Science – Page 34 – a sibilant intake of breath

Science and morality

I encourage readers to pick up a copy of Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. A friend and I are already reading it, with the intention of discussing it, and my preliminary experience suggests that it will provide good fodder for discussion.

Harris argues that what is good and what is bad ultimately depends on the experiences of conscious beings. Since science can illuminate what those experiences are like and what triggers them, science can speak on moral questions.

Harris also questions the moral authority accorded to religions. Just as religions teach deeply misleading things about the physical nature of the universe (such as that it is 6,000 years old, was created in six days, and contains unchanging species), they arguably teach deeply misleading things about morality, since their prescriptions fail to encourage the well being of conscious beings.

Rather than leap into discussion of these ideas now, I encourage readers to buy or borrow the book. It will be more interesting to discuss on the basis of all of its contents, rather than on the basis of my brief comments on some of the early pages combined with the pre-existing beliefs of myself and readers.

A pan-European electricity grid

Last month, The Economist made a convincing case that a pan-European electricity grid could help Europe move to a future more compatible with a stable climate:

This offshore grid is the germ of a big dream: a Europe-wide system of electricity highways. If it makes sense in the North Sea, it makes even more for wind and solar power from Spain and, one day, solar energy from the Sahara desert. And as well as Norwegian reservoirs, why not store power in existing Alpine valleys? This would reduce the need for more power stations to balance the spikes and troughs of renewables. Moreover if producers could trade energy over the grid in a single market, the benefits could be bigger still. European officials reckon energy savings of some 20-25% would be possible.

Such ideas have nostalgic appeal because the European Union was born from a move to pool energy sources in 1951 in the European Coal and Steel Community. These days the EU can be the community of wind and sun, not to mention gas and nuclear power. The trouble is that such dreams are not cheap. The European Commission this week said that €1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) of investment would be needed in the next decade. Most should come from the industry, but a chunk must also come from already tight public budgets.

They are wrong, however, to claim that rising natural gas consumption is not a major problem. Burning gas may be a better way to get a kilowatt-hour of electricity than burning coal, but both are unacceptable in a world where carbon dioxide concentrations are already dangerously high.

Europe’s improved grid should be connecting energy demand centres to diverse and disparate sources of renewable wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal energy – not perpetuating dependence on fossil fuels.

Mythbusters

For the unfamiliar, Mythbusters is a television show in which a group of geeks test the validity of ‘myths’ about how the world works. Examples include whether poppy seeds can make a person fail a drug test, whether cell phones interfere with aircraft instruments, whether falling bullets can be lethal, etc.

While many of these questions can probably be answered with a reference text and as calculator, what distinguishes the show is how they set out to physically test the myths in question. Rather than just calculating how much helium it would take to lift one of them, they build a gigantic rig of 50 huge helium-filled tubes in a gigantic hanger.

In the past, I have been a bit bothered when they have done something physically that could have been very easily disproven with a bit of math. A little moment in an episode I saw yesterday changed my thinking a bit though. It was the demeanour of Adam Savage – one of the show’s two main hosts – when they were trying to make him buoyant in air by filling a small inflatable boat with helium. In the little clip, it is obvious that both he and Jamie Hyneman know perfectly well that the boat won’t have sufficient buoyancy. They do the physical test not because it is necessary, but because it illustrates their methodology.

As an XKCD comic points out, the lack of scientific rigour in some Mythbusters experiments is only a very minor basis for criticizing the show. It’s obvious that they put more thought into their trials than they have time to discuss on the show. For instance, testing the myth that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm with a key on the string, they mention in passing the use of an ‘authentic’ key. Furthermore, it seems clear that their major message is about the importance of empirical testing and verification, which is ultimately the best mechanism we have for making sure what we believe about the world is remotely accurate.

The show is a lot of fun, and I think it transmits some really important ideas about science. Their fondness for explosives certainly makes for enjoyable television. Furthermore, Kari Byron’s participation certainly doesn’t hurt the show’s entertainment value; she has to be one of the most attractive women in the entertainment industry, particularly when welding.

Energy flow from a gas pump

Here’s a statistic that does a good job of demonstrating just how energy-rich fossil fuels are:

An ordinary gas station gasoline pump transfers about 16 megawatts (MW) of chemical energy while operating. That’s about ten times the power output of the Grouse Mountain wind turbine. For any particular span of time, a nuclear reactor puts out about as much energy as 63 gas pumps.

Also, as mentioned before, a barrel of oil contains energy equivalent to the energy output of an adult human working 12.5 years worth of 40 hour weeks.

Air pollution from shipping

This article from The Guardian makes an astonishing claim: Health risks of shipping pollution have been ‘underestimated’.

The article says that a single one of the giant container ships that transport much of the world’s freight emits as much air pollution at 50 million cars:

Cars driving 15,000km a year emit approximately 101 grammes of sulphur oxide gases (or SOx) in that time. The world’s largest ships’ diesel engines which typically operate for about 280 days a year generate roughly 5,200 tonnes of SOx.

The article refers to an American study that found that the world’s 90,000 cargo ships collectively cause 60,000 deaths per year in the United States, through air pollution. It also estimated the associated health care costs at $330 billion per year.

Reducing air pollution is one of the significant co-benefits that can accompany the replacement of fossil fuels with sustainable, zero-carbon sources of energy. At the same time, ships powered using fossil fuels could be made to emit fewer toxic chemicals by toughening the emission and fuel quality standards imposed on them.

Six Easy Pieces

In 1964, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman gave a series of introductory lectures on physics to undergraduate students at CalTech. Six Easy Pieces is an abbreviated version, with six chapters on the essential elements of modern physics including atomic theory, conservation of energy, gravitation, quantum mechanics, and the relation of physics to other sciences.

The lectures highlight Feynman’s particular style, in that they are engaging and accessible. The book contains hardly any mathematics and – aside from one dated and strangely detailed departure into categorizing elementary particles – everything in the book should be reasonably accessible to anyone with a passing knowledge of science. At many points, Feynman identifies things that were unknown to science in 1964. Contemporary readers may find themselves wondering how much has changed in the intervening time. Indeed, it would probably be a valuable exercise for somebody to write an update. Ideally, a talented science writer like Simon Singh who could bring a talent in expression to the update that would mirror that in the individual.

Feynman does accord some space to more philosophical issues, such as defining ‘science’. He repeatedly asserts that: “Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth” and uses that criterion to distinguish it from other kinds of knowledge, including mathematics.

The best thing about the book may be some of the elegant ways in which Feynman explains fundamental truths about the universe, and how they relate to each other. He doesn’t simply assert things like the nature of gravitational attraction or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but in many cases illustrates how they arise from other pieces of known physics. For instance, Feynman elegantly explains how Kepler’s Laws on planetary motion can be elaborated into Newton’s universal theory of gravitation.

The Periodic Table

In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain voted Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table to be the best science book ever written. On the basis of that endorsement, I was expecting something along the lines of a very well-written history of the discovery of the elements. Levi’s book differs substantially from that expectation; it is a kind of post-Holocaust memoir, presented in the form of twenty one sketches named after elements. Most have an element of mystery to them, usually involving an investigation of the nature of a substance or the cause of a change. Ultimately, the book feels deeply personal, set against a backdrop of very practical chemistry: the sort where a couple of men in Italy scrape together a living synthesizing pyruvic acid, or making stannous chloride from tin, to sell to small-scale mirror manufacturers.

In many ways, the one of the book is established in relation to the second world war, and especially the Holocaust. In a story focused on the dynamic between prisoner-chemists and one of their masters in Auschwitz , Levi contemplates some of the ethics of complicity:

I admitted that we were not all born heroes, and that a world in which everyone would be like him is, that is, honest and unarmed, would be tolerable, but this is an unreal world. In the real world the armed exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and unarmed clear the road for them; therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed.

For the most part, however, the book meditates on much more ordinary sorts of human relationships and is full of wise observations. Describing the purpose of the project, Levi explains that:

[I]n this book I would deliberately neglect the grand chemistry, the triumphant chemistry of colossal plants and dizzying output, because this is collective work and therefore anonymous. I was more interested in the stories of solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot, at the measure of man, which with few exceptions has been mine: but it has also been the chemistry of the founders, who did not work in teams but alone, surrounded by the indifference of their time, generally without profit, and who confronted matter without aids, with their brains and hands, reason and imagination.

At times, the abstract realities of chemistry provide solace. A compound used in high-end lipstick is most abundantly found in the excrement of vipers, but that is as good a source as any since molecules are molecules without reference to their history. Near the end, Levi tells the true story of a single atom of carbon that finds it was around the Earth – incorporated into rock and plant and animal – and explains how the story must be true, given the sheer multiplicity of carbon atoms circulating in the world.

Ultimately, that Levi excels at is the sketching of character: whether it is his own, that of the various objects of romance or curiosity he encounters, or that of compounds and the elements themselves. As such, the book is very human: a consideration of how a thoughtful person functions in a world where some conditions are established through immutable physical laws, and others through the opaque decision-making of the powerful.

CBC documentary on geoengineering

Like it or not, an increasing amount of attention is being given to geoengineering – the idea of deliberately modifying the climate system to counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gases.

On November 25, the CBC documentary series Doc Zone is broadcasting the premiere of Playing God With Planet Earth: Can Science Reverse Global Warming? According to the promotional materials, the documentary:

explores the last ditch efforts of scientists and engineers trying to avert a planetary meltdown.

As the threat of climate change grows more urgent, scientists are considering radical and controversial schemes to rehabilitate the climate. Since none of these wild—and possibly dangerous—ideas have ever been tried before, the filmmakers used a distinctive “painted animation” technique (like a “graphic novel”) to explore these futuristic scenarios.

“Human ingenuity could temporarily roll back the effects of global warming. At the same time, it could cause catastrophic damage and spark deadly political conflict,” says director Jerry Thompson. “We’ve interviewed some of the world’s leading scientists, engineers, environmentalists, lawyers, and disaster-relief workers about the possible consequences of intentionally manipulating the climate—versus the risk of doing nothing.”

In addition to the Thursday screening on CBC television, it will be possible to watch online on the show’s website.

If readers do end up watching it, please consider leaving a comment about it here.

Climate timelines

The timelines associated with climate change are of an entirely different magnitude from those associated with ordinary politics. The greenhouse gases we emit today will still be affecting the climate in thousands of years, in a time when our current leaders and forms of political organization will have become as obscure as those of the Ancient Greeks are to us now. It is possible that only scholars in under-funded departments will be aware of what the state of global politics looked like in 2010. People with the degrees they issue may worry about how they will find jobs, having specialized in such an obscure and irrelevant field. Quite possibly, the average person will have never heard of Barack Obama, the European Union, the economic resurgence of China, or the existence of Canada.

On the other hand, it is possible that the politics of 2010 will be remembered in the distant future for the same reason the general outlines of Ancient Greek society are remembered now: because they will be seen as an important explanation for why the world is as it has become. In that case, it seems likely that our time will be primarily remembered as the period in history when people could have stopped dangerous climate change, but failed to do so because of their short-sightedness and selfishness.

Federal responsibility in Canada’s oil sands

The Pembina Institute – in cooperation with Environmental Defence and Equiterre – has released a new report on Canada’s oilsands. It concludes that even with optimistic assumptions about carbon capture and storage, greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands are set to be unacceptably large by 2050, making Canada’s climate change mitigation targets infeasible:

A key finding of the report is that the math on carbon emissions doesn’t add up. If expansion of the oil sands proceeds as planned, the oil sands industry will outspend its proportional share of Canada’s carbon budget under the government’s current target by a factor of 3.5 times by 2020 and by nearly 40 times by 2050, even assuming very optimistic application of carbon capture and storage technologies. The oil sands sector must do its fair share to reach the federal government’s commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or other sectors of the economy will be asked to shoulder the extra burden.

The report calls for oil sands operations to be subject to a carbon price, which would be applied equally across the economy.

The report stresses how, if the government gives the oil sands soft treatment, everybody else will need to work harder to achieve Canada’s climate targets.

The report does not particularly stress the sheer size of the fossil fuel reserve embedded in the oil sands, which may actually be the biggest problem from a climate change perspective.