Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

Three debunkings of climate change ‘scepticism’

Reading Andrew Weaver’s new book on climate change, I came across three recommendations for journalistic sources that do a good job of examining the so-called ‘climate sceptic’ movement. Each is worth a look:

As discussed previously, there is nothing ‘sceptical’ about refusing to accept the overwhelming evidence that human beings are dangerously warming the planet. There is a universe of difference between the kind of vigorous and intellectually honest debate that refines theories and deepens understanding and the cynical and strategic efforts of those who oppose action on climate change to discredit real science and create the artificial impression that a debate about the fundamentals of climatic science continues to exist.

The book also cites two websites I frequent as good sources of information: RealClimate.org, written by five climate scientists, and DeSmogBlog.com, written by a a Canadian public relations professional.

Plants and carbon feedback cycles

This site has generally paid a fair bit of attention to positive feedback effects associated with climate change. These are akin to when a microphone gets too close to an amplified speaker to which it is connected: the sound gets louder and louder until the maximum possible output is reached. Climatic equivalents include how melted ice exposes more dark sea water which absorbs more sunlight which melts more ice, as well as how melting permafrost releases methane which causes more warming and thus more melting. Another kind of feedback worth considering is the negative sort: essentially phenomena that are self-limiting. A non-climate example is price and the quantity of something demanded in a properly functioning market; the feedback between rising prices and fewer buyers has a self-limiting effect, preventing prices from rising infinitely. A possible negative feedback associated with climate change is that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) might spur additional growth of plants, which would incorporate the carbon into their own bodies, thus partially offsetting the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere.

A study published recently in Nature examined how 3 square metre chunks of grassland would respond to 4˚C of additional temperature, compared with a control group in otherwise identical circumstances. The grasses reduced the aperture of the stomata (pores on their leaves) to limit water loss. One result was 30% less CO2 absorption, both in the year where the heat was applied and in the year following. The editor’s summary concludes:

These findings suggest that more frequent anomalously warm years, a possible consequence of rising anthropogenic CO2 levels, could lead to a sustained decrease in CO2 uptake by terrestrial ecosystems.

Climate change will bring hotter and drier conditions in some parts of the world, making an understanding of what effect that will have on biomass rather important.

A French study of Europe’s 2003 heatwave – where temperatures sometimes reached 6˚C above normal in some areas – came to a similar conclusion about heat and dryness limiting CO2 uptake. Overall, they concluded that Europe’s plant matter went from being a net sink of CO2 (accumulating it in tissue) to a net emitter (yielding it back to the atmosphere). As such, there may well be general thresholds above which ecosystems switch from having a negative feedback effect on the climate to having a positive one.

In the end, the amount of climate change that will occur for any level of human emissions is determined by the direct effects, across several timescales, coupled with all relevant positive and negative feedbacks. Learning more about all elements of that system – through the investigation of ancient climates, experiments like this one, and careful observations – should allow for more robust and accurate climatic modeling.

2008 Arctic sea ice minimum

It seems that the Arctic sea ice has reached its minimum area for the year. The record for reduction from last year has not been broken, but the situation is nonetheless disturbing. Whereas last year provided optimal conditions for melting, the unusually cold winter last year – arising from La Nina conditions – meant that this year’s melt should have been quite a bit less significant. As it happened, it was within 10% of last year’s record.

Walt Meier, a scientist at the American National Snow and Ice Data Center explained the situation:

I think this summer has been more remarkable than last year, in fact, because last year we had really optimal conditions to melt a lot of ice. We had clear skies with the Sun blazing down, we had warm temperatures, and winds that pushed the ice edge northwards. We didn’t have any of this this year, and yet we still came within 10% of the record; so people might be tempted to call it a recovery, but I don’t think that’s a good term, we’re still on a downwards trend towards ice-free Arctic summers.

In short, the Arctic ice is probably already locked into a death spiral. Here’s hoping that doesn’t lead to widespread melting of the permafrost, since the results of that would be catastrophic for humanity.

Hackers in the Large Hadron Collider

Apparently, hackers managed to take control of a website related to the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment: one of the five detectors within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This isn’t terribly surprising, since high profile websites get vandalized reasonably frequently. What is rather more disturbing is that the hackers were apparently “one step away” from the control system of the detector itself. While I don’t know the details of the design, not connecting the computers that control the machine to the internet would seem like an elementary precaution. Not connecting them to publicly accessible web servers, even more so.

Apparently, the beams circulating in the LHC will eventually have as much kinetic energy as an aircraft carrier going 12 knots – all concentrated into bunches circling the accelerator 11,000 times per second. Preventing outside access to the control systems for the sensors that will make sense of all the data seems like common sense, even if the output from those sensors is getting sent around the world for analysis.

Naomi Oreskes, climate science, and the JASON group

The JASON Defense Advisory Group consists of top-notch American scientists who carry out requested research on behalf of the American government during the summer months. Past areas of research have included adaptive optics of the kind used to remove atmospheric distortions from telescope images, a system for communicating with submarines using very long radio waves, missile defence, and more.

Back in 1979, the JASONs looked into the issue of climate change – concluding that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide could double by 2035, causing an increase in the mean temperature of the oceans and atmosphere. Despite not having any climatological background, they constructed their own mathematical model to approximate the relationships between greenhouse gas emissions, atmospheric concentrations, temperature changes, sea level rise, and other phenomena. Unlike many of their other non-classified reports, “The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate” doesn’t seem to be readily available online. Nonetheless, some information on both the report and the JASONs is included in this Times article by Naomi Oreskes: the woman most famous for her 2004 Science article “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” in which she demonstrated that disagreement about the fundamentals of climate change existed in the media, not within the scientific literature.

The Times article, the Science paper, and the available JASON reports all make for informative reading.

Trick or Treatment

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine applies the methodology of double-blind, randomized clinical trials to a number of different forms of ‘alternative medicine.’ Written by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, the book describes the history of clinical trials and evidence based medicine: citing historical examples such as finding the cause of scurvy, evaluating bloodletting as a treatment, and the importance of hygiene in hospitals, as empirically and statistically demonstrated by Florence Nightingale.

The bulk of the book consists of an examination of four very common forms of alternative medicine: looking at the clinical trials that have been carried out on them, as well as meta-analyses and systemic reviews that evaluated the quality of those studies and their conclusions. In general, the determinations made about the treatments are not very positive:

  • Some evidence suggests that accupuncture can be effective for treating pain and nausea, though higher quality studies have generally found less evidence than more problematic ones. No evidence was found that accupuncture treated any other condition, despite how practitioners have advertised it as a cure for many maladies
  • Homeopathy was shown to be no better than a placebo at treating any illness. This is really no surprise, since the philosophy behind it is bunk and the ‘medicines’ are demonstrably just water.
  • Chiropractic therapy was shown to have comparable effectiveness to conventional physiotherapy in treating back pain, though with significant risks that do not exist for the latter treatment. Specifically, the ‘high velocity low amplitude’ manipulations used can tear blood vessels in the spine, causing strokes and infarctions.
  • Some herbal remedies were shown to be effective (such as Saint John’s wart for mild to moderate depression). That being said, much evidence was uncovered of ineffective treatments (including many of the most common), contaminated medications, lax oversight, and possible adverse interactions with pharmaceuticals, when people do not inform their doctors about herbal supplements they are taking.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is the evidence of very poor medical advice provided by alternative care practitioners. All homeopaths surveyed suggested (completely ineffective) homeopathic remedies to protect against malaria during an extended trip through Africa. Chiropracters were willing to perform adjustments on the delicate and developing spines of children and infants, as well as perform adjustments without warning or notice about the significant risk of damage to blood vessels in the spine. Alternative practitioners of all stripes advised parents to avoid using highly effective vaccines on their children, and sometimes told people to discontinue conventional therapies for diseases as serious as cancer and AIDS, leading to suffering or death.

The book also covers a number of critical related topics, including the placebo effect, regression to the mean, the reasons for which large numbers of people (and doctors) have faith in alternative therapies, and issues about medical ethics. In an annex, the authors provide more concise summaries of the research done on many other treatments: ranging from reiki to meditation to yoga. Some are deemed effective, others harmless placebos, while some are identified as dangerous.

I definitely hope this book gets a great deal of public attention. Many of the abuses described are very serious. Unfortunately, the people who would probably benefit most from the book are those who are least likely to accept its analysis and conclusions. The logic of the double-blind, controlled, randomized clinical trial is extremely powerful. Most impressively, it produces unbiased results, even when the thing being tested is not fully understood. For instance, fresh fruit was identified as a cure for scurvy long before the mechanism of action was known. If alternative therapies were as effective as claimed, that would show up readily in the thousands of high-quality trials that have been conducted. The patchy nature of positive results, and the slew of negative ones, thus speak volumes about the relative effectiveness of conventional and alternative therapies.

Permafrost and climatic precariousness

When I look at the numbers involved, I sometimes wonder whether concerns about climate change adaptation in northern community are missing the main point. As discussed before, the Arctic permafrost contains 36 trillion tonnes (teratonnes) of carbon dioxide equivalent. By comparison, annual human emissions are in the neighbourhood of 29 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of CO2 equivalent. That means that the permafrost as a whole contains as much greenhouse gas as over 1,200 years of human emissions at the present rate. Thought about another way, that means that annual melting of 0.08% of the permafrost would have as much impact on climate change as every vehicle, power plant, farm, and burned forest around the world.

It is as though the permafrost is a frozen block of fuel that we are holding a match to. If it starts generating enough heat to melt on its own accord, we will be in for a truly wild ride. The loss of seasonal road access for northern communities may end up being the least significant problem associated with melting permafrost.

Fungi are surprisingly compelling

On the basis of a recommendation from a friend of mine who works on environmentally-friendly gardening and landscaping in North Vancouver, I am reading Paul Stamets’s Mycelium Running: a book that details ways in which human beings can achieve ecological outcomes through the intelligent use of fungus. They can be used to increase the rate of forest recovery after logging, clean up contaminated sites, and so forth. I will post a review of the whole book when I finish it.

One aspect of the book I found surprising and interesting are the ways in which the similarities of animals and fungi are emphasized. Both ecologically and genetically, the two are apparently more closely linked than any other two kingdoms. Both breathe oxygen (fungi can be suffocated), both sometimes attack and kill plants or animals. Representatives of both kingdoms sustain themselves on dead organic matter, while others live inside other live organisms and extract nutrition from them parasitically.

Some species of animals extrude their digestive organs when eating. Fungi might be considered an extreme elaboration of this. Instead of having a stomach inside the body, filled with digestive enzymes, the mycelium leaches them out into surrounding matter, then draws in the liberated and partially processed nutrients therein.

In any case, fungi are quite fascinating. For one final example, consider the genus Pleurotus. While their culinary properties are their major claim to fame, their ability to metabolize crude oil is also rather remarkable. You can start with a bucket of crude spilled on a beach somewhere, introduce some spores, and eventually wind up with material that is entirely safe for the natural environment in general.

Resources on basic climate science

To those who want to reinforce their understanding of the first principles of climate change science, here are a couple of straightforward explanations worth examining:

  • The Carbon Cycle: this page from NASA’s Earth Observatory describes how carbon behaves in the atmosphere, hydrosphere (oceans), and lithosphere (rocks).
  • The Greenhouse Effect: this page from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research provides a basic description of what the greenhouse effect is.

Understanding these two basic areas of science is a fundamental prerequisite for being knowledgeable about climate change. The BBC also has a rather good website explaining the key concepts for laypeople.

Conservatism and science

One of the most regrettable things about contemporary conservatism – aside from forgetting Edmund Burke’s notion of humanity as stewards of the natural world – is the unwillingness to acknowledge basic scientific realities. Sometimes, this is because of ideological conflicts; acknowledging the immense danger posed by climate change basically means admitting that government regulation is required. Sometimes, it is because of religious beliefs at odds with the basic knowledge we now have about the universe. It is simply embarrassing that there are still people in developed countries who do not understand evolution, or who believe the Earth to be a few thousand years old.

Also regrettably, it seems that the recent surprise Republican vice presidential choice Sarah Palin is among those who profess doubt about the existence of biological evolution. She is of the ‘teach the controversy’ school of thought, in which schoolchildren should supposedly be presented with multiple theories and charged with choosing for themselves. Thankfully, this approach provides rich opportunities for satire. One site sells ‘Teach the Controversy’ shirts showing Atlantis, the devil burying dinosaur bones, aliens building the Egyptian pyramids, and so forth. Most famously, the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster phenomenon began as a mocking response to this approach:

I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

Being tolerant of people with religious beliefs does not mean treating those beliefs with special deference, or refraining from mocking the more absurd ones among them. Indeed, it is only through the vigorous consideration of the relative merits and explanatory capabilities of different viewpoints that we can further refine our understanding of the world. The sad thing is that there are some people who never get a fair shot at it because those in power choose to give them a deeply inadequate initiation into the teaching of science.