The environment – Page 166 – a sibilant intake of breath

New climate change site from Nature

Nature, the respected scientific journal, has a new climate change portal full of free content. A free issue in the Nature Collections series on Energy is available as a PDF.

When relatively exlusive publications try to open themselves to a more general audience, the results can be interesting. In trunks back in North Vancouver, I have hundreds of issues of The Economist where all the images are black and white, and the pages are just columns of text sometimes accented in red. In the previous span where I subscribed to Scientific American they also made a big shift towards the mainstream. I doubt that Nature will undertake such a shift. It is, after all, a peer reviewed scientific journal, but it will be interesting to see whether their attempts to promote the visibility of some scientific data and analysis will shift the overall journalistic picture of climate change at all.

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood‘s novel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, portrays a future characterized by the massive expansion of human capabilities in genetic engineering and biotechnology. As such, it bears some resemblance to Neal Stephenson‘s The Diamond Age, which ponders what massive advances in material science could do, and posits similar stratification by class. Of course, biotechnology is an area more likely to raise ethical hackles and engage with the intuitions people have about what constitutes the ethical use of science.

Atwood does her best to provoke many such thoughts: bringing up food ethics, that of corporations, reproductive ethics, and survivor ethics (the last time period depicted is essentially post-apocalyptic). The degree to which this is brought about by a combination of simple greed, logic limited by one’s own circumstances, and unintended consequences certainly has a plausible feel to it.

The book is well constructed and compelling, obviously the work of someone who is an experienced storyteller. From a technical angle, it is also more plausible than most science fiction. It is difficult to identify any element that is highly likely to be impossible for humanity to ever do, if desired. That, of course, contributes to the chilling effect, as the consequences for some such actions unfold.

All in all, I don’t think the book has a straightforwardly anti-technological bent. It is more a cautionary tale about what can occur in the absence of moral consideration and concomitant regulation. Given how the regulation of biotechnology is such a contemporary issue (stem cells, hybrid embryos, genetic discrimination, etc), Atwood has written something that speaks to some of the more important ethical discussions occurring today.

I recommend the book without reservation, with the warning that readers may find themselves disturbed by how possible it all seems.

A storm by any other name

A couple of interesting facts relating to meteorological nomenclature:

First, a ‘cyclone’ is any “system of winds rotating around a centre of minimum barometric pressure,” according to the OED. Once those winds reach hurricane speeds (64 knots), the storm is called a ‘hurricane’ in North America; a ‘typhoon’ in the Northwest Pacific, west of the International Date Line; a ‘severe tropical cyclone’ in the Southwest Pacific, west of 160°E or the Southeast Indian Ocean east of 90°E; a ‘severe cyclonic storm’ in the North Indian Ocean; and a ‘tropical cyclone’ in the Southwest Indian Ocean.

Secondly, the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) names cyclones in a number of different regions several years in advance. If the list of names assigned for a season runs out (there are 21 assigned names per year) subsequent storms are named after the successive letters of the Greek alphabet. Short, distinctive names are used because doing so was found to produce fewer errors than designating storms on the basis of latitude and longitude. Sometimes, a storm is “so deadly or costly” that the NOAA retires the name, for reasons of emotional sensitivity.

Pressure and the price of gas

The tendency of gasoline to increase in price during the summer is well known. Partly, this reflects increased demand (which leads to an increased quantity sold at an increased price, given a particular supply curve). Partly, this is the consequence of how summer gasoline is a different blend of hydrocarbons. The reason for this is the need to prevent too much pressure from building up inside gas tanks as more of the liquid turns to vapour in the summer heat. This is standardized in terms of Reid vapour pressure (RVP): the pressure of any particular gasoline blend at 100°F (37.8°C) expressed in kilopascals, calibrated to a standard atmospheric pressure of 101.3 kPa.

RVP is used to specify which blends of gasoline are acceptable for sale at different ambiant temperatures. Gasoline with an RVP of over 14.7 will fairly easily pressurize gas tanks and gas cans in summer heat. It will also boil if left in open containers. As such, regulations require summer gasoline to contain less butane than the winter sort. This is on account of how butane is relatively inexpensive (making companies want to include more of it), but is also the most active contributor to vapour pressure. As such, the butane content of summer gasoline must be very low – one factor behind the higher price.

I learned all this from R-Squared, an energy blog that seems to be commonly cited. The blog makes one other important point: anyone considering storing cheap winter gasoline for use in the summer should consider the dangers of having the butane therein turn to vapour and start pressurizing the container in which it has been stored.

Some respite for bluefins

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.

A (very) partial response to David Suzuki

Last night, I saw David Suzuki speak at a conference on health and the environment. To my surprise, I was far from impressed with most of what he said. He essentially presented a false binary: conspicuous consumption on the one hand, or the preservation of pristine nature on the other. While I certainly acknowledge that a lot of consumption is unnecessary, that doesn’t mean that all sacrifices are of the same moral variety as him choosing not to fly to Australia.

The view that pesticides should not be used in farming was broadly echoed. No doubt, there can be abuse of pesticides and there is a human and ecological cost associated with employing them. That said, it hardly seems that we can take a message of pesticide abandonment to a world of six billion, in which one and a half billion live in extreme poverty. Calling for an end to economic growth means something rather different in Canada than it does in Brazil or Bangladesh or Bolivia. Likewise, not everyone in Canadian society can switch to more ecological (and expensive) options while making only trivial sacrifices.

As a public relations figure, Suzuki obviously has to simplify his messages and present things in a form that is fairly easily repeated and absorbed. That said, the parks-versus-SUVs form of environmentalism doesn’t have much chance of being relevant outside the thinking of a privileged global elite.

Chernobyl gets a new hat

At the same time as enthusiasm is growing for the use of nuclear fission as a non-greenhouse gas emitting energy source, the crumbling concrete tomb around the Chernobyl reactor is to be encased in steel, at an approximate cost of $1.4 billion. The doomed reactor will be covered by “a giant arch-shaped structure out of steel, 190 metres (623 feet) wide and 200m long.” Of course, it is only a matter of time before the new carapace will need to be replaced, in turn.

The Chernobyl disaster occurred back in 1986. Despite causing widespread contamination, about 95% of the radioactive material initially present remains within the site of the reactor complex. A motorcycle-riding photographer named Elena has put some haunting photos of the abandoned area on her website.

Just yesterday, Dr. Patrick Moore (co-founder of Greenpeace) urged the more widespread use of fission to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As ever, there are three big problems with nuclear fission: waste that will be dangerous for a span longer than the existence of civilization thus far, the possibility of catastrophic accidents, and the connection between civilian nuclear capability and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It is certainly becoming less clear-cut that nuclear is a worse option than the alternatives. For one thing, new reactor designs like the South African pebble bed promise to reduce the chances of accidents. On the proliferation side, there is talk of fuel supplier countries taking back spent rods, as protection against their plutonium being extracted and used for bombs. Of course, that just worsens the nuclear waste situation. The fact that it is all sitting in ‘temporary’ reactor ponds and that no state has constructed a permanent geological storage facility for radioactive waste should continue to give us pause.

Standing offer from the international community to the US

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.

Electric buses and a turn-of-the-century villain

Back when new technologies were just beginning to threaten the horse in urban transportation, a scam unrelated to the underlying technology may have set back electric vehicles, relative to their internal combustion counterparts. So posits this article in The Economist’s Technology Quarterly, in any case.

Between 1907 and 1909, electric buses traversed the streets of London. The company that built them was eventually driven to bankrupcy by the machinations of Edward Lehwess: “a German lawyer and serial con-artist with a taste for fast cars and expensive champagne.” After destroying the ability of the company to raise capital, he bought eight of the twenty electric buses for £800, then sold them to Brighton for £3,500.

At the very least, this demonstrates the ability of non-technological factors to significantly affect the fate of new innovations. At the most, it makes one wonder whether a more sustainable form of public transport could have gained dominance over the last century, to the benefit of the climate and those breating urban air.

Unpiloted drone to investigate ice caps

Melting sea ice was mentioned here recently. According to the MIT Technology Review, a team at the University of Kansas is building an unpiloted airplane designed to conduct detailed RADAR surveys of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets. In particular, the plane will look to see whether water has collected between glaciers and bedrock – a situation that can lead to their very rapid disintegration.

If things go according to plan the vehicle – dubbed ‘Meridian’ – should conduct its first survey next summer. Given the potential importance of melting ice for climatic feedback loops, anything that improves the quality of data available should be applauded.