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Tracking the fate of ancient carbon in the Siberian Arctic | Ensia

November 24, 2014

Tracking the fate of ancient carbon in the Siberian Arctic | Ensia.

The Siberian Arctic is one of the most remote and pristine corners of the planet. During the brief summer season, temperatures can climb into the 90s Fahrenheit, and the seemingly endless expanse of boreal forest — or taiga — and tundra explodes with plant and animal life. Every summer since 2008, R. Max Holmes and colleagues from the Woods Hole Research Center have brought a growing international team of undergraduate and graduate students halfway around the world to the Northeast Science Station near Cherskiy, Siberia. The project, called Polaris, is designed to immerse students in the arctic environment and mentor them as they carry out their own original research on permafrost, the supposedly permanently frozen soil beneath their feet.

During the Pleistocene, about 2 million to 11,000 years ago, herds of mega-herbivores including mammoth and woolly rhinoceros grazed vast, fertile grasslands that stretched across the entire Arctic. Over thousands of years, the carbon-rich remains of this productive ecosystem were slowly compacted and frozen into the soil. The amount of carbon stored in Arctic permafrost soil is estimated to be 1,500 billion tons — more than double what is currently in our atmosphere or four times as much as all of the forests on Earth.

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Divestiture is nothing but a distraction | Ensia

October 21, 2014

Divestiture is nothing but a distraction | Ensia.

As a college president and chemist, I have worked throughout my career in areas connected to climate change. As an educator, I have written chemistry textbooks and regularly teach courses in which the most urgent issue is climate change. As a president, I frequently face decisions about investments in sustainable practices, whether green buildings (our most recent construction has been certified LEED platinum) or reductions in water and energy use, or curricular changes in support of our strong environmental-analysis major.

And yet on the topic of divestment of stock in companies that produce and market carbon-based fuels — an issue that is gaining attention on college campuses and in the news media — I am a profound skeptic. Why? Because we have passed the point for symbolic actions and need to take real steps to achieve change. Feel-good measures that have no effect on actual greenhouse-gas production are a diversion from the critical actions we must take before it is too late.

Many of those involved in the divestment movement say quite candidly that they do not expect divestment (even by major universities with much larger endowments than our own, and recently by our Claremont Colleges neighbor Pitzer College) to have an effect on the policies of the companies involved, but that this is one way of getting attention for the issue, to get on the front page of The New York Times.

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