Today is the first day of the 4th International Polar Year, perhaps a fitting end or a new beginning for Climate Commons. As many of the posts here have discussed, the poles play an important role in global climate. A major goal of this IPY is to study these linkages in greater detail and make the public aware of them. You can learn more about IPY at www.ipy.org and get a 3D tour in Google Earth at www.earthslot.org/ipy . It’s been a pleasure participating in this commons, and I encourage you all to continue the sorts of discussions we’ve had here as part of IPY.

Cheers,
Matt

Speaking of kids and the IPY, I’m involved with several projects for the International Polar Year. These are primarily field projects, doing useful arctic things like installing new long-term weather stations, measuring glacier volume change, extracting lake sediment cores to understand prior climate, etc. In the past, my wife has always been my chief field assistant. Now that we have a son, we all go out together. However, the National science Foundation is not very happy about our working together and makes our lives quite difficult in the regard. I know most of the decision makers there personally and they all know we are quite competent in the field and have no personal issue with us doing this, however, as professional bureaucrats they feel they have an obligation to say No to anything that might give the public cause to give them grief. My position on this is two-fold — 1) as the National science Foundation, their decisions should be based on objective facts rather than speculation and 2) that I shouldnt have to make a choice between a life of science and a family life (considering this work takes months of field work). So I’m wondering what others think? Is the marginal extra expense of bring a child along in the field a waste of taxpayer money? Is it morally wrong? Does the public really have an issue with this? Considering that 50,000 people in the US die each year in auto accidents, half of which have no fault assigned to any of the drivers involved, and that this is just one of many crazy risks the public considers normal, personally I think we’re much safer and saner to spend as much time as we can in the Arctic. Ideas?
-Matt

International Polar year 07/08 begins on March 1 and there are amazing outreach efforts particularly in education. There are some interesting launch events and education initiatives you can check out on their website.

For those of you with kids, maybe some of these activities can fit into your school, church, etc…
To become part of this exciting international scientific effort:
1. Do some ice investigations like the ones suggested below.
2. Launch a virtual balloon representing your school on the map.
3. Check back frequently to see balloons go up around the world.
4. Continue to take part in IPY by learning about polar science in your classroom. More resources will be added to the educators’ page throughout IPY.

‘In dreams begins responsibilities’ W B Yeats
Recently when I was talking about the International Polar Year, and how they only happen every fifty years, someone joked that it might be last one. Like all good jokes, it provokes some serious questions. Will the polar regions exist as identifiable and distinct regional geography in fifty years time? What will have happened to the landscape and people of the Arctic? Given the changes that have already happened in the last 5-10 years, it is hard to imagine what the arctic might be like in fifty years. The latest climate models tells us the news is not good, no summer sea ice by 2050. As changes in the biophysical world accelerate, culturally we try to make sense of this change. One impetuous that I am interested in has been the impetuous to “archive” as a way of trying to confront a sense of loss at the extinction and disappearance of much flora and fauna. Much of these archiving impulses attempt to categorise, capture and represent that which is disappearing. But archives can be as much about the future as the past, as we see in the valuable ice core archives of climatic histories, that allow us a generative look at the future. We can imagine that if we changed the demands of the archive and the achievable we might get some very different artefacts and objects of knowledge. In my project on the “Ice Archives: Curating Climate Change” I have been interested in thinking about what kind of other archives might expand our creative imaginings of different climate futures. To that end, I have been thinking about the imaginative and physical work of ‘making sense’ and ‘thinking with’ such an array of political, media, everyday perceptual phenomena is a process of Knowledge formation in its own right: that is, it is a messy form of ‘together-work’ of thinking about climate change and building Knowledge around this flow of images, information, exhibits, data and events. Collaboration is at the centre of this. One of the ways I have been trying to work this out in practice is with my collaborator Jennifer Gabrys, on a joint project “Weather Permitting” (www.weatherpermitting.org) where we are proposing to build a number of weather gardens based on understanding of future and past climate change.

I’m always interested in seeking out other forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, which seem to be increasingly prevalent these days. One such form is the International Polar Year 07/08; their effort is described as:

The concept of the International Polar Year 2007-2008 is of an international programme of coordinated, interdisciplinary scientific research and observations in the Earth’s polar regions:

• to explore new scientific frontiers
• to deepen our understanding of polar processes and their global linkages
• to increase our ability to detect changes, to attract and develop the next generation of polar scientists, engineers and logistics experts
• to capture the interest of schoolchildren, the public and decision-makers.

Interestingly the first IPY was in 1882-83 and was the first international year of anything. Polar explorer Karl Weyprecht realized that the poles were the places where significant geophysical concerns were located–he felt that one nation or one research institution alone could not address such a vast and complex area, so he created an international scientific cooperative effort. There is a great site that looks at this history from the NOAA.