Science – Page 43 – a sibilant intake of breath

Carbon capture and storage (CCS), always around the corner

One odd thing about following climate change as a scientific, political, and ethical issue is the disparity between different sorts of relevant timelines. There is a rate at which scientific reports come out, a rate at which public opinion about climate change shifts, and a rate at which firms feel the need to change their public images. There are also much slower shifts – slower primarily because they are costly and require massive physical changes to energy systems.

Back in 2008, in a presentation at Cambridge University, the UK Environment Secretary Ed Miliband expressed his view that carbon capture and storage (CCS) was just around the corner. He says that all of the necessary technologies have been tried successfully, and the next step is a demonstration facility. He goes on to quote the European Commission’s hope of: “every new power station in Europe being carbon capture and storage ready by 2010 and using carbon capture and storage by 2020.”

We’re still waiting for that demonstration plant. This is not to say that CCS has no contribution to make to fighting climate change. Indeed, paired with power plants burning biomass, it could remove CO2 from the air in a promising way. Rather, there has been a persistent notion that CCS is just around the corner. We need a demo plant, then we can somehow magically retrofit the world’s coal stations and solve our climate problems without shutting them down or abandoning coal as a source of energy.

I can see why that is appealing, even for those not beholden to coal-dependent utilities or coal mining interests. China has lots of coal, and it is scary to think what will happen if they burn it all. That fear can give people a powerful reason to hope that CCS will mop up the whole problem without much fuss.

In the near term, CCS seems to have more potential to delay action – keeping us clinging to the belief that some wonderful technology will save the day. Meanwhile, the window in which we can take action to avoid catastrophic climate change is shrinking, and the total costs of the transition are rising as the time we have left in which to complete it diminishes.

Long-term changes in happiness

The final lecture of the psychology course I have been following focuses on the question of what makes people happy.

In addition to a lot of things that are already common knowledge – such as how winning the lottery is not all it’s cracked up to be – it includes a couple of examples of things that have a persistent effect on your happiness. This contrasts with things like the acquisition of a new gadget, which prompts a brief spike that soon falls back to normalcy.

One thing that makes people persistently happier is plastic surgery. Apparently, this is because time doesn’t desensitize us to how other people respond to our appearance. Neither does it affect how our own perception about our experience affects our mental lives. For those who don’t want to go to the extreme length of surgery, it seems plausible that improving your wardrobe could have a similar effect. Replace some shabby garment with one that you are proud to wear, and it may well make you happier for as long as you own it. I can speak to this from personal experience. Replacing my squeaky, ugly, plastic Rockport shoes with some nice leather Allen Edmonds shoes has made me feel consistently more qualified and capable at work.

Another thing that affects happiness persistently, though in a negative way, is noise. I know plenty about this personally, since I live right beside a busy street, on the ground floor, with my bedroom window right beside a speed bump that people often damage their cars on. This has bothered me every single day since I moved in, particularly when cars wake me up in the morning. I recall being annoyed by similar circumstances in the past, such as the noisy birds outside the Totem Park residence at UBC, or the booming clock beside my house in North Oxford.

The practical message of all of this seems to be: don’t spend your money on electronic gadgets, photo gear, or other expensive trinkets. Definitely don’t spend it on lottery tickets, which are likely to leave you less happy in the very unlikely situation where you win. Spend it on quiet housing and improving your appearance. Another good investment might be Professor Paul Bloom’s forthcoming book: How Pleasure Works. The New Science of Why We Like What We Like.

James Bond is a psychopath

Another interesting observation from the Paul Bloom psychology course I have been following concerns this fictional character, as well as real-life individuals who share some of his features:

They’re typically male. They are defined as selfish, callous, impulsive, they’re sexually promiscuous. They seem to lack love, loyalty, normal feelings of affiliation and compassion, and they get into all sorts of trouble because they’re easily bored and they seek out stimulation. Now, when you hear this, you’ve got to realize that this sort of person is not necessarily an unattractive person to imagine or think about or even under some circumstances to encounter. You have to avoid the temptation when you think about psychopath to think about a guy like this, to think about Hannibal Lecter. The most famous psychopath, of course, is James Bond who is a perfect psychopath in every regard as played… by Sean Connery.

Bloom elaborates in talking about real-life individuals, and whether psychopathy is an illness:

[P]sychologists study psychopaths but the psychopaths that they study are by definition unsuccessful psychopaths. And what some people have argued is the real psychopaths, the successful ones, are the ones that run the world, that excel in every field because they are successful enough that they don’t look like psychopaths. They have no conscience, no compassion, love, loyalty. They are cold-blooded and ambitious but they don’t go around making this so obvious that we throw them in prison. And so, it’s an interesting and subtle and complicated case.

It does seem inherently plausible that the kind of people who can attain positions of great power have these tendencies, and also have the ability to conceal them from others. This is where the wisdom behind Douglas Adams’ insightful perspective on politicians: “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

What lessons can we draw from this? Perhaps it tells us something about the nature of authority and power dynamics in human societies. Perhaps it should inform us to some extent about what to expect from elected officials, as well as those who attain power by other means (such as leaders of coups). It may be even more applicable to the world of business or the military than to democratic politics. In those cases, the number of people who you need to impress with your competence is smaller, and the people who you are impressing are likely to be more tolerant of ruthlessness and a lack of empathy.

Alcohol as fuel and drug

I occasionally encounter people who are surprised to learn that alcohol itself contains many of the calories contained in alcoholic drinks. In some sense, the surprise is understandable; after all, we think of alcohol as a drug and a poison more than as a food. That being said, when ethanol enters the human body, it “is converted into acetaldehyde by alcohol dehydrogenase and then into acetic acid by acetaldehyde dehydrogenase.” Both of these reactions produce energy that your body can use.

In another sense, it is a bit obvious that ethanol is full of energy. Remember, alcohol has been used before as a fuel for vehicles, and even for rockets. Gasoline contains about 32 megajoules of energy per litre. By comparison, pure ethanol contains 23.5 megajoules: 73% of what is in the gasoline.

As a consequence, vodka (40% ethanol) contains 9.4 megajoules per litre: about 30% of what is in gasoline. So, to get a sense of the energy content of your drink, multiply the quantity of pure ethanol it contains by 0.73. Then, think about the energy that volume of gasoline would release, when burned. A six pack of beer (two litres at 5% alcohol) contains about as much energy as as two shotglasses (70mL) full of gasoline. A bottle of wine (750mL at 12% alcohol), is about the same.

Expressed another way, a bottle of wine contains enough energy (2.1 megajoules) to lift a small apple 2.1 million metres. It also represents the same amount of energy as a 2.1 tonne vehicle going 160km/h. A drop of beer contains 100 joules.

Doctors and conditional probabilities

While it is not surprising, it is worrisome that doctors have trouble with statistics, particularly conditional probabilities. 25 German doctors were asked about the following situation. It is clearly a tricky question, but it is surely a type of question that doctors are exposed to constantly:

The probability that one of these women has breast cancer is 0.8 percent. If a woman has breast cancer, the probability is 90 percent that she will have a positive mammogram. If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability is 7 percent that she will still have a positive mammogram. Imagine a woman who has a positive mammogram. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?

The results of this small trial were not encouraging:

[The] estimates whipsawed from 1 percent to 90 percent. Eight of them thought the chances were 10 percent or less, 8 more said 90 percent, and the remaining 8 guessed somewhere between 50 and 80 percent. Imagine how upsetting it would be as a patient to hear such divergent opinions.

As for the American doctors, 95 out of 100 estimated the woman’s probability of having breast cancer to be somewhere around 75 percent.

The right answer is 9 percent.

You would think that this sort of quantitative analysis would play an important role in the medical profession. I am certain that a great many people around the world have received inappropriate treatment or taken unnecessary risks because doctors have failed to properly apply Bayes’ Theorem. Indeed, false positives in medical tests are a very commonly used example of where medical statistics can be confusing. It is also a problem for biometric security protocols, useful for filtering spam email, and a common source of general statistical errors.

The proper remedy for this is probably to provide doctors with simple-to-use tools that allow them to go from data of the kind in the original question to a correct analysis of probabilities. The first linked article also provides a good example of a more intuitive way to think about conditional probabilities.

Psychology and romantic attraction

The psychology course I have been following features a Valentine’s Day lecture about love. Mostly, it is about what seems to make people attracted to one another, as demonstrated by psychological experiments.

Professor Peter Salovey, the guest lecturer, argues that we have empirical evidence for seven major causes of attraction. Three of them are fairly obvious, but very demonstrably important. The next four are more subtle, but are also supported by experimental investigation.

The big three:

Proximity – we are more likely to get romantically involved with those who we live near
Familiarity – the more we see a person, the more likely we are to get involved with them
Similarity – apparently, opposites do not attract

The practical utility of this is obvious, for those looking for a romantic partner. Move to an area with people who you find attractive, and participate in social events with like-minded people, so as to improve your odds of being similar to and familiar with attractive people.

The more subtle four:

Competence – the people who we like the very best are those that strike us as highly competent, but who make some sort of humanizing blunder
Physical attractiveness – many people underestimate how important a factor this is for themselves
An increasingly positive view – if someone seems to be warming towards us, it is highly interesting
Mis-attribution of good feelings – we feel good or excited for a reason unrelated to a person, but wrongly attribute the feeling to them

These all also suggest dating strategies. The last two seem particularly easy to manipulate. It is also worth noting that we are most attracted to people who seem to be very exclusive in their choice of partners, but who we do not expect to be picky or difficult in our case. That may not be enough to constitute a Revolutionary New Dating Paradigm, but it might be helpful for some people.

Climate change and the seal hunt

Over the weekend, I found myself wondering about the relative impact of Canada’s extremely controversial seal hunt and climate change, when it comes to the prospects for Grey Seals and Harp Seals.

Given that it seems highly likely that climate change will eventually eliminate summer sea ice, and given that creatures including seals seem to be critically dependent on sea ice, it does seem possible that climate change will render these seal species extinct, eventually, or will sharply curtail their numbers.

Stage one of a comparative analysis would be developing an estimate of how many seals would have lived between the present and the non-human-induced extinction of the species. They could potentially endure until the end of the carbon cycle, or until the sun expands into a red giant. More plausibly, they might exist in large numbers until the next time natural climate change produces a world too hot to include Arctic sea ice.

If we had an estimate of how far off that probably is, and an estimate of the mean number of seals that would be alive across that span, then we can estimate how many seals would be lost if humanity eliminates summer sea ice and, by extension, wipes out or sharply curtails the number of these animals in the wild.

It is possible to imagine a chart showing seal population year by year, extending far into the future. There could be one shaded segment showing the projected seal population in the absence of human intervention, and others showing possible population crashes resulting from anthropogenic climate change. A third shaded area could show the number of seals taken annually by hunters. The relative area of the shaded regions would show the relative magnitude of hunting and climate change, as causes of seal mortality. If you think of all the seals that would have lived, if we hadn’t locked in the eventual disappearance of summer arctic sea ice, the number killed by hunters is probably quite small.

My suspicion is that hunting would be a tiny blip, compared with climate change. If so, the environmentalist campaign to end seal hunting seems misdirected. Even if protesters are more concerned about animal cruelty than about species sustainability, this argument seems to hold up. Surely it is cruel for the seals to suffer and slowly die off as their habitat loses the capacity to sustain them.

I think it would be well worth some serious organization producing an quantitative version of the argument above. Like ducks, it seems quite possible that seals are distracting us from the environmental issues we should really combating, or at least encouraging us to respond to those issues in a less effective way than we could.

Psychology of language learning

Continuing with the introductory psychology course I mentioned earlier, I have gotten to the section on language. A few of the things mentioned in it seem to have quite a bit of practical importance:

Elaborate language learning tools like flashcards are pointless, for teaching children language.
Pre-pubescent children are fundamentally more capable of learning languages than people beyond puberty, who will likely never be able to speak new languages without an accent.
Children learning two languages at once learn both just as fast as children learning only one or the other.
Being intelligent and social is not sufficient for a being to be capable of learning language. For instance, mutations in certain human genes can prevent people from ever being able to speak or understand language.
There is a strong genetic component in the ability people have to learn languages; those with parents skilled in the task are likely to be skilled as well.

The take-home message seems to be that if you want to give a child linguistic advantages, expose them to two or more useful languages as young as possible.

Back up genes from endangered species

Out in Svalbard there is a seed bank, buried in the permafrost. The idea is that it will serve as a refuge for plant species that may vanish elsewhere, perhaps because industrial monocrops (fields where only a single species is intentionally cultivated by industrial means) continue to expand as the key element of modern agriculture.

Perhaps there should be a scientific and conservational project to collect just the genes of some of the great many species our species is putting into peril: everything from primates to mycorrhizal fungi to marine bacteria. The data could be stored, and maybe put to use at some distant point where humanity at large decides that it is better to carefully revive species than to indifferently exterminate them.

For many creatures, the genes alone won’t really be enough, regardless of how good at cloning we become. An elephant or a chimp built up alone from cells would never really become and elephant or chimp as they exist today. Whether those alive now are socialized in a natural or an artificial environment, they will have had some context-sensitive socialization, which subsequently affected their mental life. It is plausible to say that elephants or chimps raised among their peers, living in the way they did thousands of years ago, will develop mentally in a manner that is profoundly different from elephants or chimps in captivity today, much less solitary cloned beings in the future. Those beings will be weird social misfit representatives of those species.

Still, it is better to have misfits than nothing at all. If there is anything human beings should really devote themselves to backing up with a cautious eye turned towards an uncertain future, it seems far more likely to be the genes of species our descendants may not be fortunate enough to know than the Hollywood movies that probably account for a significant proportion of all the world’s hard drives.

CRU exonerated again

As was the case with an earlier review by British Members of Parliament, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been cleared of wrongdoing for a second time. An independent panel chaired by Lord Oxburgh found no evidence of scientific malpractice, though it did encourage the CRU to work more with statisticians in the future.

The full report is here: Report of the International Panel set up by the University of East Anglia to examine the research of the Climatic Research Unit.

Once again, the message seems to be that whatever flaws existed within the CRU do not undermine it fundamentally as an institution, and certainly do not call climate science overall into question. Hopefully, that result will percolate through the media. In the end, I fear, these reviews will get a lot less public attention than the earliest breathless claims of climate change deniers that these emails somehow proved climate change to be a hoax or a fraud.