March 2009 – Page 6 – a sibilant intake of breath

Morton on the end of the carbon cycle

Among many other things, Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun discusses the carbon cycle across extremely long timespans. It highlights the existence of positive and negative feedbacks, which have historically constrained atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to a particular range: with a high point established though increased emissions from volcanoes, and a low point established through the absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide through the weathering of rocks.

The book predicts that, on the basis of astronomical and geological factors, this see-saw will eventually come to rest about a billion years from now: with the victory of erosion, and the permanent elimination of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As a consequence, photosynthesis will cease – for lack of building material – and the energy system that supports all complex life will collapse. Morton dubs this ‘the end of plants’ and the explanation of why it is to occur is difficult to compress into a blog post. It’s one of many reasons for which the book is worthwhile reading.

It’s a sobering perspective: akin to the knowledge that our sun will eventually fail, or that the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a universe expanding without end would combine to produce ‘heat death’ and an end to all chemical reactions everywhere.

That being said, it is essentially impossible for our minds to appreciate the meaning of a billion years, or anticipate how life (and humanity) would change across that span. Long, long before this final descent in the carbon cycle could be approached, we would have ceased to resemble our present forms; indeed, our current forms and future forms might not even be able to comprehend one another. After all, the Cambrian explosion, in which complex life forms like molluscs and crustaceans emerged, happened ‘only’ 530 million years ago.

Of course, even starting to approach that post-human future requires surviving the all-too-human threats we have created for ourselves, with climate change foremost among them. The billion-year carbon bust offers no prospect of avoiding the warming we are creating at the level of years and centuries. What Morton’s long-term perspective does offer, however, is a fairly strong assurance that life can adapt to most any set of climatic circumstances we might be able to create. Of course, ‘life’ writ large is far more adaptable and resilient than our present form of civilization, which may be quite impossible to propagate in a world where temperatures are more than 5˚C higher, on average, glaciers and icecaps are gone, the oceans are acid, and precipitation patterns have changed dramatically.

It is both startling and entirely possible that human civilization, for all its accomplishments, will prove less adept at responding to large-scale changes in climate than ancient sharks or turtles have done.

Climate change on the Globe and Mail wiki

The Globe and Mail has an initiative called Policy Wiki, in which they are trying to foster web discussions on public policy issues of interest to Canadians. The third topic they have selected is climate change. The site includes a briefing note by Mark Jaccard, of the Pembina Institute, and an analysis and proposal by David Suzuki.

Some of the sub-questions to be discussed include:

How closely should Canada’s policies be linked to the US?
Should our focus be bilateral or multilateral?
What position should Canada adopt at the Copenhagen conference?
How does the economic crisis impact actions on climate change?
How will this impact Canadian industry?
How many green jobs can Canada create?
What added responsibility does Canada have as an energy superpower?

Most frequent commenters on this site are quite concerned with Canadian climate policy. As such, this might be an opportunity to discuss the issue with a broader audience. I personally plan to contribute, and would be pleased to see readers doing so as well.

The Man Who Loved China

Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China is a competent and sometimes compelling biography of the scientist and sinologist Joseph Needham: a man who started off as a Cambridge biochemist and later devoted his life to documenting the scientific history of China. While it contains a lot of interesting narrative and information, it does sometimes feel more like a catalogue of achievements, written by an admirer, than a substantive examination of either Chinese scientific history or Needham’s own work.

The book is essentially divided into two phases: one describing Needham’s life and explorations within China, in the period of the Second World War, and a second describing the process of writing his masterwork: Science and Civilization in China. More accurately, it must be said that he began his masterwork, as he was only able to produce the overall plan and the first few volumes before dying as an elderly man. During the first section, Needham is serving as a kind of official scientific liaison between the British government and the Chinese nationalist government during the period of Japanese occupation. During the second, he is principally installed in Cambridge as an academic, though he did return to China to lead an easily-duped team of weapons inspectors, investigating claims that the United States had used biological weapons during the Korean War.

The book is a somewhat odd one to read at this point in history. Needham’s work was published long enough ago to have become the mainstream understanding: namely, that a great many critical inventions and discoveries happened earlier in China than elsewhere. Most members of the public are probably able to identify gunpowder and the compass as Chinese inventions. Those with knowledge in other fields – from engineering to nautics – are probably similarly familiar with early Chinese contributions. By not providing much evidence about the prevailing view beforehand, the book makes it a bit awkward to assess Needham’s own contribution, aside from the indirect evidence provided by all of his subsequent academic recognition.

The book does a fairly comprehensive job of expressing Needham’s curious personal characteristics: his polyamory (spending most of his life within reach of both wife and mistress, both well aware of one another), his socialism, his love of trains and boats, and his overwhelming dedication to China. The strength of the latter is revealed through his inability to appreciate the problems with Mao’s revolution, at least, nor until the man himself had been dead for some time. Needham is portrayed as quite a dashing figure: scientist, activist, diplomat, and adventurer. In terms of the sheer number and variety of experiences, his life is one that must be envied by anyone who is curious about the world.

The so-called ‘Needham question’ of why scientific innovation in China stalled, prior to exploding in the West, gets surprisingly brief and superficial treatment in this volume – just a few pages in the epilogue. This is a curious way for a biographer to treat the central subject of his subject’s fascination. It would have been interesting to see various hypotheses discussed more thoroughly, with a focus on the evidence supporting and challenging them that arose from Needham’s investigations and subsequent scholarship.

For me, this book didn’t manage to be as compelling as Winchester’s history of the Oxford English Dictionary. Nonetheless, it would probably be of interest to those who enjoy reading about people who lived notable and unusual lives. It certainly tends towards inspiring a person to wonder what more exotic and worthwhile things they might be doing themselves.

Creative Commons ‘zero’ license

It says something about the current climate of intellectual property law that Creative Commons has released a new ‘zero’ license, which strives to do everything legally possible to put a work into the public domain. The new license is meant to be an improvement over their previous public domain dedication service:

The CC0 system works better internationally, is likely more legally valid (since one can not dedicate their works into the public domain in many countries and there are questions about doing so in the U.S.) and, if the icon and meaning becomes recognizable enough, more clear.

It seems a bit remarkable that it is so difficult to choose to give intellectual property away. I can understand the importance of legal protections to ensure that people don’t do so by accident (particularly children), but it does seem as though there should be a straightforward legal mechanism to waive all rights as the creator of a work.

The contents of this site are under a Creative Commons license: specifically, one that allows anyone to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as produce adaptations. It requires that the work be attributed to me, that any derivative works be subject to the same rules, and does not grant these rights automatically for commercial purposes. That is to say, if someone wants to use one of my images on a personal site, with attribution, that’s fine; if Visa wants to use it in a commercial, I expect them to pay for the usage rights.

Creative Commons licenses are very valuable because they allow creators of content to establish such regimes without needing to hire lawyers or spend a lot of time and money.

National Geographic on the oil sands

National Geographic has released a feature article on Alberta’s oil sands. It highlights the immense scale of what is going on: geographically, economically, and in terms of water and energy usage:

Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake.

In total, the oil sands extent through an area the size of North Carolina – half of which has already been leased by the Alberta Government. That includes all 3500 square kilometres that are currently minable. In exchange, leases and royalties provide 1/3 of government income: estimated at $12 billion this year, despite the fall in oil prices.

The article also discusses some of the toxins leached by the mining operations, their impacts of health, and the inadequate work that has been done to investigate and contain them.

In the end, it is hard to write anything about the oil sands that isn’t damning, unless all it includes is information on the size and economic value of the oil reserves. The article includes a good quote from Simon Dyer, of the Pembina Institute, highlighting how the extraction of the oil sands is a mark of desperation:

Oil sands represent a decision point for North America and the world. Are we going to get serious about alternative energy, or are we going to go down the unconventional-oil track? The fact that we’re willing to move four tons of earth for a single barrel really shows that the world is running out of easy oil.

The solution is not the ever-more-costly and destructive search for new hydrocarbon resources, but rather the eclipsing of the hydrocarbon economy with one based on sustainable energy.

In addition to the article, National Geographic has also produced a flash slideshow of oil sands photographs.