Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Warren Washington is an internationally recognized expert on atmospheric science and climate research. He specializes in computer modeling of Earth's climate. Currently, he is a senior scientist and Chief Scientist of the DOE/UCAR Cooperative Agreement at NCAR in the Climate Change Research Section in the center’s Climate and Global Dynamics Division. Over the years, Washington has published almost 200 papers in professional journals, garnered dozens of national and international awards, and served as a science advisor to former presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
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Washington was born and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He became interested in science in grade school, going on to earn a bachelor's degree in physics and master's degree in meteorology from Oregon State University. His next step was to Pennsylvania State University for a doctorate in meteorology. In 1963, he joined NCAR as a research scientist.
Climate Modeling
Washington became one of the first developers of groundbreaking atmospheric computer models in collaboration with Akira Kasahara when he came to NCAR in the early 1960s. These models, which use fundamental laws of physics to predict future states of the atmosphere, have helped scientists understand climate change. As his research developed, Washington worked to incorporate the oceans and sea ice into climate models. Such models now include components that depict surface hydrology and vegetation as well as the atmosphere, oceans, and sea ice.
An Introduction to Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling, written by Washington and Claire Parkinson in 1986 and updated in 2005, is a standard reference in the field.
Washington's past research involved using the Parallel Climate Model (PCM). His current research involves using the Community Climate System Model (CESM) to study the impacts of climate change in the 21st century. Both models were used extensively in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment, for which NCAR scientists, including Washington, and colleagues around the world shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Diversity efforts
As the second African-American to earn a doctorate in the atmospheric sciences, Washington has served as a role model for generations of young researchers from many backgrounds. He has mentored dozens of graduate students, as well as undergraduates in the UCAR-based SOARS program (Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science). In 1999, Washington won the Dr. Charles Anderson Award from the American Meteorological Society "for pioneering efforts as a mentor and passionate support of individuals, educational programs, and outreach initiatives designed to foster a diverse population of atmospheric scientists."
Timeline of Service, Activities, Honors and Awards
From 1978 to 1984, Washington served on the President's National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere. He participated on several National Research Council panels and chaired the council’s advisory panel for Climate Puzzle, a film produced for the 1986 PBS television series Planet Earth.
Washington was a member of the Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board from 1990 to 1993 and has been on the Secretary of Energy's Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee (BERAC) since 1990. From 1996 - 2006, he served as the chair of the subcommittee on Global change for BERAC.
Washington held the office of President of the American Meteorological Society in 1994 and was Past President in 1995.
He served on the Modernization Transition Committee and the National Centers for Environment Prediction Advisory Committee of the U.S. National Weather Service. In 1998, he was appointed to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency Science Advisory Board, until 2002.
In May of 1995, he was appointed by President Clinton to a six-year term on the National Science Board, which helps oversee the National Science Foundation and advises the Executive Branch and Congress on science related matters. In March 2000 he was nominated by President Clinton for a second six-year term and was confirmed by the Senate in September 2000. In May 2002, The National Science Board (NSB) in Washington, D.C., elected Washington as its new Chair. He was re-elected to a second term in May of 2004. The National Science Board has dual responsibilities as national science policy adviser to the president and Congress and as governing board for the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency.......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Experts say the administration's most important outreach effort is an overlooked gem. But it hasn't come close to its potential. The New Republic: Obama’s Disappointing Legacy in Africa.
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The last we saw of President George W. Bush in Africa, he was literally dancing into the sunset of his presidency, on this occasion with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Monrovia, Liberia, America’s only former colony on the continent. There was much to celebrate. Despite the fact that his legacy was already being defined by a disastrous war in the Middle East and economic crisis at home, Bush has since been recognizedby fans and critics alike to have done the most of any American president for the African continent since perhaps John F. Kennedy in the late 1960s. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), his signature Africa initiative, has been credited with saving millions of lives on the continent. Despite backlash about the program’s moralistic focus on abstinence, it was an unprecedented success.
Bush’s successor arrived in Accra, Ghana, in 2009 with a different message. Barack Obama, the first American president with African ancestry, visited the famous “door of no return” through which slaves were led out to waiting ships at the Cape Coast Castle. He addressed the Ghanaian parliament, declaring that “the 21st century will be shaped by what happens not just in Rome, or Moscow or Washington, but by what happens in Accra as well.” He added, “Africa’s future is up to Africans.”
Obama’s popularity surged with Africans. All over the continent there are residential areas, roads, even barber shops named after the president. Harvard economist Grieve Chelwa recalls the excitement that greeted an American president who had “clearly identifiable roots, within this century,” to the continent. On the day of Obama’s inauguration, a cab driver in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, told Grieve, “Since a black man is the president of U.S., things are finally going to change for us black people.”
The general sentiment was that Obama, whose grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, would have a personal investment in Africa. He would be motivated by a genuine desire to empower citizens of the continent; a shift from the missionary quality that characterized Bush and his predecessors in their engagement toward Africa—a modern-day rendition of Kipling’s white man’s burden.
Nearly eight years later, there is a palpable sense that Obama’s legacy in Africa is not what it could have been. It is not only that his administration has failed to produce a single policy that could rival the success of PEPFAR; it has actually cut funding for the program, leading critics to warn that Obama may have set back progress on AIDS by years. Power Africa, Obama’s initiative to light up the continent with more than 30,000 megawatts of power, has only generated a little over 4,000 megawatts. The premier U.S.-Africa trade agreement, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, was renewed by Congress last year, but U.S. trade with Africa still heavily leans on extractive economies where natural resources are a source of conflict. The fraught governing coalition in Africa’s newest country, South Sudan, shepherded into the international community by the U.S., has fallen apart.
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Loraine Helber runs the public housing authority in Punta Gorda, Florida, a city of 18,000 just north of Fort Myers at the mouth of the Peace River. In March, she hopes to celebrate a milestone: the opening of new apartments for the elderly, replacing about 80 units destroyed by the hurricane.
But the storm that destroyed the original public housing wasn't Hurricane Matthew; it was Hurricane Charley, 12 years ago. Neither the insurance company nor the federal government provided enough money to rebuild what was lost. Construction could proceed only once Bank of America, through a subsidiary, invested in the new building to get a tax write-off.
None of the people forced to leave their homes will be there to move back in. Many of them left Punta Gorda altogether; there was nowhere for them to stay. Helber thinks most went to Tampa. Yet she says Punta Gorda fared better than most housing authorities, because the units got rebuilt at all. "We refused to give up," Helber told me.
As global warming causes more extreme weather and sea-level rise, coastal communities around the U.S. are starting to think about whether, and how, to help people move away from the water. But one group of Americans is already being displaced by climate change -- not through innovative urban and land-use planning, but official indifference.
Storms and flooding are damaging or destroying a growing share of the nation's 1.1 million public housing units. Those homes are getting replaced slowly or not at all, forcing the people who lived in them to leave their neighborhoods and often their cities.
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In North Carolina, any person can revoke any other person’s voting rights without their knowledge. The process is simple: Someone sends a letter to thousands of people at once based on the address listed on their voter registration. He then gathers all mail returned as undeliverable, and sends another letter to those addresses, informing them that they are being removed from the voter rolls. If the voter does not appear at a county board of elections or return a notarized form, her voting rights are nullified. How easy is that?
Recently, Republicans in North Carolina have used this method to purge thousands of voters, most of them black Democrats, from the rolls. The NAACP has sued, alleging a violation of the National Voter Registration Act, whose procedural safeguards limit states’ ability to purge the voter rolls. Now the Justice Department has joined in, filing a statement of interest essentially pointing out that an egregious and unlawful voter suppression effort is currently underway in North Carolina.
The NVRA protects voting rights by ensuring that individuals have fair notice before getting removed from the voter rolls. Under the law, a jurisdiction can’t remove a voter from the rolls based solely on a change of address to a new jurisdiction without a lengthy notice and confirmation procedure. A jurisdiction is also barred from removing a voter from the rolls because she moved to a new address within the same jurisdiction. Finally, no jurisdiction can carry out a systematic voter purge within 90 days of a federal election.
Three North Carolina counties appear to have breached all of these rules by operating under state law, which is significantly laxer than the federal standards. Over the past few months, a group of Republicans have implemented a county-level voter-purge scheme targeting black Democrats. These vigilantes have gathered mail that was returned as undeliverable and challenged the voter registration of residents at those addresses. It isn’t entirely clear how these challengers managed to target primarily black voters, but they clearly have: In one recent purge, more than 65 percent of the purged voters were black, even though black people account for just 25.9 percent of the county’s population. Because the purges are occurring county by county, it’s unclear how many North Carolina voters have unknowingly had their voting rights nullified. But the NAACP alleges that at least 4,490 voters have been purged in three counties alone, and a majority of those people are minority Democrats.
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On Wednesday, Hitler enthusiast and Donald Trump supporter David Duke, a former grand wizard of Ku Klux Klan, was onstage here for a debate at Dillard University, a historically black college. You will be hard-pressed to find a better encapsulation of America’s surreal politics in 2016 than the previous sentence. Running as a Republican, Duke was one of six candidates who qualified for a final debate in the race to replace David Vitter as Louisiana’s next U.S. senator.
Technically speaking, Duke was invited because he earned 5.1 percent support in a single poll commissioned by Raycom Media, which produced the debate. The poll had a 4 percent margin of error.
But everyone knew the real reason Duke was onstage. He is hate porn, and his mere presence ensures a spectacle. He’s bad for America and good for ratings. This, too, is American politics in 2016. Even C-SPAN aired the debate.
“I’m not opposed to all Jews,” Duke said at one point, after a moderator asked why he’d referred to reporters covering Trump as “CNN Jews.” He said he opposed a secret “cabal” controlling the media and banks. “I’m against Jews, or anybody else, that puts the interest of some other place, another country over our own country,” he continued, referring to Israel, “that is controlling and dominating the media, which is teaching black people and inspiring black people to hate white people.”
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It’s very late in Loving that Joel Edgerton’s Oscar-worthy moment happens. His character, Richard Loving, is standing on a porch with his lawyer Bernard Cohen (played by Nick Kroll); they’re looking out over the farm where he’s been hiding with his wife Mildred for years. She is black and of Native descent, and he is white. They live in 1960s Virginia, where there is an anti-miscegenation law. Cohen asks him if there’s anything he’d like the Supreme Court to know, as they decide the historic case that will forever bear Richard Perry Loving’s name. Edgerton gives him a beady, pained look before replying, “Tell them I love my wife.”
At that particular juncture in the script, I’d imagine there’s some sort of notation: “Cue audience tears.” It has this effect even though we haven’t gotten a full speech, just that one short line.
Hollywood versions of watershed moments in American history are generally high-minded shlock. JFK, The People vs. Larry Flynt, even Lincoln: all of these boast excellent performances in scripts that are ultimately very conventional, even conservative. Self-congratulatory soliloquies, for instance, are a mainstay of historical scripts, because actors like speeches and they are good for the Oscar montage. Very little of that happens in Loving, even though the film is definitely Oscar-bait. It tells the story of a man and woman so in love they will defy a racist lawto stay together and find their way into a legal system, to see that other interracial couples will be able to do the same. That tale of triumph against adversity makes it feel tailor-made for awards and acclaim. Its poster bears the tagline “All Love Is Created Equal.” And, though no one producing this film knew that this would happen, it is hitting theaters just at a moment when America—especially white America—is desperate to remember something good about itself. Many white Americans, such as Richard, and the couple’s lawyers, get to be unequivocal heroes of this story.
But its cast, if not exactly unknown, isn’t the usual Nicole-Kidman-and-Tom-Hanks A-list medley either. There is Edgerton, whose looks are not movie-star handsome. He seems pretty intent to leaving Richard’s rough edges unsmoothed, in a way that a slicker actor never could have. Ruth Negga, the British actress who plays Mildred Loving, similarly has to do most of her emoting by way of downcast looks and a few simple lines. Edgerton is likely to get more attention, though it is Negga’s incredible performance that makes the film so powerfully subtle. And her role is the more important one: It was Mildred who found the couple’s ACLU lawyers by way of a letter to Bobby Kennedy. Being more comfortable with the press, she became the couple’s public voice too, if a hesitant one. “I feel hopeful,” is all that Negga’s version tells a full press compliment outside a courthouse, even as Virginia courts rule against the couple.
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY’S PORCH, IF YOU LIVE IN A STATE WHERE YOU CAN STILL VOTE EARLY PLEASE DO SO. THIS IS THE LAST WEEKEND OF GOTV