN laboratory, home to the Large Hadron Collider, even has an artist in residency program.

Here are five artists who are using cutting edge science and technology to change the landscape of contemporary art:

Deborah Aschheim—Neural Architecture. Aschheim‘s installations are inspired by her personal connection to neurological disorders; her focus has been on investigating memory, both autobiographical and collective—in part because memory disorders like Alzheimer’s disease run in her family. She’s worked as an artist-in-residence at several academic institutions, and she immerses herself into the science behind her pieces. (At the University of California, San Francisco, she and I worked together on a piece that explored the subjectivity of neuroimaging.)

Panopticon (neural architecture no. 4). Deborah Aschheim

In the work pictured here, entitled Panopticon, Ascheim used 260 light cells on motion sensors, 23 pocket televisions, 3 DVDs, 3 closed circuit TV cameras, 14 nanny cams, and 4,000 feet of clear PVC tubing to create a series of “cells” in a type of neural network. This work was the fourth installment in her Neural Architecture series, in which each subsequent piece was “smarter” than the previous one—in essence, the architecture was “learning.” As people walked through the Panopticon installation, they triggered motion sensors that altered which cells were “on,” as lights in the nodes would turn on and off depending on the signal from the sensors. (See a video here.) Then, monitors inside the piece screened video footage from external galleries at the college, as well as a live feed of viewers from embedded spy cameras. This installation was not only responsive, it could also “remember”: monitors played short animated “memories” from the previous installation.

Here’s a close-up of the Panopticon:

Marta de Menezes—Modified Butterflies. Menezes creates “designer” butterflies: Not through genetic engineering, but by “interfering with the normal development of the wing, inducing the development of a new pattern never seen before in nature.” Her work of “art,” then, is actually the live animal that was altered by her vision. For examples of these butterflies see the lead image above, or below:

Modified butterfly. Marta de Menezes.

“They’re not genetically modified at all,” explains Miller of Menezes’ butterflies. “That’s the big thing about them. Menezes takes a hot needle and probes into the caterpillar. And out comes butterflies with asymmetrical wings.” Here’s Menezes’s description of her work:

These wings are an example of something simultaneously natural, but resulting from human intervention. The artistic intervention leaves the butterfly genes unchanged. Thus, the new patterns are not transmitted to the offspring of the modified butterflies. The new patterns are something that never existed before in nature, and that rapidly disappear from nature not to be seen again. These artworks literally live and die. They are an example of art with a lifespan—the lifespan of a butterfly. They are an example of something that is simultaneously art and life.

Brandon Ballengée—Ecological Art. Ballengée is an artist, activist and ecological researcher. He participates in biology field studies, works in a lab and uses his art to document the changes that are happening in various ecosystems. His artistic products put his biological specimens on display, and his most common subjects are frogs, toads and salamanders. In his book, Miller quotes Ballengée as saying that “amphibians are a ‘sentinel’ species, the environmental ‘canaries in the coal mine.'”

In some pieces, like the one pictured here, Ballengée uses biological technology to “clear and stain” a specimen, making it transparent and highlighting certain parts. DFA186:Hades, below, was created using more than 10 different chemicals and dyes.

Hades. Brandon Ballengee

According to Ballengée’s website, his work is designed to “re-examine the context of the art object from a static form (implying rationality and control) into a more organic structure reflecting the inherent chaos found within evolutionary processes, biological systems and nature herself.”

Mark Ackerley—DNA Melody. Ackerley is a composer and former employee of 23andMe, a biotech company that pulls genetic information out of a sample of your spit and helps you research your ancestry. While working at 23andMe, Ackerley developed an algorithm that translated snippets of DNA into music. Using four different musical parameters—rhythm, pitch, timbre and key signature—he turned genes into melodies. To hear an excerpt of a DNA melody played by a string quartet, click here.

Ken Perlin—Perlin Noise. At NYU’s Media Research Lab, Perlin invented a new way of making animation more life-like. His technique, called Perlin Noise, is used by animators world-wide, including in Pixar movies. He’s even won an Academy Award for his work. “Which is something pretty good for somebody who has an undergraduate degree in physics and a graduate degree in computer science,” comments Miller.

Watch this video to see how Pixar used mathematics and Perlin Noise to create life-like moss in the film Brave:

“When I asked Perlin what he considers himself to be—either an artist or a scientist—he said neither,” recalls Miller. Rather, Perlin identifies himself simply as “a researcher.”

“In other words,” argues Miller, “the labels ‘artist’ and ‘scientist’ are becoming increasingly irrelevant.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short discussion with Joe Hanson, writer and host of the “It’s Okay to Be Smart” video series, about the science of Game of Thrones, what blowing on Nintendo cartridges has to do with your cognitive biases, new evidence disproving Bigfoot, the relationship between seeing UFOs and alcohol consumption, why men born in winter are more likely to be left-handed…and more.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Designer Butterflies, See-Through Frogs, Giant Neural Networks…and Other Works of Modern Art

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The Science of Turning Plants Into Booze

by BobbyeDeLaConda Posted on July 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s the 4th of July, and you love your country. Your likely next step: Fire off some small scale explosives, and drink a lot of beer.

But that last word ought to trouble you a little. Beer? Is that really the best you can do? Isn’t it a little, er, uncreative?

Amy Stewart has some better ideas for you. Author of the New York Times bestselling book The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create The World’s Great Drinks, she’s a master of the wild diversity of ways in which, since time immemorial, human civilizations (virtually all of them) have created alcoholic drinks from the sugars of their native plants. “We have really good evidence—like analyzing the residue on pottery shards—really good evidence of people making some kind of alcoholic beverage going back at least 10,000 years, and probably much longer than that,” says Stewart on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

In other words, human beings pretty much always find a way when it comes to getting hammered. Indeed, you could argue that learning how to do so was one of the first human sciences. In a sense, it’s closely akin to capturing and using solar energy: Making alcohol, too, hinges upon tapping into the power created by the sun. “It is not much of an exaggeration to claim that the very process that gives us the raw ingredients for brandy and beer is the same one that sustains life on the planet,” writes Stewart in The Drunken Botanist.

Amy Stewart. Delightful Eye Photography

Here’s how it goes: The sun pours down vast amounts of energy upon the earth and fires the process of photosynthesis in plants. Plants take in sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, give off oxygen, and produce sugars.

It is from these sugars that the world’s diverse alcohols—ranging from cane alcohols to agave alcohols to tree bark alcohols—spring. But human cultures, spread across the world, had very different plant species to work with, so the resulting alcohols are also very different. “There’s all these processing steps you have to take to get at the sugar, but people were highly motivated to do that,” Stewart explained on Inquiring Minds.

One of the most interesting processes, originating in ancient Mexico, involved cutting into the stalk of the huge agave plant to get its sap to flow. But then, the agave sap seekers would cover up the puncture, letting sap pile up up, only to release it again—after which they would repeatedly scrape the plant’s insides, a process “which irritates the plant so much that sap begins to flow profusely,” explains Stewart in her book. One agave plant, Stewart reports, can generate more than 250 gallons of sap.

Once you’ve got a hearty supply of plant sugar, in the form of agave sap or whatever else, the second vital step of the alcohol process involves yeast. In the process of fermentation, these tiny microorganisms take sugar and break it down into carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol. For yeast, the alcohol is a waste product. For us, apparently, it’s a necessity. In the case of agave sap, the tradition is to let it ferment not only in yeast but a special kind of bacteria that lives on the agave plant. The result is pulque, a whitish, sour and low alcohol liquor sometimes compared to yogurt. (Using different processes, and different species of agave plant, gives you tequila and mezcal.)

But that’s just one of the myriad ways in which humans make alcohol. Forget your grapes-to-wine and your grains-to-beer pathways—they’re so unoriginal. “When you look at what the whole world drinks, you get a very different picture,” observes Stewart. “Around the world, sorghum is probably the plant used to make alcohol more than any other.” It is used to make anything from home-made beer in Africa to a high proof liquor called maotai in China.

So what are the implications for your July 4 libations? Stewart encourages making patriotic choices—but, the right patriotic choices.

First, here’s a drink that’s probably a lot less patriotic than you think: Some spruce beer claiming to have been invented by Benjamin Franklin. The history of liquors, writes Stewart, is “riddled with legends, distortions, half-truths, and outright lies,” and one of them involves Franklin. I’m always highly suspicious of any story that involves a Founding Father,” says Stewart. “You always want to look at that stuff with some scrutiny.”

The claim is that Franklin invented spruce beer, a very old drink that, Stewart explains, explorers actually used to fight scurvy because spruce trees contain ascorbic acid. When Franklin died, a recipe for spruce beer was found in his papers. But it turns out Franklin had merely copied the recipe from a book called The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747 by an Englishwoman named Hannah Glasse.

Franklin “never intended to take credit for her recipe,” says Stewart. “But nonetheless, you will see these microbreweries all over that do Founding Father beers, and they’ll have this Benjamin Franklin spruce beer. And I’m sure that they are never going to go back to put Hannah Glasse’s face on that bottle.”

So what’s a more authentic patriotic drink? Stewart gave us a recommendation, and a recipe.

“Two of the things that we drank a lot of in our early days were hard cider, apple cider, and corn whiskey, like bourbon,” says Stewart. “Those are very American drinks, and very much part of what the Founding Fathers were drinking. So, the two of them together actually make a drink called a stone fence.”

Here’s the recipe, as explained by Stewart on the podcast:

A “stone fence,” prepared at the Inquiring Minds podcast mixology laboratory.

All you do is take hard cider, which is the lightly alcoholic, fizzy kind of cider, and pour it in a glass with some ice, and add a little splash of bourbon, like an ounce, ounce and a half at the most. And give it a good stir. And that’s the drink.

Now, people really experiment with this drink. Sometimes they’ll do something a little bit like a mint julep, where they’ll add some mint, and some simple syrup, and maybe a little squeeze of lime juice to it. Sometimes people will add a little bit of fruit syrup, like cassis, or I don’t know, blackberry liqueur, or something like that, to make it a little bit of a fruitier, kind of red drink.

So it’s a nice template to explore. You’ve basically got something kind of fizzy and dry, and you’ve got the bourbon as a base alcohol. And then you can sort of add to that. But the nice thing is, it’s reasonably light. You can really dial back the bourbon, and have something that you can drink during the day when it’s hot.

So enjoy yourself (safely) this July 4—and when you have a drink, remember that alcohol production is a global scientific endeavor, based on an understanding of botany and also of the world’s diverse cultures.

“Knowing a little bit about what the plants are, and where they come from, and how they got turned into alcohol, you actually can make a better drink if you know some of that stuff,” says Stewart.

To listen to the full Inquiring Minds interview with Amy Stewart, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a conversation with Mother Jones reporter Molly Redden about how the Supreme Court flubbed reproductive health science in the Hobby Lobby case, and of Facebook’s troubling recent study that involved trying to alter users’ emotional states.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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The Science of Turning Plants Into Booze

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This Ice Sheet Will Unleash A Global Superstorm Sandy That Never Ends

by MilagroPCJA Posted on May 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you want to truly grasp the scale of the Earth’s polar ice sheets, you need some help from Isaac Newton. Newton taught us the universal law of gravitation, which states that all objects are attracted to one another in relation to their masses (and the distance between them). The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland are incredibly massive—Antarctica’s ice is more than two miles thick in places and 5.4 million square miles in extent. These ice sheets are so large, in fact, that gravitational attraction pulls the surrounding ocean towards them. The sea level therefore rises upward at an angle as you approach an ice sheet, and slopes downward and away as you leave its presence.

This is not good news for humanity. As the ice sheets melt due to global warming, not only do they raise the sea level directly; they also exert a weaker gravitational pull on the surrounding ocean. So water sloshes back towards the continents, where we all live. “If Antarctica shrinks and puts that water in the ocean, the ocean raises around the world, but then Antarctica is pulling the ocean towards it less strongly,” explains the celebrated Penn State glaciologist Richard Alley on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “And as that extra water around Antarctica spreads around the world, we will get a little more sea level rise in the US than the global average.”

Alley, a self-described “registered Republican” and host of the PBS program Earth: The Operators’ Manual, spoke on the occasion of truly dire news, of the sort that ice sheet experts like him have been dreading for some time. Last week, we learned from two separate research teams that the ice sheet of West Antarctica, which comprises just one relatively small part of Antarctic ice overall but contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by some 10 or 11 feet, has been irrevocably destabilized. Scientists have long feared that of all the planet’s great ice sheets, West Antarctica would be the first to go, because much of it is marine-based—the front edge of the ice sheet is bathing in increasingly warm water, which is melting it from beneath. Here’s a helpful visualization of how this process works:

AntarcticGlaciers.org (Bethan Davies) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

The great ice sheet naturally wants to push outwards and spread into the sea, Alley explains, much like water spreads out when poured onto a flat surface. But the advance is held up by the “grounding line”—the ice sheet’s mooring at a particular point on the sea floor.

And here’s where the problem arises: The latest research suggests that the ice is melting from below, and thus, losing its moorings. The oceanfront glaciers of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are experiencing “rapid grounding line retreat,” in scientific parlance, and this is happening “sooner than we initially expected, scientifically,” says Alley. The cause seems to be a change in winds driven by global warming, which in turn, is sending more warm water towards Antarctica’s glaciers. And as the glaciers lose ice from below, there is less friction with the ground, and thus, faster ice flow into the sea, where it can contribute to sea level rise.

“What they found,” Alley continues, “is that it’s likely that the fuse has already been lit.”

You need to really pause, and take a deep breath, to take in what that means: A little over three meters of sea level rise is already on its way into the ocean, with nothing to stop it. Granted, the process still takes a long time—likely hundreds of years—because as Alley explains, melting an ice sheet is a lot like unsnarling a traffic jam. “There’s this huge merge, that you take something that is a couple of miles thick, and a hundred miles wide, and you squeeze it way down,” says Alley. “And it’s coming out through a place that’s well less than a mile thick, and not nearly that wide.”

Richard Alley. Geoff Haines-Stiles for Earth: The Operators’ Manual.

Last year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a high-end estimate for global sea level rise of about three feet by the year 2100. Is that still valid? Given how long it takes to drain West Antarctica, maybe so. But maybe not. The latest research, Alley points out, “did not run the worst case scenario.”

Either way, three feet by 2100 is hardly any consolation to those humans, our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, who will be living in the 22nd century. If it hasn’t already collapsed by then, West Antarctica will be coming for them. And what does that mean?

As of now, coastal counties are home to 39 percent of the US’s population and generate nearly half of its GDP, according to the National Academy of Sciences. In other words, they are absolutely fundamental to our country and economy. But the collapse of West Antarctica basically means that in the future, all of these coastal regions—and all of the coastal regions everywhere else in the world—will be subjected to ocean conditions similar to a permanent Superstorm Sandy.

“The highest storm surge from Hurricane Sandy, or Superstorm Sandy, was just under 13 feet, and a whole lot of places it was 10 feet or less,” explains Alley. “And we’re looking at 11 feet, or something like that, from West Antarctica. Plus a little thermal expansion water expanding as it gets warmer and some mountain glacier melting that are already on the table. And so you can sort of think of the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy, something vaguely in that neighborhood for most of the coastline of the world.”

We remember what that looked like:

Queens, N.Y., during Superstorm Sandy. Wang Chengyun/Xinhua/ZUMA

The chief difference (besides the lack of hurricane-like wind and rain) would be that the water wouldn’t retreat any more. It wouldn’t just be a storm surge, it would be the new state of the ocean.

And it gets even worse: West Antarctica isn’t the only worry. To hear Alley tell it, it’s just that West Antarctica is pretty much lost to us already. Next up is a place that we might still be able to save, but that we’re currently playing an insane game of roulette with: Greenland.

It contains much more water than West Antarctica: About 23 feet of global sea level rise. That’s equivalent, on a worldwide scale, to the storm surge caused by Supertyphoon Haiyan when it struck the Philippines last year.

Satellite images show Greenland’s ice sheet before and after a stunning melting event in July 2012. NASA.

And here again, the news isn’t good. Recently published research finds that much more of the Greenland Ice Sheet than previously believed is exposed, from beneath, to the ocean. Basically, the new science amounts to a topographical re-mapping exercise—for terrain that is as much as three miles below a vast sheet of ice. And it turns out that the canyons beneath Greenland’s glaciers are deeper than scientists previously thought, and in some cases, well below sea level. This means, in turn, that more of the ice sheet is potentially exposed to warming seas—similar to the ice sheet of West Antarctica.

“It doesn’t yet say, ‘Greenland is about to fall into the ocean, run for the hills,'” says Alley, “but it does make Greenland look a little bit more vulnerable than we thought.”

But not yet sacrificed. Not yet gone. For Alley, then, the true upshot of the West Antarctica news is this: It makes saving Greenland absolutely essential. Ten feet of sea level rise will be incredibly painful to adapt to already, but 33 feet from the combined loss of West Antarctica and Greenland? It’s simply inconceivable. There is no such thing as adapting to that.

Essentially, then, we need an all out global push to stop global warming and save Greenland—and thus, the places where we all live.

Alley puts it like this: “If we’ve committed to 3.3 meters from West Antarctica, we haven’t committed to losing Greenland, we haven’t committed to losing most of East Antarctica. Those are still out there for us. And if anything, this new news just makes our decisions more important, and more powerful.”

Or, we could continue to fiddle and do nothing. If that happens, then Greenland is still just the beginning. Next up: The rest of Antarctica, of which West Antarctica comprises only a small part. Melt the whole continent, the largest mass of ice on Earth by far, and someday, it would reward you with as much as 200 feet of sea level rise. That would take a very long time to happen, and there is still plenty of time to stop it…but, we know already that it is possible, given high enough temperatures. According to Alley, the Earth currently sports many so-called “raised beaches” at altitudes far above our current sea level—preserved shorelines from a time when the oceans were radically higher.

That’s why, as a human civilization on Earth, pretty much the dumbest thing you could possibly do is melt your planet’s ice sheets. And that’s why, if the news about West Antarctica isn’t enough to snap us into action on climate change, then we will only be able to thank ourselves for the disaster that is coming.

To listen to the full interview with Richard Alley, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of a controversial project to replicate some of the most famous studies in social science, and of new research on whether firstborn children are more politically conservative than their later-born siblings.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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This Ice Sheet Will Unleash A Global Superstorm Sandy That Never Ends

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How To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real

by BettyWhitefoord Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian, has had quite the run lately. A few weeks back, she was featured in the first episode of the Showtime series The Years of Living Dangerously, meeting with actor Don Cheadle in her home state of Texas to explain to him why faith and a warming planet aren’t in conflict. (You can watch that episode for free on YouTube; Hayhoe is a science adviser for the show.) Then, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2014; Cheadle wrote the entry. “There’s something fascinating about a smart person who defies stereotype,” Cheadle observed.

Why is Hayhoe in the spotlight? Simply put, millions of Americans are evangelical Christians, and their belief in the science of global warming is well below the national average. And if anyone has a chance of reaching this vast and important audience, Hayhoe does. “I feel like the conservative community, the evangelical community, and many other Christian communities, I feel like we have been lied to,” explains Hayhoe on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “We have been given information about climate change that is not true. We have been told that it is incompatible with our values, whereas in fact it’s entirely compatible with conservative and with Christian values.”

Hayhoe’s approach to science—and to religion—was heavily influenced by her father, a former Toronto science educator and also, at one time, a missionary. “For him, there was never any conflict between the idea that there is a God, and the idea that science explains the world that we see around us,” says Hayhoe. When she was 9, her family moved to Colombia, where her parents worked as missionaries and educators, and where Hayhoe saw what environmental vulnerability really looks like. “Some of my friends lived in houses that were made out of cardboard Tide boxes, or corrugated metal,” she says. “And realizing that you don’t really need that much to be happy, but at the same time, you’re very vulnerable to the environment around you, the less that you have.”

Her research today, on the impacts of climate change, flows from those early experiences. And of course, it is inspired by her faith, which for Hayhoe, puts a strong emphasis on caring for the weakest and most vulnerable among us. “That gives us even more reason to care about climate change,” says Hayhoe, “because it is affecting people, and is disproportionately affecting the poor, and the vulnerable, and those who cannot care for themselves.”

The fact remains, though, that most evangelical Christians in the United States do not think as Hayhoe does. Recent data from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication suggests that while 64 percent of Americans think global warming is real and caused by human beings, only 44 percent of evangelicals do. Evangelicals in general, explains Hayhoe, tend to be more politically conservative, and can be quite distrusting of scientists (believing, incorrectly, that they’re all a bunch of atheists). Plus, some evangelicals really do go in for that whole “the world is ending” thing—not an outlook likely to inspire much care for the environment. So how does Hayhoe reach them?

From our interview, here are five of Hayhoe’s top arguments, for evangelical Christians, on climate change:

1. Conservation is Conservative. The evangelical community isn’t just a religious community, it’s also a politically conservative one on average. So Hayhoe speaks directly to that value system. “What’s more conservative than conserving our natural resources, making sure we have enough for the future, and not wasting them like we are today?” she asks. “That’s a very conservative value.”

Indeed, many conservatives don’t buy into climate science because they don’t like the “Big Government” solutions they suspect the problem entails. But Hayhoe has an answer ready for that one too: Conservative-friendly, market-driven solutions to climate problems are actually all around us. “A couple of weeks ago, Texas…smashed the record for the most wind energy ever produced. It was 38 percent of our energy that week, came from wind,” she says. And Hayhoe thinks that’s just the beginning: “If you look at the map of where the greatest potential is for wind energy, it’s right up the red states. And I think that is going to make a big difference in the future.”

2. Yes, God Would Let This Happen. One conservative Christian argument is that God just wouldn’t let human activities ruin the creation. Or, as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has put it, “God’s still up there, and the arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what he is doing in the climate, is to me, outrageous.” You can watch Inhofe and other religious right politicians dismissing climate change on biblical grounds in this video:

Hayhoe thinks the answer to Inhofe’s objection is simple: From a Christian perspective, we have free will to make decisions and must live with their consequences. This is, after all, a classic Christian solution to the theological problem of evil. “Are bad things happening? Yes, all the time,” says Hayhoe. “Someone gets drunk, they get behind the wheel of a car, they kill an innocent bystander, possibly even a child or a mother.”

Climate change is, to Hayhoe, just another wrong, another problem, brought on by flawed humans exercising their wills in a way that is less than fully advisable. “That’s really what climate change is,” she says. “It’s a casualty of the decisions that we have made.”

3. The Bible Does Not Approve of Letting the World Burn. Hayhoe agrees with the common liberal perception that the evangelical community contains a significant proportion of apocalyptic or end-times believers—and that this belief, literally that judgment is upon us, undermines their concern about preserving the planet. But she thinks there’s something very wrong with that outlook, and indeed, that the Bible itself refutes it.

“The message that, we don’t care about anybody else, screw everybody, and let the world burn, that message is not a consistent message in the Bible,” says Hayhoe. In particular, she thinks the apostle Paul has a pretty good answer to end-times believers in his second epistle to the Thessalonians. Hayhoe breaks Paul’s message down like this: “I’ve heard that you’ve been quitting your jobs, you have been laying around and doing nothing, because you think that Christ is returning and the world is ending.” But Paul serves up a rebuke. In Hayhoe’s words: “Get a job, support yourself and your family, care for others—again, the poor and the vulnerable who can’t care for themselves—and do what you can, essentially, to make the world a better place, because nobody knows when that’s going to happen.”

One reason some evangelicals dismiss climate worries is an apocalyptic worldview. Igor Zh./Shutterstock

4. Even If You Believe in a Young Earth, It’s Still Warming. One reason there’s such a tension between the evangelical community and science is, well, science. Many evangelicals are Young-Earth creationists, who believe that the Earth is 6,000 or so years old.

Hayhoe isn’t one of those. She studied astrophysics, and quasars that are quite ancient; and as she notes, believing the Earth and universe to be young creates a pretty problematic understanding of God: “Either you have to believe that God created everything looking as if it were billions of years old, or you have to believe it is billions of years old.” In the former case, God would, in effect, seem to be trying to trick us.

But when it comes to talking to evangelical audiences about climate change, Hayhoe doesn’t emphasize the age of the Earth, simply because, she says, there’s no need. “When I talk to Christian audiences, I only show ice core data and other proxy data going back 6,000 years,” says Hayhoe, “because I believe that you can make an even stronger case, for the massive way in which humans have interfered with the natural system, by only looking at a shorter period of time.”

6,000 years of temperatures records and a projection of the warming to come. Jos Hagelaars/My View on Climate Change

“In terms of addressing the climate issue,” says Hayhoe, “we don’t have time for everybody to get on the same page regarding the age of the universe.”

5. “Caring for our environment is caring for people.” Finally, Hayhoe thinks it is crucial to emphasize to evangelicals that saving the planet is about saving people…not just saving animals. “I think there’s this perception,” says Hayhoe, “that if an environmentalist were driving down the road…and they saw a baby seal on one side and they saw a human on the other side, they would veer out of the way to avoid the baby seal and run down the human.” That’s why it’s so important, in her mind, to emphasize how climate change affects people (a logic once again affirming the perception that the polar bear was a terrible symbol for global warming). And there’s bountiful evidence of this: The just-released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Working Group II” report on climate impacts emphasizes threats to our food supply, a risk of worsening violence in a warming world, and the potential displacement of vulnerable populations.

So is the message working? Hayhoe thinks so. After all, while only 44 percent of evangelicals may accept modern climate science today, she notes that that’s considerable progress from a 2008 Pew poll, which had that number at just 34 percent. Ultimately, for Hayhoe, it comes down to this: “If you believe that God created the world, and basically gave it to humans as this incredible gift to live on, then why would you treat it like garbage? Treating the world like garbage says a lot about how you think about the person who you believe created the Earth.”

To listen to the full interview with Katharine Hayhoe, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of recent findings that laboratory mice respond differently to male researchers, and new breakthroughs in “therapeutic cloning,” or the creation of embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real

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Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

by FelixHuddleston Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jared Diamond didn’t start out as the globe-romping author of massive, bestselling books about the precarious state of our civilization. Rather, after a Cambridge training in physiology, he at first embarked on a career in medical research. By the mid-1980s, he had become recognized as the world’s foremost expert on, of all things, the transport of sodium in the human gall bladder.

But then in 1987, something happened: his twin sons were born. “I concluded that gall bladders were not going to save the world,” remembers Diamond on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “I realized that the future of my sons was not going to depend upon the wills that my wife and I were drawing up for our sons, but on whether there was going to be a world worth living in in the year 2050.”

The result was Diamond’s first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. It’s the book that came before his mega-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it very much lays the groundwork for that work, as well as for Diamond’s 2005’s ecological jeremiad Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a sense, The Third Chimpanzee ties together Diamond’s thinking: It’s a sweeping survey of who we humans are—evolutionarily speaking, that is—and what that says about whether we can solve the “various messes that we’re making now,” in Diamond’s words. And this month, The Third Chimpanzee has been released in a new, shortened and illustrated edition for young adults, underscoring Diamond’s view that our entire future now depends on “enabling young people to make better decisions than their parents.”

In other words, if you want to boil down Diamond’s message these days to its essence, it would be something like this: Go forth, young chimpanzees, and clean up the mess we made. (Or else.) For Diamond, the story of who we are is also the story of what we must do. The younger among us, anyway.

Jared Diamond’s new edition of The Third Chimpanzee is directed at all the young chimpanzees out there, who had better be wiser than their parents. GlobalP/Thinkstock

So who are we? From the perspective of genetics, we are clearly the third species of chimpanzee. Our DNA is only 1.6 percent different from that of either chimps or pygmy chimpanzees (today more commonly called bonobos). “The reason why you and I are talking, and we’re not locked up in cages—whereas chimpanzees are not talking, and are locked up in cages—all that lies in 2 percent of our DNA,” explained Diamond on Inquiring Minds.

In fact, as Diamond emphasizes in his book, we are more genetically similar to chimps than many other closely related species are to one another. Gorillas and chimps, for instance, are 2.3 percent different, which means that chimps are considerably closer to us than to their other nearest primate relatives. Or, consider two very closely related songbird species: the red-eyed and white-eyed vireo. They are 2.9 percent different, notes Diamond.

So what makes humans so seemingly special? Until pretty recently, we weren’t. All the way up to 80,000 years ago, we were just “glorified chimpanzees,” in Diamond’s words. But then, something changed. Diamond calls it the “Great Leap Forward.” “The first art appears, necklaces, pierced ostrich shells,” says Diamond. “There’s rapid invention of tools, implying that even though our brains had been big for hundreds of thousands of years, we were not doing much interesting with these big brains—at least nothing that showed up preserved in the fossil record.”

We’re still not sure what brought on the Great Leap Forward. There wasn’t any big environmental change that drove us to adapt; all this happened in the middle of an Ice Age. Diamond’s hypothesis is that it was the development and perfection of spoken language that catapulted us forward, making possible teamwork, collaboration, planning, long-distance trade, and much more. Whether for lack of vocal capacity, brain development, or some other reason, chimps never made this leap. “A baby chimpanzee that was brought up in the home of a clinical psychologist couple, along with their baby, by age two, the chimpanzee could pronounce only four consonants and vowels, and it never got better,” says Diamond. “But if all you can say is, bi, ba, di, do, that doesn’t get you Shakespeare, and it also doesn’t let you discuss how to construct atomic bombs and bows and arrows.”

7 Stories.

In this view, the downstream consequences of language acquisition are, basically, everything that stands out about human civilization. That ranges from the highly beneficial—the dramatic growth in life expectancy—to the mixed: technologies that have significant benefits but also huge costs (like, say, devices to exploit fossil fuels for energy). And most of all, it includes environmental despoilment and resource depletion. “At present, we, humans, are operating worldwide on a non-sustainable economy,” says Diamond. “We’re exploiting resources, water, energy sources, fisheries, forests, at a rate such that most of these resources will get seriously depleted within a few decades.”

As a result, Diamond believes that our big brains are now setting us up for a major fall—a Great Leap Backward, if you will. “We are now reversing our progress much more rapidly than we created it,” writes Diamond in the new The Third Chimpanzee. “Our power threatens our own existence.”

In our interview, host Indre Viskontas asked Diamond where he thought humanity would be 100 years from now. What’s striking is that he wasn’t positive that the modern world, as we know it, would be around at all. It all depends, he says, on where we are at 2050:

DIAMOND: Either by the year 2050 we’ve succeeded in developing a sustainable economy, in which case we can then ask your question about 100 years from now, because there will be 100 years from now; or by 2050 we’ve failed to develop a sustainable economy, which means that there will no longer be first world living conditions, and there either won’t be humans 100 years from now, or those humans 100 years from now will have lifestyles similar of those of Cro-Magnons 40,000 years ago, because we’ve already stripped away the surface copper and the surface iron. If we knock ourselves out of the first world, we’re not going to be able to rebuild a first world.

In 2005’s Collapse, Diamond provided a great deal more detail on how ecological despoilment led to the collapse of other societies, such as the Easter Islanders, who cut down all their trees. The difference now, however, is that globalization causes our peril to be more widely distributed, kind of like a house of cards. “In this globalized world,” says Diamond, “it’s no longer possible for societies to collapse one by one. A collapse that we face, if there is going to be a collapse, it will be a global collapse.”

And yet despite all of this, Diamond says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the future of humanity. What exactly does that mean? “My estimate for the chances that we will master our problems and have a happy future, I would say the chances are 51 percent,” explains Diamond. “And the chances of a bad ending are only 49 percent,” he adds.

Not everybody agrees with Diamond that we’re in such a perilous state, of course. But there is perhaps no more celebrated chronicler of why civilizations rise, and why they fall. That is, after all, why we read him. So when Diamond says we’ve got maybe 50 years to turn it around, we should at least consider the possibility that he might actually be right. For if he is, the consequences are so intolerable that anything possible should be done to avert them.

Which brings us back to his book for young people—or, perhaps more accurately, for young chimpanzees. “This is the spirit in which I dedicate this book to my young sons and their generation,” writes Diamond in the new edition. “If we learn from the past that I have traced, our future may be brighter than that of the other two chimpanzees.”

To listen to the full interview with Jared Diamond, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of the science (and superstition) behind this week’s “blood moon,” and the case of K.C., the late amnesiac patient who taught us so much about the nature of human memory.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Mindsvia iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

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Scenes from the Postdocalypse

by SpencerGrady Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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How do you become a scientist? Ask anyone in the profession and you’ll probably hear some version of the following: get a Bachelor’s of Science degree, work in a lab, get into a PhD program, publish some papers, get a good post-doctoral position, publish some more papers and then apply for a tenure-track job at a large university. It’s a long road—and you get to spend those 10 to 15 years as a poor graduate student or underpaid postdoc, while you watch your peers launch careers, start families, and contribute to their 401(k) plans.

And then comes the academic job market. According to Brandeis University biochemist Dr. Gregory Petsko, who recently chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee on the postdoctoral experience in the US, less than 20 percent of aspiring postdocs today get highly coveted jobs in academia. That’s less than one in five. Naturally, many more end up in industry, in government, and in many other sectors—but not the one they were trained for or probably hoping for. “We’re fond of saying that we should prepare people for alternative careers,” explains Pesko, “without realizing that we’re the alternative career.”

Ethan Perlstein was one of these postdocs—before he decided he’d had enough. He had gotten his Ph.D. at Harvard under Stuart Schreiber, the legendary chemist, and then gone on to a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship in genomics at Princeton. He’d published in top journals, like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Genetics. He’d put in 13 years. But that “came to a close at the end of 2012,” says Perlstein on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, “when I encountered what I have been calling the postdocalypse, which is this pretty bad job market for professionally trained Ph.Ds—life scientists, in particular.” After two years of searching for an assistant professorship, going up against an army of highly qualified, job-hungry scientists, he gave up.

But it wasn’t just the competition for jobs that deterred Perlstein. Once you land a tenure-track job, you often have to get a big government grant in order to actually get tenure. And those grants are becoming ever more competitive, meaning that young faculty members usually need to apply multiple times before securing one. That is, if they actually do get one before the university that employs them loses patience.

“I guess I just thought, well, I don’t want to keep waiting any more,” recalls Perlstein. “At the time I was 33, and thought, well, I’m also seeing the statistic that says that the average age at which an independent biomedical research gets their first big grant from the NIH is 43 or 42. And I just thought, ‘Another 10 years of just waiting around for my turn in line?'”

You’ve probably heard the claim that the United States needs to produce more scientists, like Perlstein, to remain competitive with up-and-coming science powerhouses like India and China. It is a familiar litany whenever we hear laments about American science and its disturbing habit of resting on its laurels. But what you rarely hear in this argument is the fact that we don’t have nearly enough jobs to put to work the scientists we currently have. “U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings,” writes Harvard researcher Michael Teitelbaum, “the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more.”

Ethan Perlstein.

This situation is not new. Eight years ago, in 2006, George W. Bush’s National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni lamented that by denying young scientists the opportunity to try out their ideas, we’re in effect “eating our seed corn,” likening the situation to farmers who fail to prepare for the future. And that was before budget fights and sequestration dealt a further blow to the science funding stream that heavily influences whether or not our country can provide opportunities for its talented young researchers.

The life sciences, the field in which Perlstein works, are a case in point—and arguably the most challenging arena of all. According to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients, between the years 1993 and 2010, the number of US biomedical scientists with Ph.Ds rose from 105,000 to 180,000, even as the percentage employed in academia decreased from 58 percent to 51 percent, and the number holding tenured or tenure-track academic jobs decreased from 35 percent to 26 percent. That, in a nutshell, is the postdocalpyse. (Note that the vast majority of these Ph.Ds do find jobs somewhere, but fewer and fewer find the sort of academic jobs for which the postdoctoral experience is designed to train them.)

The ultimate cause? Funding. “Obama put out the latest 2015 budget for NIH—flat again. It’s been $30 billion ever since I basically entered grad school,” says Perlstein. “I was in college in the late 90s, when the NIH budget was doubling. So I remember someone telling me for the first time, ‘They pay you to go to graduate school.'” The NIH itself recognizes that its own budget largely determines how many Ph.D. students in life sciences there are, because these students are supported by grants: training grants, fellowships, and research grants.

A doubling of the NIH budget from 1998 to 2003 created dramatic growth in the biomedical science field—positions, infrastructure, postdocs, and everything else. But that set many people up for a fall. As Science magazine reported in 2007, the doubling “provoked a massive expansion in biomedical research, and expectations of federal support surged to a level that could not be sustained when the budget stopped growing. The crash is hitting labs, careers, and the psyches of scientists with a vengeance.” How did that affect postdocs? You can see as much in this NIH figure, showing that as the agency’s budget doubled, the length of time spent as a postdoc decreased, but once the doubling ended, it shot up:

National Institutes of Health

That’s right: The Postdocalypse is partly the result of science funding policies put in place by our legislators, who love science until they don’t any more, who double budgets and then slow or freeze them.

So what do the more than 80 percent of postdocs who leave academia do? Some get jobs in industry, with large pharmaceutical companies or engineering firms. Some get MBAs or law degrees and use their scientific training to carve out a niche in a different industry. Some teach. Some write. Some few remain unemployed.

Perlstein did something radically different—something gutsy and surprising that has garnered him recent profiles in The Wall Street Journal and Science Careers. He decided to break from tradition and forge a new path: build, fund and run his own independent science lab. To become an “indie scientist.” To in effect hack the scientific system, work within it yet outside of it, and support himself through crowdfunding, a compelling social media presence, and, of course, good ideas.

He’s not just building a biotech startup or monetizing some scientific finding. He is using alternative revenue sources to fund basic research, hearkening back to the 19th century, when citizen-scientists usually had family money, a rich patron or a day job

Doing science outside of science these days is far from easy or simple. Just consider the fact that if you’re not part of a university, it is very hard to get your hands on the research papers that are the lifeblood of knowledge exchange. “I’m part of the pay-walled 99 percent, the masses who don’t actually get access to all these great journals,” says Perlstein.

Then there’s the growing costs of technology, with most scientific endeavors relying on very expensive equipment. A university department might be able to purchase a multi-million-dollar MRI machine, for example. But it’s a lot harder for an independent scientist to make that investment.

But Perstein has figured out a way to make it work. His independent research focuses on so-called “orphan diseases,” which the FDA defines as conditions that afflict fewer than 200,000 people in the US. The NIH estimates that there are more than 6,800 rare diseases, which in aggregate affect more than 25 million Americans. Perlstein’s focus on orphan diseases satisfies his passion for basic science—giving him the opportunity to make long-lasting contributions to our understanding of our bodies—while also having a clear application that makes the work fundable. You might think that biotech and pharmaceutical companies would have little incentive to develop drugs for these diseases because the market is small compared to ailments than affect millions of people, like diabetes or Alzheimer’s. But orphan diseases have other incentives for investors: premium drug pricing, protection from competition, and expedited development timelines.

And then, there are the rich patrons who want to see them cured. Perlstein now has to actively court them. Foundations or wealthy families with a stake in finding a rare-disease treatment are increasingly becoming important funders of research. Perhaps the best example is the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which committed $75 million dollars to the development of an innovative new CF treatment approved in 2012.

“I want to take the best elements of academia, the best elements of industry, try to make a business model that is sustainable, and then push forwards toward a real scientific objective,” says Perlsten. “I call it a rare disease moonshot.”

To do his work, Perlstein raises money through crowdfunding sites like Experiment.com, and rents his own lab space in a San Francisco incubator called QB3, which offers the “biotech equivalent of garages: small spaces for entrepreneurs to lay the foundations for companies that may spearhead new industries.” Organizations like QB3 are now partnering with major research universities to create innovation hubs. In these hubs, you can rent bench space or share costs of expensive equipment with other independent scientists or academics, without having to make multi-million dollar investments yourself. This strategy reduces waste—not every lab needs an expensive MRI machine. If you can simply rent some time on a machine to meet your needs, science becomes much cheaper.

So is Perlstein an anomaly, or is he the new face of science? Maybe he’ll succeed as an indy scientist, and maybe he won’t. It’s hard not to cheer for him. But at the same time, perhaps the most resounding lesson is to lament a system that is forcing some of today’s best scientific minds out into the cold.

To listen to the full Inquiring Minds interview with Ethan Perlstein, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a story about the upcoming release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report on global warming impacts, and a discussion about the difficult question of when screening for disease conditions is (and isn’t) a good idea.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Scenes from the Postdocalypse

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