Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

How aggressively skeptical to be

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, there is an interesting post about ‘skeptic etiquette.’ Specifically, this concerns the question of how aggressive one should be about debunking dubious claims made in social situations, whether those claims are about homeopathy, astrology, conspiracy theories, or what-have-you.

Personally, I tend to take a pretty aggressive approach, especially when the issue is one that has a major direct effect on people’s lives and future prospects. Beliefs like vaccines causing autism cause real damage, as do those about the non-existence of anthropogenic climate change. It may not always make you socially popular to call people on these things, but I think it is important to challenge deeply flawed ideas and modes of thinking, even when doing so produces awkwardness.

Admittedly, this approach has made me unpopular at a few dinner parties. The high point may have been when I conducted a limited double-blind clinical trial to disprove the idea that magnets ordered from infomercials improve the taste of wine.

Climate change and generations

Ann's baby, Kiran

Arguably, the more personally invested in a problem you become, the more you have to fear from a miracle solution. Say, for instance, you are a recent university graduate intensely concerned with climate change. If, a couple of years from now, someone develops a machine that can turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen and diamonds for ten dollars a tonne, you will probably be hugely relieved and excited. In one swoop, we would have dealt with climate change, while also providing a lot of very strong building material for ourselves. All hail The Diamond Age.

While I cannot speak from experience, it does seem as though the same development would appear quite different from the perspective of someone who has spent a whole career dealing with climate change, using conventional technologies, and who suddenly finds themselves confronted by this curveball. Certainly, there would be some who rejoiced with all the enthusiasm of the newbies. Others might feel redundant or even cheated, perhaps quite legitimately.

In some ways, this speculation reduces to the fact that humanity rarely, if ever, faces problems that are both multi-generational and wholly deliberate. The development of stone tools was multi-generational, but it wasn’t terribly strategic or deliberate at that timescale. Similarly, post-WWII reconstruction was strategic and directed, but did not really span across multi-dimensional time. At least, not in the same way that climate change probably will. Based on the relatively conservative projection of current trends of technological development, energy use, and human population, it may well be the case that complete and permanent carbon neutrality takes several hundred years to achieve.

Given the risks that exist, we need to commit ourselves to the long haul process of carbon neutrality the difficult way, while retaining the flexibility to adopt a less challenging path, should it be presented to us. That combination of flexibility, determination, and objective evaluation will be a difficult thing to develop and maintain.

Oceans added to Google Earth

Google’s decision to add seabed data to Google Earth is welcome. It is now conventional wisdom to argue that humanity knows less about the open oceans than we do about many of the stellar bodies in the solar system. That being said, given the level of pressure humanity is placing upon the oceans, coupled with the vital role they play in the planet’s biological functioning, gaining an appreciation for the nature and importance of the oceans is a critical medium-term undertaking for humanity.

One decidedly welcome thing about my new computer is that it has the processing and graphics power to make the Google Earth flight simulator smooth and visually compelling. It is neat to do something similar with the Mariana Trench.

Obama visiting Canada

President Barack Obama will be visiting Canada on February 19th. Presumably, that will include some sort of large public gathering, hopefully with an appearance from the man himself. In preparation, it seems fitting to contemplate what sort of message it would be most valuable to convey to the new president.

With that aim in mind, I propose that people submit their best ideas for a message that could be put on a placard for the media (and maybe even the President) to catch a glimpse of. Text versions and images would both be welcome. The former can be posted as simple comments. In the latter case, people can email images to me for possible posting. My immediate idea would be something along the lines of:

The oil sands are a trap!
Choose zero-carbon energy!

These days, it seems that the best hope for an aggressive shift towards decarbonizing the global economy comes from the possibility of new US leadership and the destruction of the reckless approach to energy the world is using at present. The challenge of expressing that general necessity in a compact statement is a considerable one.

Ice and solar power

Indirectly, Ottawa winters provide a good demonstration of just how immense a quantity of solar energy there really is on this planet. Consider the fact that the Earth’s axial tilt produces thirty degree weather here in the summer and negative thirty degree weather here in the winter. Walk out onto the frozen surface of Dow’s Lake and think about how the only reason the lake is ever liquid is because of the massive amount of solar energy striking it in the spring and summer. Then, recall that all the lakes and seas everywhere on Earth would freeze solid without the constant solar influx. This is well illustrated by the frozen moons in the outer portion of our solar system.

Burning all the world’s fossil fuels wouldn’t let us keep oceans liquid, in the absence of solar assistance. Moving to an energy system that relies directly (solar photovoltaic and concentrating solar) or indirectly (wind, hydroelectricity, biomass) on the sun is an overwhelmingly important part of creating a sustainable society. The amount of energy available to harness vastly exceeds the amount we can drill or dig up out of the ground.

Climate change and the perception of threat

Winter pigeons and bricks

This David Roberts post, over at Gristmill, discusses the relationships between public awareness of climatic science and the need to take action on climate change. In short, it concludes that the general public will not understand climatic science in the foreseeable future. The critical task is not to make them do so. Rather, what is critical is altering the answers they reach when they ask themselves the two questions through which they evaluate potential problems:

  1. “Is this a problem that threatens me/my family/my tribe? Is there an imminent threat? Is it an emergency?”
  2. “Do the proposed solutions to the problem threaten me/my family/my tribe? Am I going to get screwed?”

It goes on to argue that scientific reports and data will not change how people answer these questions. Rather, to get action on climate change, the following must be done:

  1. “Greens, politicians, and other communicators need to get serious about calling climate change the impending catastrophe it is, with serious, dire consequences for people now living, certainly for their children. That means risking being called “hysterics” by conservatives and their dupes in the media.”
  2. “The same folks need to get better at showing the public the opportunities and benefits of action. It’s about expanding the winner’s circle and making damn sure everybody in it, or potentially in it, knows about it.” (emphasis in original)

This is a strategy quite different from climate change mitigation by stealth, but it does seek to respond to the same fundamental problems of selfishness and misunderstanding.

The critical flaw in thinking we can achieve a technocratic solution to climate change is a failure to appreciate the influence of those who will be harmed by effective climate change mitigation efforts (such as coal and oil sands producers), as well as their willingness to manipulate the public into demanding inaction. In order to counter the influence of such status quo powers, there does need to be a political constituency for effective climate change action. I think Roberts is basically correct in asserting that it will be through changing the public perception of risk and opportunity that such a constituency might best be constructed.

The usefulness of being methodical

'Justice' stonework

Whenever I need to wake up early in order to catch a bus or train, I make sure to lay everything out in a clear and sequential manner. That is the most effective way of not forgetting critical items, while also not wasting too much time checking and re-checking things. While, in my case, it is early-morning brain woolliness that makes such clear sequencing valuable, there is evidence that simple lists and straightforward procedures can also serve a useful purpose in situations where complex and demanding tasks are undertaken, sometimes making it too easy to forget a seemingly small but crucial step. Flying airplanes and performing surgery are examples. Indeed, it seems that the pilots might be able to teach some useful techniques to the men and women with the scalpels.

Some recently published research has shown that a simple World Health Organization (WHO) checklist (PDF) is highly valuable for preventing surgical mishaps. The British National Patient Safety Agency found that the use of the checklist (which includes simple items like having the surgical staff confirm the patient, site, and procedure to be performed) can cut deaths by over 40% and complications by over a third. The finding is especially impressive due to the sample size examined: 7,688 patients, 3,733 before the checklist was implemented, and 3,955 afterwards. The patients were located in a diverse collection of countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Jordan, India, the Philippines, and Tanzania. Clearly, surgeons worldwide tend to overlook the same things.

It’s a curious quirk of human nature that someone can be both capable of performing advanced cardiac surgery and capable of forgetting a sponge inside the patient’s body while sewing them up. Hopefully, simple tools like the WHO checklist will help the former to occur more successfully without the danger of the latter. In a less specific context, it is worth remembering the value of simple tools that produce welfare improvements quite disproportional to their cost or difficulty of use.

Fishing, weather, and uncontrolled experiments

New Scientist recently published an interesting article discussing the importance of weather for fisheries. Specifically, it examines some of the ways in which weather and climatic phenomena affect the stocks of individual species and the balance of species within an ecosystem. Important mechanisms through which effects are transmitted include changed ocean temperatures and the aggravated mixing of nutrient-rich deep waters and sunlight-rich surface waters. Where they are persistent, such upwellings produce some of the world’s most fertile marine habitats, such as those off the west coast of Africa.

When it comes to the ocean in general, humanity is in the midst of an overlapping series of massive experiments: bumping the temperature and acidity by emitting CO2, altering salinity by melting ice, aggressively fishing for creatures of all kinds, dumping plastics into the oceans, and so forth. Given the scale of these actions, the unknown linkages between them, and our poor level of overall knowledge about the chemistry and biology of the oceans, it would be surprising if all this did not produce major unexpected changes in the biological makeup of the seas within the next half-century or so.

Fossil fuels and industrialization

Emily Horn in duotone

Given our present energy and climate predicament, it is interesting to contemplate how human history would have progressed in the absence of large supplies of coal, oil, and gas. Before efficient steam engines existed, heavy industry depended on mechanical water power to grind flour, saw wood, and so forth. Steam engines and coal helped kick off the path of development that leads to the present world, in which fossil fuels play critical roles as energy sources, inputs for agriculture, and feedstocks for chemical manufacture.

On a planet without fossil fuels, industrialization would probably have made use of mechanical water and wind energy for far longer. It is an open question whether such a society could ever have reached the point of being able to build current-generation renewables, such as electric wind and hydro turbines, solar photovoltaic panels, or concentrating solar arrays. It is possible, then, that only planets with ample and accessible supplies of fossil fuel are compatible with the development of things like spaceflight or computer networks. That could even be one explanation for the Fermi paradox: the question of why the vast observable universe hasn’t yet provided any signs of life outside our solar system.

The challenge now is to move beyond fossil fuel dependency, without losing the beneficial new capabilities that have largely arisen due to the use of those energy sources. Eventually, we need to reach a point where the whole lifecycle of energy production – including construction and dismantling of generation equipment – is accomplished in a zero carbon and sustainable way. We will also need to re-make global agriculture in a way that isn’t dependent on fossil fuels or fertilizers derived from them, as well as find ways to use biomass feedstocks in chemical manufacture. The fossil fuel era must be a one-off transition period in human history; at least, it must prove to be so if human history is to extend much longer.