(This is Part 2 of a three-part series on climatologist, Dr. Cameron Wake. Read Part 1 here.)
Dr. Cameron Wake. Photo courtesy UNH
Part 2: The Ice Cores of Research
Dr. Cameron Wake’s research started with the analysis of ice cores from the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau and evolved to include cores from Arctic glaciers. He studied the composition of water and amount of dust that existed in the layers of the glaciers formed over thousands of years ago. He said that this research led to three at first seemingly uninteresting discoveries that added up.
The first of such was that his team’s research defined “the spatial and temporal variation of precipitation chemistry in central Asia.” Wake explained that the study of ice cores is the study of changes over time, but central to the understanding of what those changes over time mean is the understanding of how the basic chemistry of precipitation varies over space and time.
The analysis of the change over time of precipitation chemistry led to the second significant result of Wake’s research in the Arctic: the development of a relationship between changes in ice core chemistry and changes in summertime sea ice extent. Lastly, his team tracked changes over time of various pollutant deposition in the ice.
During this exploration and research, a new batch of ice core scientists were educated by working on these research projects.
“Our understanding of the way climate has changed over thousands to millions of years does not come from studying meteorological records, because reliable records only extend back a few hundred years at best,” said Wake. “Rather, our understanding of climate changes in the past comes from paleoclimate records developed from the study of ice cores, tree rings, sediments, cave deposits, rocks and other natural archives.”
“[The paleoclimate record] has provided me with a perspective that allows me to say with confidence that humans have now become a major geological force capable of changing the climate system,” he said.
Climatology… on ice! Cameron Wake, Researcher and Professor at the University of New Hampshire, is passionate about ice. He plays on it and he works on it. Hockey and ice cores shows Cam how ice is part of the fabric of life in northern New England. And the ice itself has a story to tell. For over 100 years the ice has told of the effects of climate change by marking the day of its departure from lakes in the region. And as that date gets earlier and earlier over the passing decades the ice tells the story of a warming world, even in spite of winters with snow to spare.
The Crevasse of Denial
With a 2011 Gallup poll showing only 50 percent of respondents concerned about climate change, there seems to be an obvious rift between the climate science that Wake studies and public understanding or opinion on climate change risks.
Wake pegs part of such climate change denial on citizen inclination towards certain beliefs, such as whether or not the government should interfere with business or with individual decisions. He said that climate change denial advertising campaigns paid for by Exxon/Mobile and big coal companies appeal to individuals who are predisposed against government intervention.
“It’s not really about rational thought,” said Wake, “It’s about ‘Who do you trust?’ and ‘Where do you get your news from?’ This notion that everybody is going to weigh the scientific evidence equally is garbage. That’s a world where everybody thinks rationally, and we live in a world where many individuals do no think rationally.”
He says he grapples with climate change denial a lot because it has a big impact on how climate scientists, ecologists and environmentalists go about solving the problem.
“I think for 20 years scientists have basically said, ‘Hey look, we just need to do good science and public policy will follow,’ and in fact, that’s not the case,” said Wake.
Although the rift between both public policy and opinion and what translates as a climate crisis in the data of climate science is a tough bridge to gap, Wake has made the bridging of that gap a recent focus. “My goal is to find out how it is that we engage with the rest of society, where they are, not where I am,” he said. “We need to say, ‘Where is it that you’re at that we can talk about this issue and meet on some common ground?’”
He references an October 2010 article in The New York Times about six towns in Kansas focusing on decreasing energy usage for the sake of moral obligation, energy independence and economic prosperity rather than climate change. “That’s the next step,” said Wake, “to figure out how is it that we get people to engage in this issues. Because it is so sad that it’s a political issue. It shouldn’t be.”
Wake does his best to take part in this engagement through a variety of means. He talks at dozens of events each year to share the results of his research with the general public and has written a series of reports on climate change for a broader audience. He also served on the governor-appointed NH Climate Change Policy Task Force that wrote the climate action plan for the state and he currently serves on the NH Energy and Climate Collaborative, a group that seeks to facilitate and track progress towards implementation of the climate action plan.
Part 1:The Ascent from Mountaineer to Climatologist
A childhood adventure in the Canadian Rockies completely altered the course of Dr. Cameron Wake’s life. He was 14 when he traveled, on the suggestion of his older brother, from his hometown in Montreal to Banff National Park to complete a mountaineering course. He described the area where he camped in the Kananaskis Valley as three miles from any road, adjacent to a wide gushing river, surrounded by snow-peaked mountains and untouched forest. It was there that he fell in love with the mountains.
“I discovered a pretty powerful chord,” he said. “Some people learn how to play piano, other people learn how to hit a baseball—I went to the mountains. Everything I did from that point forward was about gaining the skills and putting myself in a position to work in the mountains.”
And that he did. Now a climatologist and associate research professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Earth Systems Research Center, Wake’s journey began with an undergraduate degree in geology and a graduate degree in geography. At the end of his undergraduate degree in Geology he was a sedimentary geologist who, in his words, was “headed for the oil patch.”
“But there were no jobs in the early 1980s because there was a huge oil glut then, and so I got a job monitoring a glacier in the Canadian Rockies,” said Wake. “It was exactly what I wanted to do.”
Through his experience monitoring a glacier he met a geographer who worked in a part of the Karakoram located in northern Pakistan. The Karakoram is a large mountain range that passes through Pakistan, India and China, north of the Himalayas, that contains the highest concentrations of mountain peaks in the world.
A mountaineer’s dream, Wake traveled to Pakistan to work in the Himalayas and the Karakoram for the next 15 years. While studying the glaciers of that area and learning about climate change, Wake said he realized the potential of glaciers as a “tremendous archive from which we could study climate change and the past.”
“That’s when I shifted from a guy that just wanted to climb mountains to a guy that wanted to study the science,” said Wake. That brought him to the University of New Hampshire to do his PhD in Earth Sciences, where he has remained to teach and continue his research.
Whole Terrain, the nationally renowned literary journal of Antioch University New England, has established an annual award for outstanding undergraduate writers. We’re seeking environmental essays from current undergraduates for this year’s volume. The writer of the winning essay will receive the New Terrain Award of $500 and have his or her work published in the upcoming issue.
To qualify for the award, you must be an undergraduate student in good academic standing, and your submission must be original work. This information will be verified for potential candidates.
Connecting school with nature and town has big results
By Hanna Wheeler
In her desk’s side drawer, Principal Dana McCauley keeps a pair of sneakers, an old tee-shirt and jeans. She has to be prepared. At any point in the day, she might be wading in the stream, weeding the butterfly garden or banding birds with her K-5 students. She also participates in what’s become an annual tradition: rolling down the hill behind the school. And she has the grass stains to prove it.
During 10 years as a teaching principal at Crellin Elementary in western Maryland, McCauley has changed the curriculum to include projects that bring the students, and their principal, away from their desks and outside the classroom.“If we’re gonna preach it, we have to do it. I have to be willing to change my clothes and go outside too,” she said.
Crellin Elementary School in western Maryland is a rural public school with fewer than 90 students. It once faced the sadly typical challenges that public schools face, including student disengagement and failing test scores. But McCauley’s changes have transformed the small public school and rural town: overhauling the blighted playground, restoring the stream, creating an environmental education center, recruiting scores of volunteers and earning multiple awards including the President’s Environmental Youth Award, the Ernest Boyer Best Practices in Character Education Award, and last year’s much publicized ranking as the Number One School in Maryland when 100 percent of students earned passing test scores.
Crellin students working in the school garden
Planting trees
Dana McCauley monitors the stream with students
The principal, staff, and students get muddy
Dana McCauley and students
Observing one of the butterflies from the school's butterfly garden
Studying the local birds
When McCauley first came to Crellin, people warned her against sending her own kids there. “The school didn’t have a very good reputation,” she said.
And the community of Crellin faces the reputation that is often affixed to small mining towns in Appalachia. In Garrett County, where Crellin is located, the per capita income and number of college degrees are far below the state and national averages. About 87 percent of Crellin students will receive free or reduced lunch this year. Driving to the school involves turning past the fire-damaged building of the local bar where patrons sit and stare from the porch. And remember that grassy hill behind the school? It once was an exposed black mound of coal waste, called a gob pile, that leached toxic metals into the stream and turned the water bright orange.
But McCauley doesn’t let statistics define her students or town. “That’s not the best thing about us,” she said. She says the best part is that students “are being responsible and respectful and taking care of what’s around. That’s what we do.”
McCauley has energized the parents too. “The parents are awesome,” she said. “They can’t always give us financial aid, but they’ll roll up their sleeves and do anything. You can’t find that everywhere.”
That level of involvement has earned the school even more national awards and speaking invitations. But the best evidence of the community’s pride in and hope for its children can be seen in the schoolyard.
When McCauley first came to Crellin, the schoolyard consisted of derelict equipment and a single line of scrubby trees separating the school from the gob pile. The property behind the school was overgrown, the neglected site of a former sawmill and railyard. McCauley says it was a place for drug deals and late-night parties. “I got tired of picking up beer cans,” she said.
She organized a community meeting to ask people how they would use the back property if the school could access it. The community responded that they wanted a place to walk and a safe place for their children to play. McCauley set out to attain that vision.
She also wanted to help her students develop a greater sense of town pride. She had them interview community members about the town’s history. The historical society helped students use old photos and documents to study what once was in the school’s back yard. Using that research, the students designed a new playground to tell the story of Crellin. When the time came to erect the new structure, a whopping 638 volunteers came to build it.
Meanwhile, the school had started a summer science camp where children explored the back property. One camper asked why the creek was orange, and McCauley promised she’d find out.
McCauley has a knack for finding people in town who seem to know everything and everyone. And she’s not afraid to ask for help. She says her tactic is “Using everybody’s strengths. And asking, ‘How can we figure this out together?’”
In a short amount of time, she collected a group of dedicated scientists, bureaucrats, business owners, non-profit workers and parents. She even tracked down a former Crellin student who had become a landscape architect. Together, they cut through legal tape to gain the use of the property, capped the gob pile with soil, treated the orange water and built a network of trails and boardwalks through the newly dedicated Crellin Environmental Education Laboratory. The restoration work was part of the curriculum. Students also built bat boxes and benches. They monitored the wetlands. They researched the history and ecology of the area and created educational signs. Instead of dealers and vandals, now families walk here after hours. Students jog along the trails as part of PE. They do real field research with experts in water chemistry, birds and fisheries.
Principal McCauley and students in the Environmental Education Laboratory
“When you see the most squirrelly kid in the class— who cannot stay focused on anything— be fabulous outside because he can multi-task and do so many things and suddenly he’s the leader… how do you not say this [kind of learning] is good stuff? You just watch them, and you know that it’s right. You just feel in your gut that it’s right,” McCauley said.
McCauley’s success comes from reaching out to people. “We ask people to do things that they’re good at,” she said. She said volunteers become “rock stars” in the eyes of the kids just from knowing what they know about birds or carpentry or old trains. At a conference on parent engagement, a father of a Crellin student said he volunteers because he’s allowed to contribute his strengths and skills. He said he feels uncomfortable with literacy tutoring— that’s “the teacher’s job”— and he doesn’t want to just “decorate some bulletin board.” So he plants trees and fixes things and helps students to learn academic and practical skills through these hands-on projects.
All of the community involvement gives school work at Crellin a sense of purpose. But there’s a sense of fun here too.
Walking through the halls and grounds is like strolling through an interactive science museum. There’s a BirdCam with live footage of hatchings in the school nesting boxes. Students build and launch their own rockets with a real rocket scientist (a former NASA aerospace engineer who retired to Garrett County) while blasting Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” There’s the tank of trout that the students are raising. Now that they’ve restored their watershed, students can release their baby trout in the creek out back. Rows of waders and kick nets hang in the hallway, getting frequent use as students regularly monitor for benthic macroinvertebrates. And classrooms aren’t classrooms, they’re “base camps” where outdoor expeditions are launched.
Most importantly, the school has a sense of heart. The students and parents all have McCauley’s cell number. They call at night or over the summer when they have exciting news or want to know if the school veggie garden needs weeding. When they won the President’s Environmental Youth Award and were told they could bring only one student to the ceremony, McCauley and the teachers declined to go at all until the entire fifth grade could attend.
At the heart of Crellin, there’s a real focus on the children. When television crews come to interview McCauley about national awards or test scores, she tells them,“You need to focus on the kids. That’s what it’s really about. It’s not about me. It’s not about the teachers. It’s about the kids gaining that confidence and pride of where they are and what they know.”
Tim DeChristopher’s fate was decided last week at the Salt Lake City federal courthouse. He was sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of $10,000 for disrupting a controversial federal oil and gas-leasing auction in December of 2008, but his sentence was not taken quietly.
Twenty-six of his supporters were arrested after the sentence was announced when they blockaded the entrance to courthouse and then, according to Fox13 news, moved to the middle of the street when police refused to arrest them on the steps.
In an official statement posted by Peaceful Uprising, the organization wrote that they support DeChristopher by continuing to organize: “Our response to this sentence is an affirmation: we will not be intimidated. What’s yours?”
The post continues, “Unless we decide to respond accordingly, as Tim serves his time, the real criminals — the fossil fuel industry wrecking our planet and our communities — will continue to run free, unaccountable for the countless oil spills, asthma attacks, contaminated waterways, cancer clusters, and carbon seeping into the air we breathe every day.”
Bill McKibben, a DeChristopher supporter and environmental figurehead, denounced the sentence as too strict and continues to call for more civil disobedience in the environmental movement. His organization, 350.org, is rallying people to answer the call for peaceful uprising through two weeks of sustained civil disobedience to halt the Keystone XL tarsands pipeline. The tarsands action is to be held between August 20th and Septmeber 3rd in Washington D.C, and may prove for many DeChristopher supporters the outlet they are looking for in response to his sentence.
Coverage of the sentencing ranges from local TV footage of the protests…
to commentary in the Huffington Post.
But those of us of a more moderate bent should stand up and support DeChristopher as well. This is someone whose actions stopped an unlawful, unethical act from taking place. He deserved to be found guilty, but he also deserved a minimal sentence. His was not a crime of vandalism or violence — only a commercial act which disrupted something which shouldn’t have been going on anyway. It was, in many ways, a desperate act, but it was also an act of conscience.
