You probably can’t attend the American Meteorological Society’s AMS Environmental Science Seminar Series in person. This is a shame, because the seminars are so good. Last month’s talk by Dr. Naomi Oreskes was particularly fine. But you can get descriptions of these talks, along with slides and background material, from the AMS web site, and these are among the best online resources for educating the public about climate change.

Dr. Naomi Oreskes

Most of the AMS Environmental Science Seminars have dealt with aspects of climate change, including such daunting topics as melting permafrost, increasing oceanic acidity, and declining snowpack in the Western United States. Oreskes’ talk was more about philosophy — it was called “The Scientific Consensus On Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?” Oreskes is an historian of science at the University of California-San Diego, and the presentation reviews decades of climate research to support a masterful description of how scientists prove things.

Induction means generalizing from observations. This method supports the argument for human-induced climate change through the use of temperature records. Deduction means proving a hypothesis. More than 75 years ago, Guy Stewart Callendar made the hypothesis that increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause increases in temperature — and the evidence has shown he was correct.

The philosopher Karl Popper famously suggested that it is impossible to prove a theory true, but you can prove it false. So far, despite monumental effort, no one has disproven the theory of human-induced climate change. Oreskes also illustrates the concept of consilience, or the agreement toward a central principle from a variety of approaches using different kinds of data. She reviews 928 studies of climate change in peer-reviewed journals and finds none that take issue with the basic idea that people are causing the earth to get hotter.

Oreskes’ talk, which is available as a free download on the AMS site, is also a chapter in the book Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren (MIT Press, 2007).  The essay has a dual purpose — explaining scientific methods and also outlining the reasons for consensus on climate change — and it succeeds brilliantly because of the quality and grace of her prose.  

Back on June 20, 2005, during the second AMS seminar, a meterologist and a sociologist said, “It just may be that New Orleans is already at or near the margins of its resiliency . . . stretching that resiliency to accommodate a changing climate will be a formidable but seemingly unavoidable challenge.” Hurricane Katrina hit the city nine weeks later. If only we had paid attention.

The PBS “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” is known for high quality broadcast journalism, and the program’s website has created a series of science-related “In-Depth” reports that reflect those high standards. Most of these packages include news reports, slide shows, interactive features, and often, lesson plans.

Several of the in-depth packages will be updated once or twice a month to reflect breaking news. These topics include a package on The Global Warming Debate that describes the scientific evidence for climate change, explains the “greenhouse effect,” summarizes the policy debate in the U.S., and even allows users to see how much carbon their automobile puts into the atmosphere. Other frequently updated packages describe Mars Exploration Rovers and Polar Discoveries.

Some PBS Online NewsHour packages will be updated less frequently, perhaps once or twice a year. These incude Predicting Earthquakes, Tracking Hurricanes, and the Hubble and Webb Telescopes. There are also NewsHour packages that will not change, including The Pluto Debate, Search for Ancestors, Chimeras (Animal-Human Hybrids), Coral Reefs, Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology, Nanotechnology, Wind Power, The Science of Aging, Adult Stem Cells, and The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Keep checking for other “New in NSDL” posts that describe PBS NewsHour Online science packages in more detail.

The site of the Memphis Astronomical Society is mostly for amateur enthusiasts in that metropolitan area, but it also has a free resource of interest to anyone who wants to get into stargazing. “Getting Started With Your New Telescope,” by longtime member Bill Busler, explains how telescopes work, defines basic terms such as magnitude and magnification, and shows how to mount a telescope, align the finder scope, use a sky map, and find several common sky objects. The seven-page article is a quick PDF download located on the organization’s home page.

“We are amateurs in the basic sense of the word,” says the home page. “We study astronomy because we love it.” They have been going strong for 54 years, and the Memphis Astronomical Society is still sharing the love. For example, member Bill Wilson took this image last fall by holding his digital camera up to a telescope’s eyepiece.

Mercury transits the Sun, November 8, 2006.

Classic Chemistry is a simple, well-executed site that explores the history of chemistry and chemists. If you were a regular visitor to their “today in chemistry” section, you might know that on May 29, 1970, the General Electric Corporation announced that its researchers had synthesized gem-grade diamonds for the first time.

The site’s “classic calculations” section includes 55 quantitative exercises tied to and based upon classic papers from the history of chemistry. The exercises allow teachers to use historical material and reinforce principle-based problem-solving learning objectives. Teachers can reproduce the analysis carried out in the original paper, or some part of that analysis; they can also critically analyze the historical data.

Classic Calculations include brief historical notes on the investigators and explanatory notes and solutions of the exercises. Exercises are suitable for in-class examples or homework assignments. Most are for introductory college chemistry courses, but some are suitable for more or less advanced courses.

Other parts of the site include reproductions of classic papers from the history of chemistry, such as Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist (1661); a glossary of archaic chemical terms; and many links to other sites on the history of chemistry. Classic Chemistry is maintained by Dr. Carmen Giunta of LeMoyne College.

Conservation Central is a habitat education program hosted by the Smithsonian National Zoological Park and intended for middle school students. Presented by a corporate sponsor (Fujifilm), the site explores the Asian temperate forest, home of the giant panda and black bear, through a variety of online activities. Visitors can design a panda habitat, conduct field research in a virtual forest, or accompany a friendly camoflauge-wearing field biologist as he walks through the forest, collecting data that will help conserve Panda habitat.

Another section of the site shows ways that students and their families are taking steps to protect habitats and the plants and animals that depend on them.

The Pacific Biodiversity Information Forum is a young organization with an ambitious goal. It hopes to develop a complete, scientifically sound, and electronically accessible biological knowledge base on the countries in and around the Pacific Ocean, and to make this knowledge widely available for decision-making. The effort is still in its early stages, but the site already includes an extensive bibliography of flora and fauna in Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia; basic information on the ecology of all Pacific Rim countries; access to two public mailing lists for persons interested in the topic; and an extensive collection of images.

Mount Ikurang North Rarotonga. Photo: A.K. Kepler

The Pacific Forum’s major partners include the Pacific Science Association, the 87-year-old research organization based in Honolulu.  Other partners are the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Global Taxonomy Initiative, which coordinate similar efforts for other bioregions. They plan for the day when all the plants and animals in the whole wide world will be linked and searchable online.

Teachers, parents, and kids go to The Science House - Countertop Chemistry to find recipes for experiments they can do without fancy equipment. The site was designed by Science House, a 16-year-old learning outreach program of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at North Carolina State University. One of the most popular experiments in the collection is also among its oldest. It explains how to make ice cream in two Ziplock bags. Students measure the temperature of the ice in the outer bag, then measure it again after they add salt to the ice. They learn that adding a solute to a solvent lowers the freezing point of the solvent enough to freeze the ingredients in the inner bag, and then they learn the taste of fresh ice cream.

“North Carolina State is a land grant university. Our mission is to work with people to solve problems throughout the state,” says Dr. David Haase, professor of physics and director of The Science House. “Our project is very much in the land grant tradition. We want to do science and math outreach activities with as much sophistication as we do research.”

Haase says that collaborations are essential to Science House’s success. The project has 28 collaborators and supporters, including Imagination Station, a science museum in Wilson, NC. NSDL added ScienceHouse to its collection last week, becoming the 29th collaborator. Haase says that “kids don’t tinker enough” and that Science House will attack the problem with its next web project, “Physics From The Junk Drawer.”