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Forum On Climate Change
Nearly 200 people attended the ACS Forum on Science & Consequences of Climate Change on Monday, Aug. 23, during the Boston national meeting. The forum was sponsored by the ACS Committee on Environmental Improvement (CEI) and was an ACS Presidential Event. It was moderated by Charles Kolb, president and CEO of Aerodyne Research and chair of CEI.
The forum was one component of CEI’s review of the ACS position statement on global climate change. Position statements must be reviewed every three years, and the statement on climate change is one of four being reviewed this year.
To this reporter, the disconnects that are manifest in discussions of climate change were in full blossom on that Monday. Earlier in the day, I had read an op-ed piece in the New York Times, “Disaster at the Top of the World,” by Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, in Waterloo, Ontario. Homer-Dixon opens his essay with observations from a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker plying the Arctic Sea, where temperatures are rising twice as rapidly as on Earth generally. He writes:
“Globally, 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record. In regions around the world, indications abound that earth’s climate is quickly changing, like the devastating mudslides in China and weeks of searing heat in Russia. But in the world’s capitals, movement on climate policy has nearly stopped.”
Climate Change and a Book Signing Event
On Monday evening in Boston, nearly 200 people gathered in a ballroom of the Seaport Hotel for the ACS Forum on Science & Consequences of Climate Change. The forum was sponsored by the ACS Committee on Environmental Improvement (CEI) and was an ACS Presidential Event. It was moderated by Charles Kolb, president and CEO of Aerodyne Research and chair of CEI.
To this reporter, the disconnects that are manifest in discussions of climate change were in full blossom on Monday. Earlier in the day, I had read a long op-ed piece in the New York Times, “Disaster at the Top of the World,” by Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Canada. Homer-Dixon opens his essay with observations from a Canadian Coast Guard ice breaker plying the Arctic Sea, and he writes:
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and this summer its sea ice is melting at a near-record pace. The sun is heating the newly open water, so it will take longer to refreeze this winter, and the resulting thinner ice will melt more easily next summer.
At the same time, warm Pacific Ocean water is pulsing through the Bering Strait into the Arctic basin, helping melt a large area of sea ice between Alaska and eastern Siberia. Scientists are just beginning to learn how this exposed water has changed the movement of heat energy and major air currents across the Arctic basin, in turn producing winds that push remaining sea ice down the coasts of Greenland into the Atlantic.
Globally, 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record. In regions around the world, indications abound that earth’s climate is quickly changing, like the devastating mudslides in China and weeks of searing heat in Russia. But in the world’s capitals, movement on climate policy has nearly stopped.
Homer-Dixon argues in his essay that climate change may not be gradual and easily adapted to and that a “devastating climate shock” may well be delivered in a very short time period. He maintains that nations should be preparing a “Plan Z” to deal with such a climate crisis.
In Boston, two speakers at the forum, Michael McElroy, the Abbott Lawrence Rotch Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and the Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Sciences at Harvard University, and James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard, presented, first, a primer on climate change and, second, an examination of anticipated climate change impacts.
An ACS colleague who sat through these first two talks with me commented, “How can you possibly listen to these two talks and not be convinced that this is a serious problem?”
The third talk, by John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center and distinguished professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Alabama’s State Climatologist, made an effort to answer that question. Christy is not a climate change denier, but he is skeptical of the predictions of many atmospheric models that project significant increases in Earth’s temperature if atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise, and he presented a number of studies that called into question whether the models’ predictions matched measured temperatures. Christy’s presentation would have been more credible had he focused on fewer examples and done a better job explaining where his data had come from.
Christy also echoed many of the climate change skeptics with less impressive credentials than his in his overall message, which was, basically, that climate change models don’t match actual temperature measurements (a lot of climate scientists don’t agree); that even if rising atmospheric CO2 levels are causing global warming, nothing we can do will make any difference; and even if we could do something about it, it would inflict an injustice on the world’s poor. Christy’s message, in other words, was a call for inaction.
Robert Socolow, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he is also the co-principal investigator of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, gave the concluding talk. Socolow primarily focused on the National Academies work on a major report on “America’s Climate Choices.” Four panels have already published their reports, and the final summary report will be released shortly. Socolow summarized the findings of the four panels and made a number of personal comments on those findings.
Of the many trenchant points Socolow made in his talk, two stood out for me. When it comes to climate science and policy:
- Never in history has the work of so few led to so much being asked of so many.
- What has seemed too hard becomes what simply must be done.
One other note on a completely different subject: One of yesterday’s events at the C&EN booth in the exposition was a book signing. George M. Whitesides, a chemistry professor at Harvard University, and Felice C. Frankel, an award-winning science photographer who holds concurrent positions at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, signed copies of their new book, “No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale.”
Whitesides and Frankel at C&EN book signing event
Editors at the ACS Meeting, day 3
The ACS Board of Directors held its open meeting this morning (Sunday) at the Boston national meeting. As is customary at open meetings, the board heard brief presentations from a number of dignitaries from sister chemical societies from around the world.
These included Temechegn Engida, president of the Chemical Society of Ethiopia; Supawan Tantayanon, president of the Chemical Society of Thailand; Choon H. Do, president of the Korean Chemical Society; Eusebio Juaristi, president of the Mexican Chemical Society; David Phillips, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry; and Michael Dröscher, president of the German Chemical Society. A common theme of all of the presentations was the International Year of Chemistry 2011 activities being planned by chemical societies worldwide.
A high point of the open meeting was the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the ACS and the German Chemical Society that commits the two societies to a three-year alliance focused on communicating the importance of chemistry to the general public and extending the rich history of collaboration between the two societies.
Prior to the signing, ACS President Joe Francisco addressed the open meeting, observing that the “far reaching exchanges between the German Chemical Society and ACS have culminated in this important memorandum. It is increasingly important that science become a global endeavor. A number of important issues are global in nature including climate change, access to clean water, and the need for sustainable energy. We need to facilitate interaction among scientific societies around the world to address these issues.”
Signing the memorandum were Francisco and ACS Board of Directors Chair Bonnie Charpentier for ACS and Michael Dröscher for the German Chemical Society.
Francisco (from left), Droscher, and Charpentier sign memorandum of understanding
C&EN Editors in Boston, Day 2
I attended the Society Committee on Budget & Finance open meeting this morning (that’s right, 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning–the things we do for you, our readers!). Committee Chair John Adams opened the meeting with a report from the chair. The first item he discussed was an interesting one–whether Goal 6 of the six goals in the ACS Strategic Plan should be eliminated.
Some background: The ACS Strategic Plan 2010 and Beyond consists of a vision, a mission, core values, and six goals. The first five goals are aspirational. Goal 1, for example, is: ACS will be the indispensable professional and information resource for members and other chemistry related practitioners. Goal 4 is: ACS will be a leader in communicating to the general public the nature and value of chemistry and related sciences.
Goal 6 is a little more prosaic: ACS will be a financially sustainable organization that serves members, chemistry, and related sciences.
The ACS Planning Committee, it seems, decided that maybe Goal 6 was out of place and ought to be either dropped altogether or have its intent incorporated into the preamble of the Strategic Plan, and the committee asked other committee chairs to sound out their committee’s membership on the idea. That’s what Adams was asking B&F to do, and he got several opinions, most of them less than enthusiastic about the idea.
Former Chair of the ACS Board of Directors Judy Benham, for instance, said that Goal 6 should be retained. “It is by no means trivial to be financially stable in difficult economic times,” she observed.
B&F committee member Anne O’Brien said that “it is important to emphasize that being financially sustainable is hard work.”
Dennis Chamot, a member of B&F and a past chair of the committee, as well as a member of the ACS board, said: “The first five goals are all invitations to spend money. Goal six balances that impulse.”
Current ACS Board Chair Bonnie Charpentier was the only B&F member to suggest a change in Goal 6. “I was one of the original ones to argue to include Goal 6,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind. I think its intent should be incorporated into the preamble.”
ACS President-Elect Nancy Jackson, who is a member of the ACS board but not a member of B&F, said that, “Some members believe that we are too focused on the return on revenue, and Goal 6 emphasizes that. This isn’t a goal; it is a tactic.”
No vote was taken. Adams asked B&F members to send further comments to him by Sept. 14 and that he’d draft a response from the committee.
What do you think? Review the six goals in the ACS Strategic Plan. Does Goal 6 fit? Or should it be removed? I’ll make sure that members of governance will receive any comments you have on the topic.
From an operations standpoint, ACS is doing just fine in 2010 financially. ACS Treasurer Brian Bernstein reported that the society expects a net contribution from operations of $14.4 million in 2010, which is $2.4 million favorable to the 2010 budget. Investment income is projected to be $14.5 million, which is just $400,000 short of the 2010 budget. However, the continued extremely low interest rates are causing problems for the society’s unrestricted net assets because the low interest rates result in a deficit in the value of the ACS defined benefits pension plan that has to be covered by funds from the society’s net assets. It’s all accounting, but it’s resulted in the society’s unrestricted net assets falling from $124 million at the end of 2009 to $98 million as of July 31, 2010.
This And That
I was away the week before last on annual leave with my wife, Jan, visiting Oregon. We spent two days in Portland, two in Hood River, and three in Bend hiking, touring, eating—boy, did we eat; they take their food seriously in Oregon—and drinking some of the state’s wondrous microbrews. So this is a week to catch up, get ready for the ACS national meeting in Boston (more on this after the jump), and write an editorial on this and that.
Did you know that ACS Executive Director and CEO Madeleine Jacobs has started a blog on the ACS Network? Her first post went up on Aug. 4, and she used it to praise ACS’s outstanding staff on the occasion of the retirement of Marlyne Carr after 29 years of service to the society, the past six-and-a-half years as a special assistant to Jacobs.
As most of you know, Madeleine was C&EN’s editor-in-chief from 1995 to 2004, and in that position she was renowned for her graceful, witty, and thoughtful editorials. She says in her second blog post that writing those editorials was harder than writing a blog post. As her managing editor and the first person usually to critique the drafts of her editorials, I can attest to how hard she worked to polish them. I know her well enough to know that she will work just as hard to polish her blog entries; they’ll just be shorter than an editorial.
Check out Madeleine’s blog. And make it a point to leave a comment. We need to encourage her to keep up her blogging in the face of the many other demands on her time.
Sustainability And Growth
This week’s cover story on sustainability focuses on a green supply chain—manufacturers who are working to ensure that the ingredients that go into their products are produced in a sustainable fashion by workers who are treated fairly.
Senior Editor Melody Voith talked to four niche consumer-brand companies about their relationships with raw material suppliers and profiled their efforts to work with those suppliers to ensure that the raw materials supported the companies’ green claims. Even for relatively small companies catering to high-end markets, Voith’s reporting suggests, ensuring a green provenance for raw materials is a challenge.
Soap manufacturer Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, for example, is committed to using only tropical oils that are certified to be organic and made under fair-trade practices. “Finding palm, olive, and coconut oils that meet Bronner’s high standards,” Voith writes, “has taken Gero Leson, the company’s chief operating officer, to the ends of the Earth.”
The kind of commitment practiced by Dr. Bronner’s simply isn’t possible for all companies, Voith notes. Unilever, for example, which makes Dove soap, is the world’s largest buyer of palm oil. Unilever has committed to buy all of its palm oil from certified sustainable sources by 2015, Voith writes. But the company acknowledges that “there isn’t yet sufficient volume coming through segregated supply chains where buyers can have confidence that the refined oil which they are buying comes from a plantation, mill, and refinery that have been certified sustainable.”
U.S. Chemical Industry Must Convert Barriers Into Bridges
This guest editorial is by Greg Babe, president and chief executive officer of Bayer Corp. and Bayer MaterialScience, who serves on the American Chemistry Council’s executive committee and board of directors.
Major chemical plants that cost $1 billion or more are now almost exclusively being built overseas.
Many think the decline of the U.S. chemical industry is inevitable, as countries such as China and India beckon with cheap labor and fast-growing domestic markets. But that’s far from the whole story. If it were, we’d see declining public and political support for other U.S. industries, such as the automotive industry, that have seen their jobs going overseas. We haven’t.
As chemical production has moved to other countries, so have high-paying jobs. U.S. chemical industry employment has declined by more than 20% in the past two decades. In 1990, our industry employed 1 million people. Today, we employ 780,000. These jobs, in turn, support nearly 4 million supplier and other expenditure-induced jobs. Why aren’t Americans shouting, “Keep the chemical industry jobs here!”?
Chemists’ Salaries
This week’s issue contains data from the 2009 American Chemical Society salary survey, conducted in March 2009. We received the data in late April from the ACS Department of Member Research & Technology, which conducts the survey each year under the guidance of the ACS Committee on Economic & Professional Affairs. C&EN Senior Correspondent David Hanson prepared C&EN’s report on the survey.
The survey doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the employment status of chemists. “Despite holding up fairly well in previous years,” Hanson writes, “chemists in 2009 found that jobs were more difficult to get, and their median salaries were falling pretty much across the board.”
When the survey was taken, unemployment among chemists had reached 3.9%, the highest rate of unemployment among chemists in at least the past 20 years. The median salaries among all chemists had declined 3.2% compared with 2008, falling from $93,000 to $90,000, Hanson reports. Salaries dropped in almost all measured categories of the survey.
Undoubtedly, the situation for chemists has worsened since the 2009 survey. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall unemployment rate for March 2009 was 8.7%. As you can see from the graph on this page, the overall unemployment rate continued to rise in the following months, peaking at 10.1% in October 2009 and hovering between 9.5% and 10% since then. There is no reason to suppose that chemists have fared any better than workers in general during those months. It is fair to conclude that the 2010 ACS salary survey will paint a picture that is even more negative than we are reporting in this issue.
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