By Zubair A. Dar 

Last week, I went down the timeline on Facebook to check my first post ever. The three words I wrote to describe my feelings read ‘waiting for azadi’. Freedom in Urdu, azadi has come to signify the sum total of aspirations of millions of people in my homeland, Kashmir, a valley perched up in the western Himalayas near India and Pakistan. In my second post, I spell out some of these aspirations as freedom from ‘curfew, atrocities and gags on freedom of speech’.

I vividly remember the days. It was the summer of 2008. We had been constrained indoors for many days in the capital, Srinagar, placed under strict curfew after widespread protests and mass gatherings. As journalists, my friends and I could do little other than make phone calls and surf the Internet for information. Venturing out to gather eyewitness accounts was synonymous with risking your life. Authorities cancelled and reissued curfew passes to us as restrictions continued for weeks. Every day, we would hear of deaths and damages to property by armed forces. Outside the first floor apartment, we would often see troopers thrashing civilians who left their homes to buy bread, milk and other essentials. The gag was choking life in many different ways – crushing dissent, preventing information exchange and breaking the backs of people by limiting access to food and essential medicine.

It was during these strangulating days that I opened a Facebook account. As New Delhi decided to continue the policy of barring text messages and confiscating newspapers, Facebook became the space to express, to communicate, to show and to expose. It was a space that cut through vertical communication structures and established a horizontal network of the people, by the people and for the people. In conflict zones and occupied territories, it proved to be the carnival where people would act vile for a day to challenge the authority of the ruler. But Facebook has since died a death many will mourn for long time to come.

Ever since I landed in the US this summer, Facebook has come to scare me. My home page looks like a psychoanalysis report. It is a reflection of everything I have looked for in the market, searched in Google or bought from an online store. Be it the furniture I like, the boots I am planning to buy, or books of my favourite genre, all make an appearance here – as if winking at me to tell me ‘we know what you did all summer’. Facebook is no longer the space I once knew it to be. It has changed, and so has every website that once inspired me.

It is sad how a democratising tool like the Internet and social media is continuously becoming a tool for capitalist accumulation. It is painful to accept that we can sometimes be fooled into believing that democracy has breathed a fresh life, for all we witness is a gasp that keeps democracy alive. It can never be confused with the triumph of democracy, with azadi, with freedom.

Written by Yang Ruan

I read "Lean In" by Sheryl Sandberg recently.  It's basically a collection of tips for women who work in male-dominated professions.

I've always been in male dominated fields, and I could really relate to many of the situations she described.  I'm glad that she brought up that in many cases, your own prejudices and insecurities work against you to make the experiences even more negative than they otherwise would have been.  Most of the tips involve shifting your own way of thinking or doing things to compensate for your bad habits.  It was also helpful for me to read these because it also gave me a better understanding of other women.

The most interesting conflict was the one between Success and Likability, which is what Chapter 3 is focused on.  Basically, being nice is necessary for being attractive as a woman in America.  Being attractive is important for self-esteem and feeling like a complete human being.  At work, there will always be someone who will be upset so matter what you do, even is you are just doing your job.  There will always be cases where you are inconveniencing someone, and they may take it personally or simply act like they're taking it personally.  If being agreeable is important than being disliked by even one person can be very disconcerting and uncomfortable.  As a result, many American women do not feel that leadership positions and being ambitious are fun or rewarding.  Sandberg considers this the biggest reason women eventually stop working or don't return to work after having children.  It's just not worth it.

I find this really interesting because I actually don't feel the same need to be likable.  I really think it is because Chinese culture does not emphasize being nice or even liked in order to be attractive.  There is much more of an emphasis on being smart, competent, and hard-working.  Those are the qualities one's self-worth are tied to.  As my friend would say, we feel the need to be a PMOS - productive member of society.  The principle is that if you are helpful you will be liked, but good intentions are useless.  So now that I understand the need to be nice and liked, I can better understand American women.  I can also see why there are many Chinese and Taiwanese-American women in male-dominated fields and moving up corporate ladders right now. 

I wrote up more of my thoughts in a google doc where I listed what I considered to be the main points in each chapter.  I'm planning on using it for a discussion on the book.

Cross-posted with Yang's blog.

by Daniel M. Kammen

We generally complain that action on climate change is mired in polarized partisan politics and thus nothing can be done.  True to an extent, but lets hold on a bit. 

In terms of generating important discussion about the clarity that exists around the conclusion that the scientific debate over climate change as an anthropogenic process is over, the political bully pulpit can be incredibly powerful.

A case in point is the paper published last week in Environmental Research Letters, where I am the Editor-in-Chief, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” (Cook, et al., 2013) with the abstract:

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.

The paper came out, and President Barack Obama then tweeted:

‏‪@BarackObama: Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: ‪#climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: ‪http://OFA.BO/gJsdFp

Follow-on tweets came from Vice-President Al Gore and U. S. Congressman Henry Waxman.  Television coverage followed in: ABC Lateline, Al Jazeera (Inside Story), CNN International, Democracy Now, and NRK. At last count there were over 200 newspaper and magazine pieces, and a number of radio segments.  At last count there were several hundred blog posts on the findings of this paper and the Obama Tweet.  A link to the ever-growing set of media coverage is: http://sks.to/tcpmedia.

The article has been downloaded over 21,600 article downloads in just a few days of having the paper published online.

What this story highlights – beyond the excellent data collection, analysis and scholarship in the paper itself – is the value of thoughtful comments and recognition of these findings.

 

Photo credit: Mashable.com

Daniel M. Kammen is the Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he founded and directs the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (http://rael.berkeley.edu).   Kammen is a Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.  Kammen the Lead Scholar for the Fulbright NEXUS program in energy and climate for the U. S. Department of State.

References:

John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs and Andrew Skuce (2013) “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature”, Environmental Research Letters, 8 (2).

            http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

By Michael A. Cohen

Here, I'm writing about what I study in an "up-goer five" way; that is, I'm using only the ten hundred most used words to make it as easy as possible for everyone to understand!

Michael helping to put sun power on top of a house

I study power lines. Not the big power lines you see on a long car trip that carry power a long way, but the smaller lines that bring power to your home. You can see them on your street, if they're not under ground! I also study some other parts that are on the power lines that help them work. Some parts look like big cans up high next to the lines. Other ones you don't see very much because they're behind a big wall to keep them safe, but they're all needed to get power from the place where it's made to your home.

Why do I study power lines and the things that help them work? Today, more and more people are putting things up on their houses that turn the sun's light into power. This is great because power from the sun is very clean; some other ways that we make power can hurt trees, animals and people by making our air, land and water less clean. But there is a problem: the power lines that are close to our houses were made to bring power to us from far away, and they may not work right when the power goes from our houses back up the line instead.

Some things about sun power might be good for the power lines. One good thing is that if some of the power we use comes from the sun, less power has to come down the lines. So maybe we can use smaller lines and pay less to build them when we have more sun power. But some things about sun power might be bad. They could make too much power in one spot on a day with a lot of sun. A lot of power in one place could break the things in our houses that use the power, like our computers.

We don't know which is more important: the good things or the bad things that sun power might do to power lines. Or maybe they're about the same. To find out, I'm using fast computers to make working pictures of many different power lines that can tell us what sun power will do to them. So far it looks to me like the good things can be bigger than the bad things, but the answer can be very different for different kinds of power lines in different places. It also matters a lot how many people on the line have sun power; a little is probably good, but a lot can cause more problems.

Once I'm done looking at what sun power does to power lines, I also want to see if it would help if we could store the sun power at the houses. Then we could use the power when ever we need it, instead of just when the sun is bright. I hope that the things I learn will help us get as much power as we can from the sun, without breaking anything or needing to pay too much money.

Written by Diego Ponce de León Baridó

Growing up in Mexico City, and everyday on our way to school, my sister and I would stare at the two highest mountains in the country: Pico de Orizaba (5,600 meters) and Iztaccihuatl (5,200 meters). At sunrise, and after a hard rain, the mountains would rise over a thick layer of smog, would fade throughout the day, but would always return at dawn. Omnipresent, yet taken for granted, these mountains and their glaciers go largely unexplored by most Mexicans, including myself, as it took me more than 20 years to break away from the urban jungle. 

On the glacier at the top of ‘Pico de Orizaba’ with my uncle Hector and Kat. Spending time with family in challenging adventures makes long lasting bonds (Kat still smiling despite breathing less than 50% her usual oxygen intake!)

Urbanization, the unstoppable force driving the future of human settlements, is high (>80%) in the developed world, but urbanization growth rates are much higher in rising and developing economies. Where urbanization has a positive effect (mainly rich countries with strong environmental policies), society benefits: increased investments in public transport, less vehicle miles traveled, more localized health and education services, and a gradually smaller environmental footprint. In the developing world, however, urbanization is a force that has not come accompanied with better services, particularly because of inequality in the distribution of services and a strong focus on unconstrained growth.  More important however, and despite the benefits of urbanization, is our losing touch with nature. One cannot expect an urbanite, struggling to make ends meet (rich and poor), to worry about the forest or the groundwater that is being cut and depleted to grow food, or to worry about the glaciers that are melting, risking water availability for millions throughout the world. The connection between our immediate reality and the services provided by nature are lost in the city.

There are few experiences in my life that have been as enriching as mountaineering. Up there, time passes slowly, nature challenges you in a positive way, and the unmoving power of the mountain humbles you down to your feet, and to a few deep breathes.  You see water melting away, trickling its way to a river, unto a pipe, and to a city.  You see water making its way to a dam. Out there the connection is obvious, but only if your privileged enough to spend time outside, or poor enough to live off the land in some of the most isolated areas of the world. The space in between these two extremes is massive.

To me, being outside fills me with purpose and reminds of the interconnectedness of nature and society. The experience is unparalleled. But how can more people enjoy this? How can we bring nature, and these raw experiences, to the city? Making these linkages will be crucial in communicating climate change for an increasingly urban population, that doesn’t go outside. For now, I’ll keep exploring California, spending time outside with friends, and in the near future, begin volunteering with Bay Area Wilderness Training  (BAWT), an NGO focused on taking urban youth outside. I hope some of you will join me there!

 At the summit of White Mountain (4,300 m) in California, with Carlos, one of my best friends who works at PG&E and with a new found interest on the relationship between energy and the environment.

In class today Jess Reilly gave an amazing presentation on the power of body language. It turns out that by mastering non-verbal communication skills, we can influence ourselves and others in more ways that we usually think!

Enjoy!