Green: Damaging the Earth to Feed Its People

 Associated PressA farmer applied anhydrous ammonia to a field southwest of Stephen, Minn.

On a warming planet, humanity faces a great challenge in feeding itself at reasonable cost in the coming century, as I explain in Sunday’s paper. An issue I raise only in passing in the article is that agriculture itself is one of the earth’s greatest environmental threats.

To put a finer point on it, farming and livestock grazing are not just potential victims of climate change — they are major causes of it.

Humans are cultivating almost 40 percent of the land surface of the earth, and nearly a third of all the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet comes from agriculture and forestry. Those emissions are linked not only to the factors that many people tend to think about, like the fossil fuels burned in transporting food; that, in fact, is only a minor source of emissions.

Nitrogen fertilizer, though essential to producing food for seven billion people, is one large source of emissions, and not only because it requires natural gas to produce. After it is spread on farmers’ fields, a portion of it turns into a potent greenhouse gas that escapes into the atmosphere. (As many people know, some nitrogen also washes into rivers and streams, ultimately making its way to the ocean, where it contributes to dead zones at the mouths of many of our great rivers, including the Mississippi.)

The biggest of all the ways that agriculture contributes to climate change, though, is the chopping down of forests to make way for farms and cattle grazing. The world’s forests are enormous stores of carbon dioxide, and when they are cleared, the vegetation that is burned or allowed to decay oxidizes into carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas. In recent years, changes in land use have accounted for some 25 percent of the carbon dioxide being emitted on the planet, and the bulk of those changes are driven by agriculture.

As my colleague Elisabeth Rosenthal has reported here and here, efforts are under way to slow deforestation. But scientists say that alone will not be enough. Somehow, even as humanity increases the production of food over the coming decades, it must reduce the environmental footprint of agriculture. The alternative is continued ecological degradation and a worsening of climate change, which in turn would make food production harder.

When you view the problem in that light, the challenge of feeding ourselves becomes that much larger.

I visited the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico in February, near the end of the wheat-growing season. This institution was the original starting point for the Green Revolution, which raised agricultural output across much of the planet.

While it saved humanity from mass starvation, the Green Revolution has often been attacked on the left for having spread environmentally unsustainable practices to developing countries. Most agronomists now acknowledge that it did, in fact, cause many environmental problems, although they contend that these have sometimes been exaggerated, and were in any case necessary at the time to prevent famine.

Perhaps it will come as a surprise to many to learn that the sustainability of agriculture has become a major focus at the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement.

The director general, Thomas A. Lumpkin, told me that the real task at hand was not just to increase food output, but to make agriculture so productive that humanity could begin to restore some of what it has destroyed.

“We need to be really bold here,” he said in an interview. “It’s not just that agriculture needs to keep food prices reasonable. We need to find a way to make a dramatic contribution to the greenhouse-gas problem. We need to make farming so productive that we can get off half the agricultural land out there, so that we can return it to nature.”

That is a tall order indeed, and how it might be done is not clear. But the center in Mexico, like many other institutes around the world, is exploring various strategies. One approach, known as conservation agriculture, has begun to gain some traction. It involves minimal tillage of the soil, leaving straw and stubble in place as a soil cover, and various other techniques that conserve water and nutrients and allow carbon to build up in the soil.

In some ways this approach resembles organic farming of the sort that has caught on in the West. But it differs in that farmers are still allowed to use inorganic fertilizers and to make judicious use of herbicides. “I’m not for or against organic agriculture,” Bram Govaerts, one of the researchers in Mexico who is studying this method, told me when I visited. “I am for rational agriculture.”

Conservation agriculture has not been proven to work in all farming scenarios, and even when it does work, yields sometimes fall during the initial changeover period. It can require new machinery, a barrier for many farmers. But in many places, after a transition of several years, the method has been shown to increase organic matter in the soil, raise yields, lower costs, increase resilience to drought and other stresses, and reduce the use of nitrogen and water.

Technology adapted to the needs of small farmers may be able to help. When I was in Mexico, I met Jared Crain, a student at Oklahoma State University. He was working to improve a hand-held sensor that uses the color of plants to tell when they need nitrogen fertilizer.

Such machines are available in the West for thousands of dollars, but the one Mr. Crain was working on might sell for $200 or so, making it accessible to villages or to agricultural extension agents in developing countries. The idea is to cut the excessive use of fertilizer that is common in many of the areas touched by the Green Revolution.

As conservation agriculture becomes more advanced, improved crop varieties are likely to be an important part of the picture. Gary Toenniessen is director of agricultural programs at the Rockefeller Foundation, of New York, which provided the original funding for the work that led to the Green Revolution. “The Green Revolution varieties were ecological weaklings,” he told me in an interview. “They had shallow roots, short stems and couldn’t compete with the weeds. They needed tender loving care from the farmer. Given tender loving care, they put all their energy into grain production.”

The task now for plant breeders is to preserve and enhance the yield gains of the Green Revolution, while creating varieties with deeper root systems that can survive on less water and fertilizer and are also strong enough to germinate through a dense cover of decaying vegetative material from the previous season.

Conventional breeding can accomplish some of that. But many experts say the biggest gains will eventually come from the genetic engineering of crop varieties. For example, Monsanto is on the verge of winning approval for a transgenic corn plant designed to protect crops from moderate drought; a project is under way to make that trait available to African farmers.

Such varieties could presumably be employed in irrigated agriculture as a way to cut down on water use; and in the future, transgenic varieties might allow lower use of nitrogen fertilizer, directly tackling one of the major sources of greenhouse gases from agriculture.

As such approaches become more widespread, I am guessing that critics of crop biotechnology will face a choice: Do they embrace technologies that violate their ideological precepts but offer potentially big environmental gains, or do they continue to oppose them?

In fact, among many of the experts I interviewed, I detected a great weariness with the ideological battles that have surrounded the food system in recent years. Like it or not, they said, the reality is that the agricultural system is only going to get more intensive as the human population rises and diets grow richer.

“We’re not going to be abandoning conventional agriculture,” said Jonathan A. Foley, a University of Minnesota scientist. “So why don’t we fix it?”

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Green: U.S. Orders TransCanada to Shut Pipeline

 

After a series of spills, the United States Department of Transportation has ordered the TransCanada Corporation to suspend operation of its one-year-old Keystone 1 pipeline, which carries oil extracted from oil sands in the Canadian province of Alberta to the United States. The order was issued by the department’s Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

“Effective immediately, this order prevents TransCanada from restarting operations on their Keystone crude oil pipeline until P.H.M.S.A. is satisfied with the ongoing repairs and is confident that all immediate safety concerns have been addressed,” the agency said. It issued the order in response to two incidents in May involving oil leaks from small-diameter pump-station pipe fittings.

TransCanada’s Keystone 1 is under particular scrutiny because the company has applied to build and operate a much larger pipeline, the Keystone XL, which would run from Canada to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. That pipeline would pass under some of the Midwest’s most productive farmland and through its major aquifer.

Just last month, the Keystone 1 pipeline suffered two leaks, according to the Sierra Club, one of which involved over 10,000 gallons of oil.

Environmental experts have raised concerns about the possibility of leaks from Keystone XL, in part because TransCanada has been granted waivers that effectively allow it to use thinner steel than would normally be required in the United States. They add that the company’s pipelines are particularly vulnerable because oil from tar sands is more corrosive than conventional oil and is pumped under higher pressures and temperatures.

“I find that the continued operation of the pipeline without corrective measures would be hazardous to life, property and the environment,” Jeffrey Wiese, an administrator at the department, wrote in issuing the order.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has to decide whether to approve the Keystone XL project and is expected to render her opinion by the end of the year. In making a decision, she will have to weigh both energy and environmental concerns to determine whether the pipeline is in the national interest.

While oil from Canada’s oil sands is dependable fuel from a friendly neighbor, it comes with environmental costs because extracting oil from oil sands results in heavy carbon dioxide emissions and can destroy ecosystems.

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Temperature Rising: A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself

Dr. Singh, a wheat breeder, grabbed seed heads that should have been plump with the staff of life. His practiced fingers found empty husks.

“You’re not going to feed the people with that,” he said.

But then, over in Plot 88, his eyes settled on a healthier plant, one that had managed to thrive in spite of the drought, producing plump kernels of wheat. “This is beautiful!” he shouted as wheat beards rustled in the wind.

Hope in a stalk of grain: It is a hope the world needs these days, for the great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble.

The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.

Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.

Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.

Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.

Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.

Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.

For nearly two decades, scientists had predicted that climate change would be relatively manageable for agriculture, suggesting that even under worst-case assumptions, it would probably take until 2080 for food prices to double.

In part, they were counting on a counterintuitive ace in the hole: that rising carbon dioxide levels, the primary contributor to global warming, would act as a powerful plant fertilizer and offset many of the ill effects of climate change.

Until a few years ago, these assumptions went largely unchallenged. But lately, the destabilization of the food system and the soaring prices have rattled many leading scientists.

“The success of agriculture has been astounding,” said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher at NASA who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture. “But I think there’s starting to be premonitions that it may not continue forever.”

A scramble is on to figure out whether climate science has been too sanguine about the risks. Some researchers, analyzing computer forecasts that are used to advise governments on future crop prospects, are pointing out what they consider to be gaping holes. These include a failure to consider the effects of extreme weather, like the floods and the heat waves that are increasing as the earth warms.

A rising unease about the future of the world’s food supply came through during interviews this year with more than 50 agricultural experts working in nine countries.

These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture.

Agronomists emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. Examples are already available, from the deserts of Mexico to the rice paddies of India, to show that it may be possible to make agriculture more productive and more resilient in the face of climate change. Farmers have achieved huge gains in output in the past, and rising prices are a powerful incentive to do so again.

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Scientist at Work: Life at the Edge of the Verde Island Passage

Rich MooiThe California Academy of Sciences team and its Philippine collaborators approach a new dive site, expecting new and amazing things. The Philippine boats we use are called bankas, and they are ideal dive platforms?— a fantastic blend of speed and stability.

Rich Mooi, curator of invertebrate zoology and geology at the California Academy of Sciences, writes from the Philippines, where he is surveying echinoderms off the coast of Luzon Island.

This is the most amazing place I have ever been in my 30 years of research. We are situated in Mabini, southern Luzon, at the edge of the Verde Island Passage, studying the marine biodiversity of this center of the center of species richness in the Indo-Pacific region. Each day starts with a series of dives, and ends in night dives that further reveal nocturnal denizens of the passage.

We have racked up more than 115 sampling visits over the past few weeks, yet surprises still keep us astonished. Like Mr. Gump and his box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. Our team is finding a new species of sea slug per day and more new bristle worms (polychaetes) than we can process, and our expert on sponges from the Philippines National Museum has more than doubled the size of that museum’s entire sponge collection. Our mutually beneficial collaborations with a team of experts on reef-building corals from the University of the Philippines netted 50 or more staghorn coral species from a single location. The Verde Island Passage is living up to its reputation: The ocean vibrates with the cycles of living things inhabiting every nook and cranny.

I, too, have stories from my own area of expertise, the sea urchins — those spiky balls that occur everywhere here. Urchins belong to a group known technically as the echinoids. Echinoids come in two main varieties: One is more or less spherical, with long-spined forms, and is a conspicuous inhabitant of reefs and rocks. The most familiar of echinoids, these are sometimes informally referred to as “regular” urchins because the mouth on the bottom is surrounded by five regularly radiating rows of tube feet that converge again at the top of the dome-shaped body. These animals wedge themselves into crevices with their spines or, in the case of the black urchins that have long spines that can inflict damage to the unwary (fish or divers), live brazenly out in the open. Another large group of urchins might be called “stealth” urchins. These are less seldom seen, and keep mysteries of their own.

Rich MooiThe rare, wily and newly discovered red form of Echinothrix. Is this the first new species of the genus in over 230 years?

In a few weeks here, I have identified 42 species of sea urchins, about half of which fall into the “regular” category. This is staggering diversity when it comes to these animals. Among these is a real stinger of an urchin in the genus Echinothrix that is normally pale, with banded spines. I received an e-mail from a colleague suggesting that I look out for a red variety that could be a new species. Within hours, a diver brought me an urchin that looked sort of familiar, yet not so. The red variety had karmically appeared, and molecular and other work can now be done to determine if this is a new species in the genus. Although these large, relatively dangerous urchins are known throughout the Indo-Pacific, there has not been a new species of Echinothrix in over 230 years.

Rich MooiThis small urchin, Lissodiadema, is only about an inch across the body. It hides under rocks and in small caves in the reef. It was known from Hawaii to Guam, but we have extended its known range to the Philippines.Rich MooiThe spines of Lissodiadema are so thin, they can flex at the slightest pressure. Why they are like this is completely unknown.Rich MooiJuvenile fire urchins, Asthenosoma, are almost never found. Every spine on this species has a venom gland, and the sting is like an electric shock. Note the iridescent blue spots common to this group of urchins — perhaps nature’s way of saying “do not touch”?

There are other ways of making new discoveries apart from finding new species. For many years I have been working on “regular” echinoids called hair-spined urchins. These are small-bodied, but with very long spines. The spines are as thin as or thinner than a human hair, even though they are made of the same limestone skeleton as the rest of the body. It’s as if these urchins have learned to “spin” limestone into fibers like we spin fibers of silica into fiberglass. Like fiberglass, the spines of these urchins are unexpectedly flexible. In spite of these fascinating attributes, this urchin remains very poorly known, and only a handful of specimens exist in all the world’s museums. The nearest record to the Philippines was 1,500 miles away as a fish swims, in Guam.

Another remarkable range extension was found for a species of fire urchins, so named because of a nasty sting deliverable by every spine on its body. So we have discovered major range extensions of some of the most mysterious and poorly known of all “regular” urchins found in shallow waters.

In my next entry, I will introduce you to the world of those stealthy “irregular” urchins. Sand dollars, sea biscuits, and sea mice have their own odd stories to tell.

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Scientist at Work: Getting to the Tundra

 Natalie Boelman Researchers returning to camp, with Toolik Lake in the foreground, still partly covered with ice.

Natalie Boelman, an ecosystem ecologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, writes from the North Slope of Alaska, where she is studying the effects of climate change on the interactions among plants, insects and migratory songbirds.

I’ve been doing fieldwork in the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range on the Alaska North Slope since 2001. This area is part of the tundra ecosystem, which is characterized by permanently frozen ground and the absence of trees.? All of my work in this rather remote region has been based out of the Toolik Field Station. The purpose of most of my visits to Toolik has been to explore the use of remote sensing techniques to measure the response of tundra vegetation to climate change and, more recently, wildfire.

But last summer, my collaborators (Laura Gough from the University of Texas at Arlington, and John Wingfield from the University of California, Davis) and I began working on a new project that extends beyond the response of tundra plants to explore the effect that changes in vegetation have on organisms at higher trophic levels that depend on it for food and shelter.

In a nutshell, we are exploring how global climate change will affect songbirds that spend winters in our backyards and migrate to Alaskan tundra to breed every summer.? Among other effects, Arctic warming is causing spring snowmelt to occur earlier, and is changing the type of plant growth on the tundra. Over the course of five songbird breeding seasons (2010 through 2015), we’re testing a series of predictions related to songbirds and their interactions with plants and insects, to begin to untangle the complex relationships among these groups in the context of these warming-induced changes.? We began this project last spring, so this spring marks the beginning of our second field season, which began on May 1 and will end on Aug. 2.

I left New York City on May 25 to join other members of my science team at the Toolik Field Station.? Although I’m just getting to Toolik now, we’ve had a small early-season crew working to get this year’s field season up and running since May 1.? It takes two days to get from Manhattan to Toolik. On the way there, I made a stopover in Seattle to hand over our two children to my parents, who live down the road in Vancouver, British Columbia.? Our daughter, Aline (4 years old), was all smiles when I said goodbye, excited to play in a garden and get spoiled rotten for two weeks.? On the contrary, however, our son, Nico (2 years old), wasn’t too thrilled to see me walk away.? Poor little man — Mummy will be back soon!? I took a deep breath, waved goodbye, and continued northward on Alaska Airlines to Anchorage.

Caged next to me on the flight, in seat 18B, was Poncho the yellow cockatiel, a species of bird endemic to Australia and popular as a house pet worldwide. Poncho and his keeper, in 18C, were traveling from Phoenix, where they spend winters, to King Salmon, Alaska, where they spend summers.? Is migration via commercial jet considered migration fraud in the bird world?

Natalie BoelmanThe welcome sign at the general store in Deadhorse, Alaska.

After switching to a connecting flight in Anchorage, I arrived in Deadhorse, Alaska, which is located not quite at the Arctic Ocean, and is very obviously dedicated the extraction of oil. To be honest, it’s a rather unsightly gravel pad lined with semipermanent buildings — a charming place. Here I was met by the “Toolik Taxi,” a large and dusty pickup truck operated by field station workers.? Justin, the driver,? drove us south for about three hours along the Dalton Highway, a gravel road built to support the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which runs from Deadhorse to Valdez.

Natalie BoelmanA willow ptarmigan.

As we made our way toward the field station, we saw caribou, musk oxen, a 25-gallon barrel that we initially mistook for a grizzly bear, a very mischievous-looking red fox, some waterfowl and a few willow ptarmigan (a k a? tundra chickens).

Relative to other ecosystems, there are few animal species in the Arctic, and as a result there is little “functional redundancy” among Arctic species.??This means that Arctic ecosystems are both unique and fragile, because if a single species is lost — for instance, because they’re unable to adapt to life in an increasingly warmer Arctic — there will most likely be no other species available to fill in the ecological gap, or to perform the ecosystem functions the original species was responsible for.? To make a simple analogy, imagine that the factory worker whose job it is to attach the wheels to cars in an assembly line gets laid off and isn’t replaced because no one else with the right skill set is available to take over the job.? Without someone to put the wheels on, no marketable cars can be made and the factory is likely to shut down.? Similarly, every component of the Arctic tundra ecosystem is essential to its function. Remove one, and things are likely to fall apart.

Natalie BoelmanA musk ox.

We arrived at the field station around 9 p.m.? Of course, since we are north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun doesn’t set all summer long, it felt more like noon.? It’s always hard getting used to the perpetual daylight up here.? On one hand, it’s great because you can be in the field doing your work for as long as you please.? On the other hand, you can wear yourself out pretty easily, so we pay special attention to our watches, set time limits and force ourselves into bed every night.

I heated up some delicious leftovers from dinnertime, and briefly caught up with some friends and colleagues who have been in camp for a while.? I’m recovering from a cold that’s caused me to temporarily lose my voice, so I’m communicating through strained whispers. As a result, folks are joking that I’m talking about “secret science.”? By 11:30 p.m. I settled into my trailer room, pulled down the blinds to keep the sun out, and fell asleep.

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A Conversation With Ellen Bialystok: The Bilingual Advantage

Q. How did you begin studying bilingualism?

A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area. But it was close enough.

As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road.

Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road?

A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.

But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

Q. How does this work — do you understand it?

A. Yes. There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.

If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

Q. One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?

A. We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.

That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function. In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.

Q. So high school French is useful for something other than ordering a special meal in a restaurant?

A. Sorry, no. You have to use both languages all the time. You won’t get the bilingual benefit from occasional use.

Q. One would think bilingualism might help with multitasking — does it?

A. Yes, multitasking is one of the things the executive control system handles. We wondered, “Are bilinguals better at multitasking?” So we put monolinguals and bilinguals into a driving simulator. Through headphones, we gave them extra tasks to do — as if they were driving and talking on cellphones. We then measured how much worse their driving got. Now, everybody’s driving got worse. But the bilinguals, their driving didn’t drop as much. Because adding on another task while trying to concentrate on a driving problem, that’s what bilingualism gives you — though I wouldn’t advise doing this.

Q. Has the development of new neuroimaging technologies changed your work?

A. Tremendously. It used to be that we could only see what parts of the brain lit up when our subjects performed different tasks. Now, with the new technologies, we can see how all the brain structures work in accord with each other.

In terms of monolinguals and bilinguals, the big thing that we have found is that the connections are different. So we have monolinguals solving a problem, and they use X systems, but when bilinguals solve the same problem, they use others. One of the things we’ve seen is that on certain kinds of even nonverbal tests, bilingual people are faster. Why? Well, when we look in their brains through neuroimaging, it appears like they’re using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.

Q. Bilingualism used to be considered a negative thing — at least in the United States. Is it still?

A. Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of this was xenophobia. Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite is true.

Q. Many immigrants choose not to teach their children their native language. Is this a good thing?

A. I’m asked about this all the time. People e-mail me and say, “I’m getting married to someone from another culture, what should we do with the children?” I always say, “You’re sitting on a potential gift.”

There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise.

Q. Are you bilingual?

A. Well, I have fully bilingual grandchildren because my daughter married a Frenchman. When my daughter announced her engagement to her French boyfriend, we were a little surprised. It’s always astonishing when your child announces she’s getting married. She said, “But Mom, it’ll be fine, our children will be bilingual!”

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Despite Advances, Tornado Forecasts Show Limits

“There was a roar like hundreds of airplanes, then an explosion,” Joy Lutz recalled years later. She was crouching in a cave with her husband, Guy, and their three children at the next farm up the road. Then came a second explosion, “louder and longer than the first,” she wrote. Then quiet. Mr. Lutz went outside to reconnoiter. Their own house was flattened. The Madsen place had virtually disappeared.

That tornado, in Arcadia, Neb., on June 7, helped for six decades to make 1953 the deadliest year for tornadoes since the National Weather Service and its predecessor, the Weather Bureau, began keeping records. That record of 519 fatalities has been eclipsed, with more than 520 recorded so far this year. Neither year, however, has had anything remotely approaching the 1925 Tri-State tornado, the deadliest single tornado in United States history, which killed 695 people by unofficial count.

Tornado forecasting and the technology that accompanies it have improved greatly over the years, researchers say. Thanks to heightened reporting and awareness, better building practices and inventions like the radio and Doppler radar, tornado fatalities have declined steadily for nearly a century.

But the disasters of 2011 underline a lingering reality: Many of the circumstances that were beyond science in 1953 are still beyond science today.

One factor is that, for unknown reasons, 2011 has had many more tornadoes than other recent years. Another is what the historian Thomas Grazulis describes with a single word: coincidence.

A tornado “could easily hit nothing but empty farmland,” said Mr. Grazulis, who began collecting information on tornadoes for the government in 1979. Or it could instead wipe out three generations of Madsens at a family reunion. The farmhouse, beautifully remodeled not long before the storm, was not built wrong, or built in the wrong place. Tornadoes simply do not care.

“Move the Joplin tornado five miles to the south or to the north,” Harold Brooks, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory, in Norman, Okla., said of the twister that hit Joplin, Mo., this month, “and our death toll is maybe 10 or 15 — not more than 100. As much as we think we have control, that’s not the way the world is.”

In 1953, only weeks after tornado forecasting began, three monster tornadoes touched down in population centers: Waco, Tex. (114 dead); Flint, Mich. (116 dead); and Worcester, Mass. (94 dead). Before that year the only alerts were internal bulletins issued by the United States Air Force, intent on protecting its aircraft. Public warnings, shunned for fear of causing panic, began when civilians demanded the same information their Air Force neighbors had.

Meteorologists in those days knew the basic science about tornadoes — that they are caused by masses of warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico rising through cold, dry air moving south from Canada. The high-altitude jet stream carries strong winds that torque the warm air, making it rotate.

These two conditions — warm air in the south and fast-moving cold winds swooping down the alley between two mountain ranges (the Rockies and the Appalachians) — exist nowhere else in the world, said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for Weather Underground, a service based in San Francisco.

In 1953, the major tools for detecting tornadoes were the measurements obtained from twice-daily weather balloons that rose 1,000 feet per minute and periodically radioed sensor data on air temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure. Dr. Brooks said meteorologists could estimate wind speed and direction by observing the angular drift of the balloon through a theodolite, a tripod-mounted surveyor’s tool.

Weather balloons are still “very, very important” in tornado prediction, Dr. Brooks said, but while meteorologists could get 20 readings per balloon in 1953, today’s technology produces updated and more detailed information 10 times more often. Also, today’s scientists have decades’ worth of experience interpreting balloon results, so that “when you start seeing a particular result in your data set,” Dr. Brooks said, “you know it’s coming.”

The early forecasters created tracking maps, marking likely tornado threats with grease-penciled, rectangular red “watch boxes” that moved across the country as new sets of observations were obtained. The boxes were big because “the information was vague,” said Mr. Grazulis, the weather historian. Spotty and imprecise data produced many false alarms, and “people didn’t believe the warnings.”

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