Findings

Getting technology to solve sustainability challenges takes more than just smart ideas. It sometimes takes cajoling, patience, and sharp elbows. Take the turtle exclusion devices--called TEDs--which are specially designed metal gates that keep sea turtles out of shrimp nets. In 1985, there were only roughly 700 nests left in the Atlantic Kemp's Ridley turtle's Gulf of Mexico habitat.

To save the endangered species, the government forced fishers to use the TEDs despite much resistance; industry said the devices were unwieldy and reduced the number of shrimp they caught in nets. But in the years since, fishers have come to accept TEDs, having themselves helped improve their designs. The shrimp industry now even helps preserve beaches and support biology to preserve turtles. So how did TEDs eventually win over reticent fishermen?

"Is it too late?" a Swedish reporter asked plaintively at this afternoon's session on the world's retreating glaciers. The speakers, three of the world's experts on the problem, chuckled nervously, although some in the room couldn't hear the question. So Tim Radford, AAAS's affable British emcee for the press conferences, tried to reconvey the question. "When are we doomed" he said to big laughs.

For most in the room, western reporters who likely live thousands of kilometers from glaciers, the question might have seemed alarmist. But for the millions of people in the world who rely on alpine ecosystems for water, food, shelter, and livelihood, vanishing  glaciers have profound and uncertain impacts.

Scientist trying to measure and predict how melting glaciers will impact the world are having trouble keeping up with their disappearing subjects. But that hasn't stopped mountain climbers from launching a new effort to help those who face what in many cases is a literal flood of consequences ...

(Photo: Lonnie Thompson, Ohio State University)

Scientists should get up off their duffs and do their part to protect the planet, AAAS President John Holdren told reporters in a somewhat gloomy breakfast talk this morning. He wants researchers to "tithe 10% of their time" towards "thinking about" how their work impacts larger societal problems or devising solutions.

He identified four major challenges in a depressing litany: environmental protection, nuclear proliferation, what he calls the "energy-atmosphere-climate conundrum," and poverty. While the world is more or less booming economically, he said, "Most of the other dimensions of the human condition are in some trouble."

He said that science is in part or entirely to blame for many of Earth's woes. "We are responsible both for sins of commission and omission," he said, because researchers have developed carbon-emitting technology and nuclear weapons.

Government can be counterproductive, he added. "We have seen some tendancies toward fact-averse governance," he said in response to a question about the Bush Administration ...

The AAAS annual meeting is really the only big general science conference in the business. This year's theme is sustainability, which covers a lot of the sessions at the meeting. Science (which is published by AAAS) has several reporters covering the meeting, and here's where we'll be posting on-the-spot coverage of sessions and fascinating tidbits, Q and As with the top scientists and policy makers. Check back frequently!