I spent a couple of days in Boulder, Colorado visiting Mickey Glantz, Exploratorium Osher Fellow, friend and collaborator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In his 30 years at NCAR, Mickey has concentrated on the social side of climate research shuttling between the world of science and communities of people worldwide who are affected by climate change. His usable science workshops help farmers, fishermen, small business owners, and community leaders make sense of, and prepare for, changes in the weather including extreme events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, and other disasters associated with climate fluctuations like El Nino and La Nina.

During my visit, we talked about his recent visit to China and meetings there with scientists at the polar research center in Beijing who are enlisting Mickey’s help in setting up a polar affairs center. China is among 60-some countries participating in the International Polar Year which started this spring and continues until March 2009. Canada is another of the participating countries and, while I was in Boulder, I went to a talk at the University of Colorado by a researcher, Shari Gearheard, who lives in the Canadian Arctic.

Shari is a remarkable young social scientist who occasionally sleeps in an iglo and is an apprentice dog musher, a necessary skill for traveling to her research sites on the ice. She is documenting native knowledge in an Inuit village of 800 residents, collecting observations of climate and environmental change and helping mediate that knowledge with scientific studies of the region. (In this photo, Shari is with Ilkoo Angutikjuak, Inuit Elder and hunter from Clyde River, Nunavut, with whom she has worked closely since 2000 on environmental change research). Arctic communities are experiencing more dramatic climate change than anywhere else on earth, but the patterns aren’t uniform across the North. On Baffin Island, houses aren’t falling into the sea as they are in some places in Alaska, but the Inuit are still facing changes that affect their traditional way of life. Indigenous Arctic hunters depend on stable ice, predictable seasonal and daily weather patterns, and productive ecosystems, all of which are threatened by global warming.

In her talk, Shari described the last three years living among her indigenous Arctic colleagues. Shari has deep respect for the Inuit people and spoke of all she’s learned from the hunters and their families, including patience, humor, courage, and deep, precise knowledge of the environment. It may be an exaggeration that Arctic peoples have 100 different words for snow, but there is precision in their language that can communicate subtle variations in wind direction and speed, ice thickness and stability, and changing weather conditions, all of which tells a hunter whether it’s safe or perilous to venture out on the ice. Shari talked about their curiosity and eagerness to participate in the scientific research happening around them, in many cases Inuit knowledge has preceded the science and is proving valuable in helping track both the extent and impacts of climate change in the Arctic.

Shari created a CD-ROM of her work in Clyde River, which you can order here.

For the past week, crowds along the Sacramento Delta east of San Francisco have marveled at the spectacle, and fretted over the fate, of a mother humpback whale and her calf who are headed away from rather than toward the ocean. Biologists have been trying to herd them back to the sea to no avail and now their health appears to be deteriorating.

It’s a quirk of human nature that the public (and media) care more about two individuals that can be captured on TV or seen with their own eyes than about the lives of tens of thousands of whales that hang in the balance pending a vote by the International Whaling Commission this month in Anchorage. Twenty years ago, commercial whaling was banned by the IWC, but Japan is lobbying to lift that ban to satisfy their market for whale meat. The Japanese and some of their pro-whaling supporters claim that scientific studies have shown that whale populations have recovered enough to support commercial whaling. They probably don’t have the votes needed to overturn the ban this year, thanks to some intense lobbying by conservation groups in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (those countries seem much more attentive to the issue than the U.S.)

The IWC meetings started early in May with the scientific committees meeting first. David Ainley, who’s been studying penguins in Antarctica for 20 years, presented some papers there about the interactions between whales and penguins in Antarctica’s Ross Sea. (We did a webcast with him from his research camp at Cape Royds late last year.) David, who took this picture of a minke whale at left, said the IWC conference was the only biology meeting he’s ever been to with armed guards at the door. Japanese whaling vessels were in the Ross Sea this year, killing minke whales as part of their “scientific whaling” program. The whales are cut open on the ships and data on fat stores and stomach contents is collected. It’s doubtful whether Japanese scientists would kill whales for research if there was no market for the meat and David says that nearly all biologists at the IWC meeting question the need to sacrifice whales at all since there are non-lethal ways to study them.

I’ll keep you posted what happens with the IWC meeting and writing more about the spectacular Ross Sea and David’s research there.

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Last Sunday’s New York Times had a book review of Al Gore’s version of Inconvenient Truth for kids. The review was written by Robert Coontz, Deputy News Editor for Science Magazine (full disclosure, Robert is an old grad school classmate and good friend of mine).

Robert praised the book for its concise language and organization, an improvement over Gore’s original book for adults. He chides Gore a bit about painting too much certainty about global warming as the culprit behind Hurricane Katrina, a claim that most scientists are uncomfortable making. But Robert also says that in many ways the book does not go far enough. Because the main message is already out there that humans are impacting climate, now we need to fill in the gaps and explain the uncertainties and complexities of climate science. We should be introducing the scientists and how they use and make sense of data, especially as new findings come out and refine our understanding (and sometimes overturn previous scientific interpretations).

This gap is where formal and informal educational institutions can step in to provide context by helping our audiences make sense of the basics of climate science and the new information coming out. The Exploratorium developed the Global Climate Change Research Explorer that shows real observational data and how scientists interpret these observations to understand the mechanisms of climate change. We also produced a series of Polar Science Webcasts that introduced basic concepts about climate systems and some of the scientists, many of them working in the earth’s polar regions, who are piecing together climate history to help us understand what is happening now and may happen in the future.

Since I’m new to the blogging world, I wanted to try an experiment to insert YouTube video into my blog. This video was taken a few years ago when I was in Antarctica for our Origins Project. I persuaded the National Science Foundation to let me dive under the ice and it was one of the most exhilirating experiences of my life: hundreds of feet of visibility and near-freezing temperatures.