August 2007 – Page 4 – a sibilant intake of breath

Grist for the mill

Here is an interesting article about the ongoing debates about ethical food and climate change: “The Eat-Local Backlash.” Such articles demonstrate how fiendishly complicated it can be to make personal environmental decisions. Questions about which of two options has the lesser environmental effect can rarely be definitively answered, not least because there are so many different types of environmental effects, ranging from air and water pollution to climate change and loss of biodiversity. This article is from a site called Grist, which has recently joined the ranks of those I consult most frequently and read most carefully. Their analysis isn’t always terrific, but the place has a lot of life.

Indeed, the site itself demonstrates the benefits of aggregation (one argument against local food). Rather than having the attention of a few hundred people spread between a few dozen environmental blogs, each getting a couple hundred hits a day, this provides a much more concentrated conversation. I encourage those interested in environmental issues to join and start commenting.

McIntyre and NASA data

There is a lot of talk in the media about how Steve McIntyre – an amateur scrutineer of climate statistics – found an error in data released by NASA. Specificically, it was mistankingly believed that data that had not been corrected for urban heat effects had been. This data pertains only to the United States and the correction implies that about 0.15 ºC of the observed warming there was just a statistical error. In itself, this would not get much attention. What does get attention is that this changes the rankings of the hottest recorded years in the United States. Rather than 1998 being the hottest recorded year in the United States, 1934 now wins. Many news sources are treating this data revision as though it demonstates a serious flaw in the overall quality of our climate understanding.

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmenal Panel on climate change is based on a far broader collection of data than just NASA data pertaining to just the United States. As such, their overall conclusion that is barely affected by this change. Likewise, the worldwide figures for hottest years still cluster in the last decade. The report’s Summary for Policy Makers explains:

Eleven of the last twelve years (1995–2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850). The updated 100-year linear trend (1906 to 2005) of 0.74°C [0.56°C to 0.92°C] is therefore larger than the corresponding trend for 1901 to 2000 given in the TAR of 0.6°C [0.4°C to 0.8°C]. The linear warming trend over the last 50 years (0.13°C [0.10°C to 0.16°C] per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years. The total temperature increase from 1850–1899 to 2001–2005 is 0.76°C [0.57°C to 0.95°C]. Urban heat island effects are real but local, and have a negligible influence (less than 0.006°C per decade over land and zero over the oceans) on these values.

This information is based on a broad collection of sources including satellites and ground stations around the world. It also incorporates evidence from ice cores and other historical indicators of temperature and greenhouse gas concentrations. What the McIntyre situation demonstrates is the degree to which perceived anomalies are seized on by people with pre-determined agendas to either support or refute the overall climate change consensus. While the data is not a statistical threat to that consensus, it does have the ability to foster doubt in the general public and among policy-makers, especially when presented out of context.

Having people out there scrutinizing the data is excellent, and a good check against the proliferation of misleading information. At the same time, it is necessary to be rigorous in our thinking about how one new piece of information affects the overall picture. Likewise, it is important to remain aware of the degree to which individual agendas influence how information is processed, and what responses it evokes.

Transitioning from transition

After a month on the job, this no longer feels like a “weblog in transition.” As such, I need to come up with a new secondary title. Given how it is the first piece of information most people absorb about the site – after a general appreciation for the layout and style – it is important to tune correctly. Given the diverse areas of interest explored here, I am not sure what would be most suitable. What I do know is that I don’t want it to mention my area of employment, because I do not to be an important feature of what happens here.

Do people have any suggestions? The cleverer the better. Work is also being done on a new banner.

Hollywood physics

Deficiencies in movie physics can be good fun to dissect and mock, but a recent paper suggests that they are less benign. “Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy” suggests that the absurdities that abound in popular films actually weaken the people’s ability to understand how the world works. The paper concludes that:

Hollywood is reinforcing (or even creating) incorrect scientific attitudes that can have negative results for the society. This is a good reason to recommend that all citizens be taught critical thinking and be required to develop basic science and quantitative literacy.

Specific issues discussed in the paper include projectile motion, Newton’s laws, impulse, buoyancy, and angular momentum. Certainly, some films underplay the dangers of high falls and similar phenomena – as well as playing up the dangers of things like automobiles spontaneously exploding.

Personally, I would prefer a world in which movies portrayed all the sciences in realistic and accessible ways. Unfortunately, such films are in perpetual danger of being ignored in favour of flashy absurdities like the The Core or the egregious recent Star Wars films.

Reading these entertaining reviews is a good after-the-fact vaccine.

Ravenous pine beetles

According to an interview with the CBC given by Allan Carroll at Natural Resources Canada, there is not much hope of British Columbia containing the mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae) that have already killed 9.2 million acres of forest. He said that “Our estimates are that by about 2013 to 2015, the beetle will have killed about as much as 80% of the mature pine in the province and I don’t think we can really affect that now.” As the supply of Lodgepole Pine becomes eliminated, the beetles sometimes move on to Spruce and other species. If the beetles begin to target the Jack Pine of the boreal forest, Carroll says that it “could wipe out billions of trees all the way to the East Coast.”

These insects were mentioned here before, in the context of the effect of changing minimum temperatures on species ranges. Apparently, once they have reached their maximum cold tolerance, these beetles can endure temperatures of -40°C. It is significant cold events in the early and late winter – before their chemical defences have fully come on stream – that can lead to “very large amounts of mortality in the [beetle] population.” A few very crisp fall days would do a lot for western Canada’s forests.

Cognitive dissonance

One of the odd things about reading The Economist recently is seeing the extent to which their commitment to reason and the impartial consideration of scientific facts is clashing with their long-held views about economic growth. So far, their considerations of how ecological issues – especially climate change – impact their core philosophy has been fleeting and confined to the margins. This article on air travel is a good example.

Imagine, however, that they played some of the ideas through. What would their next Survey on Business look like if they really accepted that mass air travel is climatologically and morally unacceptable?

Quite staggeringly popular in this manor, squire

So I curtailed my Walpoling activites, sallied forth, and infiltrated your place of purveyance to negotiate the vending of some cheesy comestibles.

One thing I miss about England is the cheese. While there are equally good premium cheeses in Canada, the average quality of normal cheese is much better over there. The store brand will include Cheshire, Wensleydale, Cheddar, Double Gloucester, Red Leicester, and others and they will all be a lot more enjoyable than the standard can’t – tell – if – this – is – Cheddar – or – Mozzarella variant that seems to sell best by bulk here.

When I return to graduate (eventually), I will have to make a point of enjoying them.

The Code Book

Simon Singh’s The Code Book proves, once again, that he is a superlatively skilled writer on technical and scientific subjects. Thanks to his book, I now actually understand how Enigma worked and how it was broken: likewise, the Vigenere Cipher that has been built into this site for so long. This book manages to capture both major reasons for which cryptography is so fascinating: the technical aspects, centred around the ingenuity of the methods themselves, and the historical dramas connected, from the execution of Mary Queen of Scots to the use of ULTRA intelligence during the Second World War.

Anybody who has any interest in code-making or code-breaking should read this book, unless they already know so much about the subject as to make Singh’s clear and comprehensible explanations superfluous. Even then, it may arm them with valuable tools for explaining interesting concepts to the less well initiated.

At the end of the book is a series of ten ciphers for the reader to break. Originally, there was a £15,000 prize for the first person to crack the lot. Now, they exist for the amusement of amateur cryptologists. I doubt very much I will get through all ten, but I am giving it a try. The first ciphertext is on his website and is helpfully labeled ‘Simple Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher.’ I expect to crack it quickly.

Continue reading “The Code Book“

Ottawa blogs

Within a few months of arriving in Oxford, I had sorted out which blogs were worth reading. So far, I have not stumbled across any good Ottawa blogs. Does anybody know of any? Environment blogs, photo blogs, food blogs, travel blogs – all of these are potentially interesting. Personal blogs are better than pundit blogs. High quality writing is the key factor, along with some local information.

The acid sea

One frequently neglected consequence of rising global concentrations of carbon dioxide is increasingly acidic oceans (though it has been mentioned here before). Since the Industrial Revolution, the world ocean has absorbed about 118 billion tons of anthropogenic CO2: half of total human emissions. Every day, another 20-25 million tonnes are being absorbed.

Before the Industrial Revolution, oceanic pH was about 8.179. Now, it is at 8.104. By 2100, it is projected to be 7.824. Because pH is a logarithmic scale, that is a bigger change than it seems to be. At the projected 2100 concentration, the shells and skeletons of corals, molluscs, and phytoplankton with aragonite shells begin to dissolve within 48 hours. James Orr et al, writing in Nature provide many more details:

In our projections, Southern Ocean surface waters will begin to become undersaturated with respect to aragonite, a metastable form of calcium carbonate, by the year 2050. By 2100, this undersaturation could extend throughout the entire Southern Ocean and into the subarctic Pacific Ocean. When live pteropods were exposed to our predicted level of undersaturation during a two-day shipboard experiment, their aragonite shells showed notable dissolution. Our findings indicate that conditions detrimental to high-latitude ecosystems could develop within decades, not centuries as suggested previously.

The effect of more acidic oceans on aragonite is part of why the Stern Review projects that coral reef ecosystems will be “extensively and eventually irreversibly damaged” at less than 450 ppm CO2 equivalent and less than 2°C of warming. Given how critical coral reefs are to overall oceanic ecosystems – including key commercial fish species – this should be of concern to everyone.

It is very hard to project what the consequences of all this will be. As with so many other climatic phenomena, the net impact for human beings probably has to do with the relative strength of positive and negative feedbacks and the corresponding resilience of ecosystems. What is certain is that the only way to prevent acidification is to signficantly cut CO2 emissions.