Science – Page 99 – a sibilant intake of breath

Geminid meteor shower

Those of you with clear skies should make a point of peering at them tonight. The shower – produced by debris from a near-Earth asteroid called 3200 Phaethon – should become increasingly intense throughout the night, peaking in intensity around dawn. According to NASA, this should be the best meteor shower of the year. It may well be worth getting up before dawn (or staying up especially late) and looking to the western sky.

3200 Phaethon is thought to be a former comet, dust from which began intercepting Earth’s orbit annually during the American Civil War. The object is about 5 kilometres wide and misses the earth by only 2 million kilometres. If you have access to a decent telescope (many university observatories are open to the public some nights), you can observer Phaethon in the constellation Virgo. It only has the brightness of a 14th magnitude star, so neither the naked eye nor binoculars are sufficient to pick it out.

Climate and the boreal forest

According to data submitted by Global Forest Watch Canada to the International Boreal Conservation Campaign (IBCC), Canada’s boreal forest contains 186 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That is equal to about 27 years worth of present global emissions. Permafrost – which is rich in methane – makes up about 25% of the world’s land area and about 50% of Canada.

Significant permafrost melting would release gasses that would accelerate the warming trend. Making boreal areas into parks and avoiding deforestation there isn’t a terribly effective mechanism for keeping the bulk of these greenhouse gasses in the soil. The trees themselves are increasingly threatened by pine beetles, as warm winters permit their continued spread. Maintaining the soils as a carbon sink essentially requires that they remain cold – an increasingly distant prospect as emissions continue to grow and other carbon sinks become saturated.

No Arctic summer ice in 2012-13?

According to a BBC article, some scientists are predicting the disappearance of all Arctic summer ice within five to six years. This projection is based on computer modeling by Wieslaw Maslowski and uses data that doesn’t even take into account the spectacular loss of Arctic ice last summer. Maslowski’s team has produced an estimated rate of loss much higher than those of other groups who have studied the issue, but he defends the quality of his modeling:

“We use a high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice forced with realistic atmospheric data. This way, we get much more realistic forcing, from above by the atmosphere and from the bottom by the ocean.”

Even the work of other teams suggests the loss of summer ice between 2040 and 2100: a very rapid climatic change, given how most forms of natural climatic forcing operate on the timescale of millennia

The progressive deterioration of the northern polar cryosphere is disturbing for a number of reasons. Because water absorbs more energy from sunlight than ice does, the loss of the icecap would accelerate global warming. It would also eliminate or substantially alter the lifestyles of those living in the north, as well as most Arctic species. That said, there is some chance that the sudden disappearance of the Arctic icecap would be dramatic and irrefutable enough to kick off much more serious global action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and prepare to adapt to the amount of change that is now inevitable. In a world where the Arctic vanished before our eyes, radical ideas like those of Monbiot may start seeming reasonable to a lot more people.

Another climatic threat: jökulhlaups

In some parts of the world, large lakes are bounded by natural dams made of glacial ice. When the ice melts, the resulting surges of water are comparable in effect to the failure of human-made dams. Merzbacher Lake, in Kyrgyzstan, has completely emptied 39 times, following such events. An article in Geophysical Research Letters describes that lake in greater detail.

Significant past examples of such glacial lake outbursts occurred in Iceland, Alaska, Canada, and Bhutan. While relatively few areas are threatened by such events, they are demonstrative of the kind of change that is ongoing in the cryosphere.

Tsho Rolpa, a glacial lake in Nepal, seems to be due for such an event. It is 4580m above sea level and dammed by 150m of ice. The melting of the Trakarding Glacier is feeding the growth of the lake, which will eventually breach the ice wall in a highly dramatic manner. Local communities have been building raised watchtowers and shoring up embankments. Tsho Rolpa is one of 2,323 glacial lakes in the Nepalese Himalayas.

The eradication of smallpox

On this day in 1979, the World Health Organization certified that smallpox had been eliminated from the wild. It was probably the only intentional extinction in human history, and it was a considerable boon to the human race. The disease is an atrocious one, and it took a heavy toll across history. Notably, it caused much of the death associated with the arrival of Europeans in North America.

The extinction raises a number of questions. One is whether it will ever be repeated. We came close with polio. Very few people would mourn the elimination of tuberculosis, malaria, or AIDS. Worldwide eradication requires global coordination – something very hard to bring about when territories exist outside the control of any state. Think of the tribal areas bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Another issue has to do with smallpox itself. It was horrifically destructive to the First Nations because they lacked any of the immunity conferred by prior exposure. Now, the whole world is in essentially the same boat. An intentional or accidental release of the weaponized smallpox produced by many states could thus cause of devastating global pandemic. It rather makes one wish we had never turned it into a weapon in the first place.

Meat and antibiotics

Quite a while ago, I wrote about connections between human disease and the factory farming of animals. Recently, some new observational data has supported the link between the two. In the Netherlands, a new form of the superbug MRSA has emerged. It is strongly resistant to treatment with tetracycline antibiotics: a variety heavily used on livestock. The animals need the drugs because they are kept in such appalling conditions (unhygienic and constrained) that they would get infections too easily otherwise.

Xander Huijsdens and Albert de Neeling found that 39% of pigs and 81% of pig farms in the Netherlands were hosts to the potentially lethal antibiotic resistant bacteria. People who came into contact with pigs were 12 times more likely to contract this form of MRSA than members of the ordinary population; those who come into contact with cattle are 20 times more susceptible. The strain has since been found in Denmark, France, and Singapore. A study conducted by the University of Guelph found the strain in 25% of local pigs and 20% of pig farmers.

Maintaining the effectiveness of antibiotics for the treatment of people is highly important for human welfare. Antibiotics are one of the major reasons why modern medicine is valuable: they help people die dramatically less often after childbirth and surgery than was the case before their development. They have also helped to make diseases that would formerly have been probable death sentences treatable. The fact that we are allowing farms to deplete their value so that they can produce meat more cheaply (by forcing more animals closer together in less clean conditions) seems profoundly unwise. In Pennsylvania, legislators have even banned farmers who produce hormone and antibiotic milk from saying so on their packaging – on the grounds that it would make consumers unduly worried about the other milk on offer.

Passionate Minds

I started Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Émilie du Châtelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and the Birth of the Modern World with high hopes. It promised science, literature, and history in an accessible package. That promise is only partially realized. While the book does reveal some of the most remarkable (and the most flawed) characteristics of both Voltaire and du Châtelet, it sometimes makes claims that stretch the evidence provided. Often, the book simply asserts things rather than seeking to prove them.

Bodanis’ central thesis – that Émilie du Châtelet has been given insufficient historical attention – is fairly robust. Clearly, hers was an extraordinary life: born into nobility, but driven towards science and the sometimes hapless literary life of Voltaire instead of occupying a more traditional position in the Court. At times, the book demonstrates startling contrasts between the way of life at the time and the present. This is especially true of the marriages: purely political and economic unions in which years of habitation with a prominent lover were apparently not too exceptional. When a court rival attacks Voltaire through a lawsuit, her husband comes to his defence – despite how Voltaire has been living with his wife for years and they are a highly prominent couple.

In the end, the book would have been better if it had focused less on intrigue and more on what significant scientific contributions du Châtelet actually made. Saying that “[m]ore technical aspects of her work played a great role in energizing the French school of theoretical physics, associated with Lagrande and Laplace” isn’t a very convincing way of showing historical importance. Likewise, the assertion that “[t]he use of the square of the speed of light, c², in Einstein’s most famous equation, E=mc² is directly traceable to her work” is never adequately argued.

The book does an excellent job of describing how atrocious the medicine of the time was, contributing to du Châtelet’s own relatively early death in childbirth. It also relates some fascinating historical episodes in an engaging way: for instance, the rigged lottery through which Voltaire made his fortune.

A book about du Châtelet written by someone with more of a focus on studying and explaining science would be a better tribute to the woman than this interesting yet flawed volume.

Clearing Indonesian rainforests for biofuel

I have already mentioned how important rainforests are to climatic stability. Likewise, the acute danger that biofuel production will lead to increased deforestation, either directly – through the madness that is palm oil biofuel – or indirectly – by increasing the price of crops like corn, the value of agricultural land, and the profits to be made from cutting down rainforest and growing cheaper things like soy there instead.

This video – found via Grist – does a good job of attaching some visuals to the argument. Unhappily enough, this crazy conversion of rainforest into palm oil biofuels is taking place in the very state where the UNFCCC is meeting right now, in order to try to tackle the problem of climate change.

‘Green’ fuel for military jets

There has recently been a fair bit of media coverage discussing an announcement from the United States Air Force that they are trying to use 50% synthetic fuel by 2016. The Lede, a blog associated with the New York Times, seems to misunderstand the issue completely. They are citing this as an example of the Air Force “trying to be true stewards of the environment.” There is no reason for which synthetic fuels are necessarily more environmentally friendly than petroleum; indeed, those made from coal are significantly worse.

The actual fuel being used – dubbed JP-8 – is made from natural gas. Air Force officials say they eventually intend to make it from coal, given that the United States has abundant reserves. This inititative is about symbolically reducing dependence on petroleum imports, not about protecting the environment. The German and Japanese governments did the same thing during the Second World War, when their access to oil was restricted. Furthermore, it is worth stressing that efforts by militaries to be greener are virtually always going to be window dressing. The operation of armed forces is inevitably hugely environmentally destructive: from munitions factories to test ranges to the wanton fuel inefficiency of aircraft afterburners, the whole military complex is about as anti-green as you can get.

People should be unwilling to accept superficial claims that installing some solar panels and building hybrid tanks is going to change that.

The efficiency of solar

Robert Rapier, petroleum expert, and Steve Heckeroth, writing for Mother Earth News, agree that solar power is the future.

Based on their calculations, the overall efficiency of biomass “from sun to wheel” is between 0.01% and 0.05%. By contrast, charging electric vehicles using solar power can produce efficiencies of 3% to 20% on the same metric. Electric drivetrains are also “5 to 10 times more efficient than internal combustion engines.” Even if power from conventional fuels is charging the vehicles, overall emissions are likely to be lower. It is also much easier to sequester greenhouse gas emissions from big power plants than to do the same thing with car exhaust.

If you insist on maintaining a car-based society, basing it around electric vehicles charged using renewable energy or fossil fuel generation with sequestration seems to be the way to go. Hybrids are only a minor improvement and hydrogen fuel cells are a non-starter.