Science – Page 59 – a sibilant intake of breath

Privatizing the sea to prevent overfishing

One standard solution to overfishing offered by economists is to essentially privatize the sea by creating individualized transferable quotas (ITQs) that give individuals and firms an incentive to fish at a sustainable level. Where intellectually coherent, the approach can be criticized on a number of grounds.

This Grist post does a good job of doing so. It points out the importance and difficulty of setting an appropriate Total Allowable Catch (TAC), the enormous problem of subsidized overcapacity, as well as bycatch and social justice issues.

ITQs may well be part of a sustainable global fisheries regime, especially where it comes to well-studied coastal fisheries off the shore of a single state with a strong regulatory capacity. When it comes to dealing with the pillage of the open ocean, however, they don’t really stand a chance.

The JFK library’s Apollo tribute

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library has come up with a pretty cool way to mark the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission: they are making a real-time re-creation available at WeChooseTheMoon.org, complete with historic footage, photos, and interactive elements.

The site is definitely rather slick, and includes some material I hadn’t seen elsewhere before. The Boston Herald has a more detailed description.

Pine beetles spreading into the US

According to the BBC, the climate-linked mountain pine beetle epidemic in British Columbia is threatening to spread south and west, into the United States. Forests with a mixture of species and small regular fires would be more resilient, overall.

In addition to mentioning the importance of warm winters in aiding the spread of the insects, the article describes how past fire suppression policies have produced huge areas of mature lodgepole pine, which are especially susceptible to the beetles.

The continuing spread represents not only an economic and environmental cost linked to climate change, but also a potentially serious positive feedback effect. It is estimated that Canada’s boreal forests alone contain about 186 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent: an amount equivalent to about 25 years of global emissions at the present level.

G8 insufficiently wary of climate change

Writing in The Toronto Star Christopher Hume has produced a short but trenchant criticism of this government’s position on climate change: Political expediency trumps fate of planet.

As Hume explains:

In the face of overwhelming evidence that global warming is happening, and faster than the most pessimistic climatologists had expected, how can such extraordinary stupidity be justified?

Inaction of this sort goes well beyond ordinary human idiocy; it represents a collective rush to self-destruction on an unprecedented scale. And through it all, our leaders smile and assure us they won’t let our standard of living be threatened.

The G8 leaders would do well to read Jared Diamond’s work on civilizational collapse, so as to better understand the extent to which civilizational success depends absolutely on maintaining agricultural productivity, which in turn depends on avoiding massive environmental degradation and responding intelligently to the problems that arise.

As I have pointed out before, it is a false to suggest that we can continue to enjoy economic and social prosperity without dealing with the problem of climate change. Runaway climate change could literally kill everyone, and even increases of as little as 2°C “stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society” according to the scientists at RealClimate.

This government needs to realize that climate change isn’t some minor political issue to be managed, but rather a major civilizational challenge for humanity. So far, Canada has influenced this process primarily be serving as an anchor, holding back those with greater vision and determination.

Who is vulnerable to climate change?

Yesterday, I attended a meeting on climate change, security, and human rights (mentioned before). One thing about it disturbed me: namely, that the entire perspective offered was a north-south narrative of industrialized states causing harm to vulnerable populations around the world. The discussion was largely about how that harm could be reduced, and whether any legal mechanism exist through which states could be called to account, for the damage they do to the prospects of vulnerable groups.

Sadly, this perspective is over-optimistic, given the world’s track record so far. While highly vulnerable groups and poor states may be hit first and hardest by climate change, the idea that they will be the only people profoundly affected is misleading and potentially dangerous. It feeds into the flawed notion that rich states can basically keep behaving as they have in the past, with the worst possible outcome being a lot of suffering for poor people elsewhere.

The reality is that business-as-usual emissions would probably produce a mean global temperature increase of 5.5°C to 7.1°C by 2100. That is a massive enough change to raise doubts about the future of even some rich societies. Could Australian agriculture cope with that much of an increase? Could cities in the southern United States continue to provide the minimum level of water required to sustain their populations? (US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu suggested perhaps not.)

My fear is that people who expect that only the poor and vulnerable will suffer from climate change will not be sufficiently motivated to deal with the problem. Such a belief strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of both the best scientific and political assessments. It would be hard to read the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC and not conclude that people in rich countries face acute vulnerability to unchecked climate change. Similarly, the basic message of economic analyses like those performed by Nicholas Stern is that the costs of inaction are very high, especially when compared with the real but comparatively modest price of dealing with the problem.

‘Sexy’ studies, the media, and scientific certainty

A post on RealClimate identifies some problematic aspects of science reporting, such as how the media preference for new and surprising information means that spectacular and unreproduced studies can get more attention than those that have been carefully examined and replicated:

The more mature and solid a field, the less controversy there is, and thus the fewer news stories. Ironically, this means the public is told the least about the most solid aspects of science.

The whole post is worth reading.

The consequences of this tendency are probably pretty serious. For one thing, it makes science seem less credible than it otherwise would. One day, scientists say red wine is good for you, the next day they seem to say something else. We would all be better off if the most authoritative studies, such as the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the systemic reviews undertaken by the Cochrane Collaboration, were represented as such in the mainstream media, as well as if individual unconfirmed studies were described with an appropriate focus on methodology, and an awareness that those studies which are new, surprising, and contradict well-established hypotheses are often later shown to be incorrect or of limited application or importance.

I also like the rule of thumb the post attributed to Richard Feynman: “the last data point on any graph should be discounted because, if it had been easy to obtain, there would have been another one further along.”

In Mortal Hands

Stephanie Cooke’s In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age is a four hundred page account of the major problems with the global nuclear industry, both civilian and military. It argues that the costs associated with both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy have been hidden by self-interested governments and organizations, and that nuclear energy should not be part of our future energy mix, despite concerns about climate change and energy security. The book’s unceasingly critical position leaves one longing for a more comprehensive account, where arguments in favour of nuclear energy would at least be more comprehensively rebutted. Nonetheless, Cooke’s book does a good job of reminding the reader of the many special dangers associated with nuclear energy, and the risks associated with re-embracing it, due to our concerns about fossil fuels.

In Mortal Hands argues convincingly that most of the costs associated with nuclear energy are hidden, and not borne by the utilities that provide it or the people that use it. These costs include wastes, contaminated sites, decommissioning of plants and related facilities, risks of accident, nuclear proliferation, providing targets to enemies and terrorists, routine radioactive emissions, the redirection of capital and expertise from potentially more positive uses, and the further entrenching of secrecy and self-serving pro-nuclear entities within government and industry. Certainly, the issue of secrecy is an important one. Along with concealing costs and subsidies, it is demonstrated that the nuclear industry has misled policy-makers and the public about the risks associated with the technologies, timelines and costs associated with the emergence of new technologies like reprocessing and ‘breeder’ reactors, and the number and severity of nuclear accidents. The industry knows that another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island could undue their anticipated ‘renaissance,’ so they are arguably less likely than ever to disclose accurate information on dangers, or on incidents which do occur. Governments that authorize, encourage, and fund new nuclear facilities will be in a similar situation, in terms of the harm awareness of risks and accidents could do to them politically.

Cooke raises a number of important points about regulation, both nationally and internationally, and the conflicts that exist between commercial pressures to get reactors sold and keep them running and concerns about safety and proliferation. None of the big nuclear states has a good record on preventing sales to states secretly working on nuclear weapons. Lack of toughness on the part of international and national regulators is a major reason why countries like Israel, South Africa, and North Korea have been able to use the cover of civilian nuclear programs to get themselves nuclear weapons. Lack of rigour is also clearly evident in nuclear programs, in terms of making sure facilities have been built and operated properly, bombs are secure, and the massive contamination is avoided.

The book is arguably weakest in its discussion of technical matters, which are not discussed at great length or in a way that seems entirely credible and convincing. Opportunities to elaborate and justify claims made about technical matters are often missed, and the book includes at least a few claims that seem likely to be erroneous. For instance, Cooke misrepresents where most of the energy in a thermonuclear explosion comes from, and fails to point out that the START-II agreement never went into effect. More than a discussion about the physics and engineering of nuclear technology, this book focuses more on the regulatory, political, and economic aspects. While that might annoy those with more technical inclinations, it is probably the right approach for a volume with the ultimate intention of informing public policy choices about whether to use nuclear energy for electricity production.

Cooke’s response to the question of how the energy currently being provided by nuclear plants could be replaced is especially unsatisfying. Essentially, it is: “Wind energy is growing very quickly, and perhaps distributed microgeneration could be the solution.” Some consideration of scale, such as that provided by David MacKay, is essential here. Small wind turbines on the roofs of houses as not a viable alternative to gigawatts worth of reactors. At the very least, those who advocate using renewables in place of nuclear need to recognize the enormous scale of deployment that would require, and the various associated costs. While Cooke’s book does not provide a sufficiently broad-minded basis for reaching a final judgment on nuclear energy, it is a convenient antidote to some of the current industry messaging that new plants will be safe and cheap, proliferation isn’t much of a concern, and even Chernobyl wasn’t so bad.

Diet for nerds and computer programmers

John Walker, the founder of Autodesk, has written an interesting guide on health and weight loss, which is available for free online: The Hacker’s Diet.

Basically, the book focuses on the fundamental mathematical issues associated with weight loss and gain, and describes some useful techniques for transitioning to a lower weight. In particular, the moving average approach to measurement described seems quite valuable, insofar as it helps to separate the ‘signal’ of actual weight from the ‘noise’ of variation in things like water retention. The moving average generates a trend line that seems like it should provide more meaningful guidance than a scatterplot of individual data points, or even a simple curve fit to them.

The book also describes a 15-minute health regimen that ramps up in difficulty and is intended to serve as a minimum level of exercise for life.

The book is quite an unusual one, as health books go. For instance, it endorses frozen microwave dinners as a convenient way to get a predetermined number of calories. It also insists that exercise is not a critical weight loss strategy, and that some degree of suffering inevitably accompanies efforts to move closer to one’s ideal healthy weight. While I am sure people could take exception to this approach, it is good to have variety out there, and encouraging that tools are being created for the ever-larger number of people worldwide that are overweight or obese, and likely to suffer significant health risks as a consequence. Those who don’t want to mess around with Walker’s custom Excel files can use a web-based version of Walker’s approach at PhysicsDiet.com

Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air

David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air is a remarkably engaging book; it has certainly kicked off and contributed to some very energetic discussions here. The book, which was written by a physics professor at Cambridge and is available for free online, is essentially a detailed numerical consideration of renewable forms of power generation, as well as technologies to support it, and to reduce total power demand. MacKay concludes that the effort required to produce sustainable energy systems is enormous, and that one of the most viable options is to build huge solar facilities in the world’s deserts, and use that to provide an acceptable amount of energy to everyone.

The book has a physics and engineering perspective, rather than one focused on politics or business. MacKay considers the limits of what is physically possible, given the character of the world and the physical laws that govern it. Given that he does not take economics into consideration much, his conclusions demonstrate the high water mark of what is possible, with unlimited funds. In the real world, renewable deployment will be even more challenging than it is in his physics-only model.

Here are some of the posts in which the book has already been discussed:

I have added relevant information from the book to the comment sections of a great many other posts, on everything from wind power to biofuels.

Even if you don’t agree with MacKay’s analysis, reading his book will provide some useful figures, graphs, and equations, as well as prompt a lot of thought. It is certainly one of the books that I would recommend most forcefully to policy makers, analysts, politicians, and those interested in deepening their understanding of what a sustainable energy future would involve.

Pumped and multi-lagoon tidal systems

Many forms of renewable power generation, such as wind and solar, suffer from differing power output depending on how intense the natural energy source is at any particular point in time. One neat exception to this is a tidal barrage with multiple lagoons. By managing the water level in each, it is possible to smooth out power generation between tides, as well as make output constant between days with bigger tides and those with smaller tides. It is also possible to use such systems to store excess energy from other renewable generation sites (such as winds farms running at full power during times of low demand) and to release energy at times of maximum demand, or when output from other renewable options is flagging.

With two lagoons and pumps for both, there are a huge number of options. You can maintain one pool at a ‘high’ level, and the other at a ‘low’ level, topping up the former using natural high tides or pumping and drawing down the latter in the same ways. When the tide is high, you can generate power by letting water flow into the low pool from the sea, or by letting water flow into the low pool from the high pool. When the tide is low, you can generate power by letting water flow from the high pool out to sea, or from the high pool into the low pool. Whenever you are producing power, you can use it for any mixture of supplying the grid, pumping up the high pool, and pumping down the low pool.

The combination of pumping with tidal lagoons is even better than conventional pumped storage. This is because you can actually produce more energy letting the previously pumped water flow than it took to do the pumping. Wikipedia explains:

If water is raised 2 ft (61 cm) by pumping on a high tide of 10 ft (3 m), this will have been raised by 12 ft (3.7 m) at low tide. The cost of a 2 ft rise is returned by the benefits of a 12 ft rise. This is since the correlation between the potential energy is not a linear relationship, rather, is related by the square of the tidal height variation.

David MacKay’s book also has a detailed section on tidal pumping and two-lagoon arrangements.

Of course, tidal power is not without environmental consequences. It will certainly alter the marine ecosystems that exist wherever facilities are built, and may create consequences in river systems located behind the barrage. That being said, the many advantages of tidal power as an energy generation and energy storage option mean that it probably has an important role to play in building a sustainable global society.