saturday science

Have you heard about planet hacking? The theory is that because carbon dioxide lasts for thousands of years in the atmosphere even if we stopped all our carbon emissions tomorrow the planet would continue to heat up . This has led a number of scientists to consider some radical plans for geoengineering the planet in order to begin a cooling process:

1. Seed the atmosphere with sulphur compounds because they make clouds brighter and more reflective. Yes, this is the same stuff that industrial smokestacks have been doing for years and the very same that has been the cause of acid rain.

2. Drop tons of iron dust into the oceans with the idea of stimulating the growth of phytoplankton which would consume excess carbon dioxide, die, sink to the ocean floor and thus sequester the CO2. Unfortunately, when they tried it for two months other creatures simply ate the excess plankton.

3. Have all the ships at sea pump compressed air into the oceans on their travels leaving swathes of microbubbles in their wakes to reflect more sunlight. There's a good possibility there aren't enough ships and besides, they do use a lot of fuel.

4. Cover the ice that's still on mountaintops (and perhaps at the north pole?) with giant pieces of white plastic. Hmmm..

5. Build artificial trees that can chemically extract CO2. Hmmm..

6. My favorite of all the geoengineering plans I've heard is the one that would see us launching millions of mirrors into a stable LaGrange point between Earth and the sun. I though this was an old joke but apparently it's being considered.

The trouble with most of the hacking ideas is that they are either too expensive or too dangerous and the law of unintended consequences wouldn't be recognized until it's too late. Growing more real trees and having green rooftops is a far better plan in my opinion so long as we could avoid the tendency of eliminating everything that doesn't make a financial profit for someone.



I don't really know much of anything and perhaps the time is coming for major operations of the kind described but what I do know is we should never consider geoengineering unless we reduce our dependence of fossil fuels first.




(The picture at the top is of a rare roll cloud from Apod.)

cantankerous crow

Crow here. On cold winter nights when it's more comfortable on a perch here in susan's living room than outside flying, I enjoy alternate history, ie, whether or not there were higher human cultures before yours that, like Atlantis, sank beneath waves both literal and figurative over the course of the millennia of human existence. I also like reading about how humanity might possibly develop and where you might go as you move inexorably into the future. Often the most difficult place to be is in the present.

Avoidable human misery is generally not caused so much by stupidity than by ignorance, especially ignorance about yourselves. You inhabit a global civilization in which the most important elements - transportation, communications, medicine, protecting the environment - depend on science and technology. Yet things have been arranged in such a way that very few people understand those subjects. Media programming is generally focused on the lowest common denominator with the result being that study and learning can be seen not only as unnecessary but undesirable. It's not only sad but dangerous to have an uneducated majority in a modern democratic society.

There have always been power elites whose main interest is in manipulating the populace and if you're desperate enough you become all too willing to abandon reason and skepticism. People in general are very susceptible to believing things that are in their own self interest so when powerful corporate structures determine that it's more profitable to deny something they hire people willing to deride the science or history:

'How can you say there's global warming now that the east coast is covered in 6' of snow?' If the population in general had been exposed to even a modest level of scientific education they'd know that weather systems are both complex and chaotic. A small change in global ocean temperature can cause unexpected and likely unwelcome results.

'The government plan for single payer insurance is a plot to take away your health care.' Little or no mention is made of the fact that every modern industrialized society has had great success with government mandated health insurance for the past 60 years.

'Regulation of large banks will mean you can't get a loan to send your child to college or to buy a home or anything else.' The history of general economic growth and what allowed for the largest expansion of a comfortable middle class came from the regulations established over banks after the Depression.

'We must let bygones be bygones and not bring criminal charges against the last administration.' The trials at Nuremberg were a lesson to the world that there were serious consequences for those prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany. All they did was to invade sovereign nations who were not a threat to them.

'We have to continue war on an idea (terrorism) in order to protect you far into an undetermined future.' Now anybody who isn't aware of my old friend President Eisenhower's final address to the United States warning of the dangers inherent in the military-industrial complex has probably spent too much time watching television rather than reading.

Yes, I enjoy immersing myself in alternate possibilities but I still understand the difference between fantasy and reality. These are just a few brief examples of how ignorance is disseminated to the population at large and I wish more people would spend their time reading and talking to one another like you do on the nets.

It's too nice a day to stay inside so I think I'll shake the dust off my wings and go to see if my friends the swallows are back from Capistrano. By the way, have you ever seen squadrons of geese returning north? I'm going to have to ask them if they fly commercial on their way back.

terra what?

I apologize if I upset anyone by posting about the immediacy of global warming yesterday. Goodness knows we already have enough to worry about without having to be concerned about the planet as well. Unfortunately, no matter what happens with the economic situation, we and our children still expect to wake up here every morning so that appears to make it the most important concern of all.

James Lovelock mentioned carbon sequestration in the interview so I went back to look up what I'd remembered reading about a novel concept, even though it's very old, you may not have heard about.

The Amazonian rainforest has some of the globe's richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soil - known as terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths - and say it can pull substantial amounts of carbon out of the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, helping to prevent global warming. That's because terra preta is loaded with so-called bio-char. Terra preta is soil that has been enhanced by black carbon, derived from charcoal, and other organic matter.

It is estimated that as much as 10 to 20% of the soils in the Amazon basin are terra preta soils. Only after realizing these numbers did archaeologists finally understand how there had been a sufficient agricultural base to support the vast ancient civilizations in the Amazon basin, civilizations that, until recently, had largely been written off as myth. Of course, we'd be somebody else's myth too if the plagues had wiped out all of us instead of only 90% back in 1300AD.

The super-fertile soil was produced thousands of years ago by indigenous populations using slash-and-char methods instead of slash-and-burn. Slash-and-char, on the other hand, actually reduces greenhouse gases by sequestering huge amounts of carbon for thousands of years and substantially reducing methane and nitrous oxide emissions from soils.

Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University, who has written books and numerous articles about bio-char says, "The result is that about 50 percent of the biomass carbon is retained and by sequestering huge amounts of carbon, this technique constitutes a much longer and significant sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide than most other options, making it a powerful tool for long-term mitigation of climate change. In fact we have calculated that up to 12 percent of the carbon emissions produced by human activity could be offset annually if slash-and-burn were replaced by slash-and-char."

In addition, many biofuel production methods, such as generating bioenergy from agricultural, fish and forestry waste, produce bio-char as a byproduct. "The global importance of a bio-char sequestration as a byproduct of the conversion of biomass to bio-fuels is difficult to predict but is potentially very large," he added.

Applying the knowledge of terra preta to contemporary soil management also can reduce environmental pollution by decreasing the amount of fertilizer needed, because the bio-char helps retain nitrogen in the soil as well as higher levels of plant-available phosphorus, calcium, sulfur and organic matter. The black soil also does not get depleted, as do other soils, after repeated use.

"In other words, producing and applying bio-char to soil would not only dramatically improve soil and increase crop production, but also could provide a novel approach to establishing a significant, long-term sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide."





So it really could be done. What do you think? Are we wise enough yet as a race to actually do something constructive to not only heal the earth but make her more beautiful and fruitful too?

moonlight reprise

A few years ago I read a book by Yann Martel called 'The Life of Pi' . It's a story about an Indian boy alone in a lifeboat after the ship that was carrying him and his family to a new life in Canada sinks into the Pacific. When an old friend (perhaps acquaintance is a more fitting description) clambers aboard Pi greets him saying, 'Jesus, Mary, Muhammed and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!'





The religious faiths are scrambled throughout the book but we forgive Pi for his confusion about what in particular to believe about theology. There are bits of all of them that appeal to his sense of wonder and the fact that Richard Parker is a 450 pound Bengal tiger is just another example of how marvelous is the world.

The two of them are adrift for weeks of uneasy but mutually respectful companionship bringing together the extremes of existence on earth - the animal and the divine. In an interview Martel described having an abiding feeling that our entire planet is like a lifeboat drifting across a cosmic Pacific.

It's something worth considering. I have a feeling seeing the world anew is the only important thing. Soon it will be another full moon but what we see isn't the real moon but it's reflection in the mind's eye.

(No, this isn't Pi but then I painted the picture a while back.)

ice cubes for polar bears

On the front page of USA Today there's a headline stating that Americans drove 30 billion miles less than usual between November of last year and the end of April. That sounded pretty good until I started reading the article where it stated that 30 billion miles is only 1% of average mileage for US drivers. Now that's scary. What makes it all so much worse is that for the last 50 years everything has been set up in such a way that most people have no choice about driving if they want to keep their jobs so they can afford to drive their cars to the stores where they buy stuff that has been driven, flown, shipped and driven some more from goodness knows where.

Have I ever mentioned I love reading what is called 'hard' science fiction? Essentially, they're books written by science professionals who I presume have graduate students and assistants who do all their science work while these guys head off in flights of intellectual fancy about what human beings might get to do in the universe at large if we ever get through this difficult 'Age of Waste'.

I've just re-read Iain M. Bank's 'The Algebraist' in which one of his assumptions is that a particular alien civilization dropped by Earth 8000 years ago and made off with a sample group of the populace, raised them on planets already inhabited by other races and introduced them to the larger galactic community. They became ahumans (advanced) so when the rest of humanity, or rhumans, eventually figured out not only how to leave the gravity wells but to travel at light speeds they found a galactic society already used to people.

It's never a bad thing to remember that what we call reality might be very different from what we think we know. We can even change direction once we understand we've taken the wrong road. I found a video today called 'The Story of Stuff' which is nearly 20 minutes long but I enjoyed it while doing some paperwork. You might like it too or know somebody who would benefit from its message.

I rather like to imagine there are ahumans out there getting into the adventures people are prone to and learning the lessons that life provides or.. maybe somewhere there's a zoo with 21st Century People as the main exhibit. It could happen :-)