Dot Earth Blog: Kerry Proposes U.S.-India Push on Carbon and Climate

Shortly after prodding India in a New Delhi speech to find ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Secretary of State John Kerry sent a "Your Dot" piece (a guest post) emphasizing that he sees this as a partnership between two dynamic, innovative democracies. Here's Kerry's fresh post, followed by my initial reaction:

I was in India this week for the fourth U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue, joined by my friend from Massachusetts and one of the smartest, most creative leaders in government, Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz.

Every time I visit India, it's as if I set foot in a different country, a country racing forward to meet the economic and development demands of modernity, a boisterous democracy where debate is a prized commodity.

But the country I visited this week was also grappling with the impact of extraordinary flooding responsible for the heartbreaking loss of lives and livelihoods.

Here, too, extreme weather events are causing unbelievable disruption and dislocation — and India is not alone: extreme weather events are increasing all over the world and 12 of the hottest 14 years on record have occurred since 2000.

Just last week, the World Bank reported that within the next generation that same warming atmosphere could lead to widespread water and food shortages, historic heat waves, prolonged droughts, and more intense flooding. And tragically, India is a primary candidate for all four. India helps feed the world, but extreme heat could actually cut in half yields of the most productive areas, wreaking havoc on global food prices. The Himalayan glaciers are receding, threatening the supply of water to almost a billion people.

What does that tell us? It underscores the imperative that we act forcefully and cooperatively on climate change, not because of ideology, but because of science.

The global climate challenge is about opportunity, security, even our very survival in the long term. These challenges are interconnected and we have the opportunity — right now — to address them in ways that move our economies forward and deliver tangible benefits to the global community.

The good news is that if we address climate change the right way, it's not going to hurt our economies; it'll actually grow them. Staring us in the face today is one of the greatest economic opportunities of all time – the clean energy market.  The new energy market is a $6 trillion market and its fastest growing segment by far is clean energy.  [His office said this figure comes from an estimate for the global energy market made by the venture capitalist John Doerr.] This is not just about air and water and weather, it's about job creation, capturing investment, and improving our economies.

My time in India, fortuitously, came on the eve of President Obama announcing a series of domestic measures to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Our decisive action at home empowers us to make more progress internationally on the shared global challenge of climate change. We in the United States recognize our responsibility to lead on climate action and we are committed to doing our part by taking significant actions to reduce our own emissions.  Under President Obama, the United States has done more to combat climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions than ever before, both at home and abroad. And the announcement just this week of actions that include cutting domestic carbon pollution from new and existing power plants and increasing the use of renewable and clean energy sources puts tangible action behind our words.

India and the United States are particularly well-positioned to roll up our sleeves and cooperate to address climate change.  We have strong foundations to build on together, and I believe that by joining forces, India and the United States can make this leap for the benefit of both our countries and the world. We can, I believe, do so in a way that erases the anxiety (quite understandable) in a country like India that wants to grow and develop just as we did in the 1800s and 1900s. But the beauty of today's technology is that India can grow clean – an option the United States didn't have during our time of economic transformation from an agrarian to an industrialized nation. We can work on this together. That is why we announced this week the formation of a U.S.-India Working Group on Climate Change to seek new ways to find solutions and push the curve of discovery. This new Working Group will allow us build on our common values and seize the common possibilities that lie ahead of us.

My bottom-line take away from my climate and energy discussions in India? The world's largest democracy and the world's oldest democracy, both scientific leaders, can and must do more together to confront the climate challenge – and if we get it right, our partnership can be an example for the world.

Kerry will likely face resistance in seeking lockstep commitments, of course, given that India's prime challenge is bringing reliable electricity and affordable fuels by any means to its billion-plus citizens — some 400 million of whom were unaffected by last year's blackouts because they have no access to electricity at all.

As I've written, some of that new energy can and should come through a push on renewable sources, particularly in villages that are unlikely to be on a conventional power grid for years, if ever. But many parts of India could use energy provided by any means.

In his New Delhi speech, Kerry spoke of India joining "China and the United States and other major economies in order to rapidly develop joint technology and pilot programs for low- or no-carbon strategies." This is a sound idea, but could rub Indian officials the wrong way.

More than a few times, Indian diplomats and officials have told me they bristle every time they see India lumped with China in discussions of obligations to eschew fossil fuels, given that India's per-capita energy use is less than a third that of China.

Still, Kerry is right that the prosperous, urban side of India, with a straining, highly inefficient electrical grid, traffic-choked streets and other sources of energy waste, can do plenty to cut emissions even as it boosts energy access.

One opportunity was unmentioned in Kerry's speech and this post: the chance for the United States to help India develop its shale gas, an energy source that India is keen on tapping and that is cleaner than other fossil fuel choices. As with China, nurturing partnerships that spread best drilling practices for gas can be a win for climate and clean air — if gas is developed in place of coal (or dirty diesel). [Grist has some reactions from an environmental campaigner in India.]

Over all, there's a lot of promise in nurturing a partnership between the United States and India on expanding energy choices that work for the long haul. I hope Kerry keeps at it.

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Breaking the Seal on Drug Research

Steve Ruark for The New York Times

Peter Doshi, in background, wants to give consumers "the full picture" on drug data. He shared an article with Kevin Fain in a Johns Hopkins cafe.

PETER DOSHI walked across the campus of Johns Hopkins University in a rumpled polo shirt and stonewashed jeans, a backpack slung over one shoulder. An unremarkable presence on a campus filled with backpack-toters, he is 32, and not sure where he'll be working come August, when his postdoctoral fellowship ends. And yet, even without a medical degree, he is one of the most influential voices in medical research today.

Dr. Doshi's renown comes not from solving the puzzles of cancer or discovering the next blockbuster drug, but from pushing the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies to open their records to outsiders in an effort to better understand the benefits and potential harms of the drugs that billions of people take every day. Together with a band of far-flung researchers and activists, he is trying to unearth data from clinical trials — complex studies that last for years and often involve thousands of patients across many countries — and make it public.

The current system, the activists say, is one in which the meager details of clinical trials published in medical journals, often by authors with financial ties to the companies whose drugs they are writing about, is insufficient to the point of being misleading.

There is an underdog feel to this fight, with postdocs and academics flinging stones at well-fortified corporations. But they are making headway. Last fall, after prodding by Dr. Doshi and others, the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline announced that it would share detailed data from all global clinical trials conducted since 2007, a pledge it later expanded to all products dating to 2000. Though that data has not yet been produced, it would amount to more than 1,000 clinical trials involving more than 90 drugs, a remarkable first for a major drug maker.

The European Medicines Agency, which oversees drug approvals for the European Union, is considering a policy to make trial data public whenever a drug is approved. And on June 17, the medical world saw how valuable such transparency could be, as outside researchers published a review of a spinal treatment from the device maker Medtronic. The review, which concluded that the treatment was no better than an older one, relied on detailed data the company provided to the researchers.

For years, researchers have talked about the problem of publication bias, or selectively publishing results of trials. Concern about such bias gathered force in the 1990s and early 2000s, when researchers documented how, time and again, positive results were published while negative ones were not. Taken together, studies have shown that results of only about half of clinical trials make their way into medical journals.

Problems with data about high-profile drugs have led to scandals over the past decade, like one involving contentions that the number of heart attacks was underreported in research about the painkiller Vioxx. Another involved accusations of misleading data about links between the antidepressant Paxil and the risk of suicide among teenagers.

To those who have followed this issue for years, the moves toward openness are unfolding with surprising speed.

"This problem has been very well documented for at least three decades now in medicine, with no substantive fix," said Dr. Ben Goldacre, a British author and an ally of Dr. Doshi. "Things have changed almost unimaginably fast over the past six months."

Much of that change is happening because of what Dr. Goldacre calls an "accident of history." In 2009, Dr. Doshi and his colleagues set out to answer a simple question about the anti-flu drug Tamiflu: Does it work? Resolving that question has been far harder than they ever envisioned, and, four years later, there is still no definitive answer. But the quest to determine Tamiflu's efficacy transformed Dr. Doshi and others into activists for transparency — and turned the tables on drug makers. Until recently, the idea that companies should routinely hand over detailed data about their clinical trials might have sounded far-fetched. Now, the onus is on the industry to explain why it shouldn't.

IN summer 2009, Dr. Doshi received a call from Dr. Tom Jefferson, a British epidemiologist based in Rome. That year, the swine flu pandemic was spreading worldwide, and Dr. Jefferson had been hired by the British and Australian governments to update an earlier review of Tamiflu, a drug produced by the Swiss company Roche, aimed at reducing the flu's severity and preventing more serious complications. He asked if Dr. Doshi wanted to help.

Determining Tamiflu's efficacy had significant economic as well as health consequences. Around the world, private companies and governments — including that of the United States — were stockpiling Tamiflu in case of influenza outbreaks, and their spending accounted for almost 60 percent of the drug's $3 billion in sales in 2009.

The review of Tamiflu was being conducted under the auspices of the Cochrane Collaboration, a well-regarded network of independent researchers, including Dr. Jefferson, who evaluate medical treatments' effectiveness by analyzing all available research.

At the time, Dr. Doshi knew little about clinical trials or even much about the drug industry. But he knew Dr. Jefferson. Dr. Doshi, after receiving undergraduate and master's degrees in anthropology and East Asian studies from Brown and Harvard, had shifted focus and was pursuing a doctorate at M.I.T., studying the intersection of medicine and politics. He met Dr. Jefferson, a prominent skeptic of the flu vaccine, after researching whether the Centers for Disease Control was exaggerating the deadliness of the disease.

"We were both lone wolves in the field of influenza," Dr. Doshi recalled.

Dr. Jefferson had conducted a Cochrane review of Tamiflu's effectiveness a few years earlier, concluding that the drug reduced the risk of complications from the flu. He assured Dr. Doshi and other researchers on his team that the update would be fairly simple.

But just as their work was getting under way, a simple comment arrived on the Cochrane Web site that changed the course of the research and would ultimately fuel a worldwide effort to force drug companies to be more transparent.

The author of that comment, Dr. Keiji Hayashi, had no connection to the Cochrane group; he was a pediatrician in Japan who had prescribed Tamiflu to children in his practice, but had come to question its efficacy. He was curious about one of the main studies on which Dr. Jefferson had relied in his previous analysis. Called the Kaiser study, it pooled the results of 10 clinical trials. But Dr. Hayashi noticed that the results of only two of those trials had been fully published in medical journals. Given that details of eight trials were unknown, how could the researchers be certain of their conclusion that Tamiflu reduced risk of complications from flu?

"We should appraise the eight trials rigidly," Dr. Hayashi wrote.

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W.H.O. Issues Guidelines for Earlier H.I.V. Treatment

People infected with H.I.V. should be put on antiretroviral therapy even sooner than they are now, the World Health Organization said Sunday as it released new treatment guidelines.

While the new guidelines, issued at an international AIDS conference in Malaysia, were an aggressive step forward, they also represent a compromise between how much the world could do to suppress the epidemic if money were no object and how much donor countries are willing to pay for.

Dr. Margaret Chan, the W.H.O.'s director general, called the guidelines "a leap ahead in a trend of ever-higher goals and ever-greater achievements," while Michel Sidibé, the executive director of the United Nations AIDS agency, who several years ago called for universal treatment, said the step-by-step rise of the guidelines "gets most of the people we want on treatment, but not all — so it shows that you have limits to the system."

The new guidelines recommend that drugs be initiated as soon as a patient's CD4 count falls below 500 cells per cubic millimeter of blood. CD4s are the white blood cells that the virus first attacks. The count is an index for how much of the immune system has been destroyed; 500 is the bottom of the normal range while a patient below 200 is at high risk of fatal infections. The previous cutoff point, recommended in 2010, was a count of 350; a decade ago, when donors first began buying drugs, it was 200.

For some subgroups, the new guidelines recommend starting treatment immediately upon a positive H.I.V. test, regardless of CD4 count. Those include people with active tuberculosis or hepatitis B liver disease, those whose regular sex partners are not infected, women who are pregnant or breast-feeding, and children under age 5.

Many scientists now recommend that all patients start treatment immediately regardless of CD4 levels. The evidence is overwhelming that they are far less likely to infect anyone else if they do so. They also may live longer, healthier lives because their immune systems are not allowed to sink before being revived. In rare cases when the infection is caught very early, some may even be able to safely stop treatment after a year or two.

W.H.O. guidelines, however, are used mostly by the health ministries of poor countries that depend on donors. Not nearly enough money is contributed each year to treat everyone infected, so poor countries perform triage, telling about half of their infected citizens to wait until they get sicker.

The new guidelines mean that about 26 million people in poor and middle-income countries will be eligible for the drugs, up from 17 million under the previous guidelines. Almost 10 million people are on the drugs now. Globally, more than 34 million people are infected.

Two trends are helping increase the number of people getting treatment. The prices of drugs and diagnostic tests keep dropping, and middle-income countries are relying less on donors. South Africa, for example, has increased its AIDS budget by 500 percent in recent years.

The new guidelines also call for universal use of the simplest, most effective treatment with the least side effects: a once-daily pill containing three drugs — tenofovir, efavirenz and either lamivudine or emtricitabine.

For diagnosis, the guidelines suggest that, in addition to CD4 counts, countries do more expensive viral load tests. Tracking viral loads is the best way to tell when a patient needs a new drug regimen, said Dr. Gilles van Cutsem, medical coordinator in South Africa for Doctors Without Borders, the medical charity. And, he said, there is "no greater motivating factor for people to stick to their treatment than knowing the virus is 'undetectable' in their blood."

The guidelines do not call for giving healthy people who are at high risk — drug addicts, prostitutes, gay men, male prisoners and people whose sex partners are infected — a daily tenofovir pill to keep them uninfected.

Mr. Sidibé called that "a missed opportunity" and said that it was still being discussed.

The new guidelines drew mixed reactions from advocates.

Doctors Without Borders, which treats 285,000 H.I.V. patients in 21 countries, applauded the guidelines.

But Asia Russell, an activist with Health GAP, which lobbies for more generosity from donors and drug makers, called them "the absolute bare minimum steps that needed to be taken — because stingy donors and U.N. technocrats and national governments in the global south tend to seek incrementalism."

Behind the scenes, the proposed guidelines engendered a long debate. One fear is that countries already struggling to reach rural citizens who are close to death will run out of drugs if they start treating people who live near government clinics and have CD4 counts just below normal.

In coming years, Mr. Sidibé said, he expects the guidelines to keep shifting toward treatment upon testing, especially as recognition spreads that reducing the viral load early, when people are teeming with the virus, is the best way to stop them from spreading the disease.

"What is holding us back is that we lack a vision for ending the epidemic," he said. "If we think we'll just manage it like a chronic disease for the next 50 years, we'll never get to the end."

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Op-Ed Contributor: Native Alaska, Under Threat

PARK CITY, Utah — I TRAVEL the world on the professional ski and snowboard circuit, but I grew up in a place most will never know firsthand. I was raised in Aleknagik, Alaska — an indigenous Yupik Eskimo village 400 air miles from the nearest chairlift and accessible only by boat and plane. It's one of the most remote places in North America.

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This area is gaining attention as the proposed location of the Pebble Mine, which could end up as the largest open-pit mine in North America and threaten thousands of acres of pristine watershed and the spawning grounds of the largest wild sockeye salmon run on the planet.

In recent years, an average of 37 million sockeye have returned every year to Bristol Bay, home to nearly half the sockeye in the world, supporting both commercial and subsistence fishing. Salmon are the economic backbone for Bristol Bay's isolated bush communities. About 12,000 people work full or part time harvesting and processing the bay's sustainable salmon.

My indigenous heritage is Yupik/Inupiat Eskimo. I was raised in an environment centered on salmon. Fishing is what every family does. It is who we are. I spent my summers on the back deck of family fishing boats working multiple fisheries. The boats and fish camps are maintained by generations of families harvesting salmon not only for income, but also for food.

I remember long days of processing hundreds of pounds of salmon, setting nets, cleaning and filleting, filling tubs of salt brine, putting fresh water in clean white buckets and hanging neat rows to dry and smoke. Enjoying the bounty over the winter, my family would affectionately praise me for my hard work and contribution to our food. When I was 8, I went into business for myself, lugging a little cooler around the boatyard, selling sodas to the fishermen, welders, port engineers and fabricators.

As a child, I had no idea what magic this life was — it was just the way we did things. It's the way many Alaska Natives live — through self-reliance and hard work to harvest the many gifts of the land and sea.

This subsistence way of life that is thousands of years old is threatened by the plans of a British and Canadian mining partnership to dig a huge mine in the heart of our productive, healthy watershed.

People in Bristol Bay understand how vital our renewable resources are and that risking our lands, waters and fish for a short-term mega-mine like Pebble is a terrible idea. Eighty-one percent of Native shareholders in the Bristol Bay Native Corporation — composed of more than 9,000 Native Alaskans with ancestral ties to the Bristol Bay region — opposed the mine in a 2011 survey. And that's despite the promises of jobs and continuing efforts by the Pebble Partnership, the proponent of the mine, to buy support through grants and giveaways to communities and hundreds of millions spent to develop the mine. This issue is deeply felt in the bay, and around Alaska, where, according to a 2011 survey commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council, 68 percent said no to Pebble — in a state known for its love of resource extraction.

We know from a recent assessment by the Environmental Protection Agency (the deadline for public comments on the report is Sunday) that Bristol Bay is no place for a gigantic mine. The agency found that, depending on how much of Pebble's copper, gold and molybdenum are unearthed, as much as 90 miles of streams and up to 4,800 acres of wetlands could be destroyed. And that is the very-best-case scenario — without any disaster involving a breach of the 700-foot-tall earthen tailings dams that are supposed to hold billions of tons of toxic mine waste forever in a wet, sensitive and seismically active area.

It's truly alarming when Pebble's chief executive officer, John Shively, blithely says that, sure, the mine will damage some salmon habitat, but the company will just build "comparable" habitat nearby. Or when he says that salmon fishing is not the economic "answer for people who live out in southwest Alaska." His comments show a lack of understanding of salmon life cycles, habitat and ecosystems — not to mention the people of Bristol Bay. And it should worry us all that Mr. Shively is already saying that the government or someone else may have to handle the messy aftermath of mining if "we're not available to work on closure."

The E.P.A. can block the mine under the Clean Water Act — something our government has done rarely and judiciously. If ever there were a case for using this power, Bristol Bay is the place, with a fishery of global scale and value, and Native communities dependent upon salmon.

Callan J. Chythlook-Sifsof was a member of the United States snowboarding team in the 2010 Winter Olympics and is training for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

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Energy Secretary Optimistic on Obama’s Plan to Reduce Emissions

WASHINGTON — The short-term plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that President Obama outlined this week is achievable with some new programs and better management of existing ones, the new energy secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, said in an interview on Thursday. But he said reaching a longer-term goal would require bigger reductions as well as action from Congress.

When Mr. Obama first ran for president, he pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States 80 percent by 2050, compared with 1990 levels.

Mr. Obama's interim goal, for 2020, is a 17 percent reduction in global warming gas emissions compared with 2005. The 2020 goal is already half achieved, Dr. Moniz said, and achieving the rest will require faster fulfillment of new appliance efficiency standards, among other steps. Many of those standards are stuck in a bottleneck at the Office of Management and Budget, which evaluates the costs and benefits of proposed regulations.

"I think the president's commitment will provide the spur to O.M.B. and the Energy Department to move smartly on these," Dr. Moniz said.

Other steps include government loan guarantees for fossil fuel projects that will cut pollution, which the Energy Department will administer but has yet to describe in detail.

"Fossil fuels are not going away any time soon," Dr. Moniz said. He said it was essential to build power plants that would capture and bury their carbon dioxide emissions and that after that technology was commercialized for coal it would have to be used on natural gas as well. Carbon emissions from power plants that use natural gas are about half of those from coal, but they are still not nearly small enough to meet long-term climate goals, he said.

Another step, he said, is the completion of new civilian nuclear power reactors at a price and on a schedule close to what has been budgeted. The department is still negotiating a loan guarantee for one of those projects, Vogtle 3 and 4, near Waynesboro, Ga. He said that the four new reactors under construction — the other two are in South Carolina — were only slightly larger, in capacity, than the four reactors whose retirements have been announced this year. In the long term, he said, it was essential that the plants under construction become templates for building more.

By midcentury, when the president's goal is an 80 percent reduction in emissions compared with 1990, "you have to replace essentially all the nuclear capacity, and build more," he said.

Production of a new kind of factory-built "small modular reactors" would also be needed, but those would not be deployed by 2020, he said.

One of the big steps the president described this week was setting standards for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. The Energy Department might play a role in helping improve power plant efficiency, but the standards would be set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

To reach the 80 percent goal, set forth by Mr. Obama when he first ran for president, would require cutting emissions every year by about 20 percent more than what the president proposed this week, said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Kammen also said the 17 percent goal is "not as deep as I would like initially, but it's critical to do this step."

Dr. Moniz said that the interim goal was compatible with the long-term goal, but reaching the 2050 goal "would require a lot more to happen."

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Chinese Firm Is Charged in Theft of Turbine Software

WASHINGTON — China's biggest wind turbine company and two of its executives conspired with an employee of a Massachusetts wind company to steal the American firm's software for controlling the flow of electricity, causing $800 million in damages, according to an indictment on Thursday.

The indictment by a federal grand jury in Madison, Wis., outlined actions that the Chinese firm, Sinovel, took against AMSC, formerly the American Superconductor Corporation, and represents the latest skirmish in a series of trade disputes between the United States and China involving renewable energy.

AMSC said the theft in 2011 led to the loss of 500 jobs and cited the damages as lost sales and trade secrets.

The two Chinese executives are in China, and the former employee, who was working for AMSC in Austria, has returned home to Serbia, according to John W. Vaudreuil, the United States attorney. He said that the United States did not have extradition treaties with either nation, but the accused could be arrested if they traveled to a country with which the United States does have an extradition treaty.

Sinovel will face a trial here, he said, and could face fines equal to twice the damages, plus restitution to AMSC.

The employee, Dejan Karabasevic, 40, served a brief prison term in Austria related to the case, Mr. Vaudreuil said. According to the indictment, after Mr. Karabasevic quit AMSC, he was offered a lucrative contract to work for a Chinese turbine blade factory, apparently to disguise the nature of the payment to him.

The indictment is a small vindication for AMSC, which has been pursuing claims against Sinovel, a former customer, in China. AMSC says that after Sinovel stole the software, it refused delivery of merchandise it had ordered, worth more than $700 million. It is seeking $70 million in arbitration in that case. It is also suing in China for $450 million for infringement of trade secrets.

Matthew J. Jacobs, a lawyer at Vinson & Elkins, which represents Sinovel, said that he had no immediate comment. When AMSC filed for arbitration in Beijing, Sinovel filed a counterclaim for $58 million, accusing it of breach of contract.

The indictment named the executives as Su Liying, 36, deputy director of research and development at Sinovel, and Zhao Haichun, 33, a technology manager. It also says that Sinovel even exported to the Boston area a computer with stolen software that had been paid for with stimulus money.

In response to the indictment, AMSC asked the Obama administration and Congress to "re-evaluate the U.S. trade relationship with China."

Daniel P. McGahn, the president and chief executive, said in a statement, "We have worked with law enforcement to verify that these Sinovel-manufactured wind turbines contain AMSC's stolen intellectual property."

"The fact that Sinovel has exported stolen American intellectual property from China back into the United States — less than 40 miles from our global headquarters — shows not only a blatant disrespect for intellectual property but a disregard for international trade law," he said.

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News Analysis: Clean Air Act, Reinterpreted, Would Focus on Flexibility and State-Level Efforts

With no chance of Congressional support, President Obama is staking part of his legacy on a big risk: that he can substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions by stretching the intent of a law decades old and not written with climate change in mind.

His plan, unveiled Tuesday at Georgetown University in Washington, will set off legal and political battles that will last years.

But experts say that if all goes well for the president, the plan could potentially meet his stated goal of an overall emissions reduction of 17 percent by 2020, compared with the level in 2005.

"If the question is, 'Will this solve our emissions problem?' the answer is no," said Michael A. Levi, an energy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "If the question is, 'Could this move us along the path we want to be on?' the answer is yes, it could."

In his speech, Mr. Obama said he would use executive powers to limit the carbon dioxide that power plants could emit. He also called for government spending to promote the development of energy alternatives, and committed to helping cities and states protect themselves from rising seas and other effects of climate change.

But formally, the main thing he did on Tuesday was order the Environmental Protection Agency to devise an emissions control plan, with the first draft due in a year. Experts say he will be lucky to get a final plan in place by the time he leaves office in early 2017.

Mr. Obama is trying to ensure continuation of a trend already under way: emissions in the United States have been falling for several years. But at the global scale, they are rising fast, and as the president acknowledged, it will take much stronger international action to turn that around and head off the worst effects of climate change.

"For the world at large, the United States is just one piece of the puzzle," Mr. Levi said.

Already, glaciers are melting, heat waves and heavy rains are increasing, the food system is under stress and the sea is rising. The best that can be hoped for, scientists say, is to limit the damage, or slow it enough to provide society more time to adjust.

The president recognized that in his plan, calling for more steps to help the country prepare, from strengthening sea walls to hardening the electrical grid.

The heart of Mr. Obama's plan, however, is lowering the country's emissions using administrative remedies, an effort to sidestep a recalcitrant Congress. The success of that goal will depend on how far the administration is able to stretch the boundaries of the Clean Air Act, signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that it can be used to regulate greenhouse gases, which include carbon dioxide emissions, but figuring out how to do that within the technical requirements of the law will be a major challenge.

The administration's thinking appears to have been influenced by a proposal from an environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The group urged a creative approach, calling on the federal government to set a target level of greenhouse gases for each state, taking account of historical patterns. A state generating a lot of power from coal, then exporting it to other states, would not be unduly penalized, for instance.

As the environmental group envisions it, states would meet their goals by tweaking the overall electrical system, not just by cracking down on individual power plants. States might urge companies to produce more renewable power, for instance, but they could also retrofit homes and businesses to reduce energy waste, or encourage the use of clean-burning natural gas instead of coal.

States would presumably be allowed to use market signals, like a price on greenhouse emissions, to achieve their goals, as California and nine Northeastern states are already doing.

It is unclear how much all this might cost at the retail level. The Natural Resources Defense Council argues that even if prices go up, electric bills for many consumers could actually decline as their homes were retrofitted to use less energy.

The fossil-fuel industry and its allies in Congress are certain to argue that the president's plan will be ruinously expensive and require the shutdown of numerous coal-burning power plants. Republican leaders immediately condemned the plan as a job-killer and framed it as an attack on coal.

The political attraction of a state-led approach is that it would move a lot of the nitty-gritty decision making out of Washington. But, for that very reason, it would entail legal risk. The Clean Air Act, written in the heyday of environmentalism, basically envisions commandments from Washington ordering utilities to clean up the air, not flexible approaches.

While carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reached a historic level of 400 parts per million last month, emissions from the United States have been falling, partly because of the weak economy but also because of the newfound abundance of natural gas from hydraulic fracturing. Gas has displaced a lot of coal in power generation; such switching cuts greenhouse emissions nearly in half for a given amount of electricity produced.

Other factors, like tougher building codes, are contributing to the decline. And transport emissions are falling in part because of one of Mr. Obama's policies: tough fuel-efficiency measures for new cars.

But modest reductions already achieved in the United States and other Western countries are being swamped by rising emissions from the East. So the real question is whether technologies can be developed, and then deployed worldwide, that allow for continued economic growth and rising energy use with minimal greenhouse emissions.

In his speech, Mr. Obama sought to reclaim global leadership on climate change for the United States. His plan includes ideas and money for making global progress.

Daniel P. Schrag, head of Harvard's Center for the Environment, said the president's plan would succeed only if it created market conditions unleashing the creative power of American capitalism, calling forth greater innovation in the energy industry.

Mr. Obama nodded to that point in his speech, noting that "countries like China and Germany are going all in" on the clean energy race. "I believe Americans build things better than anybody else," he said. "I want America to win that race, but we can't win it if we're not in it."

John M. Broder contributed reporting.

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World Briefing | Asia: China: Astronauts Return Safely

Three Chinese astronauts returned safely to earth on Wednesday after a 15-day mission that included docking exercises, a televised science demonstration for children and a phone call from their country's president, Xi Jinping, state television reported. The Shenzhou 10 capsule landed in northeast China, ending China's fifth manned space mission. China is seeking to master the skills and technology needed to operate a manned space lab for long stretches, and the crew on the latest flight practiced rendezvous and docking exercises with the orbiting Tiangong 1 space module, a small prototype of such a lab. China first sent an astronaut into space in 2003, and government engineers have said they may eventually try to send an astronaut to the moon.

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Dot Earth Blog: Obama’s Ambitious Global Warming Action Plan

In advance of President Obama's speech Tuesday afternoon laying out his three-pronged plan to cut releases of greenhouse gases and the impacts of global warming, White House officials circulated detailed fact sheets and discussed the plans with journalists, including me, last night. They laid out an impressive array of steps, most of which have long been in the pipeline or anticipated and which can be carried out without congressional approval.

The 21-page White House "climate action plan" is easy to search and read, so I encourage you to sift it yourself.

The three main sections describe planned regulations, rules and standards aimed at cutting releases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants, heavy vehicles and buildings; a suite of new steps to cut vulnerability to climate and coastal hazards; and a fresh summary of international initiatives the administration plans to pursue with other countries.

"While no single step can reverse the effects of climate change," one circulated statement said, "the President believes we have a moral obligation to our kids to leave them a planet that's not polluted and damaged."

Of course this climate plan is just rhetoric until it is translated into on-the-ground actions. And the most significant steps, such as the rule-making that would cut carbon dioxide pollution from existing power plants, will take a decade or more to come to fruition.

But if you doubt the reality of this shift, just look at the news coverage from Monday of the drop in the price of shares in coal companies ahead of the speech. This headline in Street Insider says it all: "Coal Stocks Routed as Pres. Obama Preps to Tackle Carbon Emissions."

The plans on the international front appear to set the United States on a different track from the World Bank, which has signaled strong concerns about climate change but still supports the construction of new coal-burning power plants in some big developing countries (India, for example) if they are the most efficient design. In an interview Monday night, a senior White House official said that the United States would end financial support for such projects except if they have systems for capturing carbon dioxide (none do) or are in the "world's poorest countries."

Obama's plan for boosting the country's capacity to withstand climate-related hazards has some great sections, including this line:

The President will direct federal agencies to identify and remove barriers to making climate-resilient investments; identify and remove counterproductive policies that increase vulnerabilities; and encourage and support smarter, more resilient investments, including through agency grants, technical assistance, and other programs, in sectors from transportation and water management to conservation and disaster relief.

What's particularly welcome there is the language on "removing counterproductive policies that increase vulnerabilities" — which I hope will lead to some of the steps I recently described that could cut costs from future wildfires in America's "red zones," as well as shifts in how federal flood insurance is priced. There are echoes of points I explored in this January piece: "Obama's Second-Term Options on the Environment."

Here are the main points, as laid out in a White House fact sheet:  

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For Solazyme, a Side Trip on the Way to Clean Fuel

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Solazyme wants to develop oil derived from algae as an alternative fuel.

STARTING when they became friends in freshman year at Emory University in Atlanta, Jonathan S. Wolfson and Harrison F. Dillon would take off into the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado for weeks at time. They spent their days hiking in the wilderness and their nights drinking bourbon by the campfire, talking big about how one day they would build a company that would help preserve the environment they both loved.

They graduated, and the backpacking trips grew shorter and further between. Mr. Dillon went on to earn a Ph.D. in genetics and a law degree, and ended up working as a biotech patent lawyer in Silicon Valley. Mr. Wolfson received law and business degrees from New York University and eventually started a software business. But the two still got together every year. And they kept talking about the company that, they imagined as time went on, would use biotechnology to create renewable energy.

"These were delusional rantings of kids," said Mr. Wolfson, who, like Mr. Dillon, is now 42.

Then Mr. Dillon found microalgae, and delusional became real. Microalgae, a large and diverse group of single-celled plants, produce a variety of substances, including oils, and are thought to be responsible for most of the fossilized oil deposits in the earth. These, it seemed, were micro-organisms with potential. With prodding, they could be re-engineered to make fuel.

So in 2003, Mr. Wolfson packed up and moved from New York to Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Dillon lived. They started a company called Solazyme. In mythical Valley tradition, they worked in Mr. Dillon's garage, growing algae in test tubes. And they found a small knot of investors attracted by the prospect of compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days.

Now, a decade later, they have released into the marketplace their very first algae-derived oil produced at a commercial scale. Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.

Sold under the brand name Algenist, the product, costing $79 for a one-ounce bottle, would seem to have nothing in common with oil refineries and transportation fuel. But along with other niche products that the company can sell at a premium, it may be just the thing that lets Solazyme coast past the point where so many other clean-tech companies have run out of gas: the so-called Valley of Death, where young businesses stall trying to shift to commercial-scale production.

For years, policy makers, environmentalists and entrepreneurs have trumpeted the promise of harnessing the power of the sun, wind, waves, municipal solid waste or, now, algae. There has been some success. Since 2007, United States energy consumption from renewable sources has grown nearly 35 percent, and now accounts for about 9 percent of the total, according to the Energy Information Administration.

But the gains have been punctuated with prominent failures. Once-promising clean-tech ventures that attracted hundreds of millions in federal support — like the solar panel maker Solyndra, the cellulosic ethanol maker Range Fuels and the battery supplier A123 Systems — have failed. While ethanol, derived from crops like corn and sugar cane, has become a multibillion-dollar industry, it threatens to drive up the price of those plants for food and cannot yet replace conventional fuel. The next generation of biofuels, based on nonfood plants, is still struggling to take off.

Venture capital, which once gushed to renewable-energy start-ups like crude from an oil well, has slowed. In contrast to software-based companies like Instagram or Facebook, these new energy businesses burn through staggering amounts of capital over many years for research and early-stage equipment before even demonstrating their promise, much less turning a profit. Worldwide in 2012, venture capital investing in clean technologies fell by almost one-fourth, to $7.4 billion, from $9.61 billion in 2011, according to the Cleantech Group's i3 Platform, a proprietary database.

"These are very high-innovation, capital-intensive, long-term businesses, and new-energy technology is a very new field," said David Danielson, a former venture capitalist who is assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Energy Department. "We need a new model for how these projects are going to get financed and commercialized."

In other words, clean-energy companies can't rely only on the classic venture-capital approach in which investors demand a fat, fast return. Mr. Danielson said that to succeed, companies need a combination of government research-and-development grants, industrial partnerships and a willingness to pursue higher-value product lines en route to entering larger, but lower-margin markets.

"The problem with a lot of clean-tech deals is that they have been about the way you make things in high volume or in production, which means you can't prove out the ideas unless you build factories and actually make things in volume," said Andrew S. Rappaport, a venture capitalist who is a board member of Alta Devices, a solar film start-up.

That company is one of a handful that, like Solazyme, is pursuing niche markets for its core product, in its instance developing fast-charging cases for smartphones and tablets, until it can produce low-cost, commercial quantities of solar materials for homes and businesses. A Bay Area start-up called Amyris, meanwhile, has shifted its genetically engineered yeast toward chemicals and cosmetic ingredients as it tries to build a biofuel business.

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Dot Earth Blog: Obama Previews an Upcoming Global Warming Speech

Three years after President Obama's science adviser, John P. Holdren, said that the president was planning a "major speech" on addressing human-driven global warming, it's coming — on Tuesday at Georgetown University. The speech comes a few days after White House officials said the administration was moving forward on the long process of regulating carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.

Here's what amounts to a video trailer for the speech, which the White House distributed via Twitter on Saturday:

We owe it to our kids to do something about climate change. Share this video and join me Tuesday: http://t.co/ifWvlB6qCL -bo

— The White House (@whitehouse) 22 Jun 13

If it seems like this effort to constrain greenhouse gases is happening at the pace of one of the videos produced by the "Slo Mo Guys," that's not an illusion. It began with George W. Bush's first campaign for the White House in 2000. (His effort ended a few months later.) There's more on the challenges to presidents in pushing ahead with greenhouse gas restrictions in my 2008 post, "The Presidency and the Climate Challenge."

Here's the transcript of Obama's video narration:

In my inaugural address, I pledged that America would respond to the growing threat of climate change for the sake of our children and future generations.

This Tuesday, I'll lay out my vision for where I believe we need to go – a national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change, and lead global efforts to fight it.

This is a serious challenge – but it's one uniquely suited to America's strengths.

We'll need scientists to design new fuels, and farmers to grow them.

We'll need engineers to devise new sources of energy, and businesses to make and sell them.

We'll need workers to build the foundation for a clean energy economy.

And we'll need all of us, as citizens, to do our part to preserve God's creation for future generations – our forests and waterways, our croplands and snowcapped peaks.

There's no single step that can reverse the effects of climate change. But when it comes to the world we leave our children, we owe it to them to do what we can.

So I hope you'll share this message with your friends. Because this a challenge that affects everyone – and we all have a stake in solving it together.

I hope to see you Tuesday. Thank you.

June 23, 12:54 a.m. | Update | Politico has a pretty thorough breakdown of anticipated components of the president's climate plan, including a substantial expansion of renewable energy development on public lands.

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Kenneth Wilson, Nobel Physicist, Dies at 77

Cornell University

Kenneth Wilson in 1982, the year he won the Nobel Prize. He determined how to calculate tricky moments in physics.

Kenneth G. Wilson, who was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing how to calculate tricky moments like when ice melts or an iron bar loses its magnetism, died on Saturday in Saco, Me. He was 77.

The cause was complications of lymphoma, according to Cornell University, where he had been a professor for 25 years.

His colleagues hailed Dr. Wilson as a legend who had changed how theoretical physicists went about their work, especially in particle physics, the study of the elementary and fundamental constituents of nature. He was also a pioneer in using computers and then supercomputers to study the properties of quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons.

"He's a giant in theoretical physics," said Frank Wilczek, a Nobelist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calling his work "quite profound."

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel winner at the University of Texas at Austin, said, "Ken Wilson was one of a very small number of physicists who changed the way we all think, not just about specific phenomena, but about a vast range of different phenomena."

Kenneth Geddes Wilson was born on June 8, 1936, in Waltham, Mass., the first of three children of Edgar and Emily Buckingham Wilson. His father was a chemist at Harvard. His mother had been a physics graduate student before marrying. One grandfather was an engineering professor at M.I.T. and the other the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Kenneth Wilson entered Harvard at 16, majored in math and was the Ivy League mile champion. He obtained his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology under the legendary theorist Murray Gell-Mann, then did postdoctoral studies at Harvard as a junior fellow that included a year at CERN, the European nuclear research organization in Geneva. He joined Cornell as a physics professor in 1963.

He later said he was drawn to Cornell by, among other things, the folk-dancing scene in Ithaca, N.Y. It was at a folk dance that he met Alison Brown, who was working in the university's computer center. They were doing a Swedish dance called the hambo. "His hambo and my hambo fit together really well," she said.

They married in 1982. She survives him, along with a brother, David; a sister, Nina Cornell; a half sister, Anne Goldizen; two half brothers, Paul and Steven Wilson; and a stepmother, Thérèse Wilson.

Dr. Wilson arrived at Cornell already famous for his mathematical prowess. At Harvard he had proved a conjecture by the renowned mathematician Freeman Dyson while sitting around waiting for an M.I.T. computer to finish a job for him.

From the start, Dr. Wilson was drawn to difficult problems that could take years to solve, said Kurt Gottfried, a Cornell colleague. One such problem was phase transitions, the passage from water to steam or atoms lining up to make a magnet. At the critical point — the temperature at which the change happens — orderly behavior breaks down, but theorists had few clues to how to calculate what was happening.

Dr. Wilson realized that the key to the problem was that fluctuations were happening on all scales at once — from the jostling and zooming of individual atoms to the oscillations of the entire system — something conventional theory could not handle.

At the heart of Dr. Wilson's work was an abstruse mathematical apparatus known as the renormalization group, which had been conceived by his thesis adviser, Dr. Gell-Mann, and Francis Low in 1951. They had pointed out that fundamental properties of particles and forces varied depending on the scale over which they are measured.

Dr. Wilson realized that such "scaling" was intrinsic to the problems in phase transitions. In a series of papers in the early 1970s, building on the work of Michael Fisher and Benjamin Widom at Cornell and Leo Kadanoff, then at the University of Illinois, he applied the renormalization idea to show how the critical phenomena could be solved by dividing the problem up into simpler pieces, so that what was happening at the melting point, for example, could be considered on one scale at a time.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 24, 2013

An obituary on Friday about the physicist Kenneth G. Wilson referred incorrectly to Leo Kadanoff, one of the physicists on whose work Dr. Wilson drew for a series of papers. Dr. Kadanoff was at the University of Illinois when he conducted the research in question — not at the University of Chicago, where he is now.

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Business Briefing | Company News: Monsanto Calls Altered Wheat in Field Suspicious

Monsanto officials said that testing of United States wheat had shown that the presence of the company's unapproved, experimental, genetically altered wheat in an Oregon field was highly suspicious and was an isolated incident that could not have happened through normal farming practices. Company officials said more investigation was needed to determine why the wheat, which Monsanto said it stopped field testing in 2005, was found growing in the field in April. Robert T. Fraley, chief technology officer for Monsanto, called the finding in the field suspicious and said evidence indicated that someone had intentionally introduced the modified wheat seed. The testing of soft white wheat was conducted by Washington State University.

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For Solazyme, a Side Trip on the Way to Clean Fuel

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Solazyme wants to develop oil derived from algae as an alternative fuel.

STARTING when they became friends in freshman year at Emory University in Atlanta, Jonathan S. Wolfson and Harrison F. Dillon would take off into the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado for weeks at time. They spent their days hiking in the wilderness and their nights drinking bourbon by the campfire, talking big about how one day they would build a company that would help preserve the environment they both loved.

They graduated, and the backpacking trips grew shorter and further between. Mr. Dillon went on to earn a Ph.D. in genetics and a law degree, and ended up working as a biotech patent lawyer in Silicon Valley. Mr. Wolfson received law and business degrees from New York University and eventually started a software business. But the two still got together every year. And they kept talking about the company that, they imagined as time went on, would use biotechnology to create renewable energy.

"These were delusional rantings of kids," said Mr. Wolfson, who, like Mr. Dillon, is now 42.

Then Mr. Dillon found microalgae, and delusional became real. Microalgae, a large and diverse group of single-celled plants, produce a variety of substances, including oils, and are thought to be responsible for most of the fossilized oil deposits in the earth. These, it seemed, were micro-organisms with potential. With prodding, they could be re-engineered to make fuel.

So in 2003, Mr. Wolfson packed up and moved from New York to Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Dillon lived. They started a company called Solazyme. In mythical Valley tradition, they worked in Mr. Dillon's garage, growing algae in test tubes. And they found a small knot of investors attracted by the prospect of compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days.

Now, a decade later, they have released into the marketplace their very first algae-derived oil produced at a commercial scale. Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.

Sold under the brand name Algenist, the product, costing $79 for a one-ounce bottle, would seem to have nothing in common with oil refineries and transportation fuel. But along with other niche products that the company can sell at a premium, it may be just the thing that lets Solazyme coast past the point where so many other clean-tech companies have run out of gas: the so-called Valley of Death, where young businesses stall trying to shift to commercial-scale production.

For years, policy makers, environmentalists and entrepreneurs have trumpeted the promise of harnessing the power of the sun, wind, waves, municipal solid waste or, now, algae. There has been some success. Since 2007, United States energy consumption from renewable sources has grown nearly 35 percent, and now accounts for about 9 percent of the total, according to the Energy Information Administration.

But the gains have been punctuated with prominent failures. Once-promising clean-tech ventures that attracted hundreds of millions in federal support — like the solar panel maker Solyndra, the cellulosic ethanol maker Range Fuels and the battery supplier A123 Systems — have failed. While ethanol, derived from crops like corn and sugar cane, has become a multibillion-dollar industry, it threatens to drive up the price of those plants for food and cannot yet replace conventional fuel. The next generation of biofuels, based on nonfood plants, is still struggling to take off.

Venture capital, which once gushed to renewable-energy start-ups like crude from an oil well, has slowed. In contrast to software-based companies like Instagram or Facebook, these new energy businesses burn through staggering amounts of capital over many years for research and early-stage equipment before even demonstrating their promise, much less turning a profit. Worldwide in 2012, venture capital investing in clean technologies fell by almost one-fourth, to $7.4 billion, from $9.61 billion in 2011, according to the Cleantech Group's i3 Platform, a proprietary database.

"These are very high-innovation, capital-intensive, long-term businesses, and new-energy technology is a very new field," said David Danielson, a former venture capitalist who is assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Energy Department. "We need a new model for how these projects are going to get financed and commercialized."

In other words, clean-energy companies can't rely only on the classic venture-capital approach in which investors demand a fat, fast return. Mr. Danielson said that to succeed, companies need a combination of government research-and-development grants, industrial partnerships and a willingness to pursue higher-value product lines en route to entering larger, but lower-margin markets.

"The problem with a lot of clean-tech deals is that they have been about the way you make things in high volume or in production, which means you can't prove out the ideas unless you build factories and actually make things in volume," said Andrew S. Rappaport, a venture capitalist who is a board member of Alta Devices, a solar film start-up.

That company is one of a handful that, like Solazyme, is pursuing niche markets for its core product, in its instance developing fast-charging cases for smartphones and tablets, until it can produce low-cost, commercial quantities of solar materials for homes and businesses. A Bay Area start-up called Amyris, meanwhile, has shifted its genetically engineered yeast toward chemicals and cosmetic ingredients as it tries to build a biofuel business.

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Dot Earth Blog: Obama Previews an Upcoming Global Warming Speech

Three years after President Obama's science adviser, John P. Holdren, said that the president was planning a "major speech" on addressing human-driven global warming, it's coming — on Tuesday at Georgetown University. The speech comes a few days after White House officials said the administration was moving forward on the long process of regulating carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.

Here's what amounts to a video trailer for the speech, which the White House distributed via Twitter on Saturday:

We owe it to our kids to do something about climate change. Share this video and join me Tuesday: http://t.co/ifWvlB6qCL -bo

— The White House (@whitehouse) 22 Jun 13

If it seems like this effort to constrain greenhouse gases is happening at the pace of one of the videos produced by the "Slo Mo Guys," that's not an illusion. It began with George W. Bush's first campaign for the White House in 2000. (His effort ended a few months later.) There's more on the challenges to presidents in pushing ahead with greenhouse gas restrictions in my 2008 post, "The Presidency and the Climate Challenge."

Here's the transcript of Obama's video narration:

In my inaugural address, I pledged that America would respond to the growing threat of climate change for the sake of our children and future generations.

This Tuesday, I'll lay out my vision for where I believe we need to go – a national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change, and lead global efforts to fight it.

This is a serious challenge – but it's one uniquely suited to America's strengths.

We'll need scientists to design new fuels, and farmers to grow them.

We'll need engineers to devise new sources of energy, and businesses to make and sell them.

We'll need workers to build the foundation for a clean energy economy.

And we'll need all of us, as citizens, to do our part to preserve God's creation for future generations – our forests and waterways, our croplands and snowcapped peaks.

There's no single step that can reverse the effects of climate change. But when it comes to the world we leave our children, we owe it to them to do what we can.

So I hope you'll share this message with your friends. Because this a challenge that affects everyone – and we all have a stake in solving it together.

I hope to see you Tuesday. Thank you.

June 23, 12:54 a.m. | Update | Politico has a pretty thorough breakdown of anticipated components of the president's climate plan, including a substantial expansion of renewable energy development on public lands.

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Kenneth Wilson, Nobel Physicist, Dies at 77

Cornell University

Kenneth Wilson in 1982, the year he won the Nobel Prize. He determined how to calculate tricky moments in physics.

Kenneth G. Wilson, who was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing how to calculate tricky moments like when ice melts or an iron bar loses its magnetism, died on Saturday in Saco, Me. He was 77.

The cause was complications of lymphoma, according to Cornell University, where he had been a professor for 25 years.

His colleagues hailed Dr. Wilson as a legend who had changed how theoretical physicists went about their work, especially in particle physics, the study of the elementary and fundamental constituents of nature. He was also a pioneer in using computers and then supercomputers to study the properties of quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons.

"He's a giant in theoretical physics," said Frank Wilczek, a Nobelist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calling his work "quite profound."

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel winner at the University of Texas at Austin, said, "Ken Wilson was one of a very small number of physicists who changed the way we all think, not just about specific phenomena, but about a vast range of different phenomena."

Kenneth Geddes Wilson was born on June 8, 1936, in Waltham, Mass., the first of three children of Edgar and Emily Buckingham Wilson. His father was a chemist at Harvard. His mother had been a physics graduate student before marrying. One grandfather was an engineering professor at M.I.T. and the other the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Kenneth Wilson entered Harvard at 16, majored in math and was the Ivy League mile champion. He obtained his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology under the legendary theorist Murray Gell-Mann, then did postdoctoral studies at Harvard as a junior fellow that included a year at CERN, the European nuclear research organization in Geneva. He joined Cornell as a physics professor in 1963.

He later said he was drawn to Cornell by, among other things, the folk-dancing scene in Ithaca, N.Y. It was at a folk dance that he met Alison Brown, who was working in the university's computer center. They were doing a Swedish dance called the hambo. "His hambo and my hambo fit together really well," she said.

They married in 1982. She survives him, along with a brother, David; a sister, Nina Cornell; a half sister, Anne Goldizen; two half brothers, Paul and Steven Wilson; and a stepmother, Thérèse Wilson.

Dr. Wilson arrived at Cornell already famous for his mathematical prowess. At Harvard he had proved a conjecture by the renowned mathematician Freeman Dyson while sitting around waiting for an M.I.T. computer to finish a job for him.

From the start, Dr. Wilson was drawn to difficult problems that could take years to solve, said Kurt Gottfried, a Cornell colleague. One such problem was phase transitions, the passage from water to steam or atoms lining up to make a magnet. At the critical point — the temperature at which the change happens — orderly behavior breaks down, but theorists had few clues to how to calculate what was happening.

Dr. Wilson realized that the key to the problem was that fluctuations were happening on all scales at once — from the jostling and zooming of individual atoms to the oscillations of the entire system — something conventional theory could not handle.

At the heart of Dr. Wilson's work was an abstruse mathematical apparatus known as the renormalization group, which had been conceived by his thesis adviser, Dr. Gell-Mann, and Francis Low in 1951. They had pointed out that fundamental properties of particles and forces varied depending on the scale over which they are measured.

Dr. Wilson realized that such "scaling" was intrinsic to the problems in phase transitions. In a series of papers in the early 1970s, building on the work of Michael Fisher and Benjamin Widom at Cornell and Leo Kadanoff, then at the University of Illinois, he applied the renormalization idea to show how the critical phenomena could be solved by dividing the problem up into simpler pieces, so that what was happening at the melting point, for example, could be considered on one scale at a time.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 21, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Leo Kadanoff, one of the physicists on whose work Dr. Wilson built in a series of papers. Dr. Kadanoff was at the University of Illinois when he conducted the research in question — not the University of Chicago, where he is now.

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A Solution for a San Diego Cove’s Constant Odor: Bacteria

Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Workers from a cleaning company on Friday used a solution made up of seven kinds of bacteria that digest animal feces.

SAN DIEGO — Depending upon whom you ask, the smell that has plagued La Jolla Cove has been "putrid," "noxious" or "like the East River used to smell," for quite a while. Nose-pinching is commonplace.

But now, the stench of bird guano emanating from the cliffs in the seaside neighborhood has become, officially speaking, a public health emergency.

"Cormorants, gulls, pigeons, pelicans and other animals have fouled the area," Mayor Bob Filner wrote last month in a memo, declaring a state of emergency. "Physical disease and discomfort may result to humans if emergency action is not taken."

City officials believe they finally have a solution: guano-eating bacteria. And so, early each morning this week, workers lowered themselves onto the rocks with ropes and applied a solution made up of seven kinds of bacteria that digest animal feces.

Previous plans to clean the rocks had been stymied by a morass of state and federal regulations protecting the environmentally sensitive stretch of coastline in northern San Diego, where seals, sea lions, scuba divers, swimmers, tourists, former presidential candidates and the panoply of birds all congregate. The pretty cove is home to the area's finest restaurants and most expensive homes.

The bacterial solution, city officials insisted, would not run off into the ocean. As a result, the city could forgo the lengthy permit process that would have been required to power-wash the cliffs.

Standing near the workers on Wednesday, Antonette Gutierrez, a senior biologist with Merkel & Associates, kept an eye on the birds and sea mammals to make sure they were not disturbed. Several times this week, work was stopped when the wind picked up, to make sure the bacterial foam did not blow into the ocean. Rain would theoretically also halt work for the day (theoretically — this is Southern California).

"We don't want to disrupt the nesting birds tending to their chicks," Ms. Gutierrez said. "As far as the seals and the sea lions, we're just monitoring them to make sure if there's any aggression — really towards us — that we just back away."

After just a few days, local business owners said they had already noticed an improvement in the odor. On the section of cliff that has been cleaned this week, the brown rock — for years covered with the growing layer of white guano — is again visible.

Megan Heine, owner of the Brockton Villa restaurant, feared for her business last summer. Now, she said, the restaurant's patio, which offers views of the ocean, no longer smells of wildlife.

"We're thrilled," she said. "I'm surprised how quickly it's working. We're just hoping the effect will last."

Several diners at Brockton Villa agreed that some of the smell had dissipated. A group of children in summer camp, who walked by covering their noses with their shirts, apparently did not.

The bacteria spraying will continue through next week, then resume in July or August, once nesting gulls and cormorants have moved on from another section of rocks where the guano is thickest.

In all, the cliff cleaning will cost the city about $50,000, but will keep tourists flooding into La Jolla's art galleries, restaurants and hotels, officials said. The mayor has indicated that he will repeat the process if the stench continues to linger.

Darla Chamberlain goes snorkeling in La Jolla Cove a couple of times a week. Since the cliffs were closed off to visitors several years ago, the wildlife had taken over.

"It's wonderful that the wildlife is back," she said. "It shows we're taking better care of the environment. And part of that is the animals leave waste."

But Bradley Wood, 74, who has lived in La Jolla for four decades, said it was important to make sure humans still wanted to come here, too.

"I'm somewhat of a tree hugger, but not when it comes to everything," he said. He said he supported the mayor's "strong-arm tactics," at least in this case.

"It doesn't smell as bad to me right here," Mr. Wood said, standing above the area that had been cleaned that morning. As he walked along the edge of the cliff, he stopped and sniffed. "Oh, there it is! You catch that? Doesn't smell like it's improved a lot right here."

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Business Briefing | Company News: Monsanto Calls Altered Wheat in Field Suspicious

Monsanto officials said that testing of United States wheat had shown that the presence of the company's unapproved, experimental, genetically altered wheat in an Oregon field was highly suspicious and was an isolated incident that could not have happened through normal farming practices. Company officials said more investigation was needed to determine why the wheat, which Monsanto said it stopped field testing in 2005, was found growing in the field in April. Robert T. Fraley, chief technology officer for Monsanto, called the finding in the field suspicious and said evidence indicated that someone had intentionally introduced the modified wheat seed. The testing of soft white wheat was conducted by Washington State University.

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Dot Earth Blog: ‘Pandora’s Promise’ Director and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Debate Nuclear Options

I promised to alert folks when video was available of the heated discussion I moderated recently between Robert Stone, the director of "Pandora's Promise," the new film in which five former foes of nuclear energy defend this power source, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Pace University law professor and environmental firebrand. Here it is*, courtesy of the Jacob Burns Film Center, which hosted the debate after a screening.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Debates Director of 'Pandora's Promise'

It's a brisk and frequently heated exchange in which I barely had time to step in and separate or reorient the two men. Kennedy set the tone from the start by answering my request for his Siskel-Ebert style review with this line:

If I had to characterize the film, I would say it's an elaborate hoax. Almost every fact in it that's presented as facts is untrue or misleading.

Stone initially rocked in his chair as if absorbing a body blow, but held his ground. Kennedy's most convincing points were on the economics of nuclear energy (an area the film avoids tackling), while Stone effectively challenged assertions about health risks.

Toward the end, I said we'd need to do a blow-by-blow fact-checking exercise to test which assertions were correct. Nonetheless, the video is worth watching as a vivid illustration of how people with deep concerns about human-driven climate change can have starkly different visions of how to blunt warming and limit risks.

Another illustration of the deep divisions among environmentalists came in the days following the Fukushima nuclear calamity, when Bill McKibben and a British counterpart, George Monbiot, drew utterly divergent lessons from the disaster.

I hope you'll have a look and weigh in. My previous posts on the film are here.

[*I apologize for the slight lag between the imagery and audio.]

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Observatory: 3-D Map of Human Brain Gives Unprecedented Detail

Amunts, Zilles, Evans et al.

Researchers use a special tool called a microtome to cut sections from a brain preserved in paraffin wax into tiny slivers 20 micrometers thick.

Researchers in Germany and Canada have produced a new map of the human brain — not the sort that shows every brain cell and its every connection or the kind that shows broad patterns of activity in brain regions, but a work of classic anatomy, done with high technology, that shows a three-dimensional reconstruction of a human brain in unprecedented detail.

The new map, called BigBrain, is 50 times as detailed as previous efforts and will be available to researchers everywhere, said Katrin Amunts of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine in Jülich, Germany, the lead author of a report on the project in the current issue of Science.

BigBrain depicts a specific human brain, that of a 65-year-old woman. It was preserved in paraffin after her death, sliced into 7,400 sections and photographed at a microscopic level just above that of viewing individual cells. Its portrait will serve, the researchers said, as an anatomical framework that other researchers can use as a reference, whether they are investigating large patterns of brain function or small details.

This kind of anatomical map is not what neuroscientists are pursuing in the new brain initiative from the Obama administration, nor does it show the expression of genes or connectivity that other projects are pursuing. But David Van Essen, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis and a principal investigator in the Human Connectome Project, which uses M.R.I. images of active human brains, described the work as a "technological tour de force," adding that the three-dimensional reconstruction could help distinguish the many small areas of the brain with greater accuracy.

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Kenneth Wilson, Nobel Physicist, Dies at 77

Cornell University

Kenneth Wilson in 1982, the year he won the Nobel Prize. He determined how to calculate tricky moments in physics.

Kenneth G. Wilson, who was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing how to calculate tricky moments like when ice melts or an iron bar loses its magnetism, died on Saturday in Saco, Me. He was 77.

The cause was complications of lymphoma, according to Cornell University, where he had been a professor for 25 years.

His colleagues hailed Dr. Wilson as a legend who had changed how theoretical physicists went about their work, especially in particle physics, the study of the elementary and fundamental constituents of nature. He was also a pioneer in using computers and then supercomputers to study the properties of quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons.

"He's a giant in theoretical physics," said Frank Wilczek, a Nobelist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calling his work "quite profound."

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel winner at the University of Texas at Austin, said, "Ken Wilson was one of a very small number of physicists who changed the way we all think, not just about specific phenomena, but about a vast range of different phenomena."

Kenneth Geddes Wilson was born on June 8, 1936, in Waltham, Mass., the first of three children of Edgar and Emily Buckingham Wilson. His father was a chemist at Harvard. His mother had been a physics graduate student before marrying. One grandfather was an engineering professor at M.I.T. and the other the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Kenneth Wilson entered Harvard at 16, majored in math and was the Ivy League mile champion. He obtained his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology under the legendary theorist Murray Gell-Mann, then did postdoctoral studies at Harvard as a junior fellow that included a year at CERN, the European nuclear research organization in Geneva. He joined Cornell as a physics professor in 1963.

He later said he was drawn to Cornell by, among other things, the folk-dancing scene in Ithaca, N.Y. It was at a folk dance that he met Alison Brown, who was working in the university's computer center. They were doing a Swedish dance called the hambo. "His hambo and my hambo fit together really well," she said.

They married in 1982. She survives him, along with a brother, David; a sister, Nina Cornell; a half sister, Anne Goldizen; two half brothers, Paul and Steven Wilson; and a stepmother, Thérèse Wilson.

Dr. Wilson arrived at Cornell already famous for his mathematical prowess. At Harvard he had proved a conjecture by the renowned mathematician Freeman Dyson while sitting around waiting for an M.I.T. computer to finish a job for him.

From the start, Dr. Wilson was drawn to difficult problems that could take years to solve, said Kurt Gottfried, a Cornell colleague. One such problem was phase transitions, the passage from water to steam or atoms lining up to make a magnet. At the critical point — the temperature at which the change happens — orderly behavior breaks down, but theorists had few clues to how to calculate what was happening.

Dr. Wilson realized that the key to the problem was that fluctuations were happening on all scales at once — from the jostling and zooming of individual atoms to the oscillations of the entire system — something conventional theory could not handle.

At the heart of Dr. Wilson's work was an abstruse mathematical apparatus known as the renormalization group, which had been conceived by his thesis adviser, Dr. Gell-Mann, and Francis Low in 1951. They had pointed out that fundamental properties of particles and forces varied depending on the scale over which they are measured.

Dr. Wilson realized that such "scaling" was intrinsic to the problems in phase transitions. In a series of papers in the early 1970s, building on the work of Michael Fisher and Benjamin Widom at Cornell and Leo Kadanoff, then at the University of Chicago, he applied the renormalization idea to show how the critical phenomena could be solved by dividing the problem up into simpler pieces, so that what was happening at the melting point, for example, could be considered on one scale at a time.

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NASA’s New Class of Astronauts Gives Parity to Men and Women

NASA

The new class of trainees includes four women and four men. From left, Josh A. Cassada, Victor J. Glover, Tyler N. Hague, Christina M. Hammock, Nicole Aunapu Mann, Anne C. McClain, Jessica U. Meir and Andrew R. Morgan.

One flies a fighter jet for the Marines. Another is an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School. A third is a helicopter pilot for the Army. And the fourth leads the station in American Samoa of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

They are the four women in NASA's latest class of astronaut trainees, which also includes four men. The eight recruits — the first NASA has named in four years, and the first group to include equal numbers of men and women — were selected from 6,300 applicants and will start training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston in August, the space agency said Monday.

If all goes well after a few years of training, one or more might be selected for a stint at the International Space Station, or — eventually — for a trip to an asteroid or Mars, places that NASA eventually hopes to visit.

"It's just so surreal that this moment has arrived," said Anne C. McClain, 34, the helicopter pilot, who is from Spokane, Wash., and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. "I truly don't remember ever wanting to be something else."

She and the other recruits spoke in prerecorded video introductions that NASA shared as part of an online video conference. The agency did not make the trainees available for interviews.

NASA said that the new class, the agency's 21st, was the smallest group to date, chosen after a year-and-a-half search from the largest applicant pool since 1978. Only 120 applicants were invited to come to the Johnson Space Center, where they underwent initial medical evaluations and an hour interview with the selection board. Forty-nine candidates were invited back for a second round of interviews as well as language aptitude tests, psychological evaluations and mechanical skills assessments.

Of the eight who were finally selected, five come from branches of the military and many of them hold multiple advanced degrees in physics, engineering, biology and medicine. Those who make it through two years of intense training will join NASA's existing corps of 49 astronauts, down from a peak of 149 in 2000. And the newcomers may then have to wait up to 10 years before their first spaceflight.

"With a smaller astronaut corps, fewer people in the office now, each person needs to have as diverse a background as possible," Janet Kavandi, director of flight crew operations at Johnson Space Center, said during the online video hosted on Google+ Hangout. "So we tried to work hard to make sure that the eight people we got had a broad spectrum of experiences."

The new class also has the highest percentage of female candidates, which NASA said was not intentional.

"I think it's actually just a reflection of how many really talented women are in science and engineering these days," said Kathleen Rubins, a NASA astronaut from the class of 2009, in a telephone interview. "They're folks that have technical expertise in their chosen field, but they also bring a whole lot to the table" in their determination and ability to thrive under pressure.

The number of astronauts has dwindled along with the number of human space missions. NASA retired its space shuttle program two years ago, and has been booking space for American astronauts on Russian Soyuz capsules since then. But commercial spaceflight companies are now preparing to resume piloted American rocket launchings, ideally in 2017, according to the goal date by NASA, which has supported the private efforts.

The eight new astronaut candidates will compete to be among "the first to launch from U.S. soil on commercial American spacecraft since the retirement of the space shuttle," NASA said in its announcement.

In addition to Ms. McClain, the women of the class of 2013 include Christina M. Hammock, 34, the NOAA station chief, of Jacksonville, N.C.; Nicole Aunapu Mann, 35, the fighter pilot and a Marine Corps major, of Penngrove, Calif.; and Jessica U. Meir, 35, of Caribou, Me., and Harvard Medical School.

The four men are: Josh A. Cassada, 39, a physicist and former naval aviator from White Bear Lake, Minn.; Victor J. Glover, 37, a pilot and lieutenant commander in the Navy from Pomona, Calif., and Prosper, Tex.; Tyler N. Hague, 37, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, of Hoxie, Kan.; and Andrew R. Morgan, 37, a physician and an Army major, of New Castle, Pa.

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