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With the advisement of several Joint Program on Global Change researchers—including the co-director Ron Prinn and co-director emeritus Jake Jacoby—the MIT Museum opened a new exhibition “Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya.” The exhibit draws from mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears’ breathtaking photographs, and places them in context with those of earlier mountaineer photographers—revealing the glacial melt that has occurred over time.

Breashears, who took the photos throughout his forty-five expeditions to the Himalaya, views the Rivers of Ice exhibition as an opportunity to trigger public dialogue as scientists and policymakers work to better understand what exactly is happening to the glaciers of the Greater Himalaya. Formed by the collision of continents, the water from the glacial ice melt in the Himalaya contributes to watersheds that serve the drinking, agriculture and business needs of more than 1 billion people throughout Asia. As the snow cover melts and the glaciers of the Greater Himalaya retract and change, the need for greater and more detailed understanding of their importance to human and ecological systems increases.

Breashears hopes the exhibit—and a related symposium taking place on Saturday, April 21—will provide insight into some of the groundbreaking research being done to better understand the glaciers’ potential impact on global environmental issues.

Rivers of Ice, once viewed, cannot be forgotten. By experiencing the photography 'in the round' and at large scale, by viewing artifacts from expeditions past and present, and by learning about the people who call the Himalaya home, MIT Museum visitors gain a deeper understanding of the grand beauty of these mountains, as well as their significance to the global challenges we face today.

 
The exhibit, which will be open from April 13, 2012 to March 17, 2013, is a collaboration between the MIT Museum, GlacierWorks, and the Asia Society and designed by ThincDesign.

More information about the exhibit can be found here: web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/rivers-of-ice.html

In an effort to share what is known, what isn't, and what can and cannot be done about climate change, MIT's John Reilly and Kerry Emanuel joined UMass Amherst researchers as part of a "Global Warning" panel convened by The Boston Globe.

The Obama administration proposed rules limiting carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants, a move that could essentially bar new coal-fired electric generation facilities. Howard Herzog comments.

'Weather in a tank' demonstration helps students grasp fluid dynamics.
By: Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office

Fluid dynamics plays a central role in determining Earth's climate. Ocean currents and eddies stir up contents from the deep, while atmospheric winds and weather systems steer temperature and moisture around the globe. As the planet spins on its axis, this rotation can significantly affect fluid motion. To fully understand how climate works, researchers at MIT say students must first understand how Earth's rotation affects winds and currents. "Rotating fluids are not intuitive," says Lodovica Illari, a meteorologist and senior lecturer in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

Since 2001, Illari and her colleague John Marshall, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography, have worked to make rotating fluid dynamics more intuitive for undergraduate students studying weather and climate, using a demonstration aptly named "Weather in a Tank." The setup — a clear circular basin of water on a rotating platform that simulates Earth's spin — illustrates weather phenomena such as atmospheric cyclones, fronts, jets, and ocean currents and eddies.

Video: Melanie Gonick


In 2006, as part of a three-year study sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the team tested the setup at six universities across the United States. The researchers found that students who took part in the demonstration learned more than those who did not. The results of three years of quantitative evaluation, involving more than 700 students, have just been published in the Journal of Geoscience Education. The work was done in collaboration with Kathleen Mackin, an independent evaluator, and with Nancy Cook and Philip Sadler from the Science Education Department at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

In many introductory college courses in weather and meteorology, rotating fluid dynamics is taught via textbook — mainly with short descriptions of weather phenomena, while more complex mathematical explanations are left for later studies. Experiments in such courses are rare, though necessary, Illari says, to connect mathematical theory with physical observations.

Putting 'Weather in a Tank' to the test

For their study, the team chose a diverse mix of colleges in which to test the demonstration, including several state universities and private institutions. The classes using the setup also varied, including introductory-level and advanced courses in ocean and atmospheric sciences, as well as classes geared toward climate majors and non-majors.

Illari and Marshall provided each school with two to three Weather in a Tank setups, as well as suggested lesson plans for 16 different experiments — eight atmospheric and eight ocean-related demonstrations. The team left it up to course instructors to choose which experiments to include in their curriculum. Students were given a test at the beginning and end of their course to test their knowledge of weather-related concepts before and after seeing the demonstrations. Questions ranged from the basic — "Why is it hotter in the summer than in the winter?" — to the more advanced, such as: "What does the frontal boundary look like between cold air from the poles and warm air from the tropics?"

Overall, Illari and Marshall found students who observed the demonstration performed better than those who did not, at both the introductory and advanced levels. The students with the greatest improvement were those in small lab groups, rather than those in larger lecture environments.

Garbage patch 101

The three-year study also spurred an unexpected outcome: Students at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, working with physics professor Amit Tandon, came up with an experiment of their own, using the Weather in a Tank setup to illustrate the effects of currents in the Pacific Ocean. In particular, the students looked at a region commonly known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: vast quantities of marine litter held in place by currents circulating in the region.

To demonstrate the phenomenon, the students rigged up a pair of small fans opposite each other on the edge of the rotating tank to simulate the region's surface winds. They then scattered a handful of paper dots into the tank and observed them migrating along the surface, to the tank's center. Finally, the students splashed a few drops of food coloring into the tank, and observed that the dye — like the dots — collected in the center, then sank to the bottom, and rose up again at the edges of the tank. In 2008, the students detailed the demonstration in the journal Oceanography. The experiment, Illari says, is an effective demonstration of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and has become one of the group's flagship experiments.

Tandon says the key to getting students interested in the experiments was to ask them to predict what would happen before performing the demonstration.

"Even though the students haven't learned the theory behind it, they can question themselves and they have a stake in the matter," Tandon says. "Making the students think about what's going to happen before you actually do the experiment is really important — that's when they get a lot out of it, and change their understanding."

Since Illari and Marshall designed the weather demonstrations, more than 50 colleges in the United States and around the world have adopted the setup in climate-related courses. Illari has also taken the experiments into museums, middle schools and high schools.

"I use the experiments as a way to introduce the basics of rotating fluid dynamics," Illari says. "But it also gets students excited. You're posing questions like, 'Why do you see this?' and 'Why is this happening?' If you don't have the phenomena in front of you, it's much harder to answer."

A new study by researchers at MIT shows that there is enough capacity in deep saline aquifers in the United States to store at least a century’s worth of carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s coal-fired powerplants. Though questions remain about the economics of systems to capture and store such gases, this study addresses a major issue that has overshadowed such proposals.

Like a lot of economists, Christopher Knittel entered college with career plans in mind. Unlike a lot of economists, Knittel had plans that involved baseball. At California State University at Stanislaus, Knittel was good enough to make the team as a second baseman. But during his freshman season, reality sank in.

“I quickly learned the pros weren’t in my future,” says Knittel, a lifelong Oakland A’s fan who played baseball recreationally until his mid-30s.
 

Christopher Knittel
Photo: M. Scott Brauer
 

For a while in college, Knittel also considered becoming an attorney. But then, he says, “I took my first economics course and fell in love with it. Economics teaches you how to think and you constantly see real-world examples of the concepts you’re learning.”

Today, Knittel is the William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, having joined MIT earlier this year. He is known for inventive, heavily empirical work largely focusing on energy and transportation, although he has studied electricity markets and corporate strategies as well.

Knittel’s research addresses a clutch of practical and linked questions: How much progress have automakers made on fuel efficiency? (More than you might think.) How do car owners respond when fuel prices rise? (They really do ditch their gas-guzzlers.) How large are the collateral health benefits of removing dirty vehicles from the nation’s fleet? (Very large.)

All told, Knittel has produced concrete findings that he hopes will have an impact in the halls of Washington. “A lot of energy policies that we have are not the most efficient policies,” he says. “I want to inform policymakers what the true costs and benefits of certain policies are.”    

Detroit: Actually more fuel-efficient

Knittel mostly grew up in Northern California, where his father was an engineer for Peterbilt, the truck manufacturer. In addition to baseball, he developed a liking for cars and learned to replace the engine in his Ford Mustang while in high school.

After getting his undergraduate degree, Knittel (pronounced with a hard “k”) received his M.A. in economics from the University of California at Davis, then got his PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, after his graduate adviser, Severin Bornstein, moved from Davis to Berkeley. Knittel taught for three years at Boston University before returning to U.C. Davis, where he remained until joining MIT.

“A lot of my work draws on the hard sciences,” says Knittel, 39. “Davis was great, but there’s no place like MIT, in terms of the opportunities to do quality interdisciplinary work.”

In a sense, Knittel is still looking under the hoods of cars. One of his papers, “Automobiles on Steroids,” recently published in the American Economic Review, examines technological progress in the auto industry. From 1980 through 2006, the fuel efficiency of America’s vehicles has increased by just 15 percent — at first glance, a lethargic rate of improvement. But as Knittel points out, cars’ average horsepower has roughly doubled since then, and average curb weight of those vehicles rose 26 percent during that time. Adjusting for these changes, fuel economy has actually increased by 60 percent since 1980, but as Knittel observes, “most of that technological progress has gone into [compensating for] weight and horsepower.”

On the stagnation of overall fuel efficiency since 1980, Knittel adds, “It’s no fault of the manufacturers and consumers. Firms are going to give consumers what they want, and if gas prices are low, consumers are going to want big, fast cars. If you’re going to blame anyone, it’s the policymakers for not creating the incentive structure for putting that technological progress into fuel economy.”

Pain at the pump

Cars and light trucks produce about 15 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases. The best policy for reducing energy consumption from those sources, Knittel believes, would be higher fuel prices. “That would incentivize all the things we want,” Knittel says. “When gas prices go up, people shift to more fuel-efficient cars, they drive fewer miles, and insofar as there are lower-carbon-intensive fuels out there, people shift to them. They get rid of their clunkers faster.”

That’s not just an assumption; Knittel has studied the responses of auto owners nationwide to rising gas prices from 1999 to 2008 in another research paper, “Pain at the Pump,” co-authored with Meghan Busse and Florian Zettelmeyer of Northwestern University. The researchers found that with each $1 rise in the price of gas, purchases of highly fuel-efficient autos increase 21 percent, while purchases of gas-guzzling vehicles drop 27 percent.

A shift to newer, more fuel-efficient vehicles would actually help people in another way, besides releasing fewer greenhouse gases: It would reduce the amount of harmful local pollution in the air, as Knittel detailed in a paper written with Ryan Sandler of U.C. Davis, based on a study of California from 1998 to 2008. “When gas prices go up, you’re getting bigger mileage reductions from cars that are worse in terms of these pollutants,” Knittel observes.

That produces significant health benefits beyond the problems associated with climate change. “We’re talking about asthma attacks and respiratory problems,” he adds. “This isn’t just a matter of helping the world two generations from now. You can point to this and say, ‘Here is a more immediate, salient reason for a gas tax.’” According to Knittel and Sandler, 70 percent of the costs of a gas tax of $1 per gallon could be recouped by immediate health benefits from reduced pollution. Other possible benefits from the tax — reductions in climate change, traffic congestion and accidents — could make it a net winner for people in economic terms alone.

But will politicians ever impose higher gas prices on a financially stretched public? A variety of powerful lobbying interests in Washington oppose such a move — and Knittel knows hardball when he sees it. Indeed, Knittel is examining the financial rewards industries reap from their lobbying efforts in some of his current research. Still, he does retain a sense of optimism. “The idealistic academic in me says that the more you broadcast the truth, the more likely it will be to win out,” Knittel says. “But we’ll see.”

Today’s global challenges will significantly affect how we grow our food. But these challenges are so complex and intertwined that response measures require collaboration and a broad, integrated lens.