2606. The March for Science: Which Way for Science?

By The Editorial Team, Science for the People, April 18, 2017

On April 22, 2017, the March for Science will pull several thousands of people into the streets to stand up for science and resist funding cuts proposed by the current US administration. Our organization, Science for the People, sees this development as a mostly positive step in the right direction. The scale of the political and economic crises facing people across the world is enormous and will require mass movements to resist and organize for change. However, we believe there is a need to advance radical solutions to face these crises. As such we have been interested in how the March for Science has developed since its inception around January 25, 2017. Our members have been taking measured approaches to engaging with the March for Science–nationally and locally–with the overall goal of putting forward a politics capable of both taking seriously the multitude of contradictions that define scientific enterprise and accounting for the people affected by and disaffected with the pursuit, uses, and abuses of science.

For radicals and revolutionaries, unearthing and addressing the burning questions of the latent social movement for science is an urgent and primary task:

• What’s happening to U.S. Science?

• Who will March for Science? Who will not?

• What is Science for the People?

What’s Happening to US Science?

Supporting science as a national priority has fallen out of favor with the powers that be, to say the least. The new administration has made it perfectly clear that it intends to incapacitate the agencies and programs that make science happen every day in America–or at least those with missions orthogonal to developing U.S. military or resource extraction technologies. Their budget calls for the evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency, a double decimation and reorganization for the National Institutes of Health, annihilation of various Department of Energy advanced research programs dedicated to renewable energy and climate, and more. While none of this is set in stone yet, as the budget must pass through the US House and Senate, it remains to be seen just how much the legislature will dispose of what the president proposes. Either way, by a few major lacerations or a thousand tiny cuts, U.S. science is likely to lose a lot of blood.

For mainstream commentators, the primary victim is US leadership in research, as they see these attacks as tarnishing America‘s reputation for innovation and compromising national security. Concordantly, the tears of patriotism shed for the coming loss of America’s scientific hegemony come with a blurry vision for change: perhaps Congressional bipartisanship and compromise will save us all?

As bad as the current situation is, it’s worth remembering that funding woes for U.S. science are not new. Despite help from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the past near-decade of U.S. fiscal policy shows science losing out in the budgetary fights between the Obama administration’s ambitions for science and the GOP-controlled House of Representatives’ preference for imposing across-the-board austerity. Biomedical research institutions and their workforce have experienced much of the damage, with cuts and inflationary pressure on federal nondefense science and technology spending. It’s not just federal austerity bringing down U.S. science, either, as state cutbacks to public research universities have compounded the downward pressure for funding research and for the costs of providing science education, as the increasing costs of the university are passed on to the students as tuition.

None of this is intended to diminish the gravity of the current situation, but we should understand that what is happening is an increase in the rate of change on the same trajectory. This should prime us to be critical of establishment science organizations claiming to be vehicles of resistance to the current attacks on science. If the strategies and tactics of establishment science organizations were not able to secure the foothold for U.S. science during an administration that has been characterized as being the most friendly to science on record, how are we to expect that they will work under a regime that is decidedly oppositional to science and scientists? Ruthless criticism of the capacity of establishment organizations to make a change from science workers themselves is necessary if we wish to move beyond the current, stultifying paradigm of lobbying and “science communications” as being the only legitimate mode of political organizing for science. Neither perfectly crafted explanations of climate change nor new science-friendly PACs offer a way for science to move beyond its designated but diminished roles within increasingly dysfunctional U.S. federal and state governments, into a form that realizes its radical potential to catalyze transformative social and political change.

Which brings us back to the March for Science, its significance in this political moment, the entanglement of reformist and radical forces within the march, and the need for both progressive and radical scientists to strategize about moving forward after the march is over.

Who will March for Science? Who will not?

When the March for Science was announced in late January, the spontaneity and resonance of the call to action was palpable, as tens of thousands of people hopped into social media groups clamoring for details about the march and how they could get involved. No doubt, the magnitude of the organizing task–bringing together potentially hundreds of thousands of people in just over a month’s time to march on Washington, D.C. (the original event was supposed to take place in March)–proved too much for the group of initiators. Soon thereafter, a network of coordinators and communicators tapped into the digital infrastructure to take over the reins for organizing the march. The opacity of the internal organizing processes and leadership structure of the march makes it difficult to assess exactly how the current organizing committee came together. Representatives of the organizing committee have made several thoughtless remarks and strategic missteps that have induced negative feedback toward the organizers, leading to rolling revisions to the statements of principles and recomposition of the organizing body.

Scientists and activists have engaged in heated debate and varied discussions about the March for Science on Facebook and Twitter, stemming from claims by the march’s organizers that the march would be apolitical, nonpartisan, and separate from “identity politics.” For instance, in Memphis, the latest version of the March for Science Diversity and Inclusion Principles caused a split between organizers willing to uphold these principles, and those that were not. “This isn’t about scientists. It’s about science,” claims co-chair and science writer Dr. Caroline Weinberg, a stance March for Science has since changed. Science is inherently political. What is studied, to what end, by whom and under what conditions, are all political questions integral to the very nature of science. By denying this fact, we risk erasing the struggle of scientists of color, women, disabled scientists, and scientists from the LGBTQ community who have had to fight for education, credibility, funding, and job opportunities within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). 

Concordantly, we risk ignoring and diminishing the struggles of scientists who have resisted the use of science for making war, exploitation of workers, the enabling of environmentally destructive resource extraction, and the support of industries that harm people and the planet.

The slow acknowledgment of the political nature of science and the marginalization and exclusion of underrepresented groups from the March for Science, especially scientists of color, unleashed a Twitter storm in the three months leading up to the march. 

Underrepresented scientists expressed concern about the lack of diversity in the leadership of the March for Science, intersectionality, the hesitancy to reach out to other activist groups (e.g., Black Lives Matter, #NoDAPL, Women’s March), the need for a diversity statement, and accessibility issues. Dr. Stephani Page, a biochemist/biophysicist, and creator of #BLACKandSTEM, spearheaded a discussion on diversity on Twitter with the hashtag #marginsci. This thread has helped force the March for Science to reflect on and reconsider their approach to organizing the march. Thanks to #marginsci, the March for Science diversity statement has been through several revisions. The March for Science organizers have also more recently created an anti-harassment policy (due to several racist, sexist, ableist, and homophobic incidents online) and recruited a few scientists of color to assist with the march.

These various stumblings reveal the ugly, longstanding problem with diversity and inclusion in STEM. According to sociologist Dr. Zuleyka Zevallos, who has been following and reporting the actions and discourse of the March for Science, organizers have even perpetuated sexist and racist stereotypes of passivity and potential for violence, respectively, in promoting the march. Female scientists of color have been trolled (i.e., harassed online) for their comments by White and primarily male peers in the science community. In response to #marginsci, the organizers announced two female scientists of color, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, and Dr. Lydia Villa-Komaroff, as spokespeople for the march. According to critics, the addition of these women seems to be an afterthought to the organizers, who had early on slated celebrity scientist Bill Nye as a march co-chair. Dr. Stephani Page responded to the announcement by stating that despite the fact that she loves Nye, she still thinks that he reinforces the White, male narrative in science. “He is a white male, and in that way he does represent the status quo of science, of what it is to be a scientist,” Page tells Buzzfeed.

We applaud the efforts of activists like Page to push the March for Science to take such steps and consider it their victory that the organizers were made to respond. As of the writing of this statement, it is unknowable how many scientists of color or other individuals from underrepresented groups plan to attend or stay home during the March for Science. But it is clear that many people from marginalized and oppressed communities have been turned off by the messaging and the lack of acknowledgment of their historic struggles within STEM. 

This negation both whitewashes the impact of science in enabling the oppression and marginalization of these communities and ignores the contributions of scientists from these communities. For many marginalized scientists, the March for Science appears to be centering the concerns of those who are overrepresented in STEM by focusing on issues of funding and shifting research priorities as the dominant themes of the march, while subsuming the experiences of marginalized scientists to statements of diversity, rather than creating parity for issues that are just as important and longstanding as funding. The attempts made by the organizers of the March for Science to downplay the deeply political nature of contemporary science risk making it a symbolic representation of objectivity and “science for all,” a unifying rallying cry to fight against the “attack on science.” Such failures do not address the systemic racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and classism that still plagues the science community and society more broadly. These are not simply problems of individual morality but rather are complex structural problems and must be addressed as such through organization and demands beyond the calls for objective or diverse science.

In this moment, it is vital that we question who the scientific establishment benefits, oppresses, excludes, and ignores. How can science be more inclusive and equitable to people who identify as being disabled, LGBTQ, of color, and/or female-identifying? How can we enhance science access to local disenfranchised communities (e.g., indigenous, low-income, Black, Latinx) and how can we work with and for those communities? How can science serve humanity and the planet? Is it possible for scientists who desire meaningful social change in our society to put their talents to work for a movement capable of achieving that change, or must “politics” remain split off from their work? Can we ensure the use of evidence-based, ethical decision-making in public policy? As the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, and the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) fight have shown us, now is not the time for scientists to sit on the sidelines, claim neutrality or objectivity, and remain silent. Silence amounts to acceptance of the status quo, which could mean life or death for people and the planet.

What is Science for the People?

It is impossible to escape the political implications of scientific work. Particularly since the Sputnik era, the American ruling class–primarily characterized by upper-class, educated, wealthy Whites–has long had a commitment to science based on the belief that science is good for the long-term welfare of American capitalism, exemplified by the rhetoric around the potential STEM workforce shortage and the imperative that the U.S. should reclaim its rightful place as the top nation in STEM. This outlook is shared by the trustees of universities, leading U.S. scientists in the National Academies, government administrators, and private funding agencies. They see this viewpoint as representing a mature social responsibility that is morally superior to the “pure search for truth” attitudes of some scientists, who are tolerated as long as they don’t impede or challenge these economistic aims. With the reemergence of the use of biological concepts of race in genomics research and climate change denial, persistent environmental racism (environmental disasters that disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income residents, like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and fracking in North Dakota and California), major racial, class, and national health disparities, the role of scientists and science in society needs to be reexamined. Dr. Marc Edward’s, in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education about his and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s investigation that revealed the deliberate inaction of the city and state government to address the lead contamination of Flint’s water supply, shared:

I am very concerned about the culture of academia in this country and the perverse incentives that are given to young faculty. The pressures to get funding are just extraordinary. We’re all on this hedonistic treadmill—pursuing funding, pursuing fame, pursuing h-index—and the idea of science as a public good is being lost. [emphasis added]

Like Edwards, if the scientific community believes that science truly is a public good, then more scientists need to speak out, organize, and engage, for themselves, with, and for all marginalized and oppressed people. As a society, we need to use science to serve the people, not to turn profits or support private interests. Traditional attempts to reform scientific activity through professional societies and conferences, to disentangle it from its more malevolent and vicious applications, have failed. Actions designed to preserve the moral integrity of individuals without addressing how the institutions of science and the power they embody are complicit in systems of domination have been ineffective. What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical shift in the practice of science. 

Scientific workers must organize amongst themselves and as part of broader struggles to envision and achieve a liberatory science. This will require close attention to the changing nature of scientific work itself. For instance, young scientists, who are increasingly unable to find permanent employment as scientists, especially in the academy with its supposed offer of intellectual independence, will have difficulty changing science in a purely individualist manner.

The March for Science nationally and others globally who have been politically energized by the current state of affairs can learn from the history of radical politics in science.

Courageous scientists throughout history have taken on social and political issues above and beyond their disciplinary “expertise.” Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, Jon Beckwith, Stephen Jay Gould, Ruth Hubbard, Hilary Rose, Steven Rose, Christopher Caudwell, Helen Rodriguez-Trias, Connie Redbird Uri, and antebellum scientists of color like James McCune Smith and Martin Delany, are all examples of scientists whose lives, science and activism were propelled by the understanding that science is deeply political. In the 1970s, radical socialist science movements like Science for the People in the U.S. and British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the U.K. enabled a renaissance for socially conscious, politically radical critiques and analyses of the entanglement of science with U.S. imperialism and global capitalism. At the 1970 meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science, members of Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (a precursor to Science for the People) publicly disrupted a keynote by Glenn Seaborg, then Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, and indicted him for both his role in aiding the development of nuclear weapons and “establishing, organizing, maintaining, and developing institutions of science and government for the effective use of the ruling class.” In the early 1970s, Science for the People’s Technical Assistance Program (TAP), designed to aid radical groups with technical needs, helped free medical clinics hosted by the Chicago Black Panther Party break into city electrical power grids to provide free power for the clinics. 

Journalists for the Science for the People magazine worked to document the negative consequences of environmental exploitation on local populations and the movements of citizens to protect the land against energy and mining corporations (see Kelly Moore’s Disrupting Science and the forthcoming book on SftP for more history). They demonstrated that such environmental catastrophes could not be undone by science alone, but required scientists to unite with citizens organizing for their communities against powerful corporations and lackadaisical regulatory agencies. Yet with the deradicalization of academia and lack of history within science education curriculum, many scientists are unaware of this history, as evidenced by the national March for Science’s blundering statements concerning politics and science.

By reorganizing Science for the People, we aim to revitalize its legacy of documenting the use and abuse of science and to organize scientists to contribute to human liberation and transformative social change. As a coalition of progressive and radical science workers and supporters, Science for the People finds the alternatives of “science for science’s sake” and “science for the progress of capitalism” equally unacceptable. We can no longer stand by as science is used as a means to promote a neoliberal, capitalist agenda that objectifies individuals and communities in pursuit of exploitative and imperialist goals. We also cannot simply engage in scientific pursuits without questioning who the research serves and impacts, how science is directly or indirectly complicit in oppression, and how we can make our work accessible and meaningful to everyone. To uncritically assume that science is progressive is to leave the tools of science in the hands of the powerful. We need to think about scientific work differently: what would science look like if it were with and for the people?

Science for the People must be organized through a grassroots effort that is intersectional, inclusive, democratic, and accessible from its inception. We must be cognizant of how individual experiences of science are shaped by race, gender, class, nationality, and so on and how this, in turn, shapes the questions, assumptions, approaches, and social interactions in science. Rather than hiding behind the pretense of an “apolitical science,” we should acknowledge, reveal, critique, and contest the ways in which power and privilege manifest within the scientific community, scientific practice, and society. Scientists, science educators, science communicators, advocates, and community members should share “ownership” of the movement while elevating and centering the voices of the marginalized and oppressed. This is especially vital if the scientific community intends to (re)establish trust with communities that have often been harmed and traumatized by scientists and scientific research (e.g., indigenous, Black, Latinx, disabled, LGBTQ). We should be inspired by the work of those scientist-activists who have been and continue to engage the scientific community and society in difficult conversations around science, power, privilege, and oppression, such as Dr. Danielle N. Lee, Dr. Jedidah Isler, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and the Scientists Against Fascism, Dr. Raychelle Burks, Dr. Caleph Wilson, Dr. Marc Edwards, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, and Free Radicals.

Anything called Science for the People must directly serve marginalized, exploited, and oppressed persons and strengthen their ability to participate in struggles and achieve liberation for all. Doing this radical political work requires forging connections to community and political organizations where scientific analysis and technical prowess can provide aid in struggle, addressing the “undone science” that has yet to be completed. To accomplish this, it will be necessary to establish within Science for the People a network of scientists organized and capable of collaborating on projects brought forth by social and political organizations seeking assistance and take seriously the process of learning from criticisms and suggestions by others. It also calls for the (re)learning of the history of science with a focus on hidden or untold stories and the creation of decolonized science.

Additionally, we must foster resistance to doing science that can be used as weapons against the people, either in the natural or social sciences, or that aids in the efficiency of the capitalist system to exploit people and the planet for profit. The time has come for a revitalized Science for the People. STEM workers must redirect their capacity away from serving reactionary forces and institutions that uphold the current system, and towards work that saves the planet and serves the people.

The March for Science this weekend is the exciting first step of what we hope will become a mass movement to both defend the necessity of science and to build science that works for all people. We have an opportunity to raise the issues we have discussed with our colleagues and community members while there is heightened visibility and momentum around the power of science to unite and change our world. We present both enthusiasm for and criticism of the March for Science in the spirit of solidarity and construction. As scientists and those who deem science valuable mobilize this weekend we have a chance to think deeply and critically about the root of issues in science research, funding, and impact. Science has the potential to be a force of liberation but is frequently complicit in systems of domination. Let us join with all those engaged in liberatory struggles to build a world where all science is Science for the People.

2605. The Great Acceleration

By International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, January 15, 2015

Great Acceleration 2015 from International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme

The second half of the 20th Century is unique in the history of human existence. Many human activites reached take-off points sometime in the 20th Century and sharply accelerated towards the end of the century. 

The last 60 years have without doubt seen the most profound transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind. 

The effects of the accelerating human changes are now clearly discernible at the Earth system level. Many key indicators of the functioning of the Earth system are now showing responses that are, at least in part, driven by the changing human imprint on the planet. The human imprint influences all components of the global environment--oceans, coastal zone, atmosphere, and land. 

Dramatic though these human-driven impacts appear to be, their rates and magnitudes must be compared to the natural patterns of variability in the Earth system to begin to understand their significance.

The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration provides a useful measure with which to evaluate the rate and magnitude of human-driven change compared to natural variability. The human imprint on carbon dioxide is unmistakable. In December 2014, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration stood at 399 parts per million by volume (ppmV), over 100 ppmV above the previous maximum level of around 280 ppmV recorded in the Vostok ice core.

Within the current limits of resolution of the ice-core records, the present concentration has been reached at a rate at least 10 and possibly 100 times faster than carbon dioxide increases at any other time during the previous 420 000 years. Thus, in this case human-driven changes are well outside the range of natural variability exhibited by the Earth system for the last half-million years at least.

Over just the past few hundred years, human activities have clearly evolved from insignificance in terms of Earth system functioning to the creation of global-scale impacts that:

• are approaching or exceeding in magnitude some of the great forces of nature

• operate on much faster time scales than rates of natural variability, often by an order of magnitude or more

• taken together in terms of extent, magnitude, rate and simultaneity, have produced a no-analogue state in the dynamics and functioning of the Earth system.

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The domino effect

Human impacts on the Earth system do not operate in separate, simple cause-effect responses. A single type of human-driven change triggers a large number of responses in the Earth system, which themselves cascade through the system, often merging with patterns of natural variability.

The responses seldom follow linear chains, but more often interact with each other, sometimes damping the effects of the original human forcing and at other times amplifying them. Responses become feedbacks, which in turn can lead to further forcings that can alter the functioning of the Earth system.

The nature of the Earth system’s responses to the increasing anthropogenic forcing is more complex than simple cause-effect relationships, such as greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming. 

Fossil-fuel combustion produces a range of gases that have a large number of cascading effects. For example, carbon dioxide not only affects climate but directly affects how vegetation grows. It changes the carbonate chemistry in the ocean – the oceans are becoming more acidic, which in turn affects marine organisms. Changing carbonate chemistry is a factor in the widespread decline of coral reefs around the world

Fossil-fuel combustion also produces oxidising gases such as nitric oxide and sulphur dioxide that have well-known effects such as acidification and eutrophication of ecosystems. 

However, these gases can eventually contribute to changes in fundamental Earth system functioning because of their indirect effects on the radiative properties of the atmosphere, and hence climate. The mechanisms are through reactions with other gases plus their impacts on the ability of the atmosphere to cleanse itself through oxidation and other processes.

Aerosols produced by fossil-fuel combustion can fertilise or reduce plant growth, depending on the circumstances, and directly affect human health. They also lead to large-scale direct or indirect modifications of climate.

We can trace even more subtle effects back to fossil-fuel combustion. Increasing carbon dioxide levels affect the stomatal opening of terrestrial vegetation, reducing water vapour loss through the stomates. This results in higher water-use efficiency. This effect is especially pronounced in semi-arid vegetation, and can lead to increased productivity through enhanced soil moisture.

More generally, no two species react in an identical way to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. This leads to changes in the competitive abilities of plants and hence to changes in species abundances and community composition. Fossil-fuel combustion cascades through the Earth system to become even a biodiversity issue.

Like fossil-fuel combustion, land-cover and land-use change also trigger widespread cascading effects at local, regional and global scales. We can show a few ways local effects of land-use change cascade through regional to global scales.

Multiple, interacting stresses

Global change does not operate in isolation but rather interacts with an almost bewildering array of natural variability modes and also with other human-driven effects at many scales. Especially important are those cases where interacting stresses cause a threshold to be crossed and a rapid change in state or functioning to occur.

Adapted from Steffen et al, Global Change and the Earth System, 2004  (pdf, 4.2 MB)

Great Acceleration 2015 - Press release 15 January 2015

Great Acceleration 2015 - Data  (excel 2007, 364.7 kB)

2604. Researchers Estimate 1 Trillion Species Currently Live on Earth

By National Science Foundation, May 2, 2016

Biological tree of life

Earth could contain nearly 1 trillion species, with only one-thousandth of 1 percent now identified, according to the results of a new study.

The estimate, based on universal scaling laws applied to large datasets, appears today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The report's authors are Jay Lennon and Kenneth Locey of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

The scientists combined microbial, plant and animal datasets from government, academic and citizen science sources, resulting in the largest compilation of its kind.

Altogether, these data represent more than 5.6 million microscopic and non-microscopic species from 35,000 locations across all the world's oceans and continents, except Antarctica.

Great challenge in biology

"Estimating the number of species on Earth is among the great challenges in biology," Lennon said. "Our study combines the largest available datasets with ecological models and new ecological rules for how biodiversity relates to abundance. This gave us a new and rigorous estimate for the number of microbial species on Earth."

He added that "until recently, we've lacked the tools to truly estimate the number of microbial species in the natural environment. The advent of new genetic sequencing technology provides a large pool of new information."

The work is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Dimensions of Biodiversity program, an effort to transform our understanding of the scope of life on Earth by filling major gaps in knowledge of the planet's biodiversity.

"This research offers a view of the extensive diversity of microbes on Earth," said Simon Malcomber, director of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program. "It also highlights how much of that diversity still remains to be discovered and described."

Estimating numbers of microbial species

Microbial species are forms of life too small to be seen with the naked eye, including single-celled organisms such as bacteria and archaea, as well as certain fungi.

Many earlier attempts to estimate the number of species on Earth ignored microorganisms or were informed by older datasets based on biased techniques or questionable extrapolations, Lennon said.

"Older estimates were based on efforts that dramatically under-sampled the diversity of microorganisms," he added. "Before high-throughput genetic sequencing, scientists characterized diversity based on 100 individuals, when we know that a gram of soil contains up to a billion organisms, and the total number on Earth is more than 20 orders of magnitude greater."

The realization that microorganisms were significantly under-sampled caused an explosion in new microbial sampling efforts over the past several years.

Extensive sampling efforts

The study's inventory of data sources includes 20,376 sampling efforts on bacteria, archaea, and microscopic fungi, as well as 14,862 sampling efforts on communities of trees, birds and mammals.

"A massive amount of data has been collected from these surveys," said Locey. "Yet few have tried to pull together all the data to test big questions."

He added that the scientists "suspected that aspects of biodiversity, like the number of species on Earth, would scale with the abundance of individual organisms. After analyzing a massive amount of data, we observed simple but powerful trends in how biodiversity changes across scales of abundance."

Scaling laws for all species

The researchers found that the abundance of the most dominant species scales with the total number of individuals across 30 orders of magnitude, "making it the most expansive scaling law in biology," says Lennon.

Scaling laws, like that discovered by the scientists, are known to accurately predict species numbers for plant and animal communities. For example, the number of species scales with the area of a landscape.

"Until now, we haven't known whether aspects of biodiversity scale with something as simple as the abundance of organisms," Locey said. "As it turns out, the relationships are not only simple but powerful, resulting in our estimate of upward of one trillion species."

The study's results also suggest that identifying every microbial species on Earth presents a huge challenge.

"Of those species cataloged, only about 10,000 have ever been grown in a lab, and fewer than 100,000 have classified genetic sequences," Lennon said. "Our results show that this leaves 100,000 times more microorganisms awaiting discovery -- and 100 million to be fully explored.

"Microbial biodiversity, it appears, is greater than we ever imagined."

2603. Antarctic Ice Reveals Earth’s Accelerating Plant Growth

By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, April 5, 2017

The Amazon rain forest in Brazil. “The pace of change in photosynthesis is unprecedented in the 54,000-year record,” said one scientist, J. Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced.Credit Brazil Photos/LightRocket, via Getty Images.

For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out what all the carbon dioxide we have been putting into the atmosphere has been doing to plants. It turns out that the best place to find an answer is where no plants can survive: the icy wastes of Antarctica.

As ice forms in Antarctica, it traps air bubbles. For thousands of years, they have preserved samples of the atmosphere. The levels of one chemical in that mix reveal the global growth of plants at any point in that history.

“It’s the whole Earth — it’s every plant,” said J. Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced.

Analyzing the ice, Dr. Campbell and his colleagues have discovered that in the last century, plants have been growing at a rate far faster than at any other time in the last 54,000 years. Writing in the journal Nature, they report that plants are converting 31 percent more carbon dioxide into organic matter than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

The increase is because of the carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere, which fertilizes the plants, Dr. Campbell said. The carbon in the extra plant growth amounts to a staggering 28 billion tons each year. For a sense of scale, that is three times the carbon stored in all the crops harvested across the planet every year.

“It’s tempting to think of photosynthesis at the scale of the entire planet as too large to be influenced by human actions,” said Christopher B. Field, the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, who was not involved in the study. “But the story here is clear. This study is a real tour de force.”

Starting in the Industrial Revolution, humans began to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a prodigious rate. Since 1850, the concentration of the gas has increased over 40 percent.

Since plants depend on carbon dioxide to grow, scientists have long wondered if that extra gas might fertilize them. The question has been hard to answer with much certainty.

For one thing, a plant relies on more than just carbon dioxide. It also needs water, nitrogen, and other compounds. Even with a perfect balance of nutrients, plants may grow at different rates depending on the temperature.

To get some real-world measurements of plant growth, some scientists have built enclosures so that they can determine the precise amounts of carbon dioxide as well as the growth of plants. They can even run experiments by flooding the enclosures with extra carbon dioxide.

Trees and other plants in these enclosures have indeed grown faster with more carbon dioxide. But it has been hard to extend these results to the planet as a whole. Scientists found that plants responded differently to carbon dioxide in different parts of the world. The logistical challenge of these experiments has mostly limited them to Europe and the United States, leaving huge swaths of forests in the tropics and the far north little studied.

More recently, scientists have turned to satellites to get clues to what plants have been doing. They have measured how green the land is, and from that data, they have estimated the area covered by leaves.

But this method has its shortcomings, too. Satellites cannot see leaves hiding under clouds, for example. And the size of leaves serves as only a rough guide to a plant’s growth. If a plant builds bigger roots, that growth will be hidden underground.

In the mid-2000s, atmospheric scientists discovered a powerful new way to measure plant growth: by studying an unimaginably rare molecule called carbonyl sulfide.

Carbonyl sulfide — a molecule made of a carbon atom, a sulfur atom, and an oxygen atom — is present only in a few hundred parts per trillion in the atmosphere. That is about a million times lower than the concentration of carbon dioxide. Decaying organic matter in the ocean produces carbonyl sulfide, a gas that then floats into the atmosphere.

Plants draw in carbonyl sulfide along with carbon dioxide. As soon as it enters their tissues, they destroy it. As a result, the level of carbonyl sulfide in the air drops as plants grow.

“You can see it in real-time,” said Max Berkelhammer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “In the morning when the sun rises, they start to pull it out.”

This discovery led scientists to go to Antarctica. The air that reaches the South Pole is so well mixed that its carbonyl sulfide level reflects the worldwide growth of plants.

As ice forms in Antarctica, it captures bubbles of air, creating a historical record of the atmosphere reaching back thousands of years. Last year, Dr. Campbell and his colleagues analyzed carbonyl sulfide records from the last 54,000 years.

Over the course of several thousand years at the end of the ice age, the gas dropped significantly. Dr. Campbell said the decline reflected the retreat of the glaciers. As new land was uncovered, plants sprang up and began destroying carbonyl sulfide.

It is more challenging to interpret the more recent record in the ice. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have added extra carbonyl sulfide through textile manufacturing and other activities. This infusion of carbonyl sulfide has raised levels of the gas in the ice over the past century.

But Dr. Campbell and his colleagues found that it hasn’t increased very much. As we have been adding carbonyl sulfide to the atmosphere, plants have been pulling it out. In fact, the scientists found, they have been pulling it out at a staggering rate.

“The pace of change in photosynthesis is unprecedented in the 54,000-year record,” Dr. Campbell said. While photosynthesis increased at the end of the ice age, he said, the current rate is 136 times as fast.

With all that extra carbon dioxide going into plants, there has been less in the air to contribute to global warming. The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, but it might be even hotter if not for the greening of the Earth.

Dr. Berkelhammer, who was not involved in the new study, said the research would serve as a benchmark for climate projections. “It means we can build more accurate models,” he said.

To test out climate models, researchers often go back to the historical record and see how well they can replay it. Now they can see if their models project plants growing at the rate observed by Dr. Campbell and his colleagues.

It is still an open question what plants will do in years to come if carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise.

More carbon dioxide might spur even more growth. But many climate models project that plants will suffer as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift. Despite the extra carbon dioxide, worldwide plant growth may fall, and plants will no longer help to buffer the impact of global warming.

“I’ve been referring to this as a carbon bubble,” Dr. Campbell said. “You see ecosystems storing more carbon for the next 50 years, but at some point you hit a breaking point.”

2602. Remembering Vilma Espín on Her 87th Birthday

By Eduardo Palomares Calderón, Granma, April 7, 2017 

Vilma Espín in the Second Front in the east of the island.
 Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of the Second Front

SANTIAGO DE CUBA.– Colonel Alberto Vázquez García’s participation in the clandestine struggle in Santiago de Cuba, his early incorporation into the Rebel Army, and being among the founders of the Frank País Second Eastern Front, allowed him to interact with Vilma Espín Guillois. Today, on the 87th anniversary of the birth of this extraordinary Cuban woman, he offers some of his fondest memories of her.

“We were practically neighbors because we lived two and a half blocks from each other. In addition, I was a bus driver on a route that passed by the University of the Oriente, and I often saw her take the bus to go to classes, but it never crossed my mind that this young girl would become that outstanding figure of the struggle and the triumphant Revolution.”

Thus began Vázquez García’s conversation with Granma. Today he is director of the Frank País Second Oriental Front Historical Complex, located in the Santiago mountains, where a rock surrounded by orchids, ferns, roses and other plants that Vilma so liked, treasures the ashes of the Cuban Heroine.Vilma Espín in the Second Front in the east of the island.  

“Afterwards,” he noted, “we began the clandestine struggle and we met in meetings with Frank País, but it was with the armed uprising of November 30, 1956, that I was able to get to know her better, because after the attack on the Maritime Police station we went to the Headquarters of the General Staff, where she was with Frank, Haydée, Hart, Asela de los Santos, and other comrades.

“It was admirable to see her with such equanimity, her attention to the combatants. In that difficult moment, she made us a papaya fruit smoothie, and bid us farewell asking us to take care of ourselves. The next time I saw her was February 27 in my house, when she came to give me the antipyretic vaccine, before giving me the instructions for the transfer to the Sierra Maestra, as part of the first reinforcement sent by Frank to Fidel.”

More than a year would pass before Vázquez García saw Vilma again when he was accompanying the founder and chief of the Second Front, Comandante Raúl Castro Ruz, in the area of Soledad de Mayarí. Vilma passed by in a jeep that would take her to the rebel frontline. Her participation in the guerrilla struggle would allow him to repeatedly coincide with her during tours of the Front.

“She led by example,” he notes, “She was capable of undertaking significant unifying work with the peasant women, she created a revolutionary environment among them, which was not easy, because many of these women were not educated or in the proper social situation, but as a Chemical Engineer and given her personal qualities, Vilma had the tremendous ability to do so.

“For this and more one can say that despite being at Raúl’s side, Vilma was a person who shone on her own. It suffices to recall the moment when they killed Frank, in which our leader had fallen when she took responsibility and began to manage the movement in Santiago, where there were so many reckless fighters, men of different character, and that tremendous courage is not assumed by just anyone.

“For me,” the Colonel emphasizes, “she is the most complete woman I have ever met in the Revolution, given all that is known about her, for everything she did in the clandestine struggle on the orders of Frank and Fidel, for what she did in these mountains and her great contribution after the triumph, for what she was as a wife and as a mother, because she is one of those people who still remain useful after death.”