The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 (23 page)

The apparent stability of the East Antarctic ice in modern history is either confounding or reassuring, depending on your attitude to the science. Sceptics and deniers have frequently pointed to it as evidence that bad things are not happening, but the first readings to emerge from ICECAP's scrutiny, and from improved satellite systems, are fast eroding that comfort. The project's mission is to get to the bedrock of the issue, metaphorically and practically. Working out of the American base of McMurdo, the French station of Dumont d'Urville, and Australia's Casey,
ICECAP is one of the most significant projects of the season.

While the preoccupation of the other ICECAP scientists is the future of this planet, and Young's work will contribute to that, over dinner it emerges that he has an ulterior motive for visiting Antarctica. He is using it as a dress rehearsal for a space mission to Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. A whole new world. ‘Great,' I reflect glumly. ‘Plan B.'

Young is hauling down south an instrument the size of a suitcase which contains ice-penetrating radar which can see deep into the white. He hopes to send a refined version of this device – squashed to a fraction of the size – into space. His objective is not climate data but insight into the greatest of galactic mysteries: are we alone?

The allure of Europa has been increasing ever since its surface was glimpsed by the Galileo space probe. Scientists began to suspect that beneath its thick ice crust there may be an ocean – just as great bodies of water lie deep beneath the Antarctic ice. Young's radar will reveal where the ice is thinnest, so that ultimately a probe might collect water. ‘And where there is water, you expect some sort of life form – primitive life,' he explains.

Primitive life is the specialty of the third diner at the table, Mark Schultz, the young biologist. He studies tiny, almost invisible invertebrates. He's not long finished his PhD, and is now on his way to assist in a field project probing the microscopic populations of wildlife living in the ‘Antarctic rainforest' – the mosses and lichens which cling to exposed areas of rock, falling into hibernation if the ice sheet covers them, reviving when they feel the sun again.

As Young Gim warms to speculation on the possibility of finding life under the ice of Europa – ‘We know from Antarctica, in water temperatures like –4ºC, even in the deep sea and with no light, you still have life' – Schultz reveals that he had spent his day visiting the laboratory of a colleague at the university.
His friend had pulled out of the freezer some Antarctic samples. They had been held there for five years. ‘And he put the sample in a petri dish and it just starts buzzing and moving about,' Schultz enthuses. His studies have not dulled his wonder.

I'm reassured by the stories of such resilience in nature. This is a theme which permeates much of the scientific debate on climate – have the doomsayers underestimated the capacity of nature to adapt and bounce back? It's a comforting notion in the sense of highly adaptive broader biology, but I am not sure how well it applies to humans.

Back at our apartment that evening, playing the Werner Herzog documentary
Encounters at the End of the World
for my two new friends, I am struck by the sequence when the director turns the camera on an American biologist – a rather hauntedlooking individual with a penchant for vintage science-fiction movies – who talks graphically about the brutality and awfulness of the invisible world of microbes, a place where tiny creatures tear one another apart. Our most distant biological ancestors had fled such horror all those aeons ago, he reflects.

Really? The sight and sounds of the hospitalised victims of terrible human violence in Afghanistan and the wild high country of Papua New Guinea are still fresh, grotesque and vivid when I shut my eyes. As are the casualties of corruption in the Congo and invisibility in Mozambique or Mutitjulu, in Central Australia. And I ache for the purity of Antarctica,
terra incognita
. Unknown, untouched, unspoilt.

I go to bed thinking that evolution hasn't guaranteed escape from the most basic of our hard-wired urges. Meanwhile, our primitive reflexes struggle to recognise a threat which sneaks up on us slowly, which doesn't snarl and bare its teeth, and so we miss the cue to act to save ourselves and our children.

One of the questions I have for scientists is how they endure their knowledge, if it anticipates terrible danger. If their grasp
of science brings an amorphous future into sharp, cataclysmic focus, how do they pursue ordinary lives, imagine a future, grow families? It is a question often asked of journalists who witness human suffering or atrocity. I was asked it by biologist Schultz. I confessed I didn't know. I told him I was hoping the scientists might help answer that one for me.

Plainly there is some mechanism which allows us to switch off what is too awful to bear. We cordon off our personal, intellectual and intimate lives from harsh reality; we summon up hope to obscure scenes too horrible to contemplate. Hope is our shield.

Our capacity for hope has clearly served us well through human evolution, providing the momentum, vision and resilience to overcome obstacles with sheer obstinate intent. But Clive Hamilton argues that hope, in terms of the consequences of climate catastrophe, is a dangerous delusion, one of the human distractions which hogtied useful response in the lost window when it might have done some good. What we require, he argues, is not hope, but the courage to embrace hopelessness, and to be galvanised by that.

A few years earlier, I had a long conversation about these issues with Graeme Pearman, arguably Australia's foremost climate authority. Formerly CSIRO's chief of atmospheric research, and the author of more than 150 scientific papers, he has devoted years to broadening his knowledge beyond his core expertise to earn international recognition for his capacity to speak across the scientific disciplines on climate. He had come to understand the planet probably as well as any one person ever might. But the people on it – the species he had watched become increasingly endangered – remained a riddle to him.

As a scientist, he said, he once believed that his role would be to assemble the evidence, be as impartial and clear as possible, present it, and step back. Humanity would recognise what was at stake and act appropriately. It struck me that good science had
much in common with the best journalism. Pearman devoted more than 25 years of his professional life, and much of his private energies, to precisely this task.

But this thesis turned out to be horribly flawed. What it failed to take into account was human vagary, human psychology. He waited, he told me, with increasing distress and despair for humanity to act, feeling himself gradually consumed by bleakness and depression. He had, he realised, been ‘suffering under the delusion that as knowledge of the physical world improves, rationally based information would lead to rational responses to such threats as climate change'.

But what a surprise: human rationality turns out to be highly individual, a unique expression of life and circumstances. This understanding came as something of a shock to a physical scientist. The clever modellers on whom we rely to divine our futures are sometimes gobsmackingly gauche in their appreciation of how people work and how the world turns.

So with the assistance of some new colleagues expert in human behaviour, Pearman delved into dark new scientific territory, the human psyche. He learned that confronted with a truth too awful to contemplate, many people seek diversion, distraction, denial. There are so many coping mechanisms – the anxious might deny; the sad might avoid; the hopeless become resigned; the frustrated, cynical; the depressed, sceptical; the angry, just fed up. Pearman, ever the scientist, rescued himself from despair through immersion in this new field – turning his energies into the study of human responses to climate change, eventually publishing papers on the issue urging social, behavioural and organisational scientists to enter the fray, arguing that they had an essential role to play in shaping the attitudinal changes required to respond to the warming being forecast by physical scientists.

I climb into bed. Where am I in the continuum of response? Anxious, tick; frustrated, confused – tick, tick. For me, these emotions
are the impetus for wanting to look, to know, to understand the gathering storm. Without hope? Not quite, not yet. Like Ed Wilson, I'm reckoning we're smart enough to find a way out of this mess. But perhaps that is my happy delusion. Like any girl raised on storybooks, I want to believe that noble hearts defeat vile interests. If Copenhagen could not be the land of happily ever after, maybe Antarctica would? After all, as Roald Amundsen observed of his visit, ‘The land looks like a fairytale.'

Three days are lost in Hobart, pondering too much in the vortex of transition. Finally it's the last throw of the dice. The alarm is set for 2am, when we will head for the airport and try one last time for Antarctica. There was never going to be much rest anyway.

Antarctica

Catastrophe

I want to play video games when I grow up (and so should you)

Michael Kasumovic

Just like rock music in the 1950s, Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s, and death metal in the 1990s, video-gaming has been demonised by parent groups. For decades, gamers were portrayed as obese social outcasts who spent hours in a dark basement hunched over a flashing screen, slowly becoming more aggressive and distanced from reality.

Today, that stereotype couldn't be further from the truth. The average gamer is as likely to be a university professor or a corporate banker as they are to be a high school or university student.

Furthermore, a growing body of research is showing a whole host of health benefits associated with gaming. The most recent piece of research shows an improvement in vision in those who suffer from congenital cataract disorders.

But it wasn't always this way. Early studies were quick to demonstrate the negative consequences of gaming, linking time spent in front of a console or PC with obesity, increased aggression, decreased empathy and a desensitisation to violence.

In fact, video game-related literature in the mid 2000s paints a bleak, violent and anti-social picture of gamers. With the help of the media, video games quickly became the scapegoat for
everything that was going wrong with kids.

But the vast majority of early studies only showed associations between gaming and adolescent decline, providing no evidence that video games were the actual cause.

More recently, studies have shown no difference in aggression or depression levels between gamers and non-gamers. Similarly, researchers have shown that violent games increased frustration in players because of their difficulty rather than aggression because of their violence.

Moreover, when researchers tested young gamers before and after they entered their teens, the strongest predictors of increased aggression were increased exposure to family violence and peer influences.

All of a sudden, the link between video games and real-world violence isn't so clear. This isn't to say that video games have no negative effects, just that they aren't the root of the problem.

Researchers have shown that, unlike the moderate use of alcohol, cigarettes and coffee (which have proven detrimental effects) gaming has a raft of positive effects.

As touched on earlier, a recent study shows that patients with a rare cataract disorder improved their vision by playing a first-person shooter for about two hours a day, for a month. This improvement led to an increased ability to recognise faces and see small print, and allowed them to read two lines lower on an eye chart.

This finding isn't all that surprising. In a first-person shooter, players have to deal with multiple fast-moving targets while keeping track of ammunition, available cover and teammates. Given that the brain continually creates new connections throughout our lifetime, gaming is the equivalent to exercise for your eyes and brain.

And the above is not an isolated case. Studies show that gaming can lead to improved reaction time, improved memory
and spatial skills, and even decreased blood pressure associated with increased relaxation, regardless of the level of violence in the game being played.

Video games also have marked effects on cognitive functions in the elderly, thereby combating the onset of dementia, and can also improve stroke rehabilitation rates.

But this next one is my favourite.

University students who played 11–50 hours of games per week were found to have higher grades than non-gamers and those who played a greater variety of games were more imaginative.

Where was this study when I was growing up?

(Although I'd like to think video games make you smarter, it's more likely that gaming was a parental reward to get homework done. As economists know, incentives are powerful drivers.)

There's even evidence of skills transference into real-world situations. Surgeons who played video games for three hours a week made 37 per cent fewer errors and completed operations 27 per cent faster than non-gamers.