Science – Page 86 – a sibilant intake of breath

Natural laboratory for ocean acidification

One of the larger unknowns when it comes to the impact of human carbon dioxide emissions is the degree to which living things will be harmed by more acidic oceans. This is occurring because water with more CO2 dissolved in it is more acidic. There are concerns that overly acidic sea water might compromise the ability of organisms with shells made of calcium carbonate to build and maintain their bodies. Other affects on marine ecosystems are anticipated, though it is challenging to assess what their magnitude will be and when they will occur.

Scientists recently completed a study of a place where such effects are occurring naturally due to carbon dioxide venting from the sea floor:

Around the vents, [pH] fell as low as 7.4 in some places. But even at 7.8 to 7.9, the number of species present was 30% down compared with neighbouring areas.

Coral was absent, and species of algae that use calcium carbonate were displaced in favour of species that do not use it.

Snails were seen with their shells dissolving. There were no snails at all in zones with a pH of 7.4.

Meanwhile, seagrasses thrived, perhaps because they benefit from the extra carbon in the water.

The latest IPCC estimate is that global pH will fall from 8.1 today to about 7.8 by 2100. Greater than expected CO2 emissions would cause a larger change. Coral reefs are especially likely to suffer.

Oceanic acidification is the inevitable result of adding CO2 to the atmosphere, but it not otherwise causally connected to climate change. It does add a complication to any plan that seeks to reduce global temperature change through a means other than reducing CO2 emissions; even if more energy could somehow be reflected or dissipated into space, the marine consequences of acidic oceans would endure.

Ways to generate electricity

Trying to think systematically about electricity, I am making a list of all the basic ways it can be produced. Here is what I have so far:

Moving magnetic fields: this is how generators work and, in reverse, electric motors.
Photons hitting metal: this is how photovoltaic panels (PV) work.
Materials vibrating, or stretching and compressing: see piezoelectricity.
Chemicals reacting: as in alkaline batteries and fuel cells.
Temperature differentials: as in themocouples.
Exotic options: betavoltaics, thermionic conversion, magnetohydrodynamics, and thermophotovoltaics.

Most of our power plants are of the first kind, using kinetic energy from falling water, wind, or hot water boiled using nuclear or fossil fuels. There is a smattering of PV capacity around, and wave power stations might eventually use piezoelectricity. Chemically generated electric current has niche applications and thermocouples are used along with radioactive materials to power some satellites.

Are there any basic forms I am missing here? Are any of these actually manifestations of the same phenomenon?

Dyson’s carbon eating trees

The New York Review of Books recently featured a couple of book reviews by Freeman Dyson. In them, he shares some interesting ideas:

There is a famous graph showing the fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it varies month by month and year by year
[The graph features] a regular wiggle showing a yearly cycle of growth and decline of carbon dioxide levels. The maximum happens each year in the Northern Hemisphere spring, the minimum in the Northern Hemisphere fall. The difference between maximum and minimum each year is about six parts per million.
The only plausible explanation of the annual wiggle and its variation with latitude is that it is due to the seasonal growth and decay of annual vegetation, especially deciduous forests, in temperate latitudes north and south.
When we put together the evidence from the wiggles and the distribution of vegetation over the earth, it turns out that about 8 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year. This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years.
[I]f we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands.
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals.

This is, of course, a geoengineering scheme. As such, it is subject to the two major points of opposition: that we don’t know whether it would work, and that it would probably produce unwanted and unpredictable consequences. That being said, it seems less dangerous in the latter regard than schemes to fertilize oceans or fill the air with aerosols. Ideally, these enhanced trees would just behave like a larger number of normal trees.

Genetic modification of plants is likely to play a role in addressing climate change. Food crops are an obvious area where that is true. They may need to be made more resistant to heat, extreme weather, drought, and floods. They may even need to have their photosynthetic pathways altered. If, along the way, we come up with a mechanism for producing trees that eat more carbon, it could make a useful contribution to the overall effort.

We should not, however, forget the third big danger connected to geoengineering: the risk of falling into the complacent belief that technology will bring an answer. Super carbon eating trees are a long-shot – one worth considering, perhaps, but no excuse to keep on burning forests and coal.

Almost nothing is sustainable

Sustainable development’ is an expression that you hear a great deal. It was famously defined by the Brundtland Commission as meeting the needs of the current generation without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This seems sensible enough, but it raises two major questions: how do we identify the ‘needs’ of this generation, and how do we anticipate the capabilities of future ones.

Most talk of sustainability these days is nonsense. The simple reason for that is that very little of what we do is sustainable. Nothing dependent upon fossil fuels is sustainable, so there go most of our forms of transportation, a lot of our electrical generation, and most of global agriculture. Nothing that destroys the long-term productivity of agricultural land is sustainable, but much of our agriculture does just that. Continually requiring more fertilizers to cope with loss of soil nutrients is not sustainable. Virtually no fisheries anywhere in the world are used in a sustainable way (none when you consider the impact climate change will have on them). Finally, nothing that contributes to accelerating climate change is sustainable; that doesn’t really create sharp categories between what is or is not sustainable. Rather, it gives an idea about the total intensity of all the greenhouse gas emitting things we undertake must be.

What does this generation need?

The matter of defining the ‘needs’ of the current generation is enormous and partially irresolvable. At one absurd extreme is the flawed idea that people have the right to continue living as they always have. Asserting this is akin to a French aristocrat facing the guillotine, arguing that his life of privilege so far justifies more privilege in the future. We cannot have a right to something that demands unacceptable sacrifices from others – particularly when that right hasn’t been earned in any meaningful way. At the other extreme is the assertion that nobody has any right to material things and that people starving around the world and dying from treatable, preventable diseases have no credible moral claim to additional resources. Somewhere between the two lies the truth. The important thing isn’t to work out precisely where, but to generate a universal understanding that constraint is going to need to be a part of human life, if we are to survive in the long term.

Arguably, ‘needs’ are entirely the wrong way to think about things. Instead of starting with who we are and what we want, perhaps we should start with what there is and what impact that has on how we can live, where we can be, and how many of us there can be at any one time.

How capable will future generations be?

The matter of the capabilities of those in the future is similarly challenging. Our expectations about the future produce a ‘treadmill’ effect, where we expect added financial wealth and improved technology to make future generations better off despite how more resources have been depleted, more climatic damage done, and more pollutants released into the environment. If people in the future are super-resourceful technological wizards, the degree of restraint we need to observe in order to accommodate them is small. No wonder this belief is so popular among those seeking to defend the status quo.

Of course, it is possible that future generations will have less capability to satisfy their needs than we do. Most obviously, this could be because of the depletion of fossil fuels (a vast and easily accessed form of energy) or because of the impacts of climate change. To some extent, we need to take such risks into consideration when we are deciding what duties we owe to future generations. Any such consideration will require passing along more resilience, in the form of more resources and a healthier planet.

What might sustainability look like?

Quite possibly, the only people in the world living sustainably are those in small agricultural communities with little or no connection to the outside world. Since they do not import energy, they must be sustainable users of it. Even such communities, however, need not necessarily be sustainable. Unless they have a low enough population density to keep their food production from slowly degrading the land, they too are living on borrowed time.

Producing a sustainable global system probably requires all or most of the following:

The stabilization of global population, perhaps at a level significantly below that of today.
The exclusive use of renewable sources of energy, derived using equipment produced in sustainable ways.
Agriculture without fossil fuels, and with soil and crop management sufficient to make it repeatable indefinitely.
Sustainable transport of old (sailing ships) and new (solar-electric ground vehicles) kinds.
The preservation of ecosystems that provide critical services: for instance, tropical forests that regulate climate.
An end to anthropogenic climate change.

While it is technically possible that we could manage to build problems and solve them through clever technology indefinitely, it does seem as though doing so is risky and probably unethical. It may be more prudent to begin the transition towards a world unendingly capable of providing what we desire from it.

Selling ‘clean coal’

In the spirit of the laughable ads from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, there is a new offering from the coal industry. The strategy seems to be shifting from “there is no reason to believe in climate change” to “anything that would harm the fossil fuel industry would cause unacceptable harm to consumers.”

‘Clean coal’ will always be a non-sensical statement, given the environmental damage done by coal mining, the toxic emissions, and greenhouse gasses. Even with carbon sequestration, coal will be a dirty way of generating power. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that coal in combination with carbon capture and storage will be a source of cheap energy. As the cancellation of FutureGen due to cost overruns suggests, clean coal isn’t cheap.

Theism in Canada

A study mentioned in The Globe and Mail suggests that a quarter of Canadians, and a third of men, say that they do not believe in a god. At least some of those who do believe in a ‘god’ probably believe in the sort that does not intervene in human affairs.

I see the steady process of declining religious faith as relatively good news. It’s a sign that people are increasingly willing to question the religious beliefs they (normally) inherited from their parents. The more you know about the world, the less necessary a god becomes for explaining the world. At the same time, greater knowledge about the world invariably shows the contradictions inherent to religious belief, whether it is the problem of evil, or the difficulty of reconciling the diversity of faiths with the idea that one conception of the supernatural is ‘correct.’

While there is no guarantee the world will improve as more and more is drawn from the ‘supernatural’ into the simply ‘natural,’ the decline of faith in modern societies does seem like reason to hope for a future in which ideas are more rigorously and fairly examined.

American climate change impacts report

Because of a 2006 lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, a judge in Oakland California ordered the release of the Climate Change Science Programs (CCSP) assessment of climate change impacts in the United States. In total, the public release of the report was delayed for three years. The report – Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Climate Change on the United States – is now available online. It is not unlike the impacts report previously released by Natural Resources Canada.

None of the contents of the CCSP report will be surprising to those who have been paying attention to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been releasing. Indeed, that is not surprising. The IPCC is looking at the same scientific evidence when they reach their judgments. One thing that would have been helpful would have been a more comprehensive effort to estimate the total economic damages associated with different plausible levels of climate change. It is information of that kind that seems most salient to those making hard choices about what actions to take.

Nitrogen trouble

Carbon dioxide isn’t the only human-generated gas about which we ought to be concerned. As this article highlights, the environmental consequences of nitrogen are also significant:

The release of reactive nitrogen into the environment has a “cascade” effect, according to two papers published in the latest issue of Science. James Galloway of the University of Virginia, the lead author of one of the papers, says that every single atom of reactive nitrogen can cause a cascading sequence of events which can harm human health and ecosystems.

In the lower atmosphere the oxides of nitrogen add to an increase in ozone and small particles, which can cause respiratory ailments. The reactive nitrogen in acid rain kills insects and fish in rivers and lakes. And when it is carried to the coast it contributes to the formation of dead zones and in the creation of red tides (a kind of toxic, algal bloom that can form in the sea). It is then converted to nitrous oxide which adds to global warming.

Marine dead zones and air pollution are threats at a lesser scale than those posed by climate change, but this is nonetheless further evidence of humanity’s ability to alter chemistry on a global scale.

Organ harvesting and natural revulsion

In a macabre tribute to utilitarian principles of welfare maximization, New York City is getting a special ambulance to collect, protect, and convey the organs of the suddenly deceased. The idea of being harvested for organs certainly makes people squeamish; most of us don’t like being reminded that we are basically delicate bags of goo. That being said, the opportunities to save lives here should trump our feelings of discomfort, just as they do in all manner of other uncomfortable medical procedures, from prostate examinations to pap smears.

Our feelings of revulsion are largely intuitive throwbacks to a world before we understood the nature of contagion and disease. Arguably, they are an increasingly useless (possibly even harmful) collection of caveman instincts.

Climate ethics and uncertainty

Climate Ethics has a thoughtful post up about climate change, scientific uncertainty, and ethics. While not particularly novel, the arguments are well and concisely expressed. Key among them is the basic ethical point Henry Shue has made about revolvers and the heads of others: even if you only have one bullet chambered, pulling the trigger is still an immoral act. It is the possibility of severe harm, rather than the probability of the harmful outcome, that is most ethically relevant.

The uncertainties of climate change are primarily about how bad it will get how quickly, as well as how quickly we need to act to stop it. There is also very strong consensus that the climate can change in ways that would be disastrous for humanity and that present activities materially contribute to the risk of that taking place.

On ethical grounds, it does not seem as though there are any remaining arguments for total inaction in the face of climate change. The question now is the degree to which our moral obligations to future generations compel us to make massive and rapid changes in our lives.