A vote for Brexit is a vote against the next generation

At its heart, is “Brexit” really any more complicated than whether you are self-centred and introspective (leave*) versus you care about the world and the next generation (stay)?

There is only really one thing in this world worth really worrying about, and that’s Climate Change. Make no mistake: this really could destroy civilisation. Really. Unless it is either stopped or mitigated, all that other stuff - jobs, health, education, even wars - is just polishing a turd.

Fighting climate change needs increased international cooperation. It needs national governments being held accountable through international agreements and organisations. The Brexiters and Trumps of this world are happy to feed off everyone else’s misery to line their own pockets. They will hopefully be dead before the shit really hits the fan. Hopefully, so will I. Our children won’t.

Humanity has progressed greatly over the past few hundred years. Knowledge, healthcare and the potential for political influence has been opened up (in developed countries, at least) to the masses. Let’s not support individuals who hark back to mythical “glory” days in which only the established elite had anything. In former times, when America or Britain was perceived as “great”, this was always at the cost of the poor and minorities. It was about lording it over your (perceived) inferiors, both nationally and internationally. It was about the status and riches of ruling classes. It was about powerful people sending powerless people to die in their millions for pointless causes. It was about gaining superiority in the game of “us versus them”.

In the 21st Century, greatness must mean something different. It must be about the state of the lowest citizen, not the highest. There is no “them” - there is only “us”. Nations and countries are arbitrary boundaries, drawn up for bureaucratic and political reasons, with no actual basis. Race is a myth. People are people, the world over.

Unless we realise this, we are all doomed. When the wings fall off and the plane crashes from the sky, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in business class or economy.

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* There will of course be some UK “winners” in the Brexit scenario, who will benefit from the removal of competition and/or want to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. However, to think that Brexit serves the nation’s self-interest, you probably need to add “deluded” to the attribute list, as John Major makes clear.

What's Really Warming the World?

It’s hard to believe in 2015 that there are people out there who have still not accepted the reality of man-made climate change. But then some people still use homeopathic medicine and think that vaccination causes autism. Sigh. Anyway, if you have any doubts about the causes of increasing global temperatures, or just really like slick infographics, you can do a lot worse than check out Bloomberg’s page on What’s Really Warming the World?

The importance of knowing how your data are scaled

A few weeks ago, there was a post on WEIT, The correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of environmental regulation: what does it mean? It was triggered by a tweet about by the Washington post about a graph comparing attitudes to the environment and attitudes to evolution, broken down by religious affiliation:

We’ll get to the tweet later. First, the graph. It was from a US National Center for Science Education blog post based on 2007 data from the Pew Religious Landscape Study, examining two binary choice statements:

y-axis. Stricter environmental laws and regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy; or Stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost.

x-axis. Evolution is the best explanation for the origins of human life on earth. (Agree/disagree)

Data was normalised onto a percentile scale with each circle representing (1) by position, the normalised percentile of that group’s response, (2) by area, the size of that group. (36,000 people were surveyed in total.)

The percentile normalisation method was based on a previous analysis of different Pew questions by Toby Grant, who explains it thus:

Geek note on measurement

The range of each dimension ranges from zero to 100. These scores were calculated by calculating the percentage of each religion giving each answer. The percentages were then subtracted (e.g., percent saying “smaller government” minus percent saying “bigger government”). The scores were then standardized using the mean and standard deviation for all of the scores. Finally, I converted the standardized scores into percentiles by mapping the standardized scores onto the standard Gaussian/normal distribution. The result is a score that represents the group’s average graded on the curve, literally.

A few things annoy me about this:

1. This is not simply a “Geek note”. Knowing what was done to data is vital for understanding what a plot means. To be fair to Grant, he does mention that he is plotting percentiles in the graph legend. (As far as I can see, Robineau does not mention it anywhere!)
2. By first normalising to the mean and then converting everything to percentiles, there is a double loss of quantitative information. Following the first normalisation, all you can do is compare groups - there is no absolute information about responses. Following the second, you cannot even compare the degree of difference. What this plot is basically doing is pulling in the outliers to make them look more similar to mean, and spreading out those similar to the mean to make them look more different.
3. When converting to percentiles, the additional normalisations seem pointless. Unless I've misunderstood, if the data is truly normally distributed then the percentile of the fitted data should be the same as the percentile of the raw data. If not, you shouldn’t do the normalisation in the first place. Either way, I think you are just adding error and confusion. (There is no data presented to support the fact that these opinions are normally distributed.)

It is also worth noting that, to the unwary, the circle sizes could be misleading. The bigger the circle, the more data and the more accurate the estimation of the value. The small circles might have much more random sampling bias in their positions. (Under a null model where all groups are the same, you would expect the large circles to gravitate towards the mean, while the smaller circles should be the outliers.) Most importantly, circles that overlap are not more similar than circles that do not.

It would be more useful to have estimated standard errors plotted for each group. Again, because we have lost the quantitative information, we cannot tell whether a small difference in responses (possibly within measurement error) would have a big difference in percentiles. There are 36,000 people in total but some of the groups are less than 0.5% and therefore have fewer than 200 people.

Robineau’s plot uses the same method although he:

“didn’t rescale to the 0-100 scale, since I didn’t want this to seem like a percentage when it isn’t.”

It's not a percentage but it is a percentile, so 0-100 is entirely appropriate. Leaving it as -1.0 to +1.0 is in fact very misleading, as it implies that people are positive or negative with respect to the questions. In reality, positive just means “above average” and negative is “below average”. I have an above average number of arms: two. This does not mean that I have lots of arms, it just means that some people have fewer arms than me.

These things aside, Robineau asks:

“So what does this tell us?

Thanks to the scaling, the only thing this graph tells us is that (a) there is a rank correlation between the answers to the two questions, and (b) some religious groups (particularly evangelical Christians) appear to agree with these statements less than average, while other groups (notably non-Christians) tend to agree with these statements more than average.

These observations could still be of interest. The real problem comes when people start interpreting this graph as if the normalisations and rescaling have not been done to it. Robineau first:

First, look at all those groups whose members support evolution. There are way more of them than there are of the creationist groups, and those circles are bigger. We need to get more of the pro-evolution religious out of the closet.

Second, look at all those religious groups whose members support climate change action. Catholics fall a bit below the zero line on average, but I have to suspect that the forthcoming papal encyclical on the environment will shake that up.”

This in turn was apparently interpreted by the Washington post to mean this:

The fact is, the normalisation has removed all hope of actually knowing whether there is conflict or not. The percentile scaling removes almost all of the quantitative info on the axes, so proximity on the scale means nothing with respect to proximity of answer. All the groups inside the small top right cluster could have >90% support for the scientific evidence and all of the groups outside <10% support, and you could still get that plot. (It’s hard to tell but the top-right cluster look closer to 1.0 than the bottom-left groups are to -1.0, indicating that they might deviate much more from the mean thanks to the mapping onto a normal distribution. This implies that the data was not normally distributed in the first place and is probably a heavy-tailed or bimodal distribution instead.)

Critically, it is impossible to conclude that any groups “support evolution” or “support climate change action”. As the graph is scaled by percentiles, 0.0 is essentially the point where 50% are above and 50% below. Because the vast majority of groups are religious, of course there are many religious groups above the line. There essentially have to be, unless all religious groups were identical (in which case they would group very slightly below 0.0).

To many, stand-out thing is that atheists and agnostics are all in the top-top right. This graph could easily have been branded “the conflict between science and religion in one chart”! But it cannot even really say that: every group could disagree with the two statements and thus be in conflict with the scientific evidence. You would still get the same plot after the rescaling.

My big question from all of this is: why not make the plot using the raw percentage responses? What do the normalisations actually achieve?

And my big take home message: if you are going to infer things from plots, make sure that you understand how the data were scaled.

XKCD hits the spot again on climate change

A couple of weeks old but no less poignant:

Climate change deniers are quick to point out that there was still life on Earth at predicted future CO₂ levels and global temperatures. This is true. The problem is, that life did not include us, anything like us, or even anything much like most of the things we eat. Oh yes, and most of the world’s major cities being under water. :sigh:

It’s a position summed up frustratingly well by Doonesbury (via WEIT):

Forget brains, we should be throwing all our money at Climate Science

2013 saw some unprecedented levels of funding being directed towards “ambitious” (read “impossible within the budget”) projects to map and simulate the human brain, with $100 million and €1.6 billion been thrown at these challenges, respectively. There is no denying that brains are important but, only a month after the $100m BRAIN Initiative was announced, 2013 also saw atmospheric carbon dioxide levels exceed 400 ppm for the first time in at least 800,000 years.

This is pretty stark as it is when you look at the Mauna Loa data, being such a sharp and large increase that it can barely be discerned:

Or zoomed in to hit home what we have been doing since the Industrial Revolution:

Climate skeptics would have us believe that this is natural and/or doesn’t really matter. After all, they say, it’s not the highest CO₂ has ever been and life did all right back in those high-CO₂ days. The thing is, though, even if you disagree with essentially every climate scientist in the world that Climate Change is man-made, it really does matter and life may have done all right at such levels but not life as we know it. For humanity - and all the organisms on which humanity relies - we are going into uncharted territory in both atmospheric CO₂ and, perhaps more importantly, global temperature as this great infographic from the World Bank hammers home to startling effect:

I was tipped off to this image by a tweet from Alessio Fratticcioli but not yet been able to find the original.

The @worldbank has created perhaps the single most telling chart on climate change ever: http://t.co/qA5z5av3ul pic.twitter.com/lIG2J7a4hY

— Alessio Fratticcioli (@fratticcioli) December 31, 2013

Here is what they say at the World Bank Climate Change site, though:

“Climate change is a fundamental threat to sustainable economic development and the fight against poverty. The World Bank Group is concerned that without bold action now, the warming planet threatens to put prosperity out of reach of millions and roll back decades of development.

The science is unequivocal that humans are the cause of global warming, and major changes are already being observed. Current global mean temperature is about 0.8° Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The 12 years from 2001 to 2012 rank among the warmest since record keeping began 133 years ago. The intensity of extreme weather-related events has also increased.

Recent experience is a stark reminder that no country – rich or poor – is immune from the impacts of climate-related disasters today.

…

The World Bank Group believes a 4°C warmer world can and must be avoided. Immediate global action is needed to slow the growth in greenhouse gas emissions this decade and help countries prepare for a 2°C warmer world and adapt to changes that are already locked in.”

The picture is pretty bleak unless we do something about it fast and, worse than that, we still do not even really know how bleak it is. The East Antarctic ice sheet, for example, holds enough ice to raise sea levels by over 50m (and basically submerge almost every major city on Earth). We think it is stable (for now) but we don’t really know. (Somewhat counter-intuitively, increases in sea ice in the region could actually be indicative of more melting: freshwater has a higher freezing point than salt water and thus melted land ice can re-freeze when it hits the colder ocean.)

Having been peripherally involved in some Climate Change studies, the thing that really boggles my mind is how little funding is being channeled into what must surely be the most important questions for all humanity: is the world going to become largely uninhabitable in the near future and is there anything we can do about it? However important brains may be, I cannot help but think that such large chunks of money could be put to better use.

Science blogging is hard!

My last post was number 400, which has caused me have a reflective moment about my blogging. (And the 87 drafts in various states of incompleteness!) One of my New Year’s aspirations was to blog more original science papers. Half a year on, I’ve not really done that well, to be honest. (Nor on my other aspirations, to be honest: Mystic Mog and the Exploding Tortoise has been on hold since Jaunary!)

Part of the reason is the impending move to Australia and all the organisation and house-selling that goes with it. A bigger part of the reason, though, is that (for me, at least) science blogging is hard! I have a lot of respect for those who can do it well, like Jacquelyn Gill and her ecology & climate change blog, The Contemplative Mammoth. (Her most recent post, The many scales of climate change, part 1: Tectonic timescales is well worth a read and I am looking forward to the parts to come.)

I consider science communication to be an important part of my job and I really want to get better at it. Happily, it is not too late. We are about half-way through 2013 and so there are 25(ish) weeks left. The only way to improve is to practice and rather than risk upsetting anyone by getting their science wrong, I have therefore decided to aim to blog one of my own papers each week to see how that goes. It may not happen but by making a public declaration of sorts, I am hoping I will get the extra motivation boost needed to make it happen. (Embracing Markdown should help too!)

The Ehux genome is here and it looks epic!

In addition to my main research on Short Linear Motifs, I have a number of collaborations with environmental scientists looking at how various organisms, such as corals, might be affected by rising CO₂ levels.

One of the more fun collaborations has been with Bethan Jones (now at Oregon State University) and Debora Iglesias-rodriguez (now at UC Santa Barbara), working on the marine phytoplankton Emiliania huxleyi. Along with Paul Skipp at Southampton, I was involved with with proteomic analysis of this small but important organism. This was challenging because, at the time, their was no annotated genome available - hence the need for some bioinformatics help. (The second paper from this came out in April but my planned blog post was postponed after the Boston marathon bombing and is now sitting on my To Do list.)

Happily, the genome is now out! As reported in the KQED blog post, Opening the Gene Box of a Key Ocean Species:

“This week in the journal Nature, a worldwide team of 75 scientists revealed the genetic blueprint of the one-celled alga Emiliania huxleyi, which may be the most important species you’ve never heard of. The genomes of the domestic dog and cat are interesting, but the E. huxleyi genome is a much bigger story. Some day this organism may become another of our partner species, as vital to us as yeast.”

Even more happily, Bethan and Debora are both authors on the paper (as part of the Emiliania huxleyi Annotation Consortium), Pan genome of the phytoplankton Emiliania underpins its global distribution, which reports “sequences from 13 additional isolates” in addition to the genome of the reference strain CCMP1516. Many years in the making, it’s a bit of an epic, and I look forward to learning some more of Ehux’s secrets.

h/t: Bethan. [Picture from KQED] Citation: Read et al. (2013). Nature doi:10.1038/nature12221.

Coral research at Southampton gets a well-deserved boost

It's always nice to bask in the reflected glory of a collaborator. EU grants are hard to get and funding is getting ever tighter due to the global economic situation, so it was great to read of a local success as reported this week in a University of Soutampton press release. The congratulations go to Joerg Wiedenmann, who heads up The Coral Reef Laboratory here in Southampton.

Joerg does lots of interesting work on corals, looking at how they adapt to (or suffer at the hands of) Climate Change, including work on coral bleaching. I've done a little work with him on coral red fluorescent proteins, which are related to the famous Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). (The massive diversity of fluorescent protein mutants that now exist are a great example of how single amino acid mutations can have quite dramatic phenotypic effects that would certainly be "visible" to Natural Selection.) It's not published yet, though, and it's very much his project, so I won't write about it now.

Corals have also been in the Science news a lot recently following the recent discovery that they recruit gobies to act as "body guards" and clean off toxic seaweed that would otherwise threaten the coral's survival. Pretty cool!

Corals are generally fascinating animals even when they're not recruiting fish body guards. For one thing, they have symbiotic algae, which photosynthesise and can make up a substantial proportion of the material in each polyp. Indeed, it is expelling these algae under stress conditions that leads to the bleaching that Joerg studies. As an evolutionary biologist studying molecular responses to stress, however, this symbiosis can be frustrating as well as fascinating: corals could acclimate through their own regulatory changes or adapt through evolutionary changes, or these changes could happen in the algae, or by swapping algae. Enough options to keep researchers busy for some time!

Standing up for Genetic Modification

It's my 300th blog post and so I wanted to try and post about something that captured the essence of the blog, hence the delay! What could be better than to combine food, science and The Cabbages of Doom?

Actually, The Cabbages of Doom is a bit of a red herring for this post. Just in case there is any confusion, The Cabbages of Doom is not a negative reference about Genetically Modified (GM) foods. (It's a surreal science fiction story about some marauding cabbages from another direction invading Swansea. And only 99p! Review here.)

In fact, I could not be much further away from an anti-GM position. For me, the success of the anti-GM lobby in the UK and across Europe in the late nineties represents one of the biggest scientific, political and media disasters of the modern age. A well-organised and probably well-intentioned but horribly misinformed group of scaremongers managed to hijack the public debate over use of one of the most promising technologies ever to be developed in the history of mankind.

Let's make one thing clear from the outset: there is nothing inherently unnatural about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). For a start, many GMO just involve targeted mutations within a strain or introduction of genetic variants from related species. These could potentially be achieved by conventional breeding and artificial selection at much greater expense of time and money (and death). The more advanced GMO involve taking DNA from one organism and inserting it in another. Even these GMO are not really unnatural, even if the techniques used to create them are: although it is rare in multicellular plants and animals, "Horizontal Transfer" of genetic material between organisms - including eukaryotes - does occur in nature. (See Keeling & Palmer (2008) Horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotic evolution. Nature Reviews Genetics 9:605-18 for some examples and discussion.)

It is true that the level of modification desired is unlikely to be achieved by natural mechanisms within the lifetimes of the scientists involved. This, though, is one of the key benefits of GM: it greatly speeds up our ability to generate and evaluate possible genetic solutions to environmental problems. We don't need to wait around just trying to get lucky.

Furthermore, far from being inherently dangerous, many GMO are probably safer to the environment than non-GM alternatives. Why? GM is far more precise and targeted than "traditional" methods of creating mutants for screening, which involve chemicals or radiation and produce something much less predictable. The more we understand the nature of the modification, the easier it is to both predict possible risks and also detect or mitigate them. You only have to look at the problems of "invasive species" to realise that entirely "natural" organisms in the wrong place can be an environmental calamity. By eliminating the ability to customise and refine appropriate native organisms through GM, inappropriate introduced species might be used instead. (Often it is not clear what the problems might be until they are released.) The other reason is that, done right, a GMO can permit reductions in uses of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides.

Food safety is more of a concern but the solution here is not a blanket ban nor even a blanket hysteria, it is adequate food testing and common sense. If a gene has simply been removed from an organism or repressed, as in the "Flavr Savr" tomato, it is no more dangerous than a new hybrid from natural breeding - DNA is digested when we eat food, so if the product itself is not toxic, there is no obvious risk. If, on the other hand, the GMO is producing something like Bt toxin, one obviously needs to be more careful. Even here, though, it is not obviously the case that using chemicals, or even "organic" alternatives (all GMO are organic!) like spraying Bt strains of bacteria, would be any safer. Preferably, all new foods would undergo appropriate toxicity and allergy testing, whether they were the product of conventional breeding or GM. If there is a genuine problem, clearly that specific GM food should be withdrawn, just as one would do with anything containing, or grown with, new bacteria or chemicals.

So, what went wrong? One of the big problems was the old chestnut of "balanced reporting" in the media. All too often, this seems to equate to equal air time for both sides, no matter how uneven the evidence supporting the two sides was. A calm and cautious (and often already pretty balanced) scientist is paired up with a volatile and definitely one-sided activist. Clearly, this is going to end up biased towards the activist even if their position is weaker and founded on misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of the science. Worse, the journalists chairing the whole thing often fail to interject when one side is just plain wrong about their facts.

The second problem was education. I don't think it would be such a big problem today because DNA and genomics is in the news so much more but, at the time, a scary proportion of the British public did not think that a non-GM tomato had any DNA in it, for example. (At Nottingham, we had a public debate on the issue and a someone had to be removed because they just kept shouting "I don't want to eat DNA!" and would not stop to have it explained that he was eating DNA in all his regular food.)

The final nail was economics. The anti-GM campaign was good enough at scaremongering that public confidence was weakened, despite (inadequate?) attempts by the scientific community to set the record straight. Supermarkets perceived that they would lose enough custom to warrant pulling the plug and so they did. GM has been largely vilified in the public domain ever since, although I think the EU has now relaxed its zero-tolerance stance. After all, if a supermarket is advertising itself as "GM free" as a good thing, GM must be bad. Right? (Obviously, the consumer desires of someone like me, who would rather eat the cheaper, tastier, less wasteful GM tomatoes, are not so important.)

GMO are not universally good and I am sure there have been situations where big corporations have used GM just to make more money or to increase herbicide resistance and thus use more herbicide, which is bad for the environment. Like any technology, the applications need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

That said, there are some clear situations where GMO can be a force for good, such as the Golden Rice Project, which seeks to use "biofortified rice as a contribution to the alleviation of life-threatening micronutrient deficiencies in developing countries". Drought- and salt-tolerance maize and other such crops could also be important in our changing world.

The sad irony is that, by resisting the development of government-funded GM crops in academic institutions, the anti-GM lobby have actually driven it all into the hands of large corporations that can get round legislation by doing tests overseas and are far more likely to create the kind of GMO that we don't actually want. (Or, even more scary, unregulated amateur biohackers.)

Whether you think it's man-made or not (it is), Climate Change is a big problem and the more we ignore it, the worse it's going to get. This is a problem so big that we need to throw every weapon in our arsenal at tackling it head-on, and that includes taking a chance here and there. There is a reason that food security is one of the major focuses of UK science funding. We have to feed a growing population on dwindling resources. It's not rocket science. (And I haven't even mentioned biofuels.) Genetically modified organisms represent one of the best - possibly the only - chance we have, short of a massive reduction in the global population. (Population crashes and extinction are natural responses to Climate Change - let's make no mistake here, "natural" is not always good.) It's time to let the genie back out of the bottle and let it be a force for good.

We have a bit of situation

This genius cartoon is doing the rounds on Facebook thanks to I f**king love science. It's originally from XKCD. Despite the clear parallels with the recent Paul Broun nonsense, it's actually a pretty old one.

The problem is, the Universe not caring what we believe is not always a good thing. Take Mitt Romney's poor grasp of climate change, for example. We're in big trouble whether Romney thinks that we (or, more precisely, America) should do anything about it, or not.

The USA is one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth and yet, despite this, some of its leading politicians are not only science illiterate but they seem to wear that illiteracy with pride, like some kind of badge of honour. That someone like Paul Broun can end up on the USA's House Science Committee (along with fellow Republican, Todd Akin) would be funny if it wasn't so downright disturbing.

I don't know what scares me more: the possibility of another Republican US President or the fact that it's even a real possibility that someone like Mitt Romney could end up wielding that much power. If US politicians do not wake up about Climate Change - and debate the issue at least - I fear that we are going to have a lot more than "a bit of situation".

Good-bye, polar bears :o(

For the past couple of years, I have been using this image of a polar bear riding a small iceberg to illustrate climate change in the talk I give to a local(ish) school about studying biological sciences at University - it's just one of the important areas to which biological sciences graduates can contribute. Sadly, according to a Guardian article earlier this week, it is an image that might go out of date sooner than I thought.

The title of the article says it all, really: "Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within four years".

As the expert in question (Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University) is quoted to suggest in the article, surely it is time to start throwing everything at this problem, including the kitchen sink of geoengineering. With a catastrophe of this magnitude so close, it is hard to see how such attempts could possibly make things worse.

Congratulations, Globe-Town!

Back in April, I posted about Globe-Town, a website made by some of the students in Southampton's Web Science Doctoral Training Centre as part of the World Bank's "Apps for Climate Change" challenge. Well, they achieved third place. Well done, Jack and all the Globe-Town team!

Move over CIA World Factbook, Globe-Town is here!

I don't know an awful lot about the World Bank but it has recently been drawn to attention that they currently have an "Apps for Climate Change" challenge. One of the entries is lead by Jack Townsend, a postgrad student in one of the labs that I collaborate with and part of the University of Southampton's Web Science Doctoral Training Centre. It's called Globe-Town and it's a really good-looking and user-friendly way to navigate around the World Bank Statistics:

The blurb:

Modern life is making us next-door neighbours with far-away places. We share major risks, responsibilities & opportunities with countries around the world, something that is never more applicable than to climate change which connects us all through the environment we share. Globe-Town is a way of viewing information about the countries of the world and exploring how they are connected together. With Globe-Town we can learn about the places we depend upon most and discover what connects them to us.

At the top of the page, you can pick a country and a climate-related statistic and get a nice visual on how that nation is connected to other countries. Below, Globe-Town offers data from the World Bank and rates them according to the World Average. These are divided into three categories: Society, Environment and Economy.


Clicking on the different sub-categories then brings up some graphs looking at that particular metric over time and, perhaps most interesting at all, comparing the numbers relating to your country of interest with those of the highest and lowest countries. I'm not sure how great all of the underlying data is - you can get some weird things like 140% of children completing primary school - but Jack and co. cannot be blamed for this as it all comes from the World Bank.

All in all, this a fun, educational and informative site and well worth a vote for the App challenge.

UK government prefers to launch cruise missiles than scientific cruises

I found out this week that, thanks to various government cuts and the like,the National Oceanography Centre is going to have massive staff cuts. Fair enough, one might say, given the "current economic climate" but I'm more worried about the actual climate, to be honest.

It always annoys me when things that we excel at as a nation, like our oceanographic science, are hit so hard when the actual numbers are, in government terms, peanuts. How much are we talking? £1.5 million. Sounds like a lot until you consider that the annual military budget for the country is approx. £37 billion, while the annual science budget is about £4.6 billion... and cruise missiles weigh in at £500,000 a pop. So, for the cost of three cruise missiles*, we could have safeguarded the NOC and its invaluable work understanding global climate and working out how to fight/mitigate climate change. There can't be that many people who wouldn't consider that a fair swap. Sadly, it seems, they're in government.

*or six dinners with David Cameron.

Small but perfectly formed

After my recent post about bobtail squid, I felt that I should give some airtime (if you're using WiFi) to the little ocean critters that I am actually involved with: the beautiful Emiliania huxleyi. It's not really a "critter" as such at all - it's a tiny marine phytoplankton, so it's more like a plant really.

Emiliania huxleyi (fondly known as "E hux") is a "Coccolithophore"; the funky appearance comes from the armoured "coccolith" plates that cover the outside of these tiny single-celled organisms. Nobody really knows what coccoliths are for but they are one of the primary reasons for the interest in species as the plates are made out of calcium carbonate. This makes E hux and its relatives a potentially potent carbon sink despite their minuscule size. (The scale bar in the image is 2μm, which is 1 million times shorter than Darth Vader.) This is because huge numbers of coccoliths sink to the sea floor and ultimately become the chalk of the future.

Although it would seem to make more sense to make these plates externally, they actually make them internally and then export them whole, as this video (of a different coccolithophore) shows. In the words of the experts:

"The coccoliths are rather large relative to the cell size; if scaled up to human size it would be like a person giving birth to a car wheel or a dustbin lid."

The project that I am involved with is primarily concerned with Ocean Acidification, which is one of the lesser-known aspects of climate change due to rising carbon dioxide (CO₂). Approx a quarter of atmospheric CO₂ is dissolved by the world's oceans. As CO₂ levels continue to rise due human activity, the amount of dissolved CO₂ therefore also increases. This, in turn, lowers the pH of the ocean, which makes calcium carbonate - the stuff of coccoliths, skeletons and shells - dissolve more easily. The prediction, therefore, is that this will be bad for calcifies, making calcification itself more difficult and reducing the effectiveness of the calcium carbonate structures that they make. (Although we don't yet know what E hux uses its coccoliths for, it's a fair bet that their important.)

The good news is that, as Dr Ian Malcolm would say, "Life finds a way" and so there is every expectation that E hux and friends could evolve and adapt to the elevated CO₂ levels. The bad news, though, is that rate of man-made CO₂ increase is so fast that they may not have the time and capacity to adapt before the oceans get too acidic for them. It is therefore important that we understand both how calcification is regulated and what the capacity of E hux for adaptation to high CO₂ is. Until we get a handle on this, we also don't really know how E hux will respond. Will the increased solubility of the calcium carbonate release more carbon into the ocean, making things even worse? Or, will E hux respond by making thicker coccoliths, incorporating more carbon and help to offset some of the effects of human emissions? (At least, that's my understanding of the main questions.)

In a future post, I'll outline a bit of what we are doing. (I say "we" but my contribution is actually pretty small.) For now, though, just marvel at their coccospherical beauty: