a sibilant intake of breath – Page 596 – climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction

Hashing with Wolfram Alpha

Separately, I have discussed both the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine and the practice of hashing information. The fact that WA allows anyone to do so easily has relevance for things like making bets online, in situations where players want to conceal their guesses until everyone else has put theirs up.

Here is an example. Say you want to place bets on who will win the next Republican presidential primary. You don’t want those who post later to have the advantage of knowing what others have already posted, so you do the following:

Choose a hash algorithm (MD5 should be fine, but SHA is more secure)
Have each participant put their guess into WA. Say I think it will be Sarah Palin. I would enter: “SHA “I think the primary winner will be Sarah Palin, though I fear what she will do with the country” into Wolfram Alpha, and it would spit out something like “f7ca 4adf 11c7 5b56 f355 1635 5b50 2eca 5950 5349”
Note that the supplementary text, in addition to the name, is vital. Otherwise, it would be trivially easy for the other players to check the hashes for likely guesses and learn what people have chosen. Incorporating a salt into the hashing algorithm would be ideal, but WA doesn’t seem to have that capability.
Have each participant post the hash of their response, saving the exact text somewhere secure to them.
When the outcome is known, those who guessed correctly can confirm that fact, by providing text that hashes into their original post.

A somewhat roundabout and nerdy solution to a relatively unimportant problem, perhaps, but it illustrates some of the ways hashes can be used to prove what you said earlier, without having the content of your earlier message immediately accessible – a general ability with many applications.

One more fact about salts: they are the most straightforward way to foil attacks using rainbow tables.

Endless Canadian delay on climate change mitigation

Jim Prentice, Canada’s Minister of the Environment has said that Canada might not impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions until 2016. This is simply preposterous. It makes a mockery of this government’s pledge to cut emissions to 20% below 2005 levels by 2020. It is also hypocritical. This government argued that they could not meet their Kyoto Protocol targets due to the inaction of their predecessors. They argued that the short time left before the deadline would require them to simply shut down Canadian industry and services to homes (See: The Cost of Bill C-288 to Canadian Families and Business) Of course, dallying until 2016 would put whatever government was in charge then in an even tighter bind.

In order to meet this government’s 2020 target, Canadian emissions will need to fall by about 170 million tonnes over the next eleven years: a task equivalent to making the entire province of Alberta carbon neutral. Obviously, waiting until 2016 to begin dooms the project to failure. That ignores the fact that even the 20% target is insufficiently ambitious, when you consider the risks associated with different global emissions pathways and the fact that rich, developed states must lead the way on the transition to low- and zero-carbon sources of energy.

The idea that we could do nothing substantial for another seven years is an affront to ethics, good sense, Canada’s international obligations, and our reputation as good global citizens. If Canada cannot show the leadership or vision necessary to appreciate the risks of unconstrained climate change, as well as the opportunities in moving the energy basis of our society to a sustainable basis, our best hope is that we will be made into a pariah state by our most important trading partners. For Canada to maintain growing emissions for another decade would be shameful, but not a global crisis in itself. For the United States, European Union, China, and Japan to do so would quite probably doom future generations to a world very different from ours. If those states do show the fortitude required to begin the transition to carbon neutrality, they will be quite justified in imposing stiff carbon tariffs against a Canada too blind or selfish to see upon or act as must be done.

UBC’s footprint reduction contest

The University of British Columbia is holding a contest where participants will set out plans on how to make the Point Grey campus “net positive” in terms of energy and water, as well as reduce greenhouse gas output. The grand prize is $5,000, second prize is $3,000, and third prize is $1,000. The contest is open to UBC community members (ie: Student, Staff, Faculty, Researcher, Resident or Alumni).

Net positive water output seems like something that could be achieved fairly easily. You would capture and purify rainwater, use it to cover all on-campus activities, and export a bit into the water system beyond. It would require infrastructure spending, but it seems clear that it could be done.

Net energy output (in a zero carbon way) might be trickier, though I presume it isn’t necessary for the campus to be exporting power to the grid all the time. As long as net exports are positive, it seems fair to call the campus “net positive” on energy. Wind and solar are the obvious renewable options, though UBC isn’t really an ideal location for either. My guess is that the best option would be to install wind and solar capacity, while retrofitting buildings to make them much more energy efficient.

Contest guidelines are online. (PDF)

Limits of aquaculture

Seen from a simplistic and very selfish human perspective, ecosystems are devices for converting sunlight into human food. Sometimes, this happens fairly directly: sun hits soybean leaves, soybeans grow, and people eat them. In the case of the fish we eat, it is generally much less direct: sun hits phytoplankton, zooplankton eats that, they get eaten by fish that can eaten by successively larger fish, finally the largest fish get caught and eaten by us. In at least one important sense, this pyramid of energy use is quite different from the terrestrial one. In terrestrial agriculture, we manage the initial sun collection and can increase its amount in various ways. We are not, and perhaps never can be, farmers of plankton at the scale necessary to sustain the global marine food web. The effort involved in boosting the global plankton supply significantly would presumably be very large, given the immense biomass involved. Also, since energy is lost in each conversion, the amount of additional high-level species that would result from any increase would be smaller than the amount of additional plankton generated.

We are seriously overfishing the stocks that depend on the energy from existing phytoplankton stocks. If we start growing tuna and salmon in farms, feeding them fish from progressively lower in the marine ecosystem, we will eventually hit the bottom (if we keep having enough fuel for all those fishing boats). It is a fallacy to think that fish farms are like livestock farming on land. In the latter case, we are responsible for providing the inputs. In the former, we are still gathering from natural ecosystems, and doing so at an unsustainable rate.

Two partial solutions seem to exist. Firstly, we can get more fish per person by eating more plentiful species with lower trophic levels (closer to being creatures that eat plankton). That means anchovies for dinner, rather than tuna. Secondly, we could conceivably feed fish in farms using food from the land. That allows us to increase the basic solar energy being collected, and sustain a larger amount of tasty fish as a result. Of course, extending land-based agriculture entails other financial and environmental costs. Not least among these are the marine dead areas produced by pollution and fertilizer runoff.

The sensible way to run global fisheries is to avoid activities that cause disproportionate harm (dynamite fishing, catching juvenile fish) and then eat the sustainable portion of the output from different trophic levels. This means basically accepting a total level of sustainable human fish consumption for different species, then resisting political and financial pressures to exceed that limit. Of course, the record of human societies on doing this is dismal. We basically only fish sustainably when we are physically incapable of fishing more. Partly as a result of that, the general outlook for the world’s marine fisheries is dire.

Increasing renewable capacity is much harder than increasing energy consumption

David MacKay’s book (described here) makes an excellent point about the asymmetry between energy supply and demand, in terms of the difficulty or ease of increasing either:

It’s so simple for me to consume an extra 30 [kilowatt-hours] (kWh) per day. But squeezing an extra 30 kWh per day per person from renewables requires an industrialization of the environment so large it is hard to imagine.

For instance, buying a car and traveling 50 km per day in it means adding 40 kilowatt-hours per day (kWh/d) to your energy consumption. By contrast, surrounding all of the United Kingdom with wind turbines – with 15 per km of coastline, extending 4 km out to sea – would produce 16 kWh/d for every UK resident, if the wind was blowing all the time, and probably about 1/3 of that in actuality.

Statistics like that deepen my suspicion that a world without fossil fuel consumption will be one where there is much less energy consumption going on, overall. While increased efficiency can offset part of that, it also seems extremely likely that some very energy intensive activities will need to cease.

Waxman-Markey worse than useless?

In a very depressing piece of analysis, Grist columnist Gar Lipow argues that the Waxman Markey climate change bill emerging in the US will do worse than nothing, when it comes to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions. This is because of how it issues permits (downstream, rather than upstream), its problematic use of offsets, and the fact that most permits (80%) will be given away, rather than auctioned.

Lipow concludes that: “Because of the flaws I’ve mentioned, it essentially requires no emission reduction in practice for at least a decade. Any short term benefits come from non cap-and-trade provisions, such as the Renewable Energy Standard.”

Muddled climate policies that get captured by industry are a major danger, throughout the developed world. Unless you get the details right, it is easy for carbon pricing policies to give a huge amount of money to the dirtiest polluters, increase consumer prices, and fail to effectively mitigate emissions. While it is urgent to begin mitigation, it is also necessary to note the trade-off between a quick and deeply flawed approach and a slower but less problematic one. To begin with, we need policies like the Vienna Convention on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer: too weak, but not hopelessly flawed. Additional political and scientific work turned that instrument into the relatively effective Montreal Protocol. If we don’t display wisdom and overcome entrenched interests in drafting climate policies, we risk blocking the chances of any such progression in climate legislation.

Sloppy reporting in The New York Times

In an article on refrigerants and climate change, New York Times reporter Irwin Arieff uses some rather misleading language to describe the warming effect associated with HFCs:

Environmentalists, meanwhile, say the shift to HFC-410A is only a halfway measure because the new refrigerant, while good for the ozone, still throws off heat, contributing to global warming.

As explained here before, greenhouse gasses (GHGs) do not cause the planet to warm because they themselves are warm or ‘throw off heat.’ Rather, they are opaque to the wavelengths of infrared light the planet radiates, and thus prevent some of that energy from escaping into space.

That said, it’s good to see that refrigerants are getting some attention as a category of GHGs, given how powerful they are relative to carbon dioxide and the special challenges involved in incorporating their management into an overall mitigation strategy. (See: Problems with carbon markets)

The Bridge at the Edge of the World

The basic contention of James Gustave Speth’s The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability is that dealing with climate change – and environmental crises more generally – requires a major project of societal reform. This includes rejecting economic growth as a major objective, and focusing instead on improving the non-material factors that determine happiness. It also involves major economic and political reforms: severely curtailing the autonomy of corporations and sharply altering the relationships between business and government. While Speth’s vision is a coherent one, I don’t think he makes the case convincingly that it is the only alternative to ecological collapse. Indeed, implementing elements of his broader social program may well involve political battles that delay effective action on climate change.

One basic idea that Speth expresses well is a two-phased understanding of human civilization. In the first stage, exponential growth occurs and the proper mentality is that of the frontier or entrepreneurship. The second phase, basically the death of libertarianism, is when population and ecological strain become so significant that society and world level planning become necessary. It is clear that we are moving from the first to the second, as a civilization, though it remains unclear whether we will be able to manage that transition well, and avoid most of the damage and suffering that would result from getting it wrong.

Speth’s chapters on government and corporations seem like they were taken directly from AdBusters or Naomi Klein. That is not to say their analysis is wholly incorrect, but I do think it seriously overstates the power of corporations. Ultimately, they are subject to the will of governments. Of course, they have a strong ability to influence governments: both directly and by manipulating voters. Nonetheless, the authority and capability necessary to solve the world’s most pressing environmental problems lies with governments, and the process of achieving that will be all about altering their internal thinking and incentives. Speth’s analysis is also almost entirely focused on political and economic reform, in the sense of corporate governance. He pays relatively little attention to technological development and deployment, or to the economic instruments through which both can be advanced.

Speth is clearly well-read on the subject of the environmental movement. Indeed, his book is so riddled with quotations that his own voice and perspective are sometimes obscured. It isn’t always clear whether he is wholeheartedly endorsing someone’s idea, or introducing it as a partial contrast to his own point. Despite that, Speth’s writing is concise, clear, and often compelling. While readers may not find themselves in total agreement at all points, Speth at least provides some solid concepts and arguments to respond to.

Ultimately, the approach described in The Bridge at the Edge of the World comes across as somewhat unfocused. The author presents a package of reforms as through each is integral to all the others, but doesn’t make a strong enough case for why that is so. Indeed, the book also fails to present a coherent path from the present forward into a reformed world, indicating which elements are better primed to emerge soon. It may be sensible to argue for more progressive taxation, banning advertising to children, supporting sports and hobbies, providing free child care, etc, but some of these things are clearly secondary to the process of reconciling human civilization with the physical and biological limits of the planet.

Indeed, a strong case can be made that climate change will only be truly solved when it becomes post-ideological: when all the major political ideologies in states with serious greenhouse gas emissions come to accept the fact that they must be reduced and ultimately eliminated. Without that consensus, it seems unreasonable to expect the process of mitigation to continue for decade after decade. By tying the need to mitigate into an overly specific political framework, Speth puts forward a proposal that could obstruct that process, or lead to it sputtering out with the political ascendacy of a group with different perspectives and priorities.

David MacKay’s sustainable energy calculations

For all the readers on this site interesting in climate change, policy, and technology, David MacKay’s book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air is a text that could be very profitably incorporated into our discussions. It seeks to evaluate whether (and how) society could operate without fossil fuels. It does so systematically, with all work shown, allowing you to question the methods and perform your own calculations for different circumstances. Another nice feature is that it is available online for free, though you may find it worthwhile to buy a professionally printed and bound copy.

The book is all about what is physically possible, rather than what is economical. As such, it sets a kind of base standard for sustainability. It evaluates whether something can be done at any cost, a pre-requisite to it being possible at a reasonable one.

To begin with, here is the methodology (p. 22 -28). It explains the exercise being undertaken and explains the key units to be used. The main unit of power selected is the somewhat unusual kilowatt-hour per day (kWh/d) per person (/p). While watts are more conventional, this unit does have some virtues in making things easily comparable and comprehensible. After all, if a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity costs me about five cents, it is easy to start thinking about the economics of an activity that requires 30 or 40 kWh/d.

Here are a few chapters that touch directly on debates that have occurred (sometimes raged) on this site:

All the other chapters are relevant, as well, but these seem especially likely to inject some new information and thinking into long-running discussions.

The United Kingdom seems to be spoiled with people who are willing to perform comprehensive analyses of how their whole societal energy system could be rendered comparable with a stable climate (George Monbiot’s book is another example). It almost seems worth going through this entire text and re-performing the calculations with Canadian figures as inputs.

Somewhat short of that, would anyone be interested in going through the book chapter by chapter?

How to be safe around cyclists

In my own experience, the situations that endanger cyclists and the operators of other vehicles near them usually arise because of a lack of awareness about making movements perpendicular to the flow of traffic. In front of a cyclist, imagine a cylinder projected forward, with a length corresponding to the distance it would take that cyclist to stop safely. If you move into that cylinder, there is likely to be a collision.

To avoid this, I suggest two basic practices:

Move in a clearly signaled and predictable manner. When making turns, always signal them. Do not make turns from lanes where it is not allowed. When opening a car door beside traffic, do so slowly. When changing lanes, signal and do it in a smooth and controlled way. When entering the flow of traffic, do so in a controlled and visible way.
Check your blind spots, whenever moving more than half a lane to the left or right. In particular, make sure to check the blind spot to your right when you are making right hand turns (even if you are in the rightmost lane) and make sure to check your left blind spot when opening a car door beside traffic. Those two habits can help you avoid the two most common cyclist fatalities: the ‘door prize,’ which occurs when a car door gets opened in front of a cyclist and they collide, and the ‘right hook,’ where a vehicle makes a right turn in front of a cyclist and they collide.

None of this is to say that cyclists are not responsible for safety, as well. Indeed, all the behaviours above apply to cyclists dealing with other cyclists.

In addition to these, cyclists should be highly visible, signal clearly, obey traffic rules, and move in a clear and predictable manner. Don’t cycle within door range of parked cars and, if safety requires it, feel free to occupy a whole lane. Cars behind you might start going nuts, but it is a smarter option that cycling on some marginal pavement or in an unsafe position. For example, there are a number of roads in Ottawa where the pavement on the rightmost extreme is in a very bad state of repair – so much so that it might make you fall or force you to swerve. In these situations, I find it sensible to make sure there isn’t a car just a couple of feet to the left of me.

Going back to the safe stopping cylinder for a moment, it is true that a cyclist can stop very quickly if absolutely necessary – though the process is chaotic and unpleasant. It consists of braking so hard you lock your front wheel, then going flying over your handlebars. It is better than colliding with a car, but it is far from pleasant and can generate other unexpected movements or collisions. Helping cyclists avoid these kind of stops is one of the more important things you can do as someone sharing a road or path with them.