Science – Page 90 – a sibilant intake of breath

Trouble with aquaculture

Recently, Manitoba banned new hog farms in a wide swathe of the province due to environmental concerns. Now, British Columbia has suspended the issuing of new licenses for salmon farms. The ecological impact of these facilities has been mentioned here before.

Generally, the idea that open-pen aquaculture makes ecological sense for carnivorous species like salmon is fallacious. All it does is displace pressure from fishing activity from wild salmon themselves to the kind of fish they eat. Inevitably, an unconstrained fishery will destroy those stocks as well. Meanwhile, the salmon farms leach lice, excrement, and antibiotics into the waters around them.

The Game Plan

The Game Plan : A solution framework for climate change and energy is a slick, Creative Commons licensed slide presentation covering issues of energy and climate change. It’s like a more numerically focused, more technical, open-source version of An Inconvenient Truth. Clearly, it is aimed at a very different audience. Still, it is interesting and potentially useful as a source of graphics and information.

A seven megabyte PDF version is also available. A PDF of the speaking notes, likewise.

Of frogs and fungus

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is devastating communities of amphibians worldwide. Strangely enough, this may partially be because of pregnancy testing. Between the 1930s and 1950s, a curious property of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) was exploited: human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), which is present in the urine of pregnant women, stimulates egg production in these animals. As a result, commercial trading spread them – and the fungi that afflicted them – around the world.

Which the clawed frogs are affected by the fungus and act as carriers, it doesn’t kill them. Other species are not so fortunate. Now, more than 100 species of amphibian have been infected by the fungus, which colonizes the skin. The spread of the disease varies according to altitude and temperature. In the right conditions, it can kill 85% of the amphibians in an area.

In the case of some species that have been especially badly affected, conservationists have taken the desperate step of removing the last living creatures from the wild:

Rather than letting the animals become extinct, a number of conservationists have started gathering up frogs believed to be doomed — in some areas collecting every last individual of a species — in an effort to enable some to persist in captivity. Some believe it would be worth causing the extinction of a species in the wild if it prevents the species from disappearing altogether.

Some captive breeding programs have been more successful than others, but all are symbols of the unpredictable and destructive impacts of human activities on the natural world, as well as our imperfect ability to counteract them.

Even if the frogs are successfully kept alive in captivity, it is dubious whether they can ever be returned to the wild. In addition to ongoing climatic changes, the simple fact of their removal will fundamentally change the ecosystem in which they lived. Their absence might disrupt the food web, or some other creature might change its location or behaviour to fill the gap. In any event, it is unlikely that many of these frogs will ever be part of a natural breeding population in the wild again.

Carbon capture in Saskatchewan

A $1.4 billion carbon capture (CCS) equipped coal plant is on the drawing board in Saskatchewan. The projected output is 100 megawatts (MW). That works out to a price of $14,000 a kilowatt, compared with about $2000 and $4600 per kilowatt for wind turbines (according to Agriculture and Rural Development Alberta). Of course, unlike the coal plant, the wind turbines wouldn’t require fuel after being installed.

Unless the cost of CCS falls dramatically, it is never going to be able to ride in, horse at a gallop and sword drawn, to rescue the coal sector. The cancelled FutureGen project in the United States was one demonstration of this. Until there is at least one unsubsidized commercial facility out there that is producing electricity from coal and sequestering emmisions – all for less than the price of ‘expensive’ renewable technologies like wind and solar – a fair bit of skepticism about the technology is justified.

Green energy ‘war’

A new blog written by a former California energy commissioner chooses to discuss the fight against climate change as a ‘war.’ At one level, this reflects the silly American tendency to discuss non-military problems using military language: the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, etc. At another, the choice reflects the serious disjoint between what most people have publicly accepted about climate change and what the problem really involves.

The public consensus seems to be: climate change is happening and it will have some bad effects. Technology and consumer choices will probably deal with it. Hybrids and fluorescent lights for all! Some of the big issues missed in this viewpoint are:

Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations is a massive undertaking. It requires deep cuts (50-95%) in emissions from all countries, rich and poor alike.
Time is of the essence. Stabilizing at an atmospheric concentration likely to avoid catastrophic impacts probably requires global emissions to peak within the next ten years and fall dramatically within the next forty.
Once concentrations are stabilized, continued effort and restraint will be required to maintain that. Human emissions will need to be kept in balance with natural absorption of carbon dioxide forever.
Abrupt or runaway climate change could completely undermine the basis for the global economy. Potentially, it could even make the planet uninhabitable for human beings for thousands or millions of years.

Referring to the situation as a war does have some potential benefits. People expect sacrifice and the suspension of normal ways of operating during wartime. The lower quality of light from fluorescent bulbs seems less significant when the future of humanity is at stake; the same goes for bans on short-haul flights or inefficient cars. At the same time, there are huge problems with the war analogy. Wars end. While it is possible that we will eventually have such excellent zero-emission technology that the world’s coal reserves and tropical forests will not tempt us, that seems a distant prospect.

What this underscores is the degree to which climate change is a challenge of an altogether new and different type for humanity. It’s one that our previous ideas about collective action, the ethics of an individual in society, and the cooperation of sovereign entities need to grow to accommodate. While the seriousness and focus sometimes applied to warfare will surely be required, the metaphor probably ultimately distorts more than it clarifies.

Snake oil in science magazines

One odd tendency I have noticed is the frequency with which popular science magazines contain ads for very dubious products and services: often, precisely the sort you would expect the scientifically knowledgeable to shun. Looking through this month’s Scientific American there are ads for ‘stress erasing’ gizmos, a machine that supposedly makes you fit and muscled on the basis of four minutes of exercise a day, and dubious dietary supplements. I recall that Popular Science regularly featured ads for hypnosis machines and virtual reality helmets supposedly capable of teaching you a new language in hours.

Why do companies selling such things consider the readers of science magazines to be a good target audience? One element is probably that actual scientists don’t read these magazines. The articles they publish are not peer-reviewed and can sometimes be quite low-brow (Scientific American, in particular, seems to have made a big shift towards the Popular Mechanics end of the intellectual spectrum). While the readers are unlikely to be scientists, they are likely to have an acute interest in scientific things, novel ideas, and new technologies. Probably, advertisers are taking advantage of the way in which seeing an ad in a trusted publication already full of novel claims provides it with more legitimacy than it might accrue on its own.

In the broader picture, this is just one reflection of the fundamental problems of authenticity and verification that exist in our society. People can’t decide if climate change is happening, whether taking vitamins is helpful and worth the cost, or whether radiation from cell phones is dangerous. Perhaps more than ever before, people are in a world that is incomprehensible due to the abundance, rather than the absence, of information. Those looking to bring in a few dollars from gullible armchair scientists are taking advantage of that confusion.

Climate blogs

For those wanting more information on climate science and policy than they are getting from here, these are some blogs to consider:

Gristmill: Diverse, accessible, and very frequently updated
R-Squared Energy Blog: Written by an oil expert, mostly about petroleum and biofuels
RealClimate: Usually very detailed and quite technical, raw climatic science
ClimateEthics: Infrequent posts, but long and complex ones
DeSmogBlog: Fairly similar to Gristmill. Sometimes has very interesting information
The Oil Drum: More than you will ever want to know about hydrocarbons

No matter what your appetite for climate information in blog form, those should satisfy it.

Are there any others that people read and would recommend?

Young ice

This image from NASA is very compelling. It contrasts the average makeup of the Arctic icesheet between 1985 and 2000 with the situation this year, in terms of how old each section of ice is. Whereas the 1985 to 2000 average included a large are of ice six years or older, the entire region of multi-year ice (two years or older) is about the same size today. Between 1985 and 2000, most of the ice area was more than two years old. Now, most of it has only frozen since this past summer.

Given how cold this winter was – largely due to La Nina – this summer may be especially instructive. If we see an ice minimum similar to last year’s aberrant plummet, we will need to start worrying a great deal about the short-term viability of the icecap.

A thought experiment on free will

Consider the following: what we know about physics and chemistry suggests that matter and energy interact on the basis of two things – physical laws and random chance. The fact that iron oxidizes is the result of physical characteristics of energy and matter that we understand well. Similarly, our understanding of the random elements in quantum mechanics is critical to a number of optical and electronic technologies. Acknowledging that we don’t fully understand either the laws of physics or the processes of randomness, it seems plausible to say that those two factors account for all the physical interactions in the universe.

If this is true, we can imagine a hypothetical computer with the capacity to store information on the nature, position, and trajectory of every particle in a human body, as well as all the types of energy acting on them. This model would allow us to project the behaviour of that collection of molecules in the face of any stimulus, at least on the basis of a range of outcomes as determined by the random elements in physical laws. Our model human could thus be exposed to any kind of prompt – from being attacked by another simulated human to being tempted by some unguarded treasure to being betrayed by a loved one – and a range of responses could be projected, with probabilities attributed.

Now, if human beings really do consist of particles and energy governed in the manner described, the behaviour of the computer model would be in no sense different from that of an actual person. The trouble here, of course, is that the model person cannot be said to have any free will. It is just a complex machine that responds to inputs in relatively predictable ways. Where outputs are not predictable, it is because of random chance. Our model person is like a computer game where the enemy you encounter is determined by a random number generator; while the outcome for any input is not entirely predictable, the system is nonetheless completely devoid of ‘will’ in the sense that we generally understand it.

How can free will be fit into a materialist model? Is free will something that exists outside of the laws of physics? Or is there some mechanism through which a macro-level entity like a person can be said to affect the particle level interactions that define them fundamentally?

Regardless of the answer, the thought experiment raises serious questions about whether we are responsible for our actions.

[Update: 2:06pm] Tristan wrote a post in response to this.

Monbiot on British carbon capture plans

Of all the comprehensive plans I have seen to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from developed states, the one in George Monbiot’s Heat is the most ambitious. Whereas most people aim at stabilizing atmospheric GHG concentrations by 2100 or so, he thinks it must happen before 2030 is we are to avoid a mean temperature increase of more than 2°C and the very serious (potentially catastrophic) consequences such an increase would have. Part of Monbiot’s plan does involve continued use of fossil fuels, specifically the use of natural gas coupled with carbon capture and storage (CCS) for electricity generation.

While Monbiot stands behind the belief that CCS can work and can contribute to climate change mitigation efforts, he is increasingly critical of how the British government is planning to use the technology:

In principle, carbon capture and storage (CCS) could reduce emissions from power stations by 80% to 90%. While the whole process has not yet been demonstrated, the individual steps are all deployed commercially today: it looks feasible. The government has launched a competition for companies to build the first demonstration plant, which should be burying CO2 by 2014.

Unfortunately, despite Hutton’s repeated assurances, this has nothing to do with Kingsnorth or the other new coal plants he wants to approve. If Kingsnorth goes ahead, it will be operating by 2012, two years before the CCS experiment has even begun. The government says that the demonstration project will take “at least 15 years” to assess. It will take many more years for the technology to be retro-fitted to existing power stations, by which time it’s all over. On this schedule, carbon capture and storage, if it is deployed at all, will come too late to prevent runaway climate change.

He also suggests that using CO2 from power plants for enhanced oil recovery risks actually increasing emissions. On the one hand, that is because it will allow extra oil to be extracted from declining fields, which will subsequently emit CO2 when burned. On the other, he touches upon concerns that CCS using depleted oil and gas fields will not be safe or permanent enough to effectively and indefinitely sequester carbon.

As with nuclear power, the issue of timelines is critical. Even good technology, when installed at a plodding rate, could propel us into very serious danger. Even if it does prove possible to start slow and late and still make the transition to a low-carbon economy, it seems highly likely that the total costs of adjustment will be much higher: a crash-building program akin to the one undertaken by Russia after Germany turned against it during WWII, rather than an economically optimal trajectory towards a low-carbon global economy.