Covid-19, Climate, Water and me

World Water Day (March 22nd) and World Meteorological Day (March 23rd) came and passed with little fanfare outside of within the usual scientific circles, but the topic for the days - Climate and water - is so relevant to every social facet of life, and even more so today. Climate and water focus on climate change which respects no geographical or political boundaries and impacts health, development and security at a global level, and directly affect our natural environment (with respect to water) through droughts, flood, sea-level rises and glacier melting. Additionally water directly impacts global food production, and downstream, food security.

Normally, many sustainably minded individuals outside of the scientific arenas celebrate these days by bringing to light the themes from a social perspective while highlighting the global challenges … even crises. Even the mainstream news channels on these days give a few minutes of airplay and social media mentions. But this year, such activity was quiet (almost non-existent) as most are focused on another global crisis - the COVID-19 pandemic. This global crisis is consuming our thoughts and resources while radically disrupting lifestyles and moving at the speed of lightning! At a first glance, comparatively climate and water seem somewhat non-priority and unrelated elements of our global existence currently, but they really are not even in light of the new global crisis. 

As we work earnestly to combat the pandemic, this article briefly dissects the cusps of interceptions of these three global crises – COVID-19, climate (& climate change), and water. 

The intercept of three global crises

One of the necessary resources at the center of the pandemic is clean water. Two core pillars of combating COVID-19 we often hear are:

• Wash your hands often for at least 20seconds each time
• Isolate

Clean water is required for sanitizing hands and surfaces as we seek to care for our ill and reduce the risk of contraction amongst the healthy. More than 35% of the global population does not have access to basic hand-washing facilities and clean water in their homes ¹. Furthermore globally water has been scarce for this northern hemisphere winter season (December - February) and many prior seasons in many regions.

US Drought outlook for March 2020. Yellows indicate abnormal dryness whereas browns indicate exceptional drought. See US Drought outlook for more details.

The Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) is an indicator of drought conditions used by climatologist globally. The SPI for the Caribbean for the last season Dec 2019 - Feb 2020. Blue is wetter than usual areas whereas red indicates drier than usual. Taken from: The Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH)

Drought is the stealthy killer that doesn’t herald its presence like a pandemic. In fact, most don’t realize they are in a drought, until … they are in a drought! As we fight this pandemic, let’s be mindful of the current water resources. Tackling COVID-19 while maintaining a commitment to sustainability and more specifically, water conservation is quite possible. For example:

• Be mindful that washing your hands for 20 seconds does not require a faucet being on for 20 seconds. Let’s turn off the faucet while soaping.
• Jailbreak your toilet to conserve water. Jailbreak you say? YEA (let’s be honest, most of us don’t have one that conserves water at home like in the office)! A really simply hack is to put a couple bottles of water in the tank. This reduces the volume required to full the tank, and will still give you sufficient volume for a decent flush.
• Be mindful of your household’s water usage especially if you have kids.
• Encourage activities to pass the time while in isolation that are not water intensive. (Please feel free to comment and leave some more ideas around this!)

The second pillar of combating COVID-19 we often hear is isolate - “Stay home. Stay healthy.” Billions of people globally have been ordered to stay home, encouraged to isolate, and, work and school remotely. Many who were naysayers of remote work have now been effective at such. Travel has screeched to an as-needed bias, and many ground, air and sea transportation companies have significantly reduced their routes and frequencies. Climate change is closely coupled to global emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, methane, and tropospheric ozone, as well as anthropogenic aerosols. The global concentrations of the greenhouse gases over the years depict a consistent, unprecedented concentration in the atmosphere (CO ₂ at the highest ever on record, currently 414 ppm February 2020 reading for Mauna Lao Observatory – the longest on record starting back in the late 1950s).

Monthly mean carbon dioxide globally averaged from instruments at varying marine surface locations. The dashed red line with diamond symbols represents the monthly mean values, centered on the middle of each month. The black line with the square symbols is the moving average of seven adjacent seasonal cycles centered on the month corrected for the average seasonal cycle, except for the first and last three and one-half years of the record. Taken from: Earth Systems Research Laboratory

Tropospheric nitrogen dioxide from satellite for Dec 2019 - Feb 2020. Blue indicates low concentration in a column where as red indicates high concentration in a column of atmosphere. Taken from TEMIS.

Atmospheric scientists collectively proved and agreed for decades that the rapidly increasing greenhouse concentrations are causing quick and intense warming of the atmosphere. This is leading to drastic changes in the globe’s natural environment that are impacting weather systems and patterns, sea-levels, ice-sheet development and maintenance, and plant and animal life, amongst others ². Furthermore, much of the anomalous increase in greenhouse gases have been linked to man and his activities – anthropogenic emissions. In many cities, emissions of greenhouse gases have significantly reduced, and air quality has improved over the last few weeks, most likely as emissions from transportation have drastically reduced ^3,4,5. The offset to those reduced emissions would be the increase of those emitted from energy used by households and by large corporations that maintain network infrastructure, cloud and data centers, in this temporary "work and school from home" state.

But I am hopeful for the future. Imagine if after the pandemic society was to maintain some aspects of limited transportation through more telecommuting options and better planned daily commuting to complete tasks while simultaneously large corporations commit to reduce their carbon footprint, similar to Microsoft’s recent commitment⁶. We might have the beginnings of a winning formula to combat the climate crisis!

Collectively, let us commit to the fight against climate change and commit to conserving water during and after this pandemic.

World Meteorological Day and World Water Day 2020 theme - Climate and water

¹ https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html

² https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

³ https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146362/airborne-nitrogen-dioxide-plummets-over-china

⁴ https://balkangreenenergynews.com/air-pollution-sharply-falls-worldwide-on-covid-19-lockdowns/?fbclid=IwAR3VISxGKNzQvXeqnqmjQfPaWemyhVHD4kPskjcTbMuPX6Fz8yBJNZ9UVm4

⁵ https://la.curbed.com/2020/3/26/21195699/pollution-los-angeles-traffic-coronavirus

⁶ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/

GitHub, not just for software developers

If you’ve ever heard of GitHub and you’ve never ever coded a line in your life, or you dabble in coding but don’t consider yourself a software developer, you will most likely say something like “GitHub is for those computer guys…” Well that’s not entirely true. What? Why? Stay tuned! What if you’ve never heard of GitHub? If you’ve never heard of GitHub, keep reading, because everyone can do with a little organization and a great collaboration environment in their lives.

GitHub is for anyone and everyone!

How many times have you worked on a document and titled it ‘My-doc-today’s-date-time’ or ‘My-doc-v1’? If you are a meticulous organizer, you would have most likely created a folder to store all these related documents. This naming convention approach effectively identifies the latest version of a document. But depending on the type of document, you may not be able to easily track the changes between the versions. (For the computer savvy, diff isn’t necessarily always a hero!) This is especially a limitation when the document has not been accessed for a while. In software engineering and development, the term ‘version control’ defines the tasks of organizing and chronicling the versions and configurations of a piece of (developing) software. Not only is it useful for working on solo documents, but it also documents with inputs from others. Consider the scenario of sharing a document or set of documents with a number of persons for their individual feedback. Each individual returns the document(s) with their edits, as the filename(s) with their name appended. Your painfully tedious task is to combine these changes into one final document - a process referred to as merging collaborators’ edits. Now, suppose you can leverage software - a ‘version control system’ - that would systematically identify changes between two documents as you combine one file into the master file at a time? That would significantly reduce the pain factor! This is where ‘version control systems’ such as GNU RCS, CVS, Apache Subversion and Git are useful to manage the version control process. These systems keep track of changes in the files, allow for easy exploration of differences between the files (irrespective of type), and provide easy methods to merge collaborators’ edits. Version control systems are extensible to any type of file - code, manuscripts, presentations, etc. - hence they can be adopted by all to aid with organization and collaboration. But they are not made equal! Version control systems are differentiated by the methods they implement to manage the process, their ease of use, and the size of the projects they best align with, amongst other factors.

GitHub can be thought of a platform built around Git. Let’s revisit the previous scenario of sharing documents with a number of persons for their individual feedback. Suppose each person could observe when another in the group made changes and thus can apply those changes to the most recent document? To implement this high-level functionality, firstly the files must be available at a location that all persons can simultaneously access, a stepping stone of creating a collaborative environment. Such a location can be, for example, on a physical server or within a cloud. This shared access location concept contrasts that of the latest files being available to only one person at a time, for example, in their inbox or on their personal computer, thus placing the task of (re)distribution at their convenience. Secondly, with file availability, the assumption is that before an update occurs, each individual will check for the latest version of that file to apply their changes to, and, upon completion of these changes, the file(s) will be (re)written to the shared location. In this scenario, the changes between an individual’s edits converge on the final document more naturally as all are aware of each other's contributions, thus avoiding repetition of corrections, suggestions or rewritten sections.

How advantageous and pain-free is that!

GitHub administers a web-based graphical interface of Git (ease of use), provides access control (shared repository for files), and furthers a collaborative environment through tools such as task management widgets and wikis (added value to the version control system). Let’s explore the collaborative environment in GitHub a bit more.

At all stages of product development (e.g. a manuscript, code, presentation), empowering all team members to contribute through adding content, reviewing content, discussing approaches, and suggesting upgrades, encourages the success of the product. GitHub supports delivering a successful product through its suite of task management widgets, one of the most powerful of which is the 'creation of issues' . Creating an issue in GitHub is analogous to adding a comment or a ‘To Do’ to a document, with the additional capabilities to add multimedia, to annotate the issue using predefined tags (for example, upgrade or new feature or user-defined tags), to format text, to ask for particular team members’ inputs, to elicit discussion on the issue and potential approaches, and to assign tasks, while leaving a history that can be reviewed at will. Through monitoring the creation of issues, discussions on them, and solutions implemented, team members can have an understanding of the health of the project and the roles of team members. New team members can also be easily integrated into the project, as an extensive history of the product, as well as issues and discussions, are all available. In terms of the product development itself, GitHub’s task management widgets also support all team members to seek assistance through tagging team members, to discuss the project in realtime via chatroom integration, to review content before merging, and to request changes. The integrity of the product between merges can be ensured by adding user-defined tests to be automatically run before merging. These user-defined tests vary according to the nature of the project, for example in presentation-based project this may be automatically running a spell checker each time a collaborator attempts to integrate content.

“But I work mostly solo on projects. Should I even consider using GitHub?”

The answer is emphatically yes. On a solo project, you will assume the roles of creator/designer, implementer, tester, and leader/manager. As such, you can effectively use the task management widgets throughout your project, to leverage the README file, to describe and roadmap your project, to identify your ‘To-Do’ list as a series of issues which you (or potential collaborators) can address at any time, and to merge content into the project intermittently. This not only creates great project organization, but also creates a healthy history of tracking project progress and self-updates on project status, as needed. The biggest advantage of using GitHub for solo projects is that it lowers the bar for future collaborations because the history generated through merging, issue generation and updates can easily be accessed by (new) members allowing them to quickly come up to speed.

Although most of the projects I have contributed to on GitHub are code-based repositories, that does not mean all of my contributions have been code-related! I’ve contributed updates to documentation, created issues for new features, and participated discussions on existing issues. I’ve observed team members (both in with students projects where I’m a stakeholder, and professional projects) who never write a line of code be able to actively contribute to the project content and thus be truly integrated into the project. All contributions on GitHub are noted in the project’s history and thus help individuals with building up their profiles - like a resume! On my solo projects, I’ve experienced the successes of others finding my (public) project and contributing as they use the project for their purposes. Collaborations like these not only assisted with addressing existing issues (from the project’s roadmap), but also grew the projects as persons add/ suggests new functionality. Hopefully, this blog has inspired you to give GitHub a try, or at least explore it a bit. A good resource for diving in, is the infamous Hello World project. If you are seriously going to use GitHub for your projects, be sure to explore the plans available to determine the best for you. Some affairs you may wish to consider in choosing a plan are is it a concern if your project is public facing? If it is public, do you need to consider licensing your intellectual property?

Credit

Image taken from: https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/images/flexslider/group-with-hands-together-large.jpg