The Birch Aquarium on Climate Change

While at AAPOR, Shirley and I and some fellow Wisconsin grad students escaped from Anaheim for a day to drive to San Diego, stopping at the Birch Aquarium. Not expecting anything other than the standard fish-tank fare, I was surprised to see a new main exhibit on global climate change and its impact on marine life. The exhibit features much of the same information as An Inconvenient Truth but without, of course, the political overtones or Al Gore's life story. We saw a busload of school kids wandering through and gaping at the chart of spiking CO2 and pictures of shrinking glaciers.

There was another link to recent media, too, and a more dramatic one. Similar to a segment of the episode of the BBC/Discovery Channel Planet Earth series entitled "Shallow Seas," the exhibit featured a tank of healthy coral reef (foreground below) next to a tank of bleached coral reef. The juxtaposition was a great illustration of the inevitable consequences of disrupting the balance of nature... and in a setting based at a research institution, where those school kids can ask experts questions.


Finally, and on a sobering but related note, the Creation Museum opened up in Kentucky on Monday. It features exhibits with children and dinosaurs playing together... and asserts that the current geography of the planet is the consequence of the only major geological event in history: the Flood. Read more here.