Social World – Page 14 – Montessori Muddle

Global Warming: We need new colors.

hansen-pink-T — These maps show the difference between last winter's average temperatures and the long term average (from 1951-1980). Notice that the scale goes up to 11. Image from Hansen and Sato, 2011.

For much of the U.S., last winter was pretty cold. If you look at the maps above, you can see that the eastern United States was up to 4 °C colder than normal in December. However, if you look a little further north into Canada, you’ll see a broad, pink region, where the temperatures were up to 11 °C warmer than normal.

The rate at which the world has been warming has been accelerating. It’s been interesting watching the predictions of the relatively crude computer models of the 1980’s coming true.

Although, it’s really the broadest, more general predictions that tend to be more reliable. One of those predictions, that’s been consistent for a long time and with a lot of different models, is that the poles would warm significantly faster than the rest of the planet.

What’s also been interesting, if somewhat depressing, is seeing the political consensus lag behind the scientific consensus. Twenty years ago there was a real debate in the scientific community about if global temperatures were rising. Now scientists argue mainly about what to do: reduce greenhouse gas pollution, adapt to the inevitable, or some mix of the two. Yet two weeks ago the House Science Committee heard testimony from a professor of marketing, advocating for an end to all government funding of climate research. Perhaps the belief is that if we don’t look it won’t happen.

Curiously, even research teams funded by people who politically oppose global warming, are just confirming the results of all the other scientific groups. Unsurprisingly, they’re now getting heat from their former supporters.

At the same time, Kate (on climatesafety.org) observes that NASA’s James Hansen has had to add a new color (pink on the graphs at the top of the page) to his climate anomaly maps because of the unexpectedly large warming over last winter.

Coon Creek Immersion: Visiting the Cretaceous

cc-fossils-0391 — 70 million year old shell and its imprint collected at the Coon Creek Science Center.

Just got back from our immersion trip to collect Cretaceous fossils at the Coon Creek Science Center, and hiking in Natchez Trace State Park.

It was an excellent trip. Despite the cold, Pat Broadbent did her usual, excellent job explaining the geology of Coon Creek and showing us how to collect and preserve some wonderful specimens. Back at the cabins, we looked at some of the microfossils from the Coon Creek sediments (and some other microscopic crystals); similar fossils can tell us a lot about the Earth’s past climate.

Back at the Park, we traced a streamline from the watershed divide to its marshy estuary, and cooked an excellent seafood dinner as we learned about the major organ systems.

cc-red-snapper-01 — Dinner was delicious.

Our trip was not without difficulties, however. The group learned a bit more about self-regulation, governance and the balance of powers, as a consequence of “The Great Brownie Incident,” and the, “P.E. Fiasco.”

We were also fairly well cut off from the “cloud”: no internet, and you could only get cell reception if you were standing in the middle of the road in just the right spot in front of Cabin #3.

But more on these later. I have some sleep to catch up on.

View Coon Creek Immersion in a larger map

Trail of Tears State Park in Missouri

trail-of-tears-outlook-panorama_b — View over the Mississippi River from the scenic outlook in the Trail of Tears State Park. The outlook juts out over rocky bluffs, which allows you to see the flood plain across the river.

Driving through Missouri last week, I stopped at the Trail of Tears State Park, which may be an excellent place to study the post-colonial history of Native Americans (perhaps as part of our civil rights discussions), and observed the Mississippi River and its flood plain before it becomes engorged at its confluence with the Ohio River.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act, which called for the removal of American Indians living east of the Mississippi River to relocate west of the Mississippi River. …

While some of the Cherokees left on their own, more than 16,000 were forced out against their will. In winter 1838-39, an endless procession of wagons, horsemen and people on foot traveled 800 miles west to Indian Territory. Others traveled by boat along river routes. Most of the Cherokee detachments made their way through Cape Girardeau County, home of Trail of Tears State Park. While there, the Indians endured brutal conditions; they dealt with rain, snow, freezing cold, hunger and disease. Floating ice stopped the attempted Mississippi River crossing, so the detachments had to set up camps on both sides of the river. It is estimated that over 4,000 Cherokees lost their lives on the march, nearly a fifth of the population.

–Missouri Department of Natural Resources: Remembering an American Tragedy

The small museum at the main park building does a very good job of trying to dispassionately tell the tragic story.

View Trail of Tears State Park, MO in a larger map

trail-of-tears-nature-walk — Taking a break on the Nature Walk behind the park's museum.

There’s a short, 1 km nature walk behind the building that was nice on a beautiful, sunny day in early spring. Warm, with the trees just barely beginning to bud you can get a feel for the ridge-and-valley topography of the park, which is in stark contrast to the flat floodplain of the Mississippi on the other side of the river. The park’s roads weave up and down the ridges, and I wished I’d had my bike with me.

riverside-campground-barge — Barge going downstream on the Mississippi River, past the river-side campground.

This early in the year (mid-March) most of the campgrounds in the interior of the park seem to be closed, but there is one down on a beach of the Mississippi River that was empty but open. This one has electrical hookups which is not a bad thing if you have the place all to yourself.

The scenic outlook is a wooden platform that juts out through the trees so you can see across the Mississippi to the flat floodplain and farmland beyond. Sitting on a cliff of sedimentary rock (it looked like limestone from a distance), the outlook is high enough that you can just make out the shapes of old meander bends and ox-bow lakes.

It’s a small park, probably worth a visit for the museum, and the outlook is nice, but probably not somewhere you’ll want to spend the night unless some of the upland campgrounds are open.

The museum’s focus on the relocation of the Cherokee would be a nice followup to the pre-Columbian focus of the Chucalissa Museum in Memphis.

cape_giradeau-river-wall — Cape Girardeau River Wall.

If you’re looking at river processes, you’ll probably also want to stop in Cape Giradeau, which boasts a fromidable wall to protect the downtown from the Mississippi River’s spring floods.

Diverse bedrooms

wherechildrensleep02 — Image from the book, Where Children Sleep by James Mollison.

To supplement our work on the fundamental needs of humans, we can add James Mollison’s poignant pictures in his book, Where Children Sleep. It ties in well with the Diverse China pictures.

You can find more of his images in LIFE.

Even without the text descriptions, the pictures are wonderfully composed and evocative. I think I’m going to have to add this one to our library.

An interesting project would be to have my students take their own pictures of their rooms. Just in the book, some of the contrasts are quite startling.

wherechildrensleep111 — From Where Children Sleep by James Mollison (via Visual News).

Radiation dosages

xkcd has published an excellent graph showing where different dosages of radiation come from and how they affect health. It’s a complex figure, but it’s worth taking the time to look through. I find it easiest to interpret going backward from the bottom right corner that show the dosages that are clearly fatal.

One red square of 100 red blocks is equal to one seivert, which is the radiation dosage that will kill you if you receive it all at once. Note:

If you were next to the reactor core during the Chernobyl nuclear accident, you would have gotten blasted by 50 Sv.
8 Sv will kill you, even with treatment.
Getting 0.1 Sv over a year is clearly linked to cancer.
One hour on the grounds of the Chernobyl nuclear plant (in 2010) would give you 0.006 Sv.
Your normal, yearly dose is about 0.004 Sv, just about how much was measured over a day at two sites near Fukushima.
Eating a banana will give you 0.000001 Sv.

While I did not find equivalent exposure levels, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki lead to many deaths and sickness from radiation created by the explosions. Within four months, there were 140,000 fatalities in Hiroshima, and 70,000 in Nagasaki (Nave, 2010). The Manhattan Engineer District, 1946 report describes the radiation effects over the first month:

Rad-injuries — Radiation effects for the month following the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. (Table from The Manhattan Engineer District (1946) via atomicarchive.com).

The effects were not limited to the explosion itself, though. There is one estimate, that 260,000 people were indirectly affected:

Radiation dose in a zone 2 kilometers from the hypocenter of the atomic bomb was the largest. Also, those who entered the city of Hiroshima or Nagasaki soon after the atomic bomb detonation and people in the black rain areas were exposed to radiation. … some people were exposed to radiation from black rain containing nuclear fission products (“ashes of death”), and others to radiation induced by neutrons absorbed by the soil upon entering these cities soon after the atomic bomb detonation.

— Hiroshima International Council for Health Care for the Radiation Exposed (HICARE): Global Radiation Exposures.

HICARE also has a good summary of what happened at Chernobyl, where 31 people died at the time of the accident, about 400,000 were evacuated, and anywhere between 1.6 and 9 million people were exposed to radiation. Modern pictures of the desolation of Chernobyl are here. The Wikipedia article has before and after pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.