Soil Science Journal Club : science

Astonishing reasoning on Greenland from U.S. scientists

Andrew.Rate — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:47:00 GMT

The good news (for some of the approximately 57,600 Greenlanders, at least): Greenland now has much more control over its destiny, following the decision from Denmark to allow self-rule for Greenlanders (see the article at the Sydney Morning Herald).

The not-so-good news: the following excerpt from this, and other, articles on this event is a real jaw-dropper:

"US scientists believe Greenland's northern tip is especially rich in oil and gas and they say global warming could help unlock the untapped wealth under the ice-cap and provide a solid foundation for an independent economy."

Let's just hope that these are the same ubiquitous and apocryphal "U.S. scientists" who seem to crop up occasionally in news articles to justify not-to-be-disputed points of view. Let's also hope they have sufficient integrity to be greenhouse sceptics.

It's hard to imagine a more cynical and blithely pragmatic approach to the issue of global warming, whether or not one has doubts about the anthropogenic hypothesis (which would be too large a can of worms ever to be opened on this blog).

Image from cartophilia.com

I feel good, I feel stupid

Andrew.Rate — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:59:00 GMT

This was something I sent around to our School's postgraduate students, after being sent the article by Prof. Martin Fey:

Schwartz, M.A. (2008) The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Journal of Cell Science121:1771 .

This should be essential reading for postgraduate students in any discipline. (It's irrelevant that it's in a biology journal.) Essentially Schwartz's argument is that since research is on the very edge of human knowledge, feeling lost or stupid should be felt regularly by researchers. This normalisation of the self-doubt that many of us feel (and not just while doing our graduate research!) is surprisingly encouraging.

"...we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students
how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it
means we’re not really trying."

It's great to see articles in scientific journals that acknowledge the humanity of researchers.

Image from www.cartoonstock.com

Science and sustainability

Andrew.Rate — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:18:00 GMT

A recent article in Environmental Science and Technology identifies scientific facilities as high energy users.

Mills, Evan. 2009. Sustainable scientists.Environ. Sci. Technol., 43:979-985.

University sustainability, as rightly pointed out by Sky elsewhere in myResearchSpace ("A Sustainable Campus"), commonly focuses on 'green' or ecological issues . Dr Mills makes the point that "much can be done to enhance sustainability within the scientific enterprise itself". The diagram at left, from Mills' article, suggests that the practice of science can result in comparatively high energy usage.

The main contributors to high energy use are identified as laboratories, computing, and clean environments.

Mills goes so fas as to suggest that sustainability, or at least energy usage, issues should be amongst the criteria against which research grants are assessed (pity the poor folks in space research).

It would definitely be interesting to analyse the energy use of earth science projects. Many (especially involving remote area or ocean travel, drilling or remote sensing) could come in fairly high.

Image from pubs.acs.org