Acme Educational Blog

By David Knowles
A musician and a novelist, David has covered politics for AOL for the past three years. His writing has appeared in such publications as USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.

Widely regarded as one of the most important of all the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson received a demotion of sorts Friday thanks to the Texas Board of Education.

The board voted to enact new teaching standards for history and social studies that will alter which material gets included in school textbooks. It decided to drop Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.

According to Texas Freedom Network, a group that opposes many of the changes put in place by the Board of Education, the original curriculum asked students to “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.”

AP
The Texas Board of Education is dropping President Thomas Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.

That emphasis did not sit well with board member Cynthia Dunbar, who, during Friday’s meeting, explained the rationale for changing it. “The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Dunbar said.

The new standard, passed at the meeting in a 10-5 vote, now reads, “Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.”

By dropping mention of revolution, and substituting figures such as Aquinas and Calvin for Jefferson, Texas Freedom Network argues, the board had chosen to embrace religious teachings over those of Jefferson, the man who coined the phrase “separation between church and state.”

According to USA Today, the board also voted to strike the word “democratic” from references to the U.S. form of government, replacing it with the term “constitutional republic.” Texas textbooks will contain references to “laws of nature and nature’s God” in passages that discuss major political ideas.

The board decided to use the words “free enterprise” when describing the U.S. economic system rather than words such as “capitalism,” “capitalist” and “free market,” which it deemed to have a negative connotation.

Serving 4.7 million students, Texas accounts for a large percentage of the textbook market, and the new standards may influence what is taught in the rest of the country.

Gregory Mone
AOL News
(March 4) — Scientists have uncovered a powerful source of a leading greenhouse gas that is venting into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates. The permafrost beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a relatively shallow section of the Arctic Ocean, has been pumping 7.7 million tons of methane into the air each year — roughly the amount released into the atmosphere by the rest of the world’s oceans combined.

The researchers, who report their work in the March 5 issue of Science, caution that their findings in this previously unstudied region raise more questions than answers. The amount of methane released, though higher than expected, represents only a fraction of total global methane emissions.

But further warming could trigger added leakage of the greenhouse gas in the area, potentially leading to a positive feedback cycle. “The current global change might contribute to this process. It might accelerate this process,” says University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist Natalia Shakhova. “The subsea permafrost is significantly more sensitive to further warming.”

Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team
Scientists are concerned about the amount of methane being released from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, an area that has not been studied until recently.

Methane ranks third on the list of greenhouse gas culprits, after water vapor and carbon dioxide, but its concentration in the air has more than doubled in recent centuries. In the past, atmospheric methane levels have varied between .3 and .7 parts per million. Currently, the numbers are up to 1.85 parts per million — a 400,000-year high. Above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, this figure is even greater.

“They’re measuring very high concentrations that aren’t observed elsewhere,” says University of Florida climate scientist Ted Schuur, who has studied climate change in the region. “Carbon is moving between different parts of the earth system every year,” he explains. “The question for the future is whether we are losing some kind of balance and going into a new carbon state.”

The study by Shakhova et al. does not answer that question, Schuur says, but it highlights the East Siberian Arctic Shelf as a potentially critical hot spot for further research. Though that’s a paradoxical description: It is a barren, frozen and thoroughly unpleasant region where “warm” temperatures are those just below freezing.

Shakhova and her colleagues braved the conditions, conducting eight separate research trips to the area over several years, ultimately taking more than 5,000 measurements at sea. Schuur and other scientists had studied the release of methane from the permafrost on land, but no group had analyzed the region below the water.

This underwater source has been subject to massive change. At various points in Earth’s history, it has been a frozen plain that effectively traps its methane stores. But that plain was flooded as the world warmed since the last ice age, and it now sits under seawater significantly warmer than the air in the surrounding region. So while the terrestrial permafrost has remained frozen, its subsea counterpart has thawed, sending its methane stores into the atmosphere.

Shakhova explains that while the rate of release the scientists measured on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already high, relative to the rest of the world’s oceans, it could still increase further. Several major rivers flow into that sea, and increased temperatures in the area could lead to more runoff.

This warmer river water could raise the temperature of the sea further, driving the release of still more methane. Shakhova estimates that even if just 1 percent of the methane stored in the permafrost were released into the air, it could triple atmospheric levels of the gas.

The broader implications of the findings are hard to gauge — Shakhova said it is too early to tell how her research could affect the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But she and other scientists will be monitoring that icy hot spot for years to come.

I read this article today by Dave Thier. It made me take pause.

Written by Dave Thier

Over the past 4.5 billion years, planet Earth has seen some rough times.

There have been five major mass extinctions — the worst one claimed up to 96 percent of marine life and 70 percent of terrestrial life — but the one most present in modern memory is the Cretaceous-Tertiary event, when a meteor impact probably claimed the dinosaurs.

Many scientists agree that there’s also one going on right now.

Minneapolis Star Tribune / MCT
Cornell University researchers announced recently that a fatal fish virus known as VHS has spread into Lake Superior and now exists in all the Great Lakes.

Cornell University researchers recently announced that a fatal fish virus known as VHS has spread into Lake Superior and now exists in all the Great Lakes. Authorities are taking measures to raise public awareness and prevent a widespread outbreak, but the virus is another indication of the dangers from the ongoing Holocene extinction, the name given to the current die-off.

Here are a few prominent types of species that have been threatened in recent years:

Bees: Since 2006, beekeepers have been reporting widespread instances of colony collapse disorder, in which the worker bees abruptly disappear from a colony.

Causes of colony collapse disorder are nebulous at best, and most beekeepers have their own pet theories about what is making the bees disappear. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is investigating new pathogens and parasites that could be causing the collapses, and some believe that agricultural pesticides are the most compelling explanation.

The implications of bee extinction are dire. Many plants and agricultural crops worldwide are completely reliant on bees for pollination and would need to revert thousands, or millions, of years of evolution to reproduce without them.

Bats: White nose syndrome, in which cave-dwelling bats are found dead with a ring of white fungal growth around their noses, was first identified in a Schoharie County, N.Y., cave in 2006. Since then, it has spread to caves across the Northeast.

The caustic fungus, Geomyces destructans, is likely just a symptom of something else that is killing bats while they sleep. Populations of some Northeastern bat species, which are crucial to controlling insect populations, have declined by more than 90 percent.

The disease may be spreading too. A bat dead from white nose syndrome was found in a cave in France in March 2009. To slow transmission, cavers are advised to stay out of caves in affected states.

Amphibians: According to a 2008 article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one-third to one-half of all amphibian species are on the edge of extinction, threatened by a perfect storm of diseases, habitat loss, pesticides and climate change.

Scientists are unclear whether this is a very recent phenomenon or the continuation of a trend thousands of years old. But human activity certainly seems involved in the current rash of amphibian death. Amphibians survived the last mass extinction, but they seem to be among the first on the chopping block in this one.

April 10 will mark the second “Save the Frogs Day,” an annual event.

Predatory fish: Top-level predators on land and in water are some of the species most affected by habitat loss, but the situation in the ocean looks especially dire. Overfishing, pollution and a shifting food supply are severely threatening such species as marlin, tuna and swordfish. Researchers believe that up to 90 percent of large predatory fish have disappeared from the oceans since the 1950s.

Steps are being taken to control overfishing, but the decline of ocean species may prove especially difficult to stanch. More than just the big fish are in danger. In 2006, CBS reported that a team of researchers predicted the oceans would be devoid of fish by 2048.

Humans: Between the infectious-disease scare of the week, the persistent threat of nuclear weapons and alarming food-supply questions, it can be easy to believe we’re on our way to being little more than an unusual blip in the history of planetary life.