Science – Page 60 – a sibilant intake of breath

Preserving plastic history

Over at Slate, there is an interesting article about art and chemistry: specifically, about the challenges involved in preserving artwork and historical objects that were made from fundamentally unstable plastics. As the article points out, this is an odd reversal of what most of the world is trying to do, namely eliminate plastic wastes that are proving far more durable than would be ideal. For instance, there is the worrisome North Pacific Gyre: a huge garbage patch in the deep ocean.

One interesting aspect of the Slate article is the assertion that some microorganisms can now digest plastics. This claim contradicts those made in Alan Weisman’s excellent book The World Without Us, in which he claims that such metabolic pathways had not yet evolved.

The overall question of materials over long spans of time is certainly an interesting one. They have a huge impact on what we do and can know about history. For instance, much of what we know about ancient peoples comes from examinations of the garbage and artifacts they left behind: clues that can give insights into diet, contact with other groups, and much else besides.

The the amount of material and information being accumulated in the modern world is unprecedented, the plight of the plastics curator is another example of how much of it is ephemeral. Perhaps that is more true of information than anything else. When the plastics and metals and dyes of our optical disks, hard drives, and flash memory systems start to degrade and fail, an unprecedented amount of information is likely to be lost, from baby and wedding photos to documentation of historical events.

Artificial geothermal and earthquakes

Apparently, artificial ‘enhanced’ geothermal sites may cause earthquakes. The concept (mentioned here before) is to drill shafts down into hot rock formations, pump in cold water, and generate steam to drive turbines. It would considerably increase the number of regions where geothermal power could be used.

According to Swiss government seismologists and officials on the Basel project, an artificial geothermal project caused an earthquake in Basel in 2006 and was subsequently shut down. Even after the shutdown, thousands of smaller earthquakes occurred in the following years. Now, there are concerns about a project that AltaRock Energy wants to undertake in California. Google’s philanthropic arm is investing $6.25 million in the project. The proposed site already experiences as many as a thousand small earthquakes per year. This video has some further details.

Obviously, the earthquake risk needs to be assessed and managed. It may be that not as many sites are suitable for enhanced geothermal as previously assumed. Perhaps such projects will only prove viable in sparsely populated regions. In any case, it is an unfortunate blow to an otherwise promising looking type of renewable generation.

Climate change impacts in the United States

The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released the most comprehensive report so far on climate change impacts in the United States: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The USGCRP consists of thirteen departments and agencies of the US federal government.

Some of the key findings include:

Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.
Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.
Threats to human health will increase.

It’s good that accurate scientific information is being released by American government agencies. Hopefully, accurate and non-partisan information on the seriousness of the climate change threat, as well as the behaviours that can effectively mitigate it, will help drive the adoption and tightening of effective climate policies in the United States.

Getting serious about climate change

The key thing that is required for dealing with climate change, and which our society does not yet possess, is seriousness. Seriousness of the kind that accompanied winning the Second World War – far more seriousness than we are displaying now in Afghanistan. We can afford to effectively lose that war, watching control pass back to the Taliban, but we cannot afford the consequences that would arise from decades of additional unmitigated emissions.

The threat certainly justifies an effort on the scale of winning a world war. The business-as-usual outcome of more than 5°C of temperature increase would cause enormous disruption. It is quite probable that it would disrupt global agriculture to such an extent that the global population would drop significantly, amid a lot of bloodshed and suffering. Preventing that requires replacing the energy inputs that run everything with carbon neutral ones: a process that will cost trillions and probably require converting areas the size of states into renewable power facilities.

Where could the necessary seriousness come from? The scientists have already given us a vivid and well-justified picture of what continuing on our present course will do. Some political parties and entities have accepted the direction in which we need to travel, though they don’t really understand how far we need to go along that road, or how quickly we need to begin. In the worst case, seriousness will come with the first concrete demonstration that climate change is a major threat to civilization. By then, however, even action on the largest scale and with the utmost urgency would probably be more of a salvage effort than a save.

Something needs to prompt us, as a global society, to take action on an environmental issue at a scale and a cost never previously borne. Rational scientific and economic analyses are already urging that, but don’t seem to have the psychological motive power to make people stop dallying. Finding something to provide the needed push into serious thinking must be a major task for the environmental movement.

Copenhagen climate science conference synthesis report

As mentioned previously, there was a major climate science conference in Copenhagen this past March. The conferences included 1,400 scientific presentations delivered to 2,500 participants from 80 countries. Now, a synthesis report (PDF) has been publicly released. Some of the key aspects have also been summarized on RealClimate.

The report reinforces the point that warming of more than 2ºC would be dangerous, arguing that such change “will be difficult for contemporary societies to cope with, and are likely to cause major societal and environmental disruptions through the rest of the century and beyond.” The report also concludes that strong and immediate action could still prevent the 2ºC threshold from being crossed. There is even scope for temporarily overshooting the target, then pulling back as the impact of greenhouse gas emissions works its way through the climatic system.

Highest greenhouse gas concentrations for 2.1 million years

By analyzing shells buried under the Atlantic seabed, off the coast of Africa, researchers from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have determined that current atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses are significantly higher than they have been for more than 2.1 million years. Whereas current levels are at 385 parts per million (ppm), the average over the span was a mere 280ppm, the same approximate level as existed in Earth’s atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution. One thing this work helps to confirm is that the current level of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is not part of any natural cycle that has taken place during the span in which human beings have existed. Our emissions are projecting the climate in a direction that is unprecedented in the history of human life.

The technique employed was based on examining boron isotopes in foraminifer shells. The work was published in Science.

Lack of vision in the Australian senate

Australia may be the rich state with the most to lose from climate change, in the near- and medium-term. Almost all of the country is already either unsuitable or marginal for agriculture. They have major problems with erosion, invasive species, drought, and salinization. They are also one of the rich countries closest to low-lying poorer states, where climate change could induce a surge of migration.

Nonetheless, the Australian Senate seems likely to defeat the Rudd government’s attempt to introduce a carbon trading scheme. The principle grounds of opposition seems to be an unwillingness to act before others do. This is in spite of the fact that the plan calls for emissions-intensive and trade-exposed industries like steel and aluminum production to be given 95% of their permits for free. Barnaby Joyce, the leader of Australia’s National Party, has expressed his desire to delay climate change regulation for as long as possible, probably in ignorance of the fact that all states behaving likewise would threaten the long-term viability of Australia as a self-sustaining society.

This suicide pact mentality is especially inappropriate coming from a state as vulnerable as Australia, which could become almost entirely agriculturally non-viable with a multi-degree increase in mean temperatures. If anybody should be willing to step out a bit ahead of the pack, it should be a highly rich and highly vulnerable state, with excellent renewable energy opportunities. The fact that even politicians in this drought-stricken state don’t have the foresight to embrace carbon pricing speaks ill of the intelligence of politicians, as well as raises doubts about whether any society is going to be able to act effectively in time to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Societal values and sustainability

In Collapse, Jared Diamond argues that sometimes the only way for societies to survive, despite the environmental problems they create and experience, is for them to re-evaluate and reform their key values. Given the environmental problems we face today – climate change foremost among them – it seems worth asking whether our core values need such revision.

To begin with, it must be recognized that societies with widely differing values are nonetheless contributing to dangerous climate change. Anybody with net positive emissions is adding to the stock of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, though naturally those who are emitting tens of thousands of kilograms a year are causing more danger than those emitting mere hundreds or thousands. That being said, both due to the non-renewable nature of the resources and the climatic consequences of their utilization, it is fair to say that all societies that are dependent on fossil fuels are contributing to the problem: a set that includes everyone from Canada to India to Saudi Arabia to Indonesia.

Within such a diverse group, are there any common values at all? Perhaps the most important ‘value’ is more like the absence of a value – an unwillingness to take the welfare of distant future generations seriously. Most people work hard to improve the prospects for their offspring in the next generation or two, but engage in behaviours that are profoundly threatening to all members of generations beyond that, for a period extending into distant geological time.

One ‘value’ that might be both common and problematic is a continued determination to grow with respect to both activities with a high biophysical throughput and those with a low one. The latter isn’t really a problem. It is no more environmentally damaging to produce good paintings or music than bad ones. The former, however, is deeply problematic. There are inevitably physical limits to growth, as well as to the conditions under which people can live present lives. Most societies disregard those limits. As Diamond argues:

Even if the human population of the Third World did not exist, it would be impossible for the First World alone to maintain its present course, because it is not in a steady state but its depleting its own resources as well as those imported from the Third World. At present, it is untenable politically for First World leaders to propose to their own citizens that they lower their living standards, as measured by lowe resource consumption and waste production rates.

If we are to maintain a decent standard of living in developed states, while also alleviating the unjust suffering in the developing world, we need to develop a society that treats both resource demands and waste production as serious issues, to be kept within the bounds of what can be maintained forever.

Are there other deeply held values that conflict with the goal of producing a sustainable global society? Like the Greenland Norse described in Diamond’s book, placing a high status value on eating meat is one, and an especially concerning one when it comes to rapidly rising wealth in developing states. Indeed, the general problem of resource-intensive status symbols is one common to the Easter Islanders and both Chinese and North American people today.

A renewable energy plan for the UK

At the end of the non-technical portion of his book, David MacKay estimates what it would take to renewably power the United Kingdom, switching forever away from unsustainable fossil fuels. With one possible approach, he reckons that it would require the following:

52 onshore wind farms: 5200 km²
29 offshore wind farms: 2900 km²
Pumped storage: 15 facilities similar to Dinorwig
Photovoltaic farms: 1000 km²
Solar hot water panels: 1 m² of roof-mounted panel per person. (60 km² total)
Waste incinerators: 100 new 30 MW incinerators
Heat pumps: 210 GW of thermal energy pumped
Wave farms – 2500 Pelamis, 130 km of sea
Severn barrage: 550 km²
Tidal lagoons: 800 km²
Tidal stream: 15 000 turbines – 2000 km²
Nuclear power: 40 stations
Clean coal: 8 GW
Concentrating solar power in deserts: 2700 km²
Land in Europe for 1600 km of HVDC power lines: 1200 km²
2000 km of HVDC power lines
Biofuels: 30 000 km²
Wood/Miscanthus: 31 000 km²

In total, this adds up to about 300 gigawatts (GW) of energy for transport, heating, buildings, and everything else. What this suggests is that, if you want to maintain population density at levels similar to now along with per capita energy use, you need to turn entire densely populated countries into energy factories even with nuclear and ‘clean coal.’ While he doesn’t estimate costs for the last two, his ballpark estimate for building all the rest are about £870 billion. That number may well be an overestimate, since the costs for many of the technologies are extrapolated from a few pilot facilities.

That may seem like a staggering amount of money and land. On the money side, however, it must be borne in mind that the UK is currently spending £75 billion per year on imported energy. That means the whole conversion would cost as much as about twelve years of continued fossil fuel use, at prices similar to now. The land use change may be a far bigger barrier. Making the UK into a renewably-powered country requires devoting a considerable portion of its total land area to that purpose. That’s a lot of spoiled views and local resistance to overcome.

He offers five other energy plans for the UK, based on different balances of technology. He also has energy plans for Europe, North America, and the world as a whole. To make the figures add up, they all require either nuclear, massive solar farms in the desert (600 by 600km), or both.

Countries are going to need to make some hard choices about population size, energy use, and the maintenance of land for agriculture, wildlife, and human enjoyment.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

In marked contrast to his previous book, I found Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed to be a consistently compelling and worthwhile read. He begins and ends it with discussions of environmental challenges in the modern world – firstly, in Montana and secondly globally – and fills out the book with descriptions of past societies that failed for primarily environmental reasons. These include Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi of North America, the Maya, and the Vikings of Greenland. He sketches out a ‘five factor’ framework for evaluating how both internally and externally induced environmental changes affect societies: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, friendly trade partners, and how a society chooses to respond to its environmental problems. Diamond makes a strong case that the framework is relevant to contemporary global society.

Diamond makes some good points about psychology. For instance, about how people who become used to abundance can forget that they are benefitting from a temporary blip above the trend line, and can end up getting hammered when things return to normal. Also, how the construction of status symbols can develop a momentum of its own, and carry on well beyond the point where it would be objectively sensible to continue. He also describes some of the many perverse subsidies that have been established by well-meaning rulers, such as the former obligation of Australian landowners to clear native vegetation, ensuring the worsening of their erosion problems.

While Diamond concludes that twelve different environmental problems are of sufficient importance to threaten the future of our society, he doesn’t perform much comparative analysis on their relative urgency and severity. Indeed, a case could be made that he seriously underestimates climate change, when compared to the others. Not only is the need to start mitigating urgent, due to long lags in the climate system, but the impacts of further emissions are irreversible to an extent that is not shared by all the other problems he lists.

While Diamond does an excellent job of chronicling reasons for historical societal failures – and argues convincingly that an appreciation of this history is important for understanding our current situation – he doesn’t do much of the work of considering what societal changes are necessary now. In particular, his assertion that a deep change in values may be required doesn’t extend to listing which of our values are problematic, or what changes to them might help society overcome the problems he anticipates will threaten it in coming decades.

Diamond’s final position is a very forceful one: for a constellation of reasons, our present global society is deeply unsustainable, and much of economic ‘growth’ is illusory. We are ‘mining’ renewable resources, in a way that will destroy them in the long term. As such, we are not earning a living off the ‘interest’ accrued to natural capital – we are cutting into the capital itself, dooming future generations to a worsened standard of living, or worse, unless we change our ways. That, plus the lesson that successful past societies were undone by failures to heed such lessons, is information that needs to be more widely absorbed and appreciated within our society.