(Photo: Richard Morgenstein)

Last month I went out to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve near Stanford, where Scott Loarie and Ken-ichi Ueda showed me and about a dozen docents how to use the new iNaturalist iPhone app, which Ueda created. The aim of the app is to make recording and sharing of accurate field observations incredibly simple. It’s still in testing mode and not yet available to the public. “Citizen scientists” can already upload their digital photos and share them with an online community of naturalists around the world, at the iNaturalist website.

This week I spoke with Healy Hamilton, who directs the Center for Applied Biodiversity Informatics at the California Academy of Sciences. Below are some excerpts from our interview about climate change, citizen science, and iNaturalist:

Q: What’s the potential of citizen science?
A: The world is changing faster than ever before in the history of all human  civilization. There’s no way that scientists can monitor those changes. It’s critical for us to understand the pace of change, and where change is taking place the most.

With global change, there’s a fundamental rearrangement of where species live.  We already know almost everywhere we look that species are on the move trying to track their preferred climate envelopes. To understand the implications of this kind of shifting, we need to have people help us monitor these changes, both the rate of the change and the locations of the changes. This is where there’s a profound role for citizen science.

Q: How can a tool like iNaturalist help scientists study climate change?
A:…Citizen science can help us understand how climate change is unfolding in situ. Every species has edges to their range, so there’s sort of a central range, a northern leading edge, a southern edge, eastern and western edges.  Citizens can help us monitor how climate change is impacting the edges of those ranges, which is where climate impacts are most likely to occur.

For example, some of the easternmost redwood forests are likely to experience the highest summer temperatures [in the redwoods' range], and summer temps seem to be changing quite rapidly, maybe more than temps at other times of the year.  So if citizens can help us say, ‘Look, I just saw a grove of redwood trees and the leaves are brown and this is where it’s located,’ we can actually map climate in that area and see how climate change is unfolding on the landscape.  There’s no way scientists can be everywhere at once to understand how these changes are unfolding, but citizens are hiking through redwood forests all the time.

…So applications such as iNaturalist are going to increase the biodiversity data that scientists have to work with. Not all observations are going to be useful, but many of them will be useful to us. Because of our need for verified observations about what occurs where and when on the planet, as scientists, we think citizen science has a huge role to play in improving our models about forecasting future climate change impacts to species and ecosystems.

Q: Why do we need to study these changes?  What’s the big picture?
A: Climate change is the single most important threat that’s facing all of human society.  If we continue to emit the current rates of greenhouse gases into the future, and if we do end up with 900 or 1,000 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere at the end of the century, we will be living on a fundamentally different planet, and that transition is not going to be comfortable for us.  All of our society, all of our infrastructure, all of our food resources, our forest resources, the things that we need, the things we’ve evolved our society around consuming, they like the climate the way it was, [at] about 150-300 parts per million of CO2.  So it’s important to understand how climate change is going to influence biodiversity, the biodiversity we depend on, every bite of food we eat, the clothes on our back, all of our paper and forest products. It influences how diseases are transmitted and all kinds of public health, food security, and national security issues.

In this short video, Scott Loarie and Ken-ichi Ueda explain how the iNaturalist iPhone app works.

By Marjorie Sun

The California Academy of Sciences and the Monterey Bay Aquarium have a big advantage that some educational institutions in other parts of the country don’t: most of their visitors — who tend to be Californians — believe that climate change is real. That means their global warming exhibits can focus on solutions, for example, rather than laying out the basics of atmospheric science.

Californians’ concern about climate change has translated into political support for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. According to survey results released in July by the Public Policy Institute of California, two-thirds of Californians strongly back the pioneering state law known as AB 32. The law requires a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. And the recent defeat of Proposition 23 by 22 percentage points would appear to affirm that support.

Californians appear to buck some national trends on climate change issues. A declining number of Americans say there is solid evidence that the world is warming. The number dropped from 79% in 2006, when AB 32 was passed, to 59% this year, according to a survey just released by the Pew Research Center.  The number who think scientists agree that the world is warming due to human activity fell from 59% to 44% over the same period. Even more telling, perhaps, is that the ratio of “yes” to “no” answers to the latter question for Republicans (30:58) is almost the mirror image of that for Democrats (59:32).

New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer details in a recent, in-depth article that billionaires David and Charles Koch, titans of the oil industry, have been spending millions of dollars waging a covert disinformation campaign to thwart climate change legislation in the United States.

Aboard the Bio-Bus

A local organization has launched a mobile counter-offensive. The Alliance for Climate Education, a non-profit based in Oakland, has created a hip, multi-media presentation spiced with animation and rock music to reach teens. Think An Inconvenient Truth goes MTV. The alliance has shown it to more than 420,000 high schoolers across the nation in the past year. The presentation teaches teens the basics about climate change and urges them to “do one thing” to fight it.

Alliance staffers also have tricked out an old school bus with clean tech, driving it to schools and museums to showcase renewable technology. The blue bio-bus runs on used cooking oil collected from restaurants. Solar panels on the bus charge cell phones and computers on board.

Unmasking the Cow

The model cow in the Monterey Bay Aquarium climate change exhibit originally appeared with a gas mask, which has since been removed. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Meanwhile, keeping the climate change exhibits up-to-date scientifically is a concern for the museums. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, outfitting a life-size model cow with a gas mask was prompted in part by a 2006 study by the Food and Agriculture Organization. The FAO study said that industrial production of livestock in general, including cattle, pigs, and poultry, accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions. But another FAO study released in April — about the same time the climate change exhibit opened — examined the GHG emissions for the dairy industry alone, not beef production. It concluded that dairy production contributes just four percent of emissions. The study (PDF download), along with howls of protests from the local dairy industry, helped convince the aquarium to unmask the Holstein.

One last tidbit about interactive exhibits: One of the most popular — common to the Academy and the Monterey Bay Aquarium — is surprisingly low-tech. Thousands of visitors write on comment cards about what they can do to fight climate change and hang them on display boards there. One of them, in a child’s handwriting, read “Reduce, reuse, recycle and homework is bad for the environment.”

Hear Marjorie’s companion radio feature on KQED’s Quest radio program, Monday morning. A version of this post also appears on the Quest blog.