climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph
I heard a lot fair amount about mercenaries when I was at Oxford, but this is the most interesting thing to happen in relation to them in decades. The degree to which war has been privatized would probably shock Eisenhower.
What remains to be seen is the degree to which the United States will respect the sovereignty of the democratic government that all the entire second Iraq war was meant to create.
Today, it seems like a good idea to provide a brief personal update, rather than a few hundred substantive words on a random topic. Life at the moment is quite heavily dominated by work – which is proving to be interesting, as well as important. I have finished one big project already, and have moved on to a collection of smaller things. At the moment, I am digging out my hazy recollections of parabolic functions and calculus. My co-workers are engaging and helpful and, while I remain largely ignorant about the mechanisms by which this organization functions, much of what I studied as an undergrad and master’s student is directly applicable to the work we do. There seems to be a reasonable chance of converting my one year contract into an indefinite position, on the basis of a competition taking place during the next few months.
My level of integration into Ottawa life is roughly where it was a month ago, though I will hopefully be getting a bike on Saturday and I have joined the Ottawa Hostel Outdoor Club. Once my membership materials arrive, I am hoping to start doing some weekend hikes with them, with the possibility of cross country skiing later in the year. Having met so few friends here thusfar is frustrating, though it has been as much a product of my time usage as anything else. Until I have a reasonable circle of Ottawa friends who I didn’t know before coming here, I don’t think I will really feel like I live in this city.
In mid-October, it seems as though Tristan and Meaghan will be coming to visit me, which should be excellent. Having Emily here back in August was amazing. At the end of the October, I am going to a conference in Montreal, then staying for the weekend. For Christmas, I hope I will get the chance to spend a reasonable amount of time in Vancouver. It seems unlikely that any substantial quantity of work is going to be ongoing at that time, anyhow.
As anyone who has ever been disappointed by what they found under the wrapping paper knows, gift-giving can lead to the misallocation of resources. Gift givers misanticipate the value a particular thing will have for the recipient, and thus devote more resources to the purchase than the recipient would. Joel Waldfogel, writing in The American Economic Review back in 1993 discussed this and other related economic issues in a notorious article called “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” (Available through JSTOR and Google Scholar)
Imperfect knowledge and non-ideal choices
The paper includes the gloomy conclusion that “gift giving destroys between 10 percent and a third of the value of gifts.” On this basis, the paper estimates that the deadweight loss of holiday giving in the United States in 1992 was between $4 billion and $13 billion. The article does note one possible saving grace: when recipients are ill informed about the existence of things they might enjoy, a gift can be worth more than a transfer of the equivalent quantity of cash. Of course, providing the cash and the information would achieve the same effect, without the risk that the choice will be different from what the recipient would have done with the money themself.
Gifts from friends and significant others are most efficient (largely because they know the preferences of the recipient best), while “noncash gifts from members of the extended family” are most likely to be valued by the recipient at less than their cost of purchase. Recipients value gifts from friends at 98.8% of their actual value, while those from significant others are valued at 91.7%. Parents and siblings give gifts worth 85% of their cost, while aunts and uncles manage only 64.4% and 62.9%, respectively. These conclusions were reached largely on the basis of surveys given to Yale undergraduates (favourite targets for psychological and economic experiments). Waldfogel notes that a social stigma can exist against giving cash gifts, but it is weakest where aunts, uncles, and grandparents are concerned – not coincidentally, the least effective choosers of gifts.
The thought counts
I have a more wide-ranging response of my own. Thankfully, there is a phenomena that partially offsets imperfect gift choice losses: the extent to which the very status of something as a gift increases its value in the eyes of the recipient. I can think of scores of cases where a product or service that would not have been particularly gratifying if purchased for myself was especially welcome and meaningful when received from someone else. In many cases, this creates utility significantly greater than that which could be achieved through personal spending of an equivalent sum.
I was reminded of all this when I saw Waldgofel’s article mentioned on Marginal Revolution, an interesting economics blog.
As of today, the European Commission has banned the fishing of Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus) in the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic. Good for them, though it is a bit late. Stocks of this impressive and long-lived creature have already been decimated globally.
[Update: 21 September 2007] Jennifer Jacquet has more about this, over on Shifting Baselines.
[Update: 2 December 2007] Shifting Baselines has even more on this.
Comparing Christopher Hitchens‘ new book god is not Great with Richard Dawkins‘ recent The God Delusion seems only natural. Hitchens engages in much more direct textual criticism – an activity that Dawkins equates to discussing the history and habits of fairies with well credentialed fairyologists. While Dawkins’ book is a reasonably comprehensive attempt to rebut what he calls ‘The God Hypothesis,’ Hitchens’ is more concise and impressionistic. Dawkins explains early in the book that he aims to rebut the claim that:
there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.
Note that this aims to rebut deism as well as those faiths that presume that god is still actively involved in the workings of the world. The most concise summarization of Hitchens’ work are his ‘four irreducible objections to religious faith:’
The degree to which any particular reader thinks they succeed in these aims probably has as much to do with their prior beliefs as with the arguments presented by Hitchens and Dawkins but, whether you agree with them or not, it is quite possibly a good idea to subject your existing view to some fairly rigorously structured criticism. It does apprear to be increasingly difficult to retain a literal interpretation of the scripture of any major faith, given evaluations of internal consistency, historical examination, and scientific inquiry.
What is often more interesting than the ontological claim made about the non-existence of god are the practical claims about what should be done in a world where the vast majority of people do believe in higher powers of various descriptions. Here, both writers are on shakier ground, though the question is an extremely difficult one. It is easier to condemn religious conflict and repression than it is to come up with practical mechanisms to reduce either. Within states, at least, there is some hope that a secular government can act to reduce such problematic manifestations of faith. Internationally, or in areas of active and religiously motivated war, relatively few such options seem to exist.
In an age where religious conflict, the question of tolerance, and multiculturalism have so much salience, both books are well constructed to make you think. Dawkins’ book is more comprehensively argued and systematic. Unless you have read a good sample of his work already, it is probably the better of the two volumes to read in isolation. That said, while his work is characterized by academic contemplation (and isolation), Hitchens has a more immediate perspective on some aspects of the operation of religion in the contemporary world.
I suspect people will get more from the volume written by the author with whom they are less familiar. Having read most of Dawkins’ prior books, relatively little in The God Delusion was a surprise. Having never before read Hitchens, the style of god is not Great was as novel as much of the content.
Loyal readers have helped my brother Mica win video contests before, and their efforts have been much appreciated. Now, Mica is in the final ten for the Molson Canadian contest mentioned here earlier. If he wins, he gets a nice contribution towards reduced student loans.
This one is a bit more of a pain to vote in than the previous competitions. Firstly, you need to have a Facebook account. Secondly, you need to join the group ‘Molson Canadian Nation.’ Thirdly, you need to sign up as a ‘Molson Insider.’ Unfortunately, this needs to be done with a real email address, since they send you a verification message. By now, everybody probably has a secondary account used for such spam-inviting registrations.
Each Molson Insider can vote once per day, and the final round of the contest runs until Friday. Once properly registered, you can vote here. Only those in Canada can vote. Any support would be much appreciated. More of Mica’s videos can be viewed on his website, where he really ought to put some kind of post about this contest.
[Update: 28 September 2007] The results are back and Mica finished second. As such, he will be getting some sort of prize pack instead of $5000. Thanks to all those readers who voted for him. I think this is the first video contest he has entered that he did not win outright.
At the next UNFCCC conference of the parties (COP-13 / MOP-3), in Bali this December, the focus will be on devising an international agreement for the period after 2012. Obviously, an agreement that incorporates the United States would be a lot more viable than one that does not, though it is unlikely that the current administration would sign on to such an undertaking. As such, I wonder whether it might be possible or desirable to come up with an agreement that basically has a USA shaped hole in it: an open invitation for the United States to become involved after the 2008 election, with space having been set out for US participation.
If such an approach were taken, the choice about whether or not to bring the US ship into the port facility provided could become a significant political factor in the next election. The willingness of various candidates to accept or reject the offer could be one characteristic upon which the populace could evaluate them. Furthermore, having such an option from the outset would help avoid a situation where an agreement gets crafted – say – from 2012 to 2020, excluding the United States, and it then proves necessary to wait for the end of that commitment before an international regime including them may be devised.
I am just thinking off the top of my head here, but it seems like a potentially valuable strategy. Of course, the feasibility of any such approach depends upon a substantial proportion of the rest of the world being able to reach agreement on what ought to be done post-2012. It is difficult to predict, at this point in time, whether such consensus is likely to emerge.
In the most common system of taxonomy, as we should all have learned in high school, human beings are Animalia Chordata Mammalia Primata Hominidae Homo Sapiens. The first bit essentially means that we eat something other than sunlight. The second bit means we are descended – like all other vertebrates – from Pikaia gracilens. This creature lived about 570 million years ago and was part of the Cambrian explosion: so spectacularly displayed in the Burgess shale near the border of British Columbia.
Pikaia was initially mis-categorized as a worm. Now, it seems that the combination of segments, muscles, and a flexible dorsal rod embodied in this little creature may mean that it was the first vertebrate: the template for all those alive today. From the first vertebrate species, all amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals evolved. From tuna fish to orangutan, we may all be descendents of Pikaia. Writing about the animal in Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould highlights both its huge evolutionary legacy and the degree to which it arose as the result of many change occurrences. If we could go back all those millions of years and let time unroll again, it is highly likely that we would have a profoundly different world at the end.
You can begin to imagine how staggeringly different the contemporary world would be if this little creature hadn’t survived and spread. The old view of evolution as a linear and predictable progression towards ‘higher’ organisms – a surprisingly common teleological view – is laid to rest by the contemplation of the degree to which chance can nudge history down one or another track.
September 26th is the next full moon. That night, I recommend getting hold of a pair of field glasses and having a look at our closest significant stellar neighbour. In particular, note the large impact crater near the moon’s south pole. The Tycho Brahe crater was determined to be about 100 million years old, on the basis of samples collected by the Apollo 17 mission. While such craters soon fall victim to erosion from air and water on Earth, they are well preserved on the airless moon.
Such craters are not just of geological interest. They testify to the reality of impacts from comets and asteroids. A sufficiently large such strike could have devastating effects for humanity. In 2029, we will get a reminder of how close some objects are to hitting us, when the 99942 Apophis asteroid will pass so close to the Earth that it will be between communications satellites in geostationary orbits and us. For a while, this asteroid topped the Torino impact hazard scale. NASA estimates that the impact of Apophis would be equivalent to the explosion of 880 megatonnes of TNT: about 58,000 times the yield of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
There is a small but real chance that the close pass of Apophis will alter its course such that it hits us on its next pass, in 2036. In response, a spaceflight subsidiary of EADS called Astrium is proposing a mission to learn more about the asteroid, study its composition, and investigate options for deflecting its orbit, if necessary.
In one sense, we are lucky with Apophis. It was discovered back in 2004 and has since had its orbit accurately tracked. A comet, by contrast, is essentially invisible until proximity to the sun causes it to melt and produce a tail. It is entirely possible that such an object could strike the Earth with little or no warning whatsoever.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a collection of technologies often mentioned in connection with global warming. Essentially, the idea is to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by things like power plants and then sequester it indefinitely in some sort of geological formation, such as a mined salt dome. While this idea is worthy of discussion in itself, my focus here is a number of approaches often described as CCS, but which do not achieve the same long-term result.
Some people have proposed that, rather than burying carbon underground, we just pump it into the sea. One option I am not going to discuss now is making big pools of liquid carbon dioxide in the very deep ocean. Rather, I will address the idea of using pipelines from shore or trailing from ships to release CO2 about 1000m down. Another alternative with similar effects is to make huge chunks of dry ice and throw them overboard, hoping most of the carbon will sink. Rather than being a type of CCS, these activities migtht be more accurately called ‘oceanic dumping of CO2.’
A matter of equilibrium
The problem here is both fundamental and intuitive. Think about a large plastic bottle of cola. With regards to the carbon dioxide, there is an equilibrium that exists between the amount dissolved in the liquid and the amount that is part of the air at the top of the bottle. As long as the system is closed (the cap is on), the amount of gas in air and water will trend towards that equilibrium point and, once the balance is achieved, stay there. This is what chemists mean when they say that equilibrium states display ‘constant macroscopic properties.’ CO2 from the water is still moving into the air, but it is now doing so at precisely the same rate as CO2 from the air is moving into the water. This is inevitable because if one rate were higher, the relative concentrations would change, and would continue doing so until the equlibrium was reached.
Now imagine that we change the equilibrium. If we take the cap off the bottle, the air inside mixes immediately with the air outside. Since the air inside has more CO2 than the air outside (because some of it has come out of the cola), this mixing causes the concentration of carbon dioxide at the surface of the cola to fall (we are ignoring the effects of atmospheric pressure in this analogy). As a consequence, the cola will start to release CO2, trying to get back to the old equilibrium between cola-dissolved and air-mixed gas. Since there is a lot more air, the equilibrium eventually reached will involve a lot less gas-in-cola. The cola goes flat. In the alternative, if we put a chip of dry ice into the cola and kept the cap on, a new equilibrium would eventually be reached in which both the cola and the air include a higher concentration of CO2.
Consequences
Dumping CO2 in the ocean thereby achieves two first-order effects. Firstly, it carbonates the sea, making it more acidic. Oceanic acidification is worrisome enough without such a helping hand. Secondly, it eventually results in an air-water balance of CO2 that is identical to the one that would have occurred if the CO2 started in the atmosphere. No matter which fluid it begins in, the same amount of CO2 at the same pressure will eventually result in the same balance between air-mixed and water-dissolved gas. It is just a matter of time. This is an important concept to understand, as it is the very heart of physical and chemical equilibria.
One big second order consequence results from this. If we do build such pipelines and do start carbonating the sea, people may decide that very carbon intensive technologies (such as coal generation or, even worse, Coal-to-Liquids) are environmentally acceptable. Using them in combination with oceanic dumping will inevitably have the same long-term atmospheric consequence as dumping the CO2 directly into the air.
Now, there is one reason for which oceanic dumping might be a good idea. Imagine there is some critical threshold for the atmospheric concentration of CO2: stay below it and things are reasonably ok, go above it and things all go wrong. In this scenario, it makes sense to store a bunch of CO2 and release it little by little. Of course, this only makes sense if we (a) only do this with CO2 we were inevitably going to release anyway (no new coal plants) and (b) aggressively cut future emissions so that the slow leak will not make us cross the threshold. Suffice it to say, this isn’t the kind of usage most advocates of CCS have in mind.